The Epic of New York City (77 page)

The clock began tolling the hour of midnight. Morgan may have raised his massive head at the first bong. So the twentieth century had arrived? Very well. Within a little more than a year Morgan was to create the first billion-dollar corporation in history, the United States Steel Corporation. Bong!

At the turn of the century eighteen-year-old Fiorello LaGuardia was earning $100 a year as a clerk in the American consulate in Budapest, Hungary. James J. “Jimmy” Walker was a skinny nineteen-year-old attending LaSalle Academy, a business school on Second Avenue, and working as a part-time referee at prizefights in Brotty's Bar on Hudson Street. Alfred E. Smith was a slim twenty-six-year-old who worked for the city's commissioner of jurors, checking applications for exemptions from jury duty. Franklin D. Roosevelt was an eighteen-year-old standing an inch more than 6 feet but weighing only 146 pounds; he sang in Harvard's Freshman Glee Club. Robert Moses was an eleven-year-old boy, who had moved with his family from New Haven to New York in 1897; he felt that New York was too big, too crowded, too noisy, and too confused. Theodore Roosevelt, now forty-two, was governor of New York State, partly because he had become a hero of the Spanish-American War. William Randolph Hearst, at the age of thirty-seven, was cruising up the Nile in search of Egyptian art treasures.

The city, state, and nation this year of 1900 enjoyed prosperity. Never had such good times been seen from coast to coast. A New York minister exulted: “Laws are becoming more just, rulers more humane. Music is becoming sweeter and books wiser. Homes are happier and the individual heart becoming at once more just and more gentle.” Except for the Boer War in South Africa, the Boxer Rebellion in China, and unrest in the Philippines, peace reigned throughout most of the world.

Sixty percent of all Americans lived in small towns or on farms. New York City itself had more than 2,000 farms, occupying nearly
a quarter of its land. But the city was in the middle of a building boom. Land and buildings on Manhattan alone were valued at $3,600,000,000, having risen $2,600,000,000 since the year 1865. The city's 40,000 manufacturing establishments accounted for more than 60 percent of the manufacturing of the entire state. Hundreds of firms escaped taxes by incorporating themselves in other states, paid almost nothing for fire and police protection, yet asked the city for help whenever their underpaid workers struck. The shopping center had reached Twenty-third Street and was gliding north toward Thirty-fourth Street.

Wages were low. City employees put in a 10-hour day, with half an hour for lunch, but many had to work even longer. At 4
A.M
. the streets were filled with people heading for their jobs, and any worker who reported late was sure to be penalized. To work from 5
A.M
. to 9
P.M
. was customary. Twelve-year-old boys and girls were allowed to earn wages if they went to school 80 days a year. Because of undernourishment, some children were slow to learn their lessons. Hundreds of youngsters lived on canal boats along the waterfront, seldom attended school, constantly played hide-and-seek with truant officers. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of homeless children in the city.

Nearly 7 percent of the population was illiterate, and 173,000 residents could not speak English. Of the city's inhabitants, 37 percent were foreign-born. About 25 percent of these immigrants came from Germany; 22 percent, from Ireland; 12 percent, from Russia; 11 percent, from Italy; 6 percent, from Austria; and 5 percent, from England. The remainder had arrived here from all other parts of the world. Although most Irishmen were still members of the working class, no longer were they caricatured on the stage as living in shanties and dressing in rags. The city's 700,000 Jews lived mainly on the Lower East Side. The 145,000 local Italians staged their first Columbus Day parade in 1900. Between 50,000 and 60,000 Negroes were residents of New York. The main Negro center was near West Fifty-third Street in Manhattan, although a large Negro community was also developing in Brooklyn.

New York was the last American city of any size to establish public high schools. The De Witt Clinton, Wadleigh, and Peter Cooper high schools were opened in 1897, and in 1900 one De Witt Clinton student was an energetic Irish boy, named Grover Whalen.
Only 13,700 of the 500,000 pupils enrolled in the elementary schools were graduated from the eighth grade.

