by Sam Roberts
While William Wilgus, the New York Central’s chief engineer, was risking the railroad’s resources on electrification—successfully, as it turned out—William Barclay Parsons was betting that Frank Sprague’s experimental electric traction motors, though still in their infancy, would work underground on scores of short-hop, start-and-stop subway cars running simultaneously. The IRT, only the sixth subway in the world, would be the longest line built as a single project and, as a result, demanded a mammoth generating plant to power it. The engineers envisioned a colossal building, stretching seven hundred feet between the avenues in western midtown, and equipped with eight steam engines, forty-eight boilers, and generators that could produce one hundred thousand horsepower. Rather than adopt Thomas Edison’s direct current, the IRT opted for alternating current, which had been developed by Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse and which could be transmitted at 11,000 volts, with less loss of energy and over longer distances, to eight substations where it was converted to 625 volts of direct current. The plant could generate fifty thousand kilowatts of electricity, sufficient to power eight hundred subway cars simultaneously.
The plant’s bunkers could accommodate as much as eighteen thousand tons of coal, which was delivered by barge on the adjacent Hudson River waterfront, or by freight trains that could enter the building on a dedicated spur. Running at capacity, the plant burned a thousand tons of coal a day. So confident was the company of regular deliveries that its reserve bunkers were virtually empty—which is why, on August 23, 1917, four months after the United States entered World War I, the government left thousands of straphangers stranded for hours when defense officials rerouted the IRT’s scheduled shipments to supply the navy’s battleship fleet.
While gunky coal enabled the transit system to supply power to the people—literally, if not figuratively—at the height of the City Beautiful movement the IRT’s directors were also intent on upgrading the grimy West Side neighborhood with an elegant public landmark instead of inserting another gloomy industrial eyesore. A company spokesman explained that beyond the practical criteria in choosing a location for the plant, there was another consideration: “that the powerhouse of the city’s great transit system will be something in which New Yorkers will take no little pride and that such a structure should have as commanding a site as possible.” IRT engineers under Paul C. Hunter and William C. Phelps conceived the overall design. They recruited Stanford White to fashion the facade, in one of his last commissions before he was shot in 1906 in the first “crime of the century,” the love triangle murder committed on the roof of White’s Madison Square Garden by Harry K. Thaw. (White’s death went unmarked in the subway system; but in 1937, during the funeral for George H. Pegram, who was chief engineer for the elevated railroads, which were energized by the IRT’s generating station twin on East Seventy-Fourth Street, every train in the city halted for two minutes—the ultimate power tribute.)
White camouflaged the factory’s facade in ashlar Milford granite, buff Roman brick (the same brick he had used on his Madison Square Garden, at an extra cost of fifty-five thousand dollars), and creamy terra-cotta. He embellished the exterior with French Neoclassical ornamentation, including lightning bolts and wings, to accentuate the electrified subway’s speed, and added pine cones, which are ancient representations of enlightenment (presumably a tribute to the city fathers and company directors who invested in the subway system to relieve vehicular and residential congestion). The original five giant chimneys, which soared as high as 225 feet above the boiler grates, incorporated what the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission described as “entasis, a gentle curvature famously used in the design of the Parthenon to enhance its perceived straightness and height” and evoked the smokestacks on luxury ocean liners docked nearby. “But for its stacks,” the engineer J. C. Bayles wrote in the Times, “it might suggest an art museum or public library rather than a powerhouse.”
The IRT’s directors integrated the powerhouse, its only generating plant at the time and its most visible aboveground structure, into a system, as the historian Clifton Hood wrote, that they built “not merely as a pedestrian municipal service but as a civic monument.” As the IRT said in its self-congratulatory brochure: “Several plans were taken up looking to the construction of a power house of massive and simple design, but it was finally decided to adopt an ornate style of treatment by which the structure would be rendered architecturally attractive and in harmony with the recent tendencies of municipal and city improvements from an architectural standpoint.”
Civic leaders hoped that the powerhouse would not only be a citywide source of pride, but, coupled with the recent construction of DeWitt Clinton Park (which, when it opened in 1901, stretched from Eleventh Avenue nearly to the Hudson at Fifty-Fourth Street and provided a swimming pavilion and children’s farm garden), would also improve the neighborhood. Before it became Lincoln Center, the area east and north of the powerhouse was known as San Juan Hill. It was one of the city’s most congested neighborhoods and, at the beginning of the twentieth century, home to the majority of New York’s black population, some of them veterans of the bloody charge in the Spanish-American War (and other victims of violent turf wars between local African Americans and Irish from Hell’s Kitchen to the south and Italians from farther north). Freight trains rumbling unguarded at grade level slaughtered enough pedestrians to bestow the name “Death Avenue” on the major north-south thoroughfare, in a neighborhood so devoid of private sanitary facilities that the municipal bathhouse on West Sixty-Second Street was commodious enough to accommodate four thousand people a day. In 1901, the Real Estate Record and Builders’ Guide reported bullishly that “the location of the power-house in that vicinity will benefit the neighborhood, both by creating a large demand for labor, and by the tendency in improvement which an important public work always bestows upon its surroundings.”
