by Sam Roberts
In 1904, six years after the Bronx was consolidated into what became known as Greater New York, most of the neighborhood still consisted of undeveloped farmland, the remnants of country estates that belonged to the Failes, Hoes, Simpsons, and Spoffords, families whose surnames would later be immortalized in local streets whose namesakes even the first wave of Hunts Point homesteaders, to say nothing of the immigrants who followed, would no longer remember.
Beginning in 1886, Jay Gould’s Suburban Rapid Transit Third Avenue Elevated Line initially spurred development along its route in the Bronx (though it later depressed property values along its umbral corridor). But like so many other bucolic communities in upper Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens, nothing transformed the South Bronx overnight as much as the arrival of the IRT subway in 1904. The Intervale Avenue station opened that year, followed in 1908 by the sprucing up of the Hunts Point Avenue and Westchester Avenue stations, both designed for the New York, New Haven & Hartford’s Harlem River branch by Cass Gilbert between his commissions for the U.S. Customs House and the Woolworth Building downtown.
Suddenly, electrified and subterranean mass transportation was refashioning a remote suburb into a modest residential and commercial hub that was conveniently commutable to the central city. Instead of being cramped by government bureaucracy, private real estate developers like Henry Morgenthau, who would later befriend Woodrow Wilson and become the U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire during World War I, invested their own funds to speed the grading and paving of streets, curbs, and sidewalks, and the installation of sewers. Flanked by the East and Bronx Rivers and amply served by rail, Hunts Point inevitably lured manufacturing. In 1909, there were seven hundred factories in the Bronx; by 1912, the number had doubled. In the natural evolution of development, industrial expansion spurred a housing boom.
In 1908, the American Bank Note Company, newly headquartered at Broad and Beaver Streets in the Financial District, announced that it would build a printing plant on the site of the eighty-five-acre cattle farm that the family of Edward G. Faile, a tea and sugar merchant, had operated since 1832 and from which he made the one-hour commute daily to his office downtown. The investment by such a venerable company in a vast plant that would employ at least twenty-five hundred skilled workers on an otherwise idle property was front-page news in the Times. The company paid about fifty million dollars (adjusted for inflation since) for a portion of the property, razed the Failes’s distinguished Doric-columned hilltop mansion, and began construction of a complex that ranged from three to five stories and covered the entire block bounded by what are now Garrison and Lafayette Avenues and Barretto and Tiffany Streets.
American Bank Note traced its corporate roots to the late eighteenth century (by one account, its first order was for one hundred thousand pounds’ worth of banknotes, consigned to Paul Revere, who only one month before had been immortalized for his midnight ride). The company, which also had plants in Boston and Philadelphia, chose the Bronx site to replace a much smaller printing operation right behind Trinity Church in Lower Manhattan. Ironically, the site of the proposed plant happened to be near the estate of Richard Hoe, a New York printer who in 1846 patented the first rotary press. Part of his estate was later divided into city streets named for two fifteenth-century printers, Aldus Street (for Aldus Manutius) and Guttenberg Street (a typographical error, of all things, for Johannes Gutenberg). A portion was later transformed into the 1.3-acre Printers Park.
The four-building, 405,000-square-foot complex included machine shops, a laundry, and a laboratory for developing special inks and paper and, because it was so isolated, its own restaurant and hospital. More than two thousand skilled engravers, typographers, lithographers, printers, and pressmen staffed the red-brick factory, distinguished by its rooftop rows of sawtooth skylights and a crenellated tower designed by Kirby, Petit & Green. (Henry P. Kirby, working for George P. Post, was also credited with a major role in designing the New York Times building on Park Row.) Robert A. M. Stern described the plant as “an austere powerfully massed complex with a vague military character” embellished with Gothic qualities well suited to a closely guarded facility that printed money. Students of architecture interpreted it as a hybrid of an impregnable nineteenth-century armory and a sprawling New England textile mill.
