The Epic of New York City (83 page)
Read The Epic of New York City Online
Authors: Edward Robb Ellis
Nine months after the fire Max Blanck and Isaac Harris were tried on charges of manslaughter. The case was heard in the Tombs, a brownstone monstrosity occupying two blocks just north of Foley Square. The attorney for the proprietors was Max D. Steuer, a soft-voiced Tammany brave, who later served a long list of notorious clients. On the bench sat Justice Thomas Crain, another Tammany stalwart. In effect, he directed a verdict of acquittal, and the jurors took only 100 minutes to pronounce the defendants not guilty. On December 28, 1911, a New York
Evening Mail
columnist, named Franklin P. Adams, wrote in his diary: “Reading that Mr. Harris and Mr. Blanck are not to suffer at all for their so dreadful negligence I am grieved, and at odds with them that did acquit them, albeit my heart is soft as any melon.”
Less melonlike was the reaction of working families that had lost loved ones. The day the verdict was handed down, hundreds of grieving relatives gathered outside the Tombs. Blanck and Harris, guarded by five cops, tried to sneak out of the building by the Leonard Street exit. They were spotted. A howl of fury smashed through the air. David Weiner, a young man whose seventeen-year-old sister had perished in the fire, charged her bosses, shaking his fist and shrilling, “Not guilty? Not guilty? It was murder! Murder!” He screamed and wept and finally collapsed and had to be taken to a hospital. One clothing worker wrote in his autobiography: “For half a year I was unable to enjoy the taste of food. Through those days and nights, I had no rest neither in the shop nor at home. Day and night I saw their forms, living and dead.”
On March 29, 1911, the State Capitol Building at Albany caught fire and caused more than $5,000,000 damages. It was one thing for upstate lawmakers to read what had happened in New York City four days earlier. It was quite another thing to see for themselves the angry glare of flames. A state factory investigating commission was organized. It consisted of two state senators, three assemblymen, and four citizens appointed by the state government. The commission was granted broad powers of investigation, and it sat for sixteen months. State Senator Robert F. Wagner, father of the city's later mayor, Robert F. Wagner, Jr., was elected chairman. State Assemblyman Alfred E. Smith was named vice-chairman. Like-minded in their liberal outlook, the German immigrant and the Irish boy who grew up on the streets of New York tackled the problem fearlessly and effectively.
Monumental reforms flowed from the Triangle fire. New York State's entire labor code was rewritten, becoming the best of any state in the nation. Labor unions, so long ignored and repressed, began to come into their own. Some historians pinpoint this tragedy and its consequences as the genesis of the New Deal.
At the turn of the century New York's public libraries did not compare with those of Boston, Cleveland, Minneapolis, and Cincinnati. However, the city fathers were remedying this situation.
At the urging of Andrew H. Green and others, in 1895 three private libraries were consolidatedâon paper. One was the Astor Library, bequeathed by John Jacob Astor, who had died in 1848. Another was the Lenox Library, put together by a book collector and philanthropist, named James Lenox, who had died in 1880. The third was the Tilden Library, established by Samuel J. Tilden, a corporation lawyer, governor of New York and Democratic Presidential candidate, who had died in 1886.
To bring the three collections together under one roof, it was decided to erect a huge new library building on the west side of Fifth Avenue between Fortieth and Forty-second streets. At the time the reservoir still occupied the site, which in 1884 had been named Bryant Park in honor of poet William Cullen Bryant. The city agreed to provide the land, to build and equip the new library, and to maintain it. On the other hand, trustees of the newly created New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundationsâits full nameâpromised to establish a free circulating branch and a public library and reading room. Andrew Carnegie donated $5,000,000 to the project.
The reservoir was torn down, and construction of the new building began in 1902. The architects were John Merven Carrère and Thomas Hastings. They built an enormous marble palace, costing more than $9,000,000. Incorporated into the structure was marble from Vermont, Tennessee, Greece, Italy, France, Germany, and Belgium. According to present-day architects, the building probably comes nearer than any other in America to the realization of Beaux-Arts design at its best, and they call it a joyous creation.
The wonderful new library was dedicated on May 23, 1911. Library directors and trustees, together with civic dignitaries, marched, two by two, past 600 invited guests to a platform erected in the central portico of the library's Fifth Avenue entrance. Bringing up
the rear were William Howard Taft, the portly President of the United States, and ninety-three-year-old John Bigelow, editor, author, diplomat, and president of the library's board of trustees. Bigelow had fretted that he wouldn't live long enough to take part in this ceremony, and when he spoke, his voice was so weak that he couldn't be heard more than two feet away. President Taft summed up the occasion best of all when he said, “This day crowns a work of national importance.”
Indeed it did. Apart from the 80 branch libraries later developed, the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue became the most widely used research library in the Western world, visited by 3,000,000 persons a year. It contains the world's largest reading room. With its 4,500,000 volumes and bound pamphlets, it ranks third in the nation, exceeded only by the Library of Congress and Harvard University. Its 80 miles of bookshelves contain data in 3,000 languages and about 50 centuries of human wisdom and folly. Its 800-member staff answers 10,000 questions a day.
Two stone lions flank the library's Fifth Avenue entrance. According to New York folklore, these kingly beasts only roar when a virgin passes.
