The Epic of New York City (57 page)

Worst of all, perhaps, the charter created a board of audit to consist of the mayor (Hall), the comptroller (Connolly), and the commissioner of public works (Tweed, whom Mayor Hall quickly appointed to this new post). According to M. R. Werner in his book
Tammany Hall:
“The Tweed charter was
carte blanche
for members of the Ring to enter the city treasury with shovels and load their wagons with gold.” Later, when Tweed was confessing, he explained how this three-man board of audit had enriched the ring: “—The understanding was that the parties to whom we advanced money, and whom we had confidence in, should, through our influence, advance bills for work purporting to be done for the county or the city—more particularly for the county—and they should receive only fifty percent of the amount of their bills.”

In addition to graft and corruption, New Yorkers were plagued with a transportation problem. After the Civil War, traffic became a headache. A state senate committee said that “the transit of freight and passenger trains by ordinary locomotives on the surface of the street is an evil which has already endured too long. . . .” The New York
Herald
grumbled that “modern martyrdom may be succinctly defined as riding in a New York omnibus.”

Between 1831 and 1858, 8 city railroads had been incorporated. In 1860, 6 of them remained in operation. Additionally, 16 omnibus companies controlled 544 licensed stages over fixed routes to all parts of the city below Fiftieth Street, as well as to neighboring villages. By 1864 there were only 12 such lines and 61,000,000 passengers a year. By 1865 the traffic snarl had become so great that it was almost impossible to get around town. By 1866 a pedestrian bridge had been built across Broadway at Fulton Street. In 1867 the
Evening Post
complained that workers had to spend more than four hours a day getting to and from their jobs. Mark Twain shook his head over the “torrent of traffic” and accused city officials of winking at the overloading of streetcars. Boss Tweed had both the streetcar and the stage companies in his pocket. All public vehicles were filthy and smelly, lighted at night by one faint kerosene lamp and warmed in winter only by straw strewed on the floor.

Most stores and offices still lay within the downtown area, and
employees had to live fairly close to their places of business in order to get to work. Lacking good transportation, they couldn't spread out. Because Manhattan was long and narrow and because it lacked bridges to Brooklyn and New Jersey, the population could expand in only one direction—north.

The world's first underground railroad system opened in London in 1863. Then a Michigan railroad man, Hugh B. Willson, raised $5,000,000 to dig a subway in New York under Broadway. Cornelius Vanderbilt, who was slowly acquiring control of the New York Central, snorted that he'd be “underground a damned sight sooner than this thing!” Boss Tweed was against Willson's subway, too, because it would compete with transit lines he already controlled. Tweed gave the word to Reuben E. Fenton, Hoffman's predecessor as governor, and Fenton promptly vetoed a bill calling for construction of Willson's underground railroad. Thus did Tweed delay New York's subway system by nearly half a century. The New York
Times
criticized Fenton, saying: “There is not enough room on the surface of the city to accommodate the traffic which its business requires.”

Now the only solution to the traffic problem was to build above the ground—in the air. In 1867 the state legislature authorized construction of an experimental line of elevated railway track stretching the half mile between the Battery and Dey Street along Greenwich Street. It had been suggested by a bearded inventor, named Charles T. Harvey. Tweed laughed, people jeered, and almost nobody thought that the train in the sky would work. On July 1, 1868, a crowd gathered to watch as the frock-coated stovepipe-hatted Harvey took his seat in a dinky car looking a little like a primitive automobile, except for the fact that it perched thirty feet above Greenwich Street. This was not a self-propelled locomotive. Its boiler turned a wheel that wound in a cable and moved the car. To everyone's astonishment, the vehicle picked up speed of five miles an hour and hit a peak of ten. The trial run of the world's first elevated had proved a success.

Tweed glowered. Harvey nonetheless got enough financial credit to extend his Ninth Avenue elevated line north toward the Hudson River railroad terminal, at Thirtieth Street near the Hudson River. In 1869 Vanderbilt merged the Hudson line with his New York Central and also broke ground for the first Grand Central terminal, on Forty-second Street at Fourth Avenue. Tweed felt that if Harvey's elevated ever reached the new depot, it was sure to succeed, so he took action. As a state senator, he pushed through the legislature a
bill branding the elevated as a public nuisance and permitting him, as city commissioner of public works, to tear it down within ninety days. However, for the first and only time during the 1870 session of the legislature, the lawmakers crossed Tweed by voting down his bill. Tweed, who had set back New York's subways, was not permitted to delay its elevateds.