As difficult as it was to break into the building, it was not easy for one Bank Note employee to leave. He was Joseph R. Ford, who was forty when the plant opened and sixty-five when he retired in 1945. For years, as part of the firm’s internal security operation, Ford worked in a locked room in the nine-story tower. His job, if not by title then by function, was chief counterfeiter. He analyzed fake currency forwarded from around the world and meticulously plodded to flawlessly replicate the company’s products. When he failed, he was considered a success. His son Will became American Bank Note’s chief engraver. “Besting the counterfeiter, that’s our business, pure and simple,” Bob Charles, a senior vice president, said in 1980.
American Bank Note dominated the industry for decades. In the early twentieth century, when J. P. Morgan was the company’s largest shareholder, the New York Stock Exchange refused to list a bond issued by the City of New York because another company had printed the certificates, even though that company had submitted a lower bid. American Bank Note contracted with Pancho Villa’s armed revolutionary faction in 1915 to print millions of pesos for his El Banco del Estado de Chihuahua (they were delivered, but the bank went out of business before the currency could be circulated). In 1917, the company contracted with the Russian embassy in Washington to print ten million dollars’ worth of bonds for Alexander Kerensky’s short-lived provisional government. During the Depression, the plant produced millions of dollars in scrip as reserve for the Treasury Department, but it was never needed and was destroyed.
On roughly ten thousand tons of paper a year, the plant shipped currency to Cuba, Canada, Luxembourg, Turkey, the Belgian Congo, and other countries, with China, Mexico, and Brazil among its biggest customers. During World War II, the company counterfeited Chinese currency because some of the original plates had been destroyed when the Japanese invaded. After the war, the U.S. government contracted with American Bank Note to secretly print ten-, twenty-, fifty-, and one-hundred-deutsche mark notes in the Bronx plant for the American occupation forces. The introduction of the deutsche mark in 1948 provided a postwar boost in revenue for the firm (and was widely considered the factor that stabilized prices and economic forecasting in Germany for the first time since the mid-1930s and became the catalyst for the Federal Republic’s miraculous recovery). The following year, though, the collapse of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist regime in China, the company’s biggest customer for foreign currency, dealt American Bank Note a major financial blow.
In the early 1960s, a typical workday would begin with nearly six million pieces of paper ready for processing. By the end of the shift, at five P.M., the presses would have endowed the blank paper with a monetary value of as much as $1.1 billion. The plant was printing half the securities issued by the New York Stock Exchange—$250 billion worth a year. The printing plates were stored in a five-thousand-square-foot vault built on solid rock. In the more than seven decades that its presses spewed out billions’ worth of legal tender, stamps, and negotiable securities, the company barely experienced a security breach at the site. The biggest robbery on record was an inside job. In 1971, a twenty-six-year-old paper handler passed 128 sheets of five-hundred-peso Mexican notes and three sheets of twenty-peso notes, worth more than five hundred thousand dollars, to an accomplice from a basement window that was supposed to have been safeguarded. Within two hours, a search began. Authorities caught the culprit after employees who had handled the currency were placed under surveillance. (The notes proved to be worthless anyway because they lacked serial numbers.) During World War II, about one hundred thousand dollars’ worth of guilders printed for the Dutch government in exile, sealed in metal containers and destined for Indoch
ina, vanished before the currency arrived at Pier 46 on the Hudson River. Five years later, detectives traced some of the cash to an apartment on West End Avenue in Manhattan, but refused to reveal who stole the shipment or how.
In 1977, a bomb placed outside near the Lafayette Avenue entrance to the plant by the FALN, the Puerto Rican terrorist group, damaged windows as high as the fourth floor. In claiming credit for the attack, the bombers released a letter in which they said that they had targeted the building because it was “one of the chief tools of capitalistic exploitation.” They were among the rare outsiders who had the slightest notion of what went on inside the plant. “I have heard it said that the greatest asset of our company is mystery,” said Daniel E. Woodhull, American Bank Note’s president from 1919 to 1935.
