by Sam Roberts
Ever since their shotgun marriage with Manhattan in 1898, Brooklynites had been wrestling with the same complex that Chicagoans suffered after surviving the fire of 1871 and rebuilding to beat New York in the competition for the site of the 1893 World Columbian Exposition—but never getting past their denigrating reputation as the Second City. The nonbinding referendum to consolidate the cities separated by the East River, physically linked by a bridge only a decade earlier, was only barely approved by Brooklyn voters. The new charter establishing Greater New York was rammed through the state legislature over the objections of the mayors of both Brooklyn and New York. Brooklyn feared being immediately subsumed by Manhattan, which it was. Even worse, for three decades beginning in 1957—Brooklyn’s annus horribilis—the borough would have the same two votes over budget, zoning, contracts, and other major decisions as Staten Island, which had about one-sixth the population, until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the city’s Board of Estimate violated the principle of one person, one vote.
The Dodgers became the personification of the borough’s inferiority complex. In 1920, then known as the Robins, the team made baseball history when Cleveland second baseman Bill Wambsganss pulled off an unassisted triple play against Brooklyn—the first and only one ever recorded in a World Series. That same year, the Robins played what remains to this day the longest major league game ever—twenty-six innings, against the Boston Braves, which ended in a 1–1 tie when it had to be called because of darkness. (Years later, playing their first night game under the lights at Ebbets Field, Brooklyn lost.) In the 1930s, Bill Terry, manager of the New York Giants, was so dismissive of the Dodgers that he asked, “Is Brooklyn still in the league?” And after his cabbie asked, “How did those bums do today?” the New York World-Telegram cartoonist Willard Mullin caricatured the circus clown Emmett Kelly to objectify the Dodgers as “Dem Bums”—a well-deserved moniker that clung to the team.
In 1955, when the Dodgers and the Yankees met in the World Series for their fifth rematch in fourteen years (the Yanks had won in 1941, 1947, 1949, 1952, and 1953), the basement of the Bossert was declared the official World Series headquarters. (Conveniently, the hotel was also literally home to a number of Dodger players in the 1940s and ’50s, among them Sandy Amoros, Clem Labine, Don Newcombe, Johnny Podres, George Shuba, and Don Zimmer.)
The Yankees had tied the series in game 5, setting the stage for a showdown in the Bronx. On October 4, before sixty-two thousand fans, the Dodgers scored two runs on Gil Hodges’s fourth-inning RBI single and sixth-inning bases-loaded sacrifice fly. In the bottom of the sixth, Sandy Amoros made a game-saving catch off the bat of Yogi Berra to begin a double play that delivered the Yankees to their first World Series loss since 1942 and only their second since 1926. The game clinched the first and, as it would turn out, the only World Series victory in the storied history of the Dodgers franchise in New York—a victory that, arguably, reverberated among Brooklynites of every race, color, creed, gender, age, and national origin with a singular passion that was not duplicated before or since. Three words on the Daily News front page above the caricature by Leo O’Melia encapsulated the savoring of overdue vindication: “Who’s a Bum!” the headline declared, without a question mark, but punctuated instead by an exclamation point.
That night, the Brooklyn Dodgers, their invited guests, and hundreds of hangers-on celebrated at the Bossert. In some ways, however briefly, the celebration contrasted strikingly with the way the world had appeared less than a decade before in the first few postwar years when Carl Furillo, the right fielder, and his fellow teammates brazenly objected to the arrival at spring training of their first black teammate. “We did it,” Furillo shouted as he rushed to hug Jackie and Rachel Robinson at the Bossert that night. “We did it!”
Welcoming the Brooklyn Dodgers at—where else?—the ballroom of the Bossert Hotel. (Brian Merlis/oldNYCphotos.com)
“Next year” had belatedly dawned in 1955, just as a sportswriter for the Brooklyn Eagle had predicted (or hungered for) far back in October 1941. But by the time the Dodgers finally fulfilled the headline’s prophecy, the Eagle was no longer publishing to record it, to trumpet the one event that might have finally assuaged diehard Brooklynites still grieving after what they still lamented as the Great Mistake of 1898. Once edited by Walt Whitman and, in its heyday, boasting the highest circulation of any afternoon newspaper in the United States, the Eagle had been hobbled by advertising losses and rising labor costs culminating in a strike by the Newspaper Guild.
