by Sam Roberts
Known, appropriately enough, as High Bridge, it became, as the most conspicuous hallmark of the city’s modern public water supply system, an immediate tourist attraction. The Harlem Railroad carried passengers to the Manhattan side, from which pedestrians could, for a fee, stroll from 173rd Street in Manhattan to 170th Street in the West Bronx. Edgar Allan Poe commuted across the bridge to and from his cottage in the Fordham section. In 1899, Jesse Lynch Williams wrote in Scribner’s magazine that the wooded hills and solid masonry of the bridge had transformed a “small, unimportant looking winding river” into “the tired city’s playground” where New Yorkers could “feel the spirit of freedom and outdoors and relaxation.” In 1928, when five of the fifteen arches that impeded navigation of bigger vessels plying the river were replaced by a single steel span, the New York Times described the scene ebulliently: “What strange traffic! No other bridge about the city carries any just like it: waters from the Old Croton Aqueduct, pedestrians crossing to the Bronx, promenaders taking advantage on a summer’s evening, as they have for almost a century, of the cool breezes and fine prospect, couples arm in arm. No clanking cars, no honking motors!” the Times swooned. “As the steel span symbolizes the future, so the old arches stand as a link with the past.” Decades later, the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission declared the bridge “an engineering triumph, unique in this country in its own time.”
The growing population and the slow but steady installation of flush toilets beginning after the mid-nineteenth century took their toll on water pressure in Manhattan (even with the aqueduct, by the Civil War, there were still only about 140 working wells and pumps supplying water to all of Manhattan). In 1872, the city responded by completing a 185-foot-tall Romanesque Revival tower at the west end of the High Bridge. Pumps transported water into a forty-seven-thousand-gallon tank atop the tower to boost pressure as far south as Murray Hill. The octagonal tower, restored after a fire in 1984, included a belfry (which now houses an electronic carillon) and is topped by a lantern, spire, and weather vane. An accompanying seven-acre reservoir, completed in 1870, was converted into a swimming pool in the mid-1930s. By 1949, city officials decommissioned the bridge and tower as superfluous remnants of the water supply system. The bridge, which had been closed to traffic in the 1970s, was reopened to the public in 2015.
The majestic arches remain, flanking a newer steel span that was added to facilitate navigation on the river. (George Samoladas)
New York City is nearly finished with its Water Tunnel No. 3, a conduit that burrows as deep as five hundred feet, is as wide as twenty-four feet, and will carry water more than sixty miles from the upstate reservoir system. When it was authorized in 1954, it was described as “the greatest nondefense construction project in the history of Western civilization.” One striking trend in the last generation, though, is that even as the city’s population has broken records, the consumption of water per person has actually declined. It plunged from 213 gallons in 1979 to 115 in 2017, the result of conservation, more efficient appliances, and the installation of meters to measure water usage. At the same time, the city also launched a campaign to discourage the purchase of plastic containers by urging New Yorkers to drink tap water.
“We’re going to all this trouble to make the water clean,” said Emily Lloyd, the environmental protection commissioner. “I hope they’re drinking it.”
10
123 LEXINGTON AVENUE
History happened here, at 123 Lexington Avenue, but hardly anyone noticed it even on the night it occurred in 1881. (New York Times, ca. 1914)
When Rutherford B. Hayes became president in 1877 and vowed to investigate rampant patronage and corruption in the nation’s customs houses, Herman Melville feared he would be fired from the four-dollar-a-day inspector’s job on Manhattan’s docks that he had gotten as a political favor to his family a decade before. “How about President Hayes?” Melville wrote philosophically to a cousin, concerned, perhaps, about the incoming president’s promise to end Reconstruction in the South as much as his civil service reform agenda. “What’s the use? Life is short, and Hayes’s term is four years, each of 365 days.”
Melville would have to work longer hours under the federal government’s crackdown on slackers and larcenists, but would survive at the Custom House in lower Manhattan for another decade. His new boss would not be so lucky. Within a year, Chester A. Arthur, after refusing to resign, would be fired as the collector of the port, in a rebuke to his own indifference, at best, to the spoils system. The job of collector, unlike, say, that of a cabinet secretary, lived up to its title. He collected, all right, so much so that Arthur not only held one of the nation’s most lucrative appointive posts, but administered an office that at one point raised enough in annual revenue to fund the entire federal budget except for debt service.
“You are hereby suspended,” read the communication that Arthur received from the White House on July 11, 1878. He packed up his personal effects, returned home to his five-story Romano-Tuscan brownstone at 123 Lexington Avenue, and resumed his law practice. Born to a Baptist preacher father in Vermont, Arthur was raised upstate in tiny Perry, New York. He graduated from Union College in Schenectady, where his commencement speech was titled “The Destiny of Genius.” (“He lacked the second of those nouns for sure,” Thomas Mallon wrote in the New Yorker, “and even his ‘destiny’ could be better described as a matter of freakish fate.”) Before he turned twenty, Arthur moved to New York City, where he became a folk hero in the black community by successfully suing a mass transit company on behalf of Elizabeth Jennings, a young black woman whom a conductor evicted from a whites-only Third Avenue trolley, which she caught because she was late for Sunday church services, where she regularly played the organ.