If the complex’s architectural design seemed at odds with the neighborhood, its geographic juxtaposition (besides occupying one of the highest points in the Bronx) was, if not unique, starkly paradoxical: here, in what would emerge as the poorest congressional district in the country, was a plant whose two hundred presses inconspicuously manufactured billions of dollars’ worth of currency, stock certificates, lottery tickets, travelers’ checks, bonds, food stamps, and other documents and official instruments far more valuable than the paper they were printed on. Moreover, most were shipped, often to far-off places, for other people to spend.
By the 1960s, the South Bronx was dispatching not only currency around the world. It was exporting people, too. Robert Moses’s Cross Bronx Expressway, completed in 1963 (when American Bank Note was printing twenty-five million stock certificates and postage stamps for sixty-five nations), bisected the borough, not only displacing residents and obliterating communities like East Tremont, but also leaving those who remained in neighborhoods that became depressed and prone to decay. In 1970, nearly 1.5 million people lived in the Bronx. By 1980, when American Bank Note was reporting sales of $106 million, the borough had hemorrhaged more than one-fifth of its population. The South Bronx became the poster borough for urban blight: for the fires that caused Howard Cosell to proclaim during the 1977 World Series that “the Bronx is burning”; for the moonscape that remained of Charlotte Street to become a metaphor for national amnesia about abandoned housing and other daily challenges afflicting poor, mostly black and Hispanic people; and for out-of-control crime that inspired films like Fort Apache, the Bronx.
Half the households were receiving public assistance in one form or another. The median income was under ten thousand dollars. Nearly two-thirds of the population younger than eighteen was living below the official federal poverty level. In his book The Brotherhood of Money: The Secret World of Bank Note Printers (1983), Murray Teigh Bloom wrote that he had asked American Bank Note’s executive vice president, Louis Hindenlang, why the company, aside from the tax benefits of employing local residents of a depressed neighborhood, would keep a money-printing plant in a high-crime area. “It sounds funny, but the fact is insurance companies like us to be in the South Bronx instead of the Jersey meadows or remote places like that,” Hindenlang replied. “In the South Bronx there are lots of cops nearby and it’s much tougher to make a getaway than it would be from the Jersey meadows.”
By the early 1980s, though, American Bank Note decided to abandon the South Bronx, to protect not so much its plant and its vault containing 130,000 printing plates but its employees on their way to and from work. Among the last contracts the company fulfilled at the Bronx plant was to print food stamps—probably the one product ordered for local consumption.
In the mid-1980s, after the company moved its plant to suburban Rockland County, New York, new owners bought and renovated the Bank Note Building for $8.3 million. They successfully wooed tenants priced out of Manhattan’s garment center, until so many firms had relocated that rents in the Bronx were no longer competitive. Since then, the Bronx has begun to rebound some. Median income in the South Bronx is still lower than in any congressional district in the country, but in the late 1980s, the administration of Mayor Edward I. Koch invested heavily in rehabilitating abandoned housing. Charlotte Street transmogrified into ninety single-family homes on grassy lots and equipped with rooftop satellite dishes. Hunts Point was slower to rally, in part because the elevated Bruckner Expressway severed it from the rest of the Bronx and relegated its appeal to owners of scrap metal shops and docks for garbage scows. Eventually, a 1.9-million-square-foot food distribution center opened, and storefront vacancies on the main thoroughfare, Hunts Point Avenue, began to fill.
Taconic Investment Partners bought the property for $32.5 million in 2007 and spent $37 million on renovations. Taconic sold the complex in 2013 for $114 million to other investors, who rented space to public schools, a wine storage retailer, art programs (including the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance), and a business incubator. The successive sales of the former printing plant, which was declared a city landmark in 2008, suggest a potential resurgence for the borough as it approaches a record population and as the South Bronx begins to generate money again, and not just on paper.
