The Epic of New York City (80 page)

Some immigrant women were engaged to men who had preceded them to the New World. Many impatient men insisted on marrying before their fiancées were released by immigration officials. It became the duty of Ellis Island interpreters to accompany these couples to City Hall to get married. In those days city aldermen could perform the wedding service. “In the few instances I attended,” LaGuardia later said, “the aldermen were drunk. Some of the aldermen would insert into their reading of the marriage ceremony remarks which they considered funny and sometimes used lewd language, much to the amusement of the red-faced, cheap ‘tinhorn' politicians who hung around them to watch the so-called fun.”
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Who could tell which immigrants would wind up as heroes and which as bums? In 1910 there arrived a hefty black-haired blue-eyed
twenty-year-old youth, born in County Mayo, Ireland. He had $23.35 in his pockets. His first job was running a pushcart. Then he signed on as a coal passer on a steamship plying to South America. Back in New York again, he worked in the firerooms of night boats cruising the Hudson River. Next, he became a hod carrier at $19.25 a week and helped put up the Hotel McAlpin on Broadway between Thirty-third and Thirty-fourth Streets. Later he worked at the Hotel Vander-bilt, at Fourth Avenue and East Thirty-fourth Street, where Alexanders seemed to be the favorite drink. His name was William O'Dwyer, and ultimately he became the mayor of New York.

For many years a New York Central Railroad monopoly had prevented any other railway from entering Manhattan except by tunnel. There was just one catch: No tunnel existed under either the Hudson or the East River. In 1900 directors of the Pennsylvania Railroad authorized an increase of $100,000,000 of stock. At the time no outsider knew that the Pennsylvania planned to buy the Long Island Rail Road, to tunnel under both rivers, and to erect a monumental station near Herald Square on Manhattan's West Side. People began to suspect that something was afoot in 1901, when the Pennsylvania bought several parcels of property in the Tenderloin district.

The railroad had decided to build its new station on a site bounded by Thirty-first and Thirty-third streets and Seventh and Eighth avenues. The 8-acre area contained 500 buildings. Hoping to make a real estate killing, businessmen started buying property in the neighborhood, but at last the Pennsylvania got possession of all the land it needed. Then the railway asked the state legislature to pass a law giving New York City the authority to grant the Pennsylvania a franchise for construction of the tunnels and station. The franchise was granted in 1902.

All 500 buildings were pulled down, and construction began. New Yorkers gaped in amazement at the colossal hole dug in the ground. The sight was so staggering that they compared it with the Panama Canal, under construction at the time.
Metropolitan Magazine
described it as the “great $25,000,000 hole.” The project came to more than this, for in 1906 the Pennsylvania granted $35,000,000 in contracts to build the terminal. Less visible, but an equal source of excitement, were the tunnels being hacked out under the Hudson River.

As early as 1850 the idea of boring under the Hudson had been proposed. In 1873 the Hudson River Tunnel Company was incorporated.
In 1874 work began at the foot of Fifteenth Street in Jersey City, but the project was quashed after legal action was taken by jealous railroads. Work resumed later, and in 1887 the tunnel extended 1,840 feet from the Jersey shore. With the aid of British capital the tunnel company had pushed the hole a distance of 3,000 feet by 1891. The same year, because of financial difficulties, the tunnel franchise was sold to some New York lawyers. The following year tall lean William Gibbs McAdoo arrived.

A member of a distinguished Georgia family, McAdoo came to New York to practice law. He acquired the franchise to the tunnel enterprise and organized a firm, called the Hudson and Manhattan Company. At first he had trouble collecting capital, but at last he completed not one but two tubes between Jersey City and lower Manhattan. On March 11, 1904, McAdoo donned rubber boots, a raincoat, and wide-brimmed hat and led a party of sixteen men through one of the tunnels from New Jersey to New York. They emerged at Morton Street. McAdoo later became Secretary of the Treasury and a son-in-law of President Woodrow Wilson.

Despite the successful completion of the Hudson and Manhattan tubes, the Pennsylvania Railroad wanted its own tunnels under the river and built them higher upstream, just opposite West Thirty-second Street. From this point on the western shore of Manhattan it was only four blocks due east to the site of the new Pennsylvania Station.

Architects regarded this terminal as one of the great monuments of classic architecture in the United States. It duplicated one of the wonders of ancient Rome, the baths built by Emperor Caracalla in the third century
A.D
. The vast waiting room consisted of a skylighted concourse with ceilings, 150 feet high, surmounting vaulting arches of lacy steel and glass. All 4 sides of the grandiose building, made of granite and travertine, were lined with 84 Doric columns, each 35 feet high. Richly detailed in solid stone, the Pennsylvania Station was entered through a magnificent portal topped by 6 huge stone eagles, weighing 5,700 pounds apiece. As the New York
Times
once said, this exalted terminal “set the stamp of excellence on the city.” On September 8, 1910, trains first began operating on regular schedules in and out of the new Pennsylvania Station.

 

 

 

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From
The Making of an Insurgent, An Autobiography: 1882-1919
by Fiorello H. LaGuardia. Copyright, 1948, by J. B. Lippincott Company. Published by J. B. Lippincott Company.

