by Sam Roberts
If history has been kinder to Arthur than most of his contemporaries were, it has sorely neglected his house. Few buildings symbolize New Yorkers’ indifference to their past more than 123 Lexington. In 1902, William Randolph Hearst, who lived at No. 119, on the northeast corner of Twenty-Eighth Street, bought the house and remodeled it into caretaker apartments and a garage. It was later home to Major George Witten, a soldier of fortune who claimed to have been the youngest enlistee in the Boer War, at age fourteen; and John Clellon Holmes, the poet and spokesman for the Beat Generation. It was bought by Abraham Yarmark, who owned a score of other residential buildings and, with more than four hundred violations pending, was branded by the city’s chief magistrate as New York’s worst landlord. At some point, Yarmark or a subsequent owner stripped the facade to the bare brick and removed the stoop leading to the parlor, replacing it with a main entrance on the ground floor.
While the building appears on the National Register of Historic Places, it has been so thoroughly transfigured that in 2016 the city decided not to designate it a landmark. As the home since 1944 to Kalustyan’s spice store and deli, No. 123 draws more cooks than history buffs and is more likely to evoke Proustian remembrances of a Middle Eastern souk or East Asian spice market than a nineteenth-century smoke-filled room. Like it did on the night of the 1881 swearing-in, the building offers virtually no visible suggestion that history happened there. Three plaques have been installed inside the locked vestibule since 1964. Two were stolen.
Today, 123 Lexington survives as another unheralded relic of American history and a unique site in New York City. (George Samoladas)
11
PIER A
The oldest dock in Manhattan, Pier A, near the Battery, welcomed dignitaries on their way to be saluted in the Canyon of Heroes. (Brian Merlis)
Herman Melville was only half right about how New Yorkers felt about the harbor that transformed a seasonal Lenape campground into the greatest city in the Western Hemisphere. “There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs—commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward,” he famously wrote in Moby-Dick. “Nothing will content them but the extremist limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in.”
New York never relinquished the dominance over East Coast maritime trade that the Erie Canal cinched for the city in 1825, but New Yorkers themselves were often ambivalent about the blessings of a coastline so lengthy that it would, if uncoiled, stretch as far as Canada or South Carolina. Until the early twentieth century, private individuals and companies owned most of the wharves. Warehouses, railroad tracks, fences, and other barriers obstructed public access and even surf and river views. Later, elevated highways blocked the shoreline, and the industrial waterfront was written off as low-rent fringe property better suited for public housing and natural gas storage tanks. In the 1920s, the East Fifties was the hangout of the Dead End Kids, until Anne Harriman Vanderbilt and Anne Morgan transformed the area into Sutton Place. Not until the late twentieth century, when most of the shipping industry had embarked for Staten Island and New Jersey, where there was more open space on shore to maneuver monster-size oceangoing shipping containers, did New Yorkers again get the urge to live and play as near the water as they possibly could and even to revive Walt Whitman’s commute across “crested and scallop-edg’d waves” by ferryboat.
One sign of the degree to which New Yorkers disregarded the waterfront is how they neglected the last surviving historic pier in Manhattan. Pier A, just north of the Battery, inherited that distinction sometime after Pier 1 (built in 1837 and sold to Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt) and Pier 2 (from where Robert Fulton’s steamship Clermont left on its first successful voyage in 1807) on the North River were demolished in the early 1920s to widen West Street from Battery Place to Rector Street. (The Hudson was traditionally called the North River well into the twentieth century to distinguish it from the Delaware, which the Dutch and Swedes called the South River.)
While a rational and rigid geometric grid system was branded on Manhattan’s topography early in the nineteenth century, no semblance of order was imposed on the haphazard docks, wharves, or piers until about 1870, when the state legislature empowered the municipal Board of Dock Commissioners to grapple with unregulated maritime congestion. The commissioners and their chief engineer—the Civil War hero George McClellan—had to deal with the ownership of piers (private or public), their number (there were not enough to accommodate the proliferation of passenger ships and freighters arriving and departing), and their length (if the so-called finger piers were too long and interfered with navigation in the river, perhaps the city could reverse course and, instead of expanding Manhattan by landfill, dredge berths farther inland). The board also lobbied Congress to fund the first federal improvement for maritime commerce in the port—deepening the main ship channel in the Lower Bay to thirty feet. In the early 1880s, the commissioners returned to the legislature with another request because, in submitting their master plan for the waterfront, they had overlooked a priority close to home: finding an adequate headquarters for the board itself.