In the final edition, dated January 28, 1955, under the headline “A Parting Word,” the publisher, Frank D. Schroth, delivered a front-page farewell to readers. He squarely placed the blame for the goodbye on the power brokers across the river—the men who imposed what he called the “Manhattan Pattern” that had prevailed since the consolidation of Greater New York. “The borough has been a stepchild in government services, charity, social activities, and indeed in every phase of community life,” Schroth wrote. “The Manhattan Pattern now closes, at least temporarily, the last voice that is purely Brooklyn.”
The Brooklyn Trust Company Building at 215 Montague Street, a graceful ten-story Venetian Gothic structure (originally the Mechanics Bank Building), had been the Dodgers’ home office since the late 1930s. The IRT Broadway–Seventh Avenue subway stop was on the corner, and Borough Hall was just a block away across Cadman Plaza, named for S. Parkes Cadman of Brooklyn, the Congregational minister and pioneering radio preacher who was an exponent of ecumenism and foe of anti-Semitism (he advocated an American boycott of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin). The team’s headquarters was on the fourth floor, but the street-level windows were emblazoned with a sign that advertised advance ticket sales, and the marquee on Montague Street resembled a mini-scoreboard. Branch Rickey and Walter O’Malley had their offices there, but O’Malley preferred to hold court afternoons at the Bossert, which is where he convened his headquarters staff in October 1957 for the fatal vote to ratify his decision. Red Barber, the legendary radio announcer, once said O’Malley was “the most devious man I’ve ever met,” which means that by that October afternoon, his mind must have been made up and the vote was just a matter of going through the motions. The team was making money, but O’Malley wanted to make even more.
“It had always been recognized that baseball was a business, but if you enjoyed the game you could tell yourself that it was also a sport,” Red Smith later wrote in the Times in an assessment of O’Malley, whom he recalled ambling about the basement of the Bossert with a cigar in one hand and a Scotch in the other. “You quoted William Wrigley’s dictum that baseball was too much a sport to be a business and too much a business to be a sport. O’Malley was the first to say out loud that it was all business—a business that he owned and could operate as he chose, and the community the team had pretended to represent for almost 70 years had no voice in the matter at all. From that day on, some of the fun of baseball was lost.”
New York City was suggesting alternative sites for a stadium to keep the Dodgers from leaving for Los Angeles, but no matter. No one ever regarded the Dodgers organization—or Major League Baseball, for that matter—as a democracy. Had there been any hope of a valid vote, the Dodgers’ owner unilaterally voided it that day. “O’Malley first counted the votes,” Buzzie Bavasi, the team’s vice president, later recalled, “and then said, ‘Everyone wants to stay except me, so we’re going.’ ”
In 1957, Americans were warily looking skyward to catch glimpses of the Soviet satellite Sputnik. West Side Story opened on Broadway (a mile uptown; demolition of the slums where the musical was set would be delayed so the film version could be shot there). In Brooklyn, the mood was less doom and gloom than resignation in the face of inevitable change. The World Series win in 1955 turned out to be a bittersweet goodbye gift, a cruel joke at the fans’ expense. They should have seen what was coming when, at the end of 1956, an omen portended the Dodgers’ departure the following year: the trolleys that B
rooklynites dodged and that inspired the team’s name began their final runs. It was no wonder that the final chapter of Elliot Willensky’s 1986 book, When Brooklyn Was the World, ended in 1957. “The fate of the home team represented to many the fate of Brooklyn,” he wrote. Pete Hamill, the Bard of Brooklyn, later recalled that when the Dodgers left Brooklyn, “for a lot of people that was the end of innocence.” (In Peter Golenbock’s 1984 book, Bums: An Oral History of the Brooklyn Dodgers, the journalist Jack Newfield said he and Hamill once wrote on separate napkins the names of the three worst human beings who ever lived. They both agreed on Hitler, Stalin, and Walter O’Malley.)