In 1859, Arthur married Ellen Lewis Herndon, a Virginia-born daughter of slave owners, and, while his sympathies remained with the North, once the Civil War began, Arthur also figured that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation would only prolong it. In 1858, the Arthurs, known as Nell and Chet, bought the Bush family house on the east side of Lexington Avenue at No. 123, originally one of nine identical four-story brownstones that were completed in 1855. According to The First Ladies Fact Book by Bill Harris, Nell Arthur “embellished it with the finest furniture and accessories that money could buy, and she hired a staff of Irish immigrant servants to help her step up her lavish entertaining.”
Arthur insinuated himself in what morphed into the Republican Party in New York, earning the enduring military title of quartermaster general under Governor Edwin D. Morgan as supplier to the New York militia, and then performing a similar function for his political patron, Senator Roscoe Conkling of New York—delivering patronage jobs and, in return, collecting kickbacks for the party coffers. In 1871, Arthur went on to what any political tyro would covet as his final reward: President Ulysses S. Grant appointed him as collector of the port, a position in which, combining his salary and income from the moiety system (through which he received a percentage of the Custom House take), he collected some fifty thousand dollars (nearly a million in today’s dollars). “His specialty,” Thomas C. Reeves wrote in Gentleman Boss in 1975, “was to be the science of gaining political office.” In 1876, Conkling and his archrival, Senator James G. Blaine of Maine, both lost the Republican presidential nomination to Rutherford Hayes, a former Ohio congressman and governor, in an irrevocable split between the party’s Stalwarts, who favored traditional machine politics, and the so-called Half-Breeds, who supported civil service reform. Hayes lost the popular vote to Samuel J. Tilden, but inveigled Congress into awarding him the winning margin of Electoral College votes after he promised to withdraw federal troops from the South. Two years later, President Hayes fired Arthur as collector.
In June 1880, less than six months after Nell Arthur died of pneumonia, Republicans convened in Chicago to nominate a successor to Hayes, who had kept his promise to serve only one term. The Stalwarts hoped to return Grant to an unpreceden
ted third term after the Hayes hiatus, but he was being challenged by Blaine and by John Sherman, a former senator from Ohio (and brother of the Civil War general William Tecumseh) who was Hayes’s treasury secretary. After deadlocking on thirty-five ballots, Blaine’s delegates and Sherman’s shifted to Sherman’s campaign manager, James A. Garfield, an Ohio congressman and senator-elect. And, as a compromise and apparently as a peace offering to console Conkling, the grandees of the Grand Old Party offered the vice presidential nomination to Arthur. The biggest question was who, among those Republicans still standing in Chicago, was most surprised. “He never held an office,” Sherman wrote later of Arthur, “except the one he was removed from.” The Nation urged its readers not to panic at the possibility that Arthur might be a mere heartbeat away from the presidency: “It is true General Garfield, if elected, may die during his term in office, but this is too unlikely a contingency to be worth making extraordinary provision for.”
The same strategic ingenuity that had enabled Arthur to deliver goods for the Union Army helped Arthur procure New York’s electoral votes for Garfield, and he managed to squeak past his Democratic rival, Winfield Scott Hancock. Garfield was inaugurated on March 4, 1881. He had a premonition of death, but not his: he bizarrely dreamed one night that Arthur had drowned. Barely four months after Garfield took office, though, on the morning of July 2, the president himself was shot at the Washington railroad station, where he was about to board a train for New York. “I did it and will go to jail for it,” the gunman, Charles Guiteau, a lawyer and disgruntled job applicant, calmly declared, “and Arthur will be president.” When Chester Arthur got the news, not surprisingly he was with his patron, the imperious Republican Stalwart Roscoe Conkling. They were returning to Manhattan by steamboat from Albany, where the legislature had just called Conkling’s bluff in a stunning snub. Apoplectic because Garfield had appointed a Conkling political foe as collector of the port, Conkling resigned as senator, expecting the New York State legislators to immediately reelect him. They balked, however. Astounded by the news from Washington, Arthur immediately was driven to the Fifth Avenue Hotel and then to his actual home, at 123 Lexington. He wired James G. Blaine, the recently appointed secretary of state: “I am profoundly shocked and await further intelligence with the greatest anxiety.”
Arthur discreetly suggested that he would probably not leave New York until he was officially informed of the president’s death. A midday bulletin from Blaine was guardedly optimistic. The surgeons, he telegraphed, REGARD HIS WOUNDS AS VERY SERIOUS, THOUGH NOT NECESSARILY FATAL. By late afternoon, though, he wrote, ANXIETY DEEPENS. A little later: HE IS RAPIDLY SINKING. Arthur, poring over the latest newspapers in his front parlor, told a reporter: “What can I say? What is there to be said by me? I am overwhelmed by grief at the awful news.” Finally, at Blaine’s request, Arthur boarded the overnight train to Washington to assure the nation on July 4 that, with each medical bulletin from Garfield’s bedside sounding more dire, the federal government was still functioning.
