The Epic of New York City (79 page)

By this time people on Manhattan's eastern shore were running along the riverbank, trying to keep up with the floating inferno. Others sped toward the waterfront in carts and wagons. Some threw barrels into the river for use as makeshift life preservers. Spectators shouted to the steamboat captain to head into shore. He ignored them. The doomed ship kept pounding upriver, while onlookers wept in frustration. Small boats took up the chase but were unable to catch the speeding
General Slocum.

Docked at 134th Street was a barge owned by the Moran Towing Company. The barge captain sprang ashore and telephoned his boss, Eugene F. Moran, in downtown Manhattan. He shouted that the
General Slocum
was on fire. Then he cried to Moran, “Get a tug!” Moran checked his operations sheet but found that he had none anywhere near the burning vessel.

About this time a wall telephone rang in the city room of the
World
on Park Row. A man, who failed to identify himself, said that he was standing in his office at 137th Street and could see a ship in flames heading north. The
World
rewrite man who took the call shouted to the city editor. The editor told a reporter to telephone Moran. The reporter asked Moran if he could provide a tug to rush
World
staff members to the scene. Moran said that they could get there faster by taking an elevated train at Park Row and getting off at the Port Morris station. Because of the anonymous caller and Moran's commonsense suggestion,
World
reporters beat their competitors to the scene of the tragedy.

By now the
General Slocum
was beached on North Brother Island. She listed. Smoke and flames enveloped her. Floating in the water and scattered along the shore were bodies blackened and bloody, torn and seared. Veteran reporters looked and wept. Then they scattered in search of phones. They delivered such sickening descriptions that rewrite men who took their stories dashed to the men's room and vomited.

Police estimated that 1,031 persons died in the fire, and a convulsive shudder ran through the city. German fathers came home to learn that their families had been wiped out. Some men died of grief. Some killed themselves. Others went mad. For three days hearses crunched through the streets of Little Germany, carrying bits and pieces of bodies to graves in the Lutheran cemetery in Middle Village, Queens. Not long afterward most German families moved away from that part of the Lower East Side because of memories too painful to bear.

There was, of course, an inquest. This proved that the
General Slocum
had not been carefully inspected, that her life preservers had been rotten, and that her crew had been virtually without emergency training. Although the steamboat company wriggled out of legal responsibility for the disaster, in 1906 Captain Van Schaick was sentenced to ten years at hard labor in Sing Sing for criminal negligence.

On May 30, 1905, a memorial fountain to the victims of the
General Slocum
tragedy was unveiled near the northwestern corner of Tompkins Square. A white shaft eight feet tall, it depicted a boy
and girl gazing into space and bore this legend: “They were earth's purest children, loving and fair.”

The New York
Times
was developing into a great newspaper under the guidance of its new owner, Adolph S. Ochs. Born in Cincinnati in 1858, he bought the Chattanooga
Times
in 1878 and made a success of it. Ochs invaded New York's fourth estate in 1896 by purchasing the faltering
Times.
In that year it had a paid circulation of only 9,000 copies. Ochs printed accurate news devoid of editorial bias, his policy paid off, and by 1900 the New York
Times
was showing a big profit.

Ochs was an ambitious man. He looked like George Washington and was delighted when strangers noticed this. Something of a dandy, Ochs was rich enough in 1900 to order tailor-made clothes from Rock's Fifth Avenue shop. In a letter to his mother he gloated: “Not bad for a country greenie from Tennessee, eh?” The
Times
was housed in a thirteen-story building at 41 Park Row, and Ochs' corner office measured only eight by ten feet. Gazing out on the statue of Benjamin Franklin in Printing House Square, Ochs dreamed of erecting the finest newspaper plant in the world—something to “wake up the natives.”

In 1902 he bought a triangular lot at Broadway and Forty-second Street in an area called Long Acre Square. A center for the manufacture and repair of carriages and harnesses, it took its name from a section of London devoted to this same business. When Ochs made his purchase, the plot was occupied by the nine-story Pabst Building, which was now torn down. Construction of the Times Building posed vexing problems because the plot was so narrow, because of its triangular shape, and because a subway station was being built under it. Overcoming these engineering handicaps, architect Cyrus L. W. Eidlitz erected a beautiful twenty-five-story structure of Italian Renaissance design, suggesting Giotto's Campanile in Florence. When completed, the Times Tower became the city's second tallest skyscraper, topped only by the thirty-two story Park Row Building downtown.