They selected a site barely north of the Battery, where they built a pier 285 feet long and 45 feet wide on a masonry foundation under the direction of George Sears Greene Jr. (who also designed the Central Park Reservoir and the enlargement of High Bridge). The pier supported a 322-foot-long brick and terra-cotta Victorian shed (later extended landward by about 50 feet to total about 40,000 square feet). Three stories high, it was decorated with pressed-metal details that included a figure of Zeus, the Greek god of sky and thunder, and the letter “A.” A four-story wood-frame tower stood at the western end as a lookout for the Harbor Police, which shared the building with the commissioners. The tin roof was painted green, the color of oxidized copper, perhaps to eventually match the Statue of Liberty, which was officially dedicated in 1886, the same year that construction on Pier A finished.
While the pier was largely utilitarian, it also served as the backdrop for some of the city’s ubiquitous seaborne pageantry. New Yorkers elevated the 1909 Hudson-Fulton Celebration, commemorating the three hundredth anniversary of Henry Hudson’s arrival and the centennial of Robert Fulton’s first successful commercial paddle steamer, into self-congratulatory extravaganza. Wilbur Wright demonstrated his new aircraft by flying up the Hudson from Governors Island to Grant’s Tomb and back, and the river was clogged with vessels of every sort, including the RMS Lusitania, the world’s largest passenger ship when it was launched three years earlier, and a replica of Hudson’s Half Moon, which, regrettably, sailed smack into a facsimile of Fulton’s Clermont. In 1914, tens of thousands of New Yorkers lined the seawalls or hung from office building windows overlooking the Battery as Harry Houdini arrived in a motorcade from Times Square to perform a heavily promoted daredevil stunt. After boarding a tugboat near the New York Aquarium (at Castle Garden, where, as a four-year-old, he had been processed as Erik Weisz, a Jewish immigrant from Hungary), he was shackled and placed in a packing crate that was weighted down with two hundred pounds of lead, nailed shut, bound with ropes, and lowered into the Hudson. One minute later, Houdini miraculously emerged.
Because the pier had welcomed American servicemen home from the Great War, a clock in their honor was unveiled in the tower in January 1919. Donated by the industrialist Daniel G. Reid (and billed as the only public clock in the world signaling the thirty-minute intervals of four-hour watch duty by sailors), the clock has generally been described as the first World War I monument erected in the United States. Pier A also welcomed notable first-class ocean liner passengers arriving in New York—among them, Charles A. Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart, and Admiral Richard E. Byrd—who disembarked to make their way the few blocks to Broadway for the traditional ticker-tape parade through the city’s Canyon of Heroes
. In 1991, the American Merchant Mariners’ Memorial was installed on a stone breakwater just south of Pier A, a poignant tribute in bronze by the sculptor Marisol Escobar. It depicts four seamen—one of whom is submerged at high tide—clinging to their sinking vessel after it was attacked by a Nazi U-boat during World War II.
Pier A, which also served as a fireboat station from 1960 to 1992, had been targeted for demolition in the early 1970s. The Battery Park City Authority, which was building offices and high-rise residences on landfill created by excavations for the World Trade Center, was planning to level the distinctive shed and its zinc-clad facade and replace it with another skyscraper. But as the city’s fiscal crisis worsened in the mid-1970s, the possibility of razing the pier evaporated: office vacancy rates had soared and there wasn’t enough money left to tear the pier down, much less replace it. Meanwhile, the New York Landmarks Conservancy and other preservation groups lobbied to list the pier on the National Register of Historic Places and eventually have it declared an official city landmark. That was in 1977. Pier A survived. But like so many other historic sites, its fate was unresolved and it was pretty much left to fend for itself. In 1979, Mayor Edward I. Koch declared, “If there is one capital project I want my administration to be identified with it is that we brought the harbor back to the City of New York.” A centerpiece of that revival was supposed to be the renovation of Pier A. But the pier became yet another New York derelict, a landmark in name, but slowly deteriorating and less and less worth preserving, particularly once the Fire Department abandoned the building in 1992. Finally, in 2009, a five-year rehabilitation began as one of the Bloomberg administration’s many economic development initiatives, culminating in 2014 with the opening of Pier A Harbor House, an elegant restaurant, bar, and special event venue.