Although Berlin had outstripped New York as the city of tenements, more than 1,500,000 New Yorkers lived in slums in 1900. Many European visitors, after one horrified look, concluded that the slum dwellers lived in misery worse than that in Berlin, London, or Paris. The section of Manhattan bounded by the East River, East Fourteenth Street, Third Avenue, the Bowery, and Catherine Street was probably the most densely populated area in the world. New York's poor lived under worse conditions and paid more rent than the inhabitants of any other big city on earth.

The average New Yorker was shorter and younger than his counterpart today. The mortality rate for children was more than five times higher then than now. Life expectancy at birth was much lower. Hospital conditions were horrible by modern standards. The city's water was first chlorinated in 1910, and milk was pasteurized for the first time in 1912.

Like artichokes, women were covered by layer after layer of clothing—chemise, drawers, corset, corset cover, and one or more petticoats. Skirts were so long that they merely showed the tip of the shoe. Ladies exposed much of their bosoms for a formal evening on the town, but during the day they wore shirtwaists with high collars. It was considered fashionable for well-dressed women to walk in such a forward-sloping position that they seemed to be falling forward. Gentlemen wore blue serge suits most of the time, and only dudes put on garters. Men's shoes had tips as sharp as toothpicks. In hot weather, men might remove their jackets in their offices, but never,
never
were they allowed to take off their vests. To appear hatless, whatever the season of the year, was unthinkable. Men wore derby hats in winter and hard straw hats in summer. Policemen wore long blue overcoats with two rows of nine brass buttons, a hard gray helmet, a leather scabbard holding a nightstick garnished with a fancy blue tassel, and a service revolver. Most cops were Irish, and almost all sported mustaches. Until 1902 they spent eighteen hours a day on patrol duty and then six hours more on reserve in the station house. They got one night off every twenty days—sometimes.

With Tammany in control again, the city was a free and easy place. On March 9, 1900, the New York
Times
said a Tammany “commission,”
consisting of a city official, two state senators, and the dictator of a poolroom syndicate, was raking in $3,095,000 a month in graft from gambling alone. New York had 25,000 prostitutes, and their come-on was: “It costs a dollar, and I've got the room.”

Washington and Buffalo were better paved than Manhattan. Vehicular traffic here consisted mainly of hansom cabs, victorias shaped like gravy boats, and closed carriages, called broughams. At busy intersections trolley tracks crisscrossed one another in bewildering patterns. Because of the building boom and the quickening thrust of population toward the north, streets were ripped up much of the time. Manhole explosions were commonplace, and horses and drivers often were hurt by manhole covers hurtling into the air. This was the gaslight era, which reached its peak in 1914.

The social center of the city had advanced from Thirty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue to Forty-ninth Street and Fifth Avenue. Never before had so much private wealth been concentrated in a single street as was on Fifth Avenue. In some of its mansions hostesses could serve dinner for 100 or more guests on a few hours' notice. India was famished, so it became fashionable to send shiploads of food from New York to the stricken country.

In the winter of 1900 Bernarr MacFadden opened a restaurant, at 487 Pearl Street, where most items sold for one cent. In addition to this penny restaurant, New York had a cafeteria in the basement of the New York Life Building, on Broadway four blocks north of City Hall. At most restaurants a regular dinner cost fifteen cents. Foreign-born laborers bought six rolls for a nickel and munched them on their way to work. In the evening, by paying a nickel for a stein of beer in a saloon, they were entitled to free bread, pickled herring, salami, or hard-boiled eggs. Butter cost nineteen to twenty cents a pound, and oleomargine was available. Macaroni factories were operating in the city. Chop suey had been invented here in 1896, but the dish, unknown in China at the time, was slow to win popularity. Ice cream sundaes, only three years old in 1900, came into favor more quickly than chop suey.