Meanwhile, a strange subway was secretly being bored through the ground under Manhattan. The man behind this mystery was a genius, named Alfred Ely Beach. An inventor, he had designed a typewriter, which he jokingly called a literary piano. A publisher, he was co-owner of the New York
Sun
and had founded a score of other periodicals. For a while he had an office overlooking City Hall and a home at 9 West Twentieth Street, and traffic was so dense that it took him almost an hour to get from one place to the other.

In 1866 Beach began experimenting with pneumatic power, making models of mail tubes. The next year, during the American Institute Fair held in the Fourteenth Street armory, he built a plywood tube six feet in diameter and a block long on the armory floor. Inside this tube was a ten-passenger car. Using a big fan, Beach blew the car from Fourteenth Street to Fifteenth Street and then sucked it back. Hundreds of people enjoyed this ride, and Beach now knew that he could propel a train through a pneumatic tube.

The inventor was aware that Tweed had killed Willson's hope of building a subway, and he knew about the graft involved in obtaining transit franchises. He decided not to seek a franchise from corrupt city officials, telling his brother, “I won't pay political blackmail. I say let's build the subway furtively.” He asked the state legislature for a charter to dig what he characterized as a pneumatic mail tube system under Broadway. In 1868 the bill crossed the desk of State Senator Tweed, who failed to understand its implications. Beach got his charter. Soon he had a gang of laborers burrowing a tunnel 21 feet under Broadway just west of City Hall. This hole in the ground was only 312 feet long, running a single block from Murray Street on the south to Warren Street on the north. The project went on in complete secrecy, the workmen dumping bags of earth into wagons whose wheels were muffled to avoid all noise. The digging was finished in only 58 nights. Then the men bricked in the tunnel, which had an outside diameter of 9 feet and an inside diameter of 8 feet.

On February 26, 1870, New Yorkers awakened to find that they had a one-block subway. The
Herald
blared: “FASHIONABLE
RECEPTION HELD IN THE BOWELS OF THE EARTH!” Tweed was furious. City and state officials, aware of his anger, stayed away from the new marvel, but the people flocked to see it. They were overwhelmed by the subway's waiting room, which was nearly half as long as the tunnel itself. All was elegance, the walls frescoed, paintings hung here and there, a grand piano standing in stately splendor, a fountain bubbling, and a tank glistening with goldfish—all lighted by zircon lights. Beach purposely had made the waiting room impressive in the hope of winning popular support for the battle he anticipated with Boss Tweed.

New Yorkers were delighted with their pneumatic subway, but Beach still had to ask the state legislators for a new charter. After all, he had built a transit line instead of a pneumatic postal system. What's more, he wanted to extend his subway the length of Broadway. Now the state governor was John T. Hoffman, whose political future lay with Boss Tweed. The lawmakers passed Beach's transit bill, but the governor vetoed it. In an editorial the
Tribune
stormed, “Of course it was to be expected that, as long as Tammany had no hand in the scheme and saw no chance of converting it into a swindle, its influence would be used against it.”

This was in 1871. The next year the people threw Hoffman out of office, and in 1873 a third Beach bill came before the legislature. It won the approval of both the lawmakers and the new governor, John A. Dix. By this time, however, the city was writhing in the grip of a depression, and Beach could not get enough capital to extend or even maintain his subway. Late in 1873 Governor Dix withdrew Beach's charter with “the greatest reluctance.” Not until the beginning of the twentieth century was New York to get a permanent subway.

In 1871 self-propelled steam locomotives replaced the cable-winding engines on the Ninth Avenue elevated, whose tracks now pushed north of Thirtieth Street. Vanderbilt's Hudson River railroad thrust even farther north, making it possible for Yonkers to become a separate city in 1872. The same year Vanderbilt wangled through the legislature a bill forcing New York City to pay $4,000,000 to improve the roadway of his New York Central tracks on Park Avenue. On February 1, 1872, the New York Council of Political Reform declared publicly that for a long time the city had been swindled out of at least $1,000,000 a year in the development of surface railroads.