The Port of New York began its decline well before Pier A did. Nineteen sixty-two was a watershed year for New York Harbor. Because of the Erie Canal, the development of steamships, the introduction of regularly scheduled packet ship departures for Europe, and the triangular trade in cotton, in the nineteenth century the city had become the predominant port for shipping goods from the nation’s interior to other coastal destinations and abroad. More tons of cargo and more passengers were passing through New York Harbor than came through all the other major ports of the United States combined. New York built the nation’s first dry dock for ship construction and repairs, became a manufacturing hub (importing and processing more sugar and cocoa than anyplace else), and undercut rivals by subsidizing the car float barges that ferried freight across the Hudson from the mainland (until electrification at the beginning of the twentieth century enabled the railroads to tunnel to Manhattan). The guesstimates are imprecise, but as many as one hundred million Americans can trace their heritage to passengers who arrived in the United States through Castle Garden at the Battery. By the 1890s, when the surge had outgrown Castle Garden and Ellis Island opened, four-fifths of the nation’s immigrants were flowing through New York. Between 1892 and 1954, Ellis Island processed more than twelve million immigrants, whose first glimpse of America was the Statue of Liberty.
In 1962, the Port Authority opened the world’s first fully containerized port; it was not in New York, but across the river in Elizabeth, New Jersey. The cargo and passenger finger piers jutting into the harbor from Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Staten Island—piers that for three centuries had defined maritime New York—suffered a precipitous decline from which they never recovered. In the early 1960s, fully a fifth of the nation’s ocean-borne general cargo shipped through the Port of New York. Within two decades, while total tonnage had increased, New York’s share of cargo had plunged to one-tenth. Labor and land transportation costs were increasing (longshoremen were guaranteed a minimum annual income whether they worked or not). River views from luxury apartments had become more valuable. Peer pressure from other ports with more space on shore for containers eroded New York’s competitive edge. In 1972, the half-century-old bistate agency confirmed the supplanting of the Manhattan and Brooklyn piers by formally changing its name to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. After little more than another decade elapsed, Pier 42 on the East River, built in 1963 as a newsprint terminal and by 1987 the last cargo pier in Manhattan—where ships had delivered nearly a billion bananas a year—closed (Dole Fresh Fruit Company consolidated its operations in Delaware, a departure that for the Port of New York represented the ultimate banana split). It’s now a seventy-thousand-square-foot event venue (called Pier 36) on South Street.
Ferry service has proliferated again and passenger ships are docking in Brooklyn. Dredging deepened the port’s main shipping channel to fifty feet, and engineers raised the Bayonne Bridge over Kill Van Kull, between Staten Island and New Jersey, to accommodate the supercontainer ships that can now navigate the widened Panama Canal. The New York port still ranks first on the East Coast and third in the nation in tonnage (behind Houston and Los Angeles), even if its biggest export by weight is, unglamorously, boatloads of wastepaper.
Still, Melville turned out to be prescient. New Yorkers have rediscovered the waterfront. Years of neglect may have eclipsed the era of maritime commerce that Walt Whitman enthused about, but the waterfront has reawakened, from Brooklyn Bridge Park to Governors Island, Jamaica Bay to Fort Wadsworth, and Riverbank State Park in West Harlem to Chelsea Piers and Buzzy O’Keefe’s River Café.
“Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see?—Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries,” Melville wrote. “But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans,” he added. “It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.”
Left derelict for decades, Pier A was refurbished into a restaurant and catering venue with an unparalleled view and a storied history. (George Samoladas)
12
THE IRT POWERHOUSE
The IRT Powerhouse generated more than electricity to run the subway. There was also praise for the architecture of what could have been an industrial eyesore. (Meyer Liebowitz/New York Times, 1956)
On October 27, 1904, Mayor George B. McClellan Jr., the son of the Civil War general, placed his hand on a silver throttle, cast specially by Tiffany’s for the occasion, as he ceremonially inaugurated subway service from the City Hall station of the Interborough Rapid Transit system. The mayor was only supposed to pose for photographers, then relinquish the throttle to the motorman. Instead, he pulled back the controller, fed six hundred volts of direct current into the motors, and commandeered the train for five miles, all the way to the station at 103rd Street and Broadway in Harlem.