It was dedicated at 3
P.M
. on the bitterly cold day of January 18, 1904. Spectators jammed into the square were delighted by the building's terra-cotta and cream-colored brick and by its graceful lines. Ochs' eleven-year-old daughter, Iphigene, was handed a silver
trowel for her part in the ceremonies. Her coat whipped by a crisp wind and warm in the heavy black tights her mother had made her wear, Iphigene advanced toward the great cornerstone as it settled into place. She wore gloves, and there is nothing in the world so dignified as a little girl wearing gloves. She smoothed the mortar with her trowel, struck the cornerstone three times, and then began her speech. To her horror, she flubbed one word. She was supposed to say, “I declare this stone to be laid plumb, level and square.” Instead, she piped, in a childish voice, “I declare this stone to be laid
plump—”

Although Ochs was rather vain, he never let his opinions interfere with his judgment as a newspaperman. The story about the dedication of the tower did not appear on page one of the
Times
the following day, but on page nine alongside social news.

City aldermen gave Times Square its new name in 1904, and the building opened for business in 1905. The New York
Times
then had a weekday circulation of 116,629 and a Sunday circulation of 54,795. It went on to become one of the three or four greatest newspapers in the world.

In 1908 the
Times
instituted its annual custom of saluting the New Year by lowering an electrically lighted ball six feet in diameter, down the tower's seventy-foot flagpole. When the ball touched the base at midnight, its lights went out and proclaimed the advent of another year.

So quickly did the
Times
grow in prestige and circulation that in 1913 it moved into the first part of still another plant at 229 West Forty-third Street, half a block west of the tower. As stores and theaters continued to advance northward up Manhattan, Times Square came to be known as the Crossroads of the World. Today the Times Square district consists of about thirty-four square blocks, three-quarters of a mile long by one-third of a mile wide. The area is the heart of New York's theatrical district.

Immigration reached a peak in 1907, a year of financial panic for New York and the rest of the nation. In those 12 months a total of 1,285,349 immigrants arrived in the United States. The vast majority landed on the 27 acres of Ellis Island, whose red spires with their bulbous green cupolas had a faintly Byzantine air.

Among those disembarking that year was a ten-year-old Italian boy, named Edward Corsi. He later became the United States Commissioner
of Immigration and Naturalization and took charge of the part of American soil on which he first set foot. His book,
In the Shadow of Liberty,
describes his boyish reactions the day of his arrival. He was struck by the fact that American men did not wear beards. Because most Italian men let their whiskers grow, young Corsi thought that American males looked almost like women. Until then it had never occurred to the lad that any language except Italian was spoken. No doubt boys from other foreign lands felt the same kind of surprise. Gazing across the Upper Bay toward the Manhattan skyline, young Corsi pointed and cried, “Mountains! Look at them!” His brother Giuseppe said with a puzzled frown, “They're strange. Why don't they have snow on them?”

Amusing and pathetic scenes were enacted on Ellis Island during this period of immigration's high tide. The buildings and lawns undulated with a variety of colorful peasant costumes. On occasion as many as twenty-five or thirty different peoples were held in detention at the same time. The Dutch and Germans had the largest families. Shawl-draped immigrant women seemed to feel that their most precious possessions were feather pillows and mattresses. It was impossible to provide a menu palatable to persons accustomed to their own native foods. Corsi said, “The Italian cares nothing for the dried fish preferred by the Scandinavian, and the Scandinavian has no use for spaghetti. The Greek wants his food sweetened, and no one can make tea for an Englishman. The basis of all Asiatic and Malay food is rice, which they will mix with almost anything. The Chinese take to other foods but want rice in place of bread.”