Another notable structure that took shape about this time was the Woolworth Building, erected by round-faced Napoleon-worshiping Frank W. Woolworth, the ten-cent-store tycoon. He envied the Metropolitan Life Insurance Building, which in 1908 was the tallest skyscraper in town. It stood at Madison Avenue and East Twenty-fourth Street, its tower soared fifty stories heavenward, and it contained four clocks with faces larger than those of Big Ben in London's Houses of Parliament.
Determined to let no one surpass him, the department store magnate hired an engineer just to measure the Metropolitan Building. From street level to the tip of its ornate peak the skyscraper loomed 701 feet 3 inches high. Woolworth then ordered architect Cass Gilbert to design a structure that would dwarf the Metropolitan. The site chosen for Woolworth's masterpiece was Broadway between Barclay Street on the south and Park Place on the north. At the time the land was occupied by a 6-story building. Woolworth told his architect to model his new building after the Houses of Parliament, so Gilbert designed in the Gothic style. The building's terra-cotta façade was so elaborately ornamented, so delicate and lacelike in
effect, so studded with gargoyles, and so beautiful that it resembled a cathedral more than an office building. In fact, it came to be called the Cathedral of Commerce. One of the hod carriers who helped build it was William O'Dwyer.
The finished structure rose 60 stories, or 792 feet above Broadway. It cost Woolworth $13,500,000, which he paid in cash. This was no strain for the chain-store owner; in 1913 his 684 stores did a business of more than $66,000,000. The new skyscraper was opened on April 24, 1913. Woolworth invited 900 guests to honor Cass Gilbert at a banquet held on the twenty-seventh floor. Woolworth's private office, modeled after a room in one of Napoleon's palaces, contained a life-size bronze bust of Napoleon, one of Napoleon's clocks, and a painting of Napoleon seated in his coronation robes. Woolworth exulted because he now owned the tallest skyscraper in the world. It attracted 300,000 visitors every year until the Empire State Building was completed. Frank Woolworth once received a postcard from the Pacific coast addressed simply: “The Highest Building in the World,” and while traveling in Europe, he gleefully noticed that a trade paper symbolized all America with a photograph of his building, not even bothering to name it.
The day the Woolworth Building opened, President Woodrow Wilson sat in the White House and pressed a button that turned on 80,000 light bulbs in the new skyscraper. Despite the glow, lights dimmed elsewhere in the world with the approach of war.
K
AISER
W
ILHELM
II, the last emperor of Germany, said long afterward, “The visit of Colonel House to Berlin and London in the spring of 1914 almost prevented the World War.” President Wilson had sent his man from Manhattan to Europe in the hope of bringing about an understanding between Germany and England, which were rasping one another raw. On June 1, 1914, Colonel House was given a private audience by the Kaiser at Potsdam. House later wrote:
I found that he had all the versatility of (Theodore) Roosevelt with something more of charm, something less of force. He has
what to me is a disagreeable habit of bringing his face very close to one when he talks most earnestly. His English is clear and well chosen and, though he talks vehemently, yet he is too much the gentleman to monopolize the conversation. It was give-and-take all the way through.
The Colonel was left with the impression that the Kaiser did not want war. House felt that Wilhelm, by trying a bluff, had put himself in a situation from which he could not back down.
New Yorkers were surprised when they picked up the New York
Times
of June 28, 1914, and read this headline:
   HEIR TO AUSTRIA'S THRONE IS SLAIN
      WITH HIS WIFE BY A BOSNIAN YOUTH
         TO AVENGE SEIZURE OF HIS COUNTRY
Psychologically unprepared for war, New York's citizens tended to shrug off the assassination at Sarajevo. They thronged to movie houses to see the latest episode of
The Perils of Pauline,
a serial in which actress Pearl White was often left dangling from a cliffâin actuality, the New Jersey Palisades, where much of the action was filmed. Europe had had no general war for ninety-nine years, or ever since the end of the struggle against Napoleon in 1815, so it seemed unlikely that the continent could now be ravaged by a new war.
Regardless of wishful thinking, events in Europe developed quickly. Austria sent Serbia an ultimatum. Serbia gave in to most of Austria's demands. European stock exchanges collapsed. Despite peace efforts, Austria declared war on Serbia. Herbert Hoover said in his memoirs: “It is a curious commentary on a civilization in process of being blown up that so well informed a newspaper as the
New York Times
from July 1st to July 22nd carried no alarming European news on the front page.” An Austrian force attacked Belgrade. Russia, France, and Germany mobilized. A British fleet sailed under sealed orders. Germany ordered Russia to end its mobilization. The balance of power had been upset, and chaos was replacing order.
On July 31 the New York Stock Exchange closed. Two days later Secretary of the Treasury William G. McAdoo hurried from Washington to New York at the urgent request of Wall Street bankers. Among other pressing problems, $77,000,000 worth of New York City's bonds and notes were held in Europe. McAdoo and his wife were met at Pennsylvania Station by harried financiers. She later wrote: “I
was startled by their white faces and trembling voices. Could these be America's great men?”
German troops goose-stepped into Luxembourg and demanded free passage across Belgium. Great Britain demanded that Germany observe Belgian neutrality. Germany refused. England then declared war on Germany. So did France. Here in neutral America, here in the port of New York, ships of the warring nations were strung out from Ellis Island to Tottenville, so close that crew members could exchange scowls and hard words.