Who knew that in the nation’s poorest neighborhood, a printing plant was routinely churning out billions of dollars in currency. (George Samoladas)
19
GRAND CENTRAL TERMINAL
Grand Central Terminal replaced an earlier station to prevent accidents caused by obstructed views and keep the Vanderbilts out of jail. (Irving Underhill, 1913)
On February 2, 1913, when the first train promptly left the new Grand Central Terminal on East Forty-Second Street at one minute after midnight for Boston, what would become the nation’s greatest monument to twentieth-century mass transportation lived up to only two-thirds of its name. The structure itself was grand. Unlike its predecessors at the same site, which were called depots and stations, the new passenger destination was, indeed, a terminal. After all, someone once asked if his train stopped there; he was told that it had better. Incoming trains terminated there because the tracks went no farther.
But when it opened, the terminal, as grand as it was, was still anything but central. On the West Side, Longacre Square had already been rebranded in City Hall’s obsequiousness to the New York Times, which by 1913 had already outgrown its tower at One Times Square and moved its headquarters one block west. On the East Side, though, midtown Manhattan was largely undeveloped. Park Avenue was not yet flanked by the hulking hotels and apartment houses that would later distinguish it. While the original blueprints for the terminal’s soaring main concourse called for matching east and west marble staircases, modeled on the Palais Garnier, the elegant Paris opera house, plans for the east staircase were abandoned. The prevailing wisdom at the time was that the tenements, shanties, slaughterhouses, and other industrial buildings and vacant lots in that direction would not be an inviting destination, and would develop only gradually.
Still, Grand Central was all about speed and time. And with record alacrity, the terminal transformed the cityscape. No other project—not Pennsylvania Station, not the Empire State Building, not even Rockefeller Center—seduced so vast a tidal wave of office workers, residents, commuters, tourists, shoppers, and sightseers as Grand Central did, shifting Manhattan’s center of gravity from downtown to midtown.
Trains had done much the same for transportation. The brains behind the Erie Canal, which in 1825 had established New York City as the nation’s premier port, was DeWitt Clinton, which made it all the more ironic that the first steam locomotive to operate in New York State would bear his name. As pivotal as the canal proved to be, within only a few decades the railroads—flexing the political muscle they were building by buying legislators in the state capital—would threaten the supremacy of the packet boats that plied the Hudson between New York City and Albany and the freight-laden barges that ferried cargo to and from the Great Lakes.
The legacy of most buildings is in their architecture or engineering innovations. Grand Central introduced plenty of those. The concept of the terminal itself was largely
a response to what remains Manhattan’s worst railroad accident. In 1902, a southbound commuter train from White Plains emerged from the smoky Park Avenue tunnel into the vast expanse of a man-made valley more than two avenue blocks wide south of Fifty-Sixth Street. The engineer apparently missed the warning signals, and in the fog-shrouded train yards smashed into the rear car of a Danbury express waiting for clearance to enter the station. Fifteen passengers were killed instantly, most of them crushed to death. Two more, among the thirty-six injured, succumbed within a week. Railroad officials and directors, who had been warned repeatedly about the potential danger, feared they would be held personally liable, if not for this accident, then for the next one and might face criminal charges that could result in fires and even imprisonment. (Steam locomotives had already been banned south of Forty-Second Street since 1858 as an unsafe nuisance; horsecars were still used instead.)
“Suddenly, there came a flash of light,” William Wilgus, the railroad’s self-taught chief engineer, recalled decades later. “It was the most daring idea that had ever occurred to me.” Collaborating with Frank Sprague, an electric train pioneer, Wilgus proposed that Grand Central Station, which had been upgraded and expanded as recently as 1900 to replace the original depot that opened in 1871, be razed and replaced with a terminal that could accommodate electric trains instead of the steam locomotives that belched noxious clouds of black, obfuscating soot. Wilgus’s response to the staggering challenge was audacious and extravagant. But it would eliminate the looming legal threat of liability for another accident, allow the railroad to cover over the train yards to create a boulevard and grand allée (like Fifth Avenue’s looking south to Washington Square), and even to double-deck the tracks to vastly increase capacity.