Shortly before the turn of the century New Yorkers became used to seeing automobiles. In 1890 the city granted the first charter to experiment with horseless trucks. By 1895 there were 300 motor vehicles operating in America. The nation's first automobile accident occurred in New York City on May 30, 1896, when Henry Wells of Springfield, Massachusetts, driving his Duryea motor wagon, collided
with a bicycle rider, named Evylyn Thomas. She was taken to Manhattan Hospital with a broken leg. In 1897 electric taxicabs were introduced into the city by the Electric Vehicle Company, whose office and garage were located at 1684 Broadway. At the start of the automobile age no one could tell whether electric batteries or internal-combustion gasoline engines would prove superior. By 1898 there were more than 100 electric taxicabs on the streets of New York. Tires cost $40 apiece. In 1899 cars were banned from Central Park, and those chugging around the rest of the city had to observe a 9-mile-an-hour speed limit and carry a gong.

Jacob German was arrested in 1899 for driving on Lexington Avenue at the “breakneck speed” of twelve miles an hour. The same year America's first auto fatality occurred when a sixty-eight-year-old real estate broker, named Henry H. Bliss, was knocked down as he stepped off a southbound streetcar at Central Park West and Seventy-fourth Street. Bliss was taken to Roosevelt Hospital, where he died. Automobiles were regarded as a curiosity at first, but when the number of accidents rose, New Yorkers became critical of them. On December 27, 1900, the
Tribune
said editorially:

Until 1900 almost all cars were custom-made and regarded as playthings of the rich. In that year the entire United States contained only 13,824 automobiles. Probably half the men and women of America had never seen a car. The nation's first automobile show was held in the old Madison Square Garden in 1900, 51 exhibitors displaying their latest models. Many were electric vehicles. Most were steered by rods, rather than by steering wheels. The show featured starting and stopping contests. Some cars were driven up a wooden ramp within the Garden to demonstrate how they could climb hills.

Some New Yorkers complained about the growing traffic problem. One of the best reporters in American history, Ray Stannard Baker,
made this monumentally wrong prediction: “It is hardly possible to conceive the appearance of a crowded wholesale street in the day of the automobile vehicle. In the first place, it will be almost as quiet as a country lane—all the crash of horses' hoofs and the rumble of steel tires will be gone. And since vehicles will be fewer and shorter than the present truck and span, streets will appear less crowded.”

In 1901 New York State ordered motorists to buy license plates at $1 apiece. The same year the Automobile Club of America, which had a clubhouse at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-eighth Street, sponsored a 464-mile endurance race between New York City and Buffalo. A French car won with an average speed of 15 miles an hour. On November 16, 1901, for the first time in American history, an auto exceeded the speed of a mile a minute in a race held by the Long Island Automobile Club on Brooklyn's Ocean Parkway. Within minutes, however, the speed record was broken.

The city's first traffic regulations for automobiles went into effect in 1903. Because the traffic situation worsened, the next year the state passed a law holding cars to a maximum speed of ten miles an hour in congested areas of the city. In 1905 the Fifth Avenue Coach Company introduced a twenty-four-passenger double-decked bus imported from France. The following year an automobile row began to develop along Broadway in the upper Fifties. In 1906 Woodrow Wilson, the president of Princeton University, said that “nothing has spread socialistic feelings in this country more than the use of the automobile” which represented “to the countryman. . . a picture of arrogance of wealth, with all its independence and carelessness.” The Fifth Avenue line was so pleased with its French buses that it bought more of them and on July 30, 1907, removed the last of its horse stages from Fifth Avenue. Taximeter cabs made their first appearance in New York on October 1, 1907.

According to a traffic study made here in 1907, horse-drawn vehicles moved at an average speed of 11.5 miles an hour. (In 1966, during the daytime, automobiles crawled through Manhattan's central business district at an average speed of 8½ miles an hour.) The nation's first electric traffic signals were installed in Cleveland in 1914. New York City didn't get its first traffic towers until 1922, and by then the city was well along its way toward the automobile congestion that remains one of its most pressing problems.