Much of what the powerhouse bestowed at first was soot from the soft coal it burned until 1959, when the city, which had assumed operation of the transit system, sold the building to Consolidated Edison Inc. The utility company upgraded the equipment, switched fuels to less-polluting gas, and still operates the plant to provide steam, which its New York Steam Company began producing in 1882. Con Ed now operates the world’s largest commercial steam operation to heat and cool three million residential and commercial customers in Manhattan. Con Ed altered the plant (only one smokestack survives) and was the only dissenting voice when the city finally designated the powerhouse as a landmark in 2017. The architect Robert A. M. Stern called the site a “compelling industrial beauty.” The artist Chuck Close described it as “among the very best twentieth-century industrial structures still standing.”
While it never achieved its ambitious goals for the neighborhood, it still holds promise for various public purposes if and when it is decommissioned by Con Ed. And it delivered when it was needed, driving mass transit in the city for more than a half century. Mayor McClellan would never have been able to jolt that ceremonial first train at City Hall into motion without the electricity that flowed from the generators at the powerhouse to the substations and the third rails, which delivered it to each subway car motor, which the mayor operated in tandem by wielding his Tiffany silver controller. “Without rapid transit Greater New York would be little more than a geographical expression,” McClellan said. “It is no exaggeration to say that without interborough communication Greater New York would never have come into being.”
The former IRT Powerhouse no longer keeps the subways running, and the gentrifying neighborhood awaits its next incarnation. (George Samoladas)
13
THE BOSSERT HOTEL
The main entrance to the Bossert Hotel, which, as “the Waldorf-Astoria of Brooklyn,” of course, had a doorman. (Brian Merlis/oldNYCphotos.com)
On Tuesday, October 8, 1957, Walter O’Malley gathered his office staff at the Bossert Hotel, three blocks down Montague Street from the Brooklyn Dodgers’ headquarters
, on the fourth floor of No. 215, for a vote. The night before, the City Council of Los Angeles had finally agreed to formally seal the contract between California’s largest municipality and the Brooklyn baseball club, but the team’s owners themselves had not yet given the go-ahead. Nelson Rockefeller, who was planning to run for governor of New York the following year, and other political and civic figures were still making last-gasp offers to keep the team in Brooklyn, but perhaps by then the Dodgers’ departure was already a foregone conclusion. Two weeks earlier, only 6,702 diehard fans—25,000 short of capacity—had turned out for the last game of the season at Ebbets Field (the Dodgers beat Pittsburgh 2–0). The final score was actually delivered by Gladys Gooding, the team’s organist (and punch line of the perennial sports stumper “Who was the only person to play for the New York Rangers, Brooklyn Dodgers, and New York Knicks in a single season?”). Gooding’s closing numbers as fans left the last game were “Thanks for the Memories” and “Auld Lang Syne.”
Baseball is a team sport. Where it is played is personal. In this case, the team’s fate, and Brooklyn’s, rested in the hands of a politically connected lawyer whose high school baseball career had ended when a ball hit him in the nose. Walter O’Malley had been recruited in 1933 as a factotum by his father’s friend, George V. McLaughlin, a former New York City police commissioner who was president of the Brooklyn Trust Company, which had become half owner of the Dodgers by inheriting Charles Ebbets’s estate. In 1943, O’Malley succeeded Wendell Willkie as the Dodgers’ chief legal counsel, and in 1945, he bought a 25 percent interest in the team. By 1950, he succeeded in ousting Branch Rickey and becoming president and majority stockholder. Which is why, of course, when he summoned his colleagues to the meeting at the Bossert, nobody objected. Nor did they have any doubt what was on O’Malley’s mind—nor whether any of them were likely to change it.
Brooklyn Heights, overlooking lower Manhattan, has been described as America’s first suburb, and Montague Street, all of about four blocks long, connects Borough Hall, the heart of Brooklyn, with the East River waterfront and the Promenade overlooking it from atop the cantilevered Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, built after World War II. Named for the eighteenth-century poet and feminist Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (a member of the Pierrepont family who was an early proponent of inoculation against smallpox), the street inspired an homage by Bob Dylan, who wrote in “Tangled Up in Blue” in 1975: “I lived with them on Montague Street / in a basement down the stairs. / There was music in the cafes at night / And revolution in the air.” The street was home to the borough’s first skyscraper, George L. Morse’s ten-story Renaissance Revival Franklin Trust Company at No. 166. While Montague Street was the Heights’ commercial Main Street, the Bossert was where, in 1959, hundreds of nearby residents convened in the hotel’s Gold Room for a pivotal meeting of the Community Conservation and Improvement Council. That meeting galvanized opposition to the slum-clearance czar Robert Moses’s indifference to the irresistible singularity of Brooklyn Heights (he had originally intended to ram the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway through along the route of local streets) and support for rezoning the neighborhood as a protected historic district.