One ship brought a group of thirty whirling dervishes. These Mohammedan priests belonged to an order given to mystical practices, such as spinning on their toes and howling at the top of their voices. They wore red fezzes, loose-flowing trousers, bright-blue coats, and soft sandals. Their religion forbade them to eat any food over which the shadow of an infidel had passed. To them all the cooks, waiters, and helpers on Ellis Island were infidels, so the dervishes refused to eat. Before they starved themselves to death, however, someone cleverly offered them hard-boiled eggs. It was true that infidels' shadows had passed over the shells of the eggs, but once the polluted shells were removed, the eggs themselves were considered to be free of contamination. The egg-happy dervishes munched their way back to good health.

Perplexed by the diversity of dietary habits and helpless in the face
of grafting food contractors, Ellis Island staff members often fed the immigrants little more than prunes and bread. One employee brought out a big pail filled with prunes. Another walked into the mess hall carrying sliced loaves of rye bread. A third plunged a dipper into the pail, slopped prunes onto a big slice of bread, and cried to the bewildered immigrants, “Here! Now go and eat!”

Grafters preyed on immigrants in many ways. Their baggage checks were conned from them by swindlers, who then picked up the luggage and walked away with it. Before departing from Europe, some emigrants were told that the American gold coins they had collected were no good in the United States unless they contained holes. The swindlers who came up with this spurious story then drilled holes and kept the gold dust, which they sold.

Most foreigners arrived with very little money. In 1907 each had to pay a federal immigration tax of $40. Some aliens were reluctant to admit that they had any more money than this, for fear of being robbed. A Greek who claimed to be penniless actually had more than $5,000 on his person. Before ferrying from Ellis Island to Manhattan, the immigrants changed their foreign currency into American dollars and cents, and some money changers cheated them. Poverty-stricken, unfamiliar with the English language, bewildered by their new environment, and intimidated by the bustle and roar of New York, the newcomers landed in the city proper in a state of confusion. At first some managed to eat for only 3 or 4 cents a day. In squalid sections of town they paid as little as $4 a month in rent.

Elderly immigrants usually were held on Ellis Island until a relative or friend called for them. But sometimes the people they counted on had died before their arrival. The stranded old folks wandered about the immigration station, asking anyone who spoke their native tongue, “Have you seen my son? Have you seen my daughter? Do you know him, my Giuseppe? When is he coming for me?”

American ways were puzzling. When 280 gypsies arrived on one ship, doctors found that 48 of their children had the measles. The youngsters were sent to a Brooklyn hospital. A rumor spread among gypsy adults that their sons and daughters had been drowned by doctors. An immigration physician tried to feel the pulse of another gypsy child on Ellis Island. He was attacked by gypsy men, who screamed that he was a murderer. This started a riot, which raged all night. Even gypsy women pulled off their heavy-soled slippers and flailed away at any doctor or inspector who came within range. The
next gypsy child who developed measles was sent to the hospital like the others, but this time his parents were permitted to go along to see for themselves that all the gypsy children were alive and well tended. They brought the news back to the other gypsies, and the disorders ceased.

The English language was puzzling, too. One immigrant tried to ask for a railroad ticket to Detroit, Michigan, but it came out sounding like
Detroit-a-Mich.
The ticket agent thought the alien had called him a dirty Mick and flamed in anger.

Fiorello LaGuardia came back to his home town in 1906 after living and working in Europe many years. He spoke Yiddish, Hungarian, Italian, German, and Serbian-Croatian. Needing a job to work his way through New York University's law school, which he attended at night, LaGuardia got a civil service appointment as an interpreter on Ellis Island for $1,200 a year. With immigrants pouring in at the average rate of 5,000 a day, the Ellis Island staff worked a 7-day week. LaGuardia would rise early in the morning to catch an 8:40
A.M
. ferry, returning to Manhattan on the 5:30
P.M
. boat. Tenderhearted and sentimental, the swarthy little LaGuardia never became callous to the heartbreaking scenes he witnessed in the immigration station. It galled him to learn that one provision of the law excluded any alien lacking a job and that another provision of the same law barred an immigrant with a job. LaGuardia tried to correct this anomaly by writing letters of protest to Congress.