By the early 1960s, with the Dodgers gone, No. 215 Montague was demolished to widen Cadman Plaza West. A modern, four-story building replaced it, which would house a number of other banks. Without elaborating, a modest plaque on the corner says that this is “where the Dodgers made baseball history and Jackie Robinson changed America.” Ebbets Field was razed and transformed into a public housing project. From 1988 to 2012, the Jehovah’s Witnesses owned the Bossert, renovating the hotel and converting the rooms into dormitories until the religious order’s Brooklyn Heights real estate holdings became too valuable to retain. After a century, the Witnesses’ corporate arm, the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, began uprooting its dormitories, printing plants, and other facilities to the Hudson Valley. Private developers bought the Bossert for about eighty-one million dollars in 2012 and have been working to restore the rooms and the rooftop restaurant, although plans for a full-scale reopening have been repeatedly delayed.
Between 1950 and 1980, Brooklyn’s population plunged by a half million as suburbanization and white flight transformed the borough. But since 1990, it has been growing again, fueled by an influx of immigrants from the Caribbean, Russia, and China and by young couples rediscovering the appeal of homegrown neighborhoods. Brooklynites are complaining again about “the Manhattan Pattern,” but this time it’s because the borough is getting too much attention: the buildings are becoming too high, the brand-new waterfront parks are becoming too dense, and the two major league sports teams that call Brooklyn home—the Nets and the Islanders—are causing too much congestion.
No sign says so, but the Bossert is among the last remaining visible legacies of the Dodgers’ glory days in Brooklyn. (George Samoladas)
14
THE ASCH BUILDING
Henry James didn’t recognize his neighborhood when he returned to Washington Square. A ten-story loft building had replaced his home. (International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union Archives, Kheel Center, Cornell University, 1911)
When Henry James returned to New York from London in 1904 to survey the American scene, he was stunned to discover how much the city had mutated in the quarter century since his last visit. In retrospect, the metaphors he first invoked to embroider his vision of the city’s vitality seem particularly poignant in light of the striking transformation that had recently occurred on the very street where he was born; and that site, already a hallowed literary landmark, would become even more historic seven years later. James lyrically limned “the bold lacing-together,” the “enormous system of steam-shuttles or electric bobbins,” the “binding stitches,” and the skyscrapers erect “like extravagant pins in a cushion.”
His father, the theologian Henry James Sr., had rented for several years in the Washington Square neighborhood and witnessed its evolution in the late 1820s from a post–Revolutionary War potter’s field to the Washington Parade Ground. Standing guard on Washington Square East was the original Gothic Revival home of New York University (originally the University of the City of New-York); the building also housed apartments, where Samuel Morse would perfect his telegraph, Samuel Colt would improve upon his revolver, and Winslow Homer would paint. Henry Jr.’s grandmother lived at No. 18 on Washington Square North, an elegant succession of Greek Revival row houses that, he would later write, endowed the genteel neighborhood with a “riper, richer, more honorable look—the look of having had something of a social history.” In 1842, Henry Sr. bought the town house around the corner at 2 Washington Place (which was later renumbered to No. 27).
No. 27 was no longer there when Henry Jr. returned in 1904, but it had only been gone for less than a decade. While the demand for uniforms that had fueled New York’s dry goods trade ended with the Civil War, industry developments (such as advances in machinery that produced standard sizes, shapes, and quality; the availability of electrical power; the expansion of railroad routes for distribution; and the spread of department stores) had elevated the clothing industry to first among the ranks of manufacturing in the city. The demand also outgrew existing capacity downtown in the neighborhoods that, at the end of the twentieth century, would become chicly branded as TriBeCa and SoHo, placing pressure on property owners, developers, and landlords around lower Fifth Avenue (where stores were moving, too) for clothiers to open bigger factories and on independent contractors to expand their own workshops, which supplied garment makers with cheap immigrant labor. In 1890, about forty thousand New Yorkers were making women’s clothing alone. By 1920, the number had quadrupled. Their factory owners’ space of choice was the industrial and commercial loft. The unobstructed space on sturdy upper floors allowed for parallel cutting tables and rows of sewing machines that could be connected to a single motor, an improvement over pedal power and another saving of electricity. Twelve-foot-high ceilings, supported by bulky columns, enabled landlords to comply with new laws requiring them to allot a minimum of 250 cubic feet of air for each worker, while actually providing workers with less floor space. Costs for electric lighting decreased due to oversize windows, which were punctuated by holes through which an occasional pipe, emitting white steam from ironing presses, offered the only suggestion to pedestrians that a sweatshop was being operated inside.