“General Arthur has held for four months an office which acquires importance only in view of such an emergency as the crime of Guiteau was intended to create,” the New York Times wrote. “Active politicians, uncompromising partisans, have held before now the office of Vice-President of the United States, but no holder of that office has ever made it so plainly subordinate to his self-interest as a politician and narrowness as a partisan.” By mid-July, the medical crisis appeared to have passed. But repeated poking by the president’s doctors apparently contributed to an infection. By early September, Garfield had been moved to the New Jersey shore for relief from the steamy capital, leaving Arthur confined to 123 Lexington as a hostage to the president’s health. Friends and colleagues said he was morose and tearful. Many described his expected ascension to the presidency, especially under these circumstances—at the hand of an assassin who claimed to be doing Arthur’s bidding—as a national calamity.
At eleven thirty P.M. on September 19, a reporter from the Sun knocked on Arthur’s door and broke the news. “The president is dead,” he said. “Oh, no!” Arthur was said to have replied when he entered the hallway. “It cannot be true.” The official confirmation arrived less than an hour later. A messenger boy delivered a telegram dispatched from Elberon, New Jersey, and signed by five members of the cabinet. IT BECOMES OUR PAINFUL DUTY TO INFORM YOU OF THE DEATH OF PRESIDENT GARFIELD, they wrote, AND ADVISE YOU TO TAKE THE OATH OF OFFICE AS PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES WITHOUT DELAY. Arthur was in his second-floor library with his lawyer, Elihu Root; his private secretary, John C. Reed; Police Commissioner Stephen B. French; District Attorney Daniel G. Rollins; and his son, Alan, a student at the College of New Jersey (now known as Princeton). They sent for judges. At two fifteen, the first one to arrive, state supreme court justice John R. Brady, a Democrat, administered the oath of office in the front parlor, a room lined with books and punctuated by a bust of Henry Clay, the Kentucky senator who was hailed as the Great Compromiser for delaying the Civil War by papering over sectional schisms. “The transition of power was brief and joyless,” Zachary Karabell, a presidential biographer, wrote. “Save the presence of half a dozen carriages and a group of reporters,” the Times reported the next morning, “there was nothing unusual in the street outside that would indicate that an event of historical importance was occurring behind the closed green blinds of the Arthur residence.”
Arthur would serve out Garfield’s term until March 4, 1885, presiding over, among other events, the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge. Declining from Bright’s disease, a degenerative kidney ailment, he did not seek, nor would he have received, the Republican nomination for president in 1884. Convening in Chicago again, the delegates anointed Blaine, delivering their final repudiation of Conkling (who collapsed and died three years later, shortly after being stranded in the Blizzard of 1888 a few blocks from 123 Lexington, in Madison Square Park, where his statue and Arthur’s were later erected at opposite corners). Abandoned by his own party, Arthur nonetheless left the presidency, as Harper’s Weekly declared in a backhanded compliment, “with a higher political consideration than when he entered it.” He returned to New York, where, on November 17, 1886, he oversaw the burning of his personal and pre–White House official papers and died the next day. He was fifty-seven. “Surely,” said Elihu Root, the future statesman who had received his first federal appointment from Arthur, served in the cabinet, and became a United States senator from New York, “no more lonely and pathetic figure was ever seen assuming the powers of government.”
With benefit of hindsight, latter-day pundits would assess Arthur more generously than most sages of his own generation. While his legacy includes the Chinese Exclusion Act, which he originally rejected, he nonetheless defied popular expectations—and those of Conkling, his patron. While the interim president named Conkling to the United States Supreme Court in 1882 (he was confirmed, but declined to serve), Arthur not only retained Conkling’s political rival whom Garfield had appointed as collector of the New York port, but also signed the Pendleton Act, which provided the underpinnings of a nonpartisan, professional civil service system for federal employees.
It would fall to Arthur’s biographers to explain his epiphany once he was accidentally elevated from the vice presidency and no longer beholden to his political sponsors in New York. A half century after his death, an envelope was rediscovered that somehow had survived Arthur’s bonfire of his vanities. Inside were twenty-three letters from Julia Sand, a bedridden woman who lived on East Seventy-Fourth Street and began writing to Arthur secretly in August 1881, when she was thirty-one and he was still the vice president. With Garfield still hovering, Sand predicted: “Now your kindest opponents say: ‘Arthur will try to do right’—adding gloomily—‘He won’t succeed, though—making a man President cannot change him.’ ” She disagreed, however, casting Arthur’s biography up to that point in its best possible light. “Great emergencies awaken generous traits which have la
in dormant half a life,” she wrote, and exhorted him: “Do what is more difficult & more brave. Reform!”