Chapter 39

A T
EXAN MOVED
to New York in 1910 and soon made the city a center of international power and diplomatic intrigue. He was a behind-the-scenes politician, a modest Machiavelli, a little man whose soft hand was as fast on the draw as some fabled gunslingers. However, his favorite weapon was words, not revolvers. His name was Edward M. House.

Born in Texas and the son of a rich man, with Dutch blood flowing in his veins, House attended private schools and Cornell, was fascinated by politics and history, and inherited an income of $25,000 a year. Never seeking public office for himself, House preferred to remain a hidden manipulator of political figures. He became close
adviser to four Texas governors and one of them gratefully made him an honorary Texas colonel. Throughout the rest of his life he was known as Colonel House, a tide that puzzled Prussian officers who met House when he was on a diplomatic mission to Germany.

Having brought the largest state in the Union under his political dominion, House now wanted to play an important role in national politics. He was a Democrat, who believed that his party's next Presidential nominee should be an Eastern liberal. House was a kingmaker in search of a king, a hero worshiper in search of a hero. An unpretentious man, he moved into an unpretentious building in the Murray Hill section of Manhattan at 145 East Thirty-fifth Street. He and his wife merely occupied an apartment. The colonel's moderate-sized study held a Queen Anne desk, a chaise longue, two giant leather chairs, and a wall lined with books.

Back in Texas, Colonel House had become friendly with William Jennings Bryan, an ambitious politician from the Midwest. The Bryan family had left the chilly prairies of Nebraska to winter in the warmer climate of Texas because of their ailing daughter. Looking over Bryan, as he looked over all promising politicians, House was amazed to see “how lacking he was in political sagacity and common sense.” House made this judgment before Bryan ran three times as the Democratic Presidential candidate, only to be defeated in 1896, 1900, and 1908. Although Bryan hankered for a fourth chance at the Presidency, he told House that Mayor Gaynor of New York might be able to win for the Democrats.

William Jay Gaynor liked to mislead those who wrote about his early life, but it seems that he was born on a farm in central New York State in 1851. A Catholic, in 1863 he entered the novitiate of De la Salle Institute in New York City and was assigned the name of Brother Adrian Denys. After almost five years in the religious order Gaynor withdrew and abandoned Catholicism. He taught school, worked as a newspaper reporter, studied law, passed his bar examination, and practiced law in Brooklyn. For sixteen years he served as a justice of the New York State supreme court. With the help of Tammany Hall he was elected mayor of New York and took office on January 1, 1910.

Mayor Gaynor was the most cantankerous man ever to rule the city, his temper tantrums making even Peter Stuyvesant and Fiorello LaGuardia look like altar boys. Of average height and slight of build, an inveterate walker who moved with almost feminine grace, Gaynor
was a handsome man, with a graying Vandyke beard and sharp eyes under his black eyebrows. He liked children and adored pigs, and while serving as a judge, he once threw an inkwell at a man in open court. Still, Gaynor was of a philosophical bent, read widely in the classics, and concealed his malicious humor behind unsmiling blue eyes.

After taking office as mayor, he gave the back of his hand to Tammany politicians, who had put him there. Concerned only with having his own way and, incidentally, with making this a better city, Gaynor lashed out on every side. During the first 2 months of his administration he saved taxpayers about $700,000 by pulling politicians away from the public trough. He cut other city expenses. He killed boards and bureaus he considered superfluous. One disgusted Tammany brave snarled that Gaynor “did more to break up the Democratic organization than any other man ever has in this city.”

Regardless of the roars of the Tammany tiger, the mayor won a reputation as a liberal. Magazine articles declared that Gaynor had the stuff of which Presidents are made. With the perspective granted us by time, we know that this was not true. Gaynor couldn't break through the stalemate of forces surrounding him, never was able to lead the board of estimate, and foolishly placed faith in his naïve police commissioner.

Colonel Edward House looked and listened. Mulling over what Bryan had said about Gaynor and reading laudatory articles about him, House felt that perhaps this righteous reformer was just the man he sought. One of Gaynor's few friends was James Creelman, the celebrated reporter, war correspondent, and editorial writer. In 1910 Creelman was working as associate editor of
Pearson's Magazine
and writing another book. Colonel House, who knew Creelman, asked him for an introduction to Mayor Gaynor. In the early summer of 1910 the three men met for dinner in the Lotus Club, at 556 Fifth Avenue near Forty-fifth Street.

Creelman was a delightful host. A dignified man with a small goatee and a worldly character, who had interviewed Chief Sitting Bull and Count Leo Tolstoy, Creelman ordered the best wine for his guests. The dinner lasted until after midnight. Colonel House was impressed with the mayor. Later he said:

Anticipating the Presidential campaign of 1912, Colonel House wooed Mayor Gaynor. He also went back to Texas and induced members of the legislature to invite the New York mayor to address them. A formal invitation was telegraphed to Gaynor. For several days nothing was heard from him. Finally, a reporter on a small Texas newspaper wired Gaynor to ask whether or not he planned to speak to the Texas lawmakers. Gaynor replied that he had heard of no such proposal and had no intention of appearing in Texas. The mayor then sent Creelman a letter saying that anyone who thought he had the Presidency in mind was wrong.