Louis Bossert, a German immigrant who became a lumber magnate, with a factory in Williamsburg and a home in Bushwick, built his namesake hotel in 1909 on the southeast corner of Montague and Hicks Streets. Frank J. Helmle and Ulrich Huberty (who, separately or together, designed the Spanish Baroque St. Barbara’s Church in Bushwick and the terra-cotta boathouse in Prospect Park) designed the fourteen-story Italian Renaissance Revival apartment hotel, which was distinguished by Helmle’s signature diamond-patterned brick facade. It was enlarged in 1912 (the same year that the cornerstone was laid for Ebbets Field; Bossert’s company supplied lumber to fashion forms for the stadium’s concrete piers and surrounding walls). The Bossert boasted 375 rooms, a majestic lobby, a Palm Room restaurant, and the two-story outdoor Marine Roof, which opened in 1916 and remained in business until 1949, with a brief hiatus during World War II, when it closed to comply with the nighttime blackouts. In 1931, when the Times asked keen-eyed observers to identify the New York vistas that impressed them most, William F. Lamb, a principal architect of the Empire State Building, listed first the “view of Lower Manhattan from the roof of the Bossert Hotel, in Brooklyn, at dusk.” (With as many as twenty-six hundred rooms, the St. George, a few blocks away, would claim the title of the largest hotel in the eastern United States when its tower opened in 1930, but the Bossert fancied itself more exclusive, as “the Waldorf-Astoria of Brooklyn.”)
The Bossert is where Clyde Sukeforth, the Dodgers’ hawkeyed scout, checked in on Monday, August 27, 1945, after traveling by train to New York from Toledo, where he had rendezvoused with twenty-six-year-old Jackie Robinson. Robinson had been discharged from the army earlier that year and had joined the Kansas City Monarchs of the American Negro League as a shortstop. Robinson stayed overnight at the Hotel Theresa in Harlem, and Sukeforth would introduce him to Rickey the next morning. “Mr. Rickey,” Sukeforth remembered saying as the three-hour meeting began, “this is Jack Roosevelt Robinson of the Kansas City Monarchs. I think he is the Brooklyn kind of player.” Rickey tested Robinson, role-playing and hurling racial epithets at him as if in the midst of a heated game.
“What do you do?” Rickey demanded.
“Mr. Rickey,” Robinson asked, “do you want a ballplayer who’s afraid to fight back?”
To which Rickey memorably replied, “I want a ballplayer with guts enough not to fight back.”
When their conversation ended, they made history that morning on Montague Street. Robinson had convinced Rickey that Sukeforth’s intuition was right. Robinson, did, indeed, have the makings of a Brooklyn kind of player. On October 23, the Dodgers announced that he would play for the Montreal Royals, the team’s International League farm club, for the 1946 season.
Five years later, the Bossert was where Rickey called a press conference after McNally ousted him as general manager (although he managed to outmaneuver the team’s imperious new owner and to walk away with his wounded pride salved by a million-dollar settlement). “Comest thou here to see the reed driven in the wind?” Rickey asked the sportswriters who packed the hotel room press conference. (Only Milton Gross of the New York Post got Rickey’s reference to the Book of Matthew.)
Invoking the Bible was no aberration either for Rickey, a devout Wesleyan Methodist (the Cincinnati Reds dropped him from the roster because he refused to play on Sundays), or in Brooklyn, where the revered Dodgers were a secular religion and some biblical prophecy—inspired by Moses’s preclusion from the Promised Land—seemed to be haunting the team. The Brooklyn National League franchise traced its roots to 1883. Then called the Brooklyn Base Ball Club, the team played its first home game on May 12 that year, defeating Trenton 13–6 at Washington Baseball Park, flanked by Fourth and Fifth Avenues and Third and Fifth Streets, not far from Gowanus Creek. Charles H. Byrne, a real estate developer and former sportswriter, called his team the Brooklyn Grays, but owners and fans would also brand and nickname them the Atlantics, the Bridegrooms, the Trolley Dodgers, the Superbas, and the Robins. (“Dodgers” wasn’t emblazoned on their jerseys until the early 1930s).
Charles Ebbets, who had been hired as a ticket-taker in 1883, gained control of the team in 1898 and moved it to a new Washington Park, across Fourth Avenue from the old one. A decade later, Ebbets acquired a garbage dump bounded by Bedford Avenue, Sullivan Place, Cedar Street, and Montgomery Street, where he began building an idiosyncratic and venerated ballpark. The stadium opened on April 5, 1913, ominously, with an exhibition game against the Yankees. On April 9, Brooklyn lost the first official game there against the Phillies.
Their defeat was a blessing in disguise. Brooklynites got accustomed to being prepared for the worst. By the time their team first captured the National League pennant in 1941 as the Dodgers (they had won five times in earlier incarnations), their mantra had become encapsulated i
n the Brooklyn Eagle’s consoling headline “Wait ’til Next Year”—a plucky optimism, a defiant battle cry by perpetual underdogs whose faith, it seemed, would never prove justified.