While New York University was contemplating an addition facing Washington Square, Joseph J. Asch, a furrier and real estate developer, was speculating on sites on the square block’s eastern flank. In 1890, he bought the Greek Revival row house at 29 Washington Place. He later purchased Nos. 25 and 27, Henry James Sr.’s town house, and, finally, in 1900, having reached an agreement with the new owner of No. 23, the vital corner property he needed to assemble the full twenty-five-by-one-hundred-foot parcel, Asch submitted plans for a ten-story, steel-and-iron-framed loft building topped with arched windows under an overhanging cornice. The plans filed with the city’s Buildings Department called for terra-cotta fireproofing, but because the structure would be less than 150 feet tall, it was permitted to have wood floors. Nor were sprinklers required. Three staircases were mandated, but the architect argued that an exterior fire escape sufficed as a third. A city inspector objected to some of the safety provisions. A few were modified. Some were exempted.
The ecru brick and terra-cotta Neo-Renaissance Asch Building opened in 1901, just a few years before Henry James returned to Washington Place. The change was jarring. “That was where the pretense that nearly nothing was changed had most to come in,” he recalled in The American Scene, “for a high, square, impersonal structure, proclaiming its lack of interest with a crudity all its own, so blocks, at the right moment for its own success, the view of the past, that the effect for me, in Washington Place, was of having been amputated of half my history.” Like most New Yorkers, James’s halcyon version of bygone days stemmed more from misty nostalgia than historical accuracy. In 1833, stonecutters rioted to protest NYU’s acceptance of marble fashioned at Sing Sing by cheap prison labor for the school’s first building on Washington Square East. In 1849, the city’s class divisions were brutishly revealed by the nearby Astor Place riots—a rupture that would endure in culture wars for decades. In 1863, Union troops summoned from Gettysburg to quell the bloody Draft Riots in New York had bivouacked in Washington Square Park. In 1894, New York University had begun transplanting its undergraduate campus to Fordham Heights (rechristened University Heights), where its chancellor, Henry M
acCracken, said the school “with attractive grounds in a residence quarter, would fulfill more nearly the American ideal of a college than a college in a business locality ever could.” A year later, President Grover Cleveland joined local dignitaries in dedicating Stanford White’s triumphal marble arch (a replica of the papier-mâché version he had designed for the 1889 centennial of the first president’s inauguration and which, during construction, unearthed remains of early immigrant burial grounds). The Washington Square that James would novelize evoked few of the imperfections he had amputated from the neighborhood’s history himself. “I know not whether it is owing to the tenderness of early associations, but this part of New York appears to many persons the most delectable,” he wrote in Washington Square. “It has the kind of established repose which is not of frequent occurrence in other quarters of the long shrill city.” That was before James returned in 1904 to the altered city that evoked his mending metaphors.
Crackdowns against so-called home work, which turned already choked tenements into mini-factories, begat an unforeseen stopgap: the sweatshop, where women, mostly, who had been paid for piecework in the discomfort of their own apartments, instead reported to equally invisible sweatshops, but even more unbearable ones where they assembled ladies’ garments like shirtwaists, high-necked blouses fabricated from translucent cotton or sheer linen. The graphic artist Charles Dana Gibson popularized it before the turn of the twentieth century with his ephemeral Gibson Girls, who were modeled on his wife and her elegant sisters. Wearing the shirtwaist was supposed to be liberating, freeing women from bustles and corsets. Making the shirtwaists was anything but. By 1900, tens of thousands of garment workers were cutting and stitching shirtwaists in a highly competitive industry whose kings were two Jewish immigrants from Russia, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris. The two men started with a small shop on Wooster Street in 1900. As they clawed their way to the top of the garment industry, producing as many as twelve thousand blouses a week, they did not distinguish themselves as benevolent despots. Blanck was the moneyman. He had made a good living—he was comfortable, as they say—the hard way, and he flaunted it. He lived in a mansion on Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn and hired a chauffeur. He gambled, but evidently was a sore loser. Early in 1911, he stopped payment on an $875 check to a bookie. When the bookie sued, Blanck argued that the courts could not legally collect a gambling debt since betting was against the law. A judge agreed.