Expansion of elevated railways marked the first real advance in
the city's rapid transit. English visitors liked New York's elevated better than their own London subway. A German geographer, who saw New York in 1873, said that its transportation facilities were better than those of any European city. Improved transit caused a real estate boom that made ever more money for Tweed and his henchmen. On the inside of everything, they bought property where improvements were to be made and then sold this land to the city at fantastic sums. The strip that became Riverside Drive should have cost only $1,400,000, but the Tweed Ring had run the cost up to $6,000,000 by the time the purchase was made in 1872.

Three years later the state legislature passed the Husted Act, empowering New York's mayor to appoint the city's first rapid transit commission. Its members chose elevated railways as the best medium for moving New Yorkers around the city speedily. They also selected Second, Third, Sixth, and Ninth Avenues as routes for these railways. Rail by rail, pillar by pillar, the elevateds took shape overhead; the tracks were thirty feet high in most places and even higher in others. On narrow streets the aerial railroads were built right over sidewalks and almost flush with the sides of buildings.

The Third and Sixth Avenue elevateds were the first to begin operations in 1878. Each train consisted of four cars, painted light green, their interior upholstery finished in dark brown. Trains ran from 5:30
A.M
. until midnight. The fare was ten cents a ride except during rush hours, when it cost five cents. Conductors collected tickets threaded with silk as a protection against counterfeiting. The engines started with a jerk that jolted the spines of passengers. The clatter and rumble of the sky trains frightened horses on the streets, while the soot, cinders, and burning coals they dropped infuriated pedestrians and housewives. People living on the second and third floors of tenements, on a level with the passing cars, lacked privacy unless they pulled down their shades. Oil squirted into their parlors when their windows were open. Property values declined all along the elevated lines. Despite these drawbacks, New York now had a transit system of which it could be proud—for a time.

The same could not be said of the interstate Erie Railroad, whose tracks were reaching the Midwest. Its flaking rails sank into rotten ties and undulated beneath the wheels of passing trains. Nonetheless, since it offered the possibility of plunder, a group of rapacious tycoons fought one another for possession of this down-at-the-heels
line. Because their fiscal war was waged in New York courts and the Stock Exchange, this railroad was called the Scarlet Woman of Wall Street.

Cornelius Vanderbilt, rapidly developing into the nation's top railway magnate, wanted this Scarlet Woman. Boss Tweed, who had served as a representative of the Vanderbilt interests in Albany, favored Vanderbilt at first. Judge Barnard therefore issued the injunctions Vanderbilt demanded in the Erie war. Vanderbilt's chief antagonist was shy, swarthy, wispy Jay Gould, a financial wizard who liked to raise orchids. Gould nervously twisted his feet as he talked, and Mrs. Abram S. Hewitt shuddered and said that he had the eyes of a snake. Gould bribed Tweed to come over to his side by offering him more money than the $19,000 Vanderbilt handed the Tweed Ring. Gould gave the Boss a block of Erie stock, had Tweed and Sweeny elected to the Erie's board of directors, and paid Tweed $1,500,000 for “legal” services and expenses—Judge Barnard having proclaimed Tweed an attorney-at-law. The judge then handed out the injunctions sought by Gould and denied those Vanderbilt wanted. Gould won the Erie war, and Tweed happily helped him defraud the railway's investors.

Using the money milked from the Erie, Gould then schemed to corner the market in gold. In the 1860's the United States was not on the gold standard. Monetary values were expressed in terms of paper money. Gold was scarce, and the scarcity resulted in high interest rates. By 1869 the federal treasury held in reserve $95,000,000 in gold, but only $15,000,000 worth of the precious metal circulated throughout the country. Gould planned to rake in this $15,000,000 and then set his own price on gold. He felt that he could make a fast killing and reap enormous profits before gold could be imported from Europe—provided one thing: provided the federal treasury did not sell any of its $95,000,000 in gold. Vital to his plot was knowledge of what the government might do once he made his move.