Frank Hedley, the IRT’s general manager, never released his nervous grip on the emergency brake. But during the entire ride, control of the new subway system was actually vested invisibly on the Upper West Side at what had been the site of the city’s largest slaughterhouse. The subway builders had bought the entire block bounded by Fifty-Eighth and Fifty-Ninth Streets and Eleventh and Twelfth Avenues to build the world’s biggest power plant—“an industrial Grand Canyon,” the Times called it—not only to generate electricity for the new mass transit system, but as a monumental civic improvement in one of the city’s most depressed neighborhoods.
Since the early nineteenth century, immigration had swelled Manhattan’s population, and mass transportation developed to disperse it. Regular ferry service across the East River to Brooklyn had begun in earnest by 1814, helping to establish the city’s first suburb in Brooklyn Heights. By mid-century, horse-drawn streetcars and later steam-powered trains, mostly on tracks elevated above the street, facilitated commuting from farther uptown. But New York’s evolution from those raised lines that cast gloomy palls on pedestrians and storefronts and depressed property values was painfully slow. Most of the els in Manhattan were razed only in the 1940s; the Third Av
enue El survived until 1955. The overnight replacement of smoky, sooty, and clangorous locomotives above- and belowground with clean and quieter subway cars was made possible by electrification. By 1903, all the elevated lines in Manhattan had converted from steam power to electricity, and a year later, the IRT established not only the city’s first successful subway but also the means to power it.
The subway opened sixteen years after the Blizzard of 1888 had crippled a city that was totally dependent on surface transportation (and overhead utility and telephone wires). More than any other public works project, the rapid transit system accomplished the merger of Manhattan’s 24 square miles into a 322-square-mile metropolis with a population of four million. The subway system translated the consolidation of the five boroughs into Greater New York in 1898 from a legal fiat by the legislature into an economic, social, and demographic reality (as the Brooklyn Bridge had, in effect, united the cities of New York and Brooklyn in 1883 and the Triborough Bridge would immutably fuse three of the boroughs in 1936). The scientific brains behind electrification, first of streetcars and then of subways, was Frank Sprague. He invented the technology that became known as multiple-unit control, which enabled each car in a train to contain its own motor, all of them controlled by one motorman stationed in the first car.
Authorized by the Rapid Transit Act of 1894 and shepherded by Mayor Abram S. Hewitt, the subway was to be publicly financed and constructed and leased to private operators. The winning bidder was John B. McDonald, who had been superintendent of the Croton Dam construction. He was so unfazed by the challenge of building the underground line on time and within his thirty-five-million-dollar budget that he whimsically belittled the work as “simply a case of cellar digging on a grand scale.” McDonald made up in confidence what he lacked in finances, until he enlisted August Belmont Jr., whose father was the Rothschild family’s North American agent. Belmont formed the IRT to operate the system and hired William Barclay Parsons as its chief engineer to supervise the construction of twenty-one miles of tunnels and elevated lines, and forty-three local stations. On Sunday, March 25, 1900, Mayor Robert Van Wyck (since immortalized not for mass transit, but in the name of a perpetually gridlocked so-called vehicular expressway) broke ground with a silver spade for the first line, which would extend from City Hall to Union Square at Fourteenth Street, then run under Park Avenue to Grand Central at Forty-Second Street, where it would veer sharply west to Times Square (now the Forty-Second Street shuttle route) and then north, running below Broadway to 145th Street. While it wasn’t the world’s first subway, it was the only one with separate local and express tracks in both directions and trains that could travel at forty miles per hour—three times the speed of the elevated lines (and nearly double the speed of the original London underground). In its first year, the IRT counted 106 million passengers. Within four years of McClellan’s joy ride, the line was extended to Broadway and 242nd Street in the Bronx—where, as on the Upper West Side, it spurred rapid residential development (between 1900 and 1910, the borough’s population more than doubled, from 200,000 to 430,000)—and to Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn. Among the passengers was Belmont himself, although, as the founder and president of the IRT, he conducted tours in his private maroon-and-gold subway car, which was equipped with a lounge, an office, a galley, and a lavatory and which he parked on a spur at Grand Central. “A private railroad car is not an acquired taste,” Belmont’s wife explained. “One takes to it immediately.”