High Steel: The Daring Men Who Built the World's Greatest Skyline

by Jim Rasenberger

  The George A. Fuller Company seems to have profited most handsomely from hardball tactics. Just five years after opening an office in New York, Fuller had grown into the dominant construction contractor in the city. Fuller grew in part because it could deliver buildings faster than any other general contractor. But how did the company manage this? To most people in the building industry, the answer was obvious: Fuller greased the most palms. Few failed to notice that unions, and most conspicuously the ironworkers union, seldom struck Fuller buildings. And no one missed the coincidence of the astonishing rise of the George A. Fuller Construction Company and the timely arrival of Samuel J. Parks in New York City. Many assumed that Parks was on Fuller’s payroll from the moment he entered the city—that he’d come to the city expressly to do Fuller’s bidding. The truth is probably more complicated. Parks did favor Fuller, going so far as to contribute a gushing letter to The Bridgemen’s Magazine complimenting Fuller for its “spirit of amity.” No doubt the compliment had been purchased. But Sam Parks carried water for nobody. He had too much pride for that. Indeed, in the end, it would be pride, not greed, that destroyed him.

  An iron contractor named Louis Brandt recalled going to visit Parks in the summer of 1902 with a payment that the walking delegate had demanded to settle a strike. This was typically how it worked: Parks summoned a graftee to his row house on East 87th Street off Lexington Avenue, named his price, then dismissed the man. “Come,” he would scoff if one objected to the payment, “we are not children.”

  Brandt had arrived on this summer day to give Parks $300 in cash. Parks told him to set the cash on a small table. As soon as Brandt put the money down, a young girl walked into the parlor, picked up the stack of bills, and walked back out without a word. It was a strange detail, particularly in light of the fact that Parks had no children of his own—who was this girl?—but it spoke volumes, somehow, of Parks’ contempt for Brandt and his ilk. Parks treated them as if they were children. These were men of means and education. They were men of achievement. They could understand Parks’ inclination to line his pockets—they were businessmen, after all—but they could not abide his contempt.

  “That man Parks is a duffer,” a Chicago union boss would later tell the New York Times. “There are a hundred men in this town who have forgotten more about working the graft than he will ever learn…. Those who know how to make the unions profitable as business propositions do not have to be ballroom bullies. Parks is entitled to what he got—not for what he did, which is all right, but for the way he did it, which was all wrong.” In other words, if Parks had treated the businessmen with a little more polish and respect as he reached into their pockets, he might have gone on with the graft as long as his brief life permitted.

  Strangely, for all of his alleged greed, Parks didn’t seem to care much about money in the end. What drove him was a more subversive and heedless urge. He voiced it in a peculiar little essay published in The Bridgemen’s Magazine in the late winter of 1903, shortly before his troubles began. The piece contains a stark, almost apocalyptic vision of a corporation like U.S. Steel usurped by a band of roughnecks.

  The Billion-dollar Steel Trust seemed to own the earth and hold first mortgage on the neighboring planets…. But while at the zenith of ambition and when it seemed impossible for anything earthly to shake their power, along comes an ungodly people, illiterate descendants of Tubal Cain, the man that stood before Solomon and demanded his rights; uncouth workers of iron, who invaded the sanctuary, hurled the gilded heifer from the altar and sacrilegiously substituted a figure made of solid unpolished steel, mounted to the image of a Walking Delegate.

  It’s worth considering that Parks probably did not “write” these words, nor any of the words he published in The Bridgemen’s Magazine. He was an unschooled man and—according to one of his obituaries—as illiterate as the descendants of Tubal Cain. He was also, as he had known for some time, a dying man, suffering from tuberculosis. Given the disease’s long incubation, Parks might have contracted the bacterium before coming to New York. He was, in any case, seriously ill by 1902.

  Tuberculosis is a slow, wasting disease that exhibits itself as fever, fatigue, and persistent, wracking cough. These days, strong antibiotics render tuberculosis curable, but at the start of the twentieth century it was the leading cause of death in America. The term “consumption,” as it was commonly known, described the course of the unchecked disease; it appeared to consume a body from the inside out. In its most common pulmonary form, bacterium devoured the tissue of the hosts’ lungs, causing them to cough up blood. The most obvious effect the disease had on Sam Parks, at least in the early stages, was that it made his skin sallow and his cheeks sunken. But it also seemed to fuel him with a kind of reckless, feverish energy.

  In the spring of 1903, Parks began acting like a man possessed. He launched a scorched-earth campaign against the steel-erection companies, ordering strikes with even greater abandon than usual. By late spring, he’d ordered a total of 2,000 strikes. In April, the United Building Trades, under Parks’ direction, threatened a general strike in all building trades, pulling 60,000 men from work. The demand: 10 to 20 percent increases across the board, or else a complete shutdown of the building industry in New York. It was a threat so broad, so unreasonable, that it demanded a reaction. It got one.

  SUMMER OF SAM

  Early in the morning of June 8, 1903, more than a year after his meeting with Sam Parks in the Flatiron, Neils Poulson, president of Hecla Iron Works, paid a visit to the office of the district attorney of New York, William Travers Jerome. Accompanying Poulson was the vice-president of Hecla, Robert McCord. Poulson and McCord presented the D.A. with a cashed check made out to Sam Parks for $2,000. The check was enclosed in an oak frame, glassed on both sides, so that Parks’ endorsement could be clearly seen on the back. The check had been written to Parks, the men told Jerome, as payment to call off the strike against Hecla in April of 1902.

  Poulson and McCord could not have found a more attentive audience for their story than William Travers Jerome. The district attorney was that most rare of turn-of-the-century New Yorkers, a genuine reformer. He’d made his name as an investigator for the Lexow Committee in 1894, snooping out corruption in the police force and Tammany Hall. Behind a well-groomed moustache and wire-rimmed glasses, he kept his expression tight-lipped and severe. Jerome had had his eye on Sam Parks for some time, and when the men from Hecla called on him on this early summer morning, he began taking sworn affidavits on the spot.

  The meeting with Jerome had been carefully orchestrated. After years of infighting, the builders of New York had reached the limit of what they would endure from Parks. That spring, every major building contractor in New York, with the exception of Fuller, had formed an alliance called the Building Trade Employers’ Association. Pooled together, the assets of its members added up to more than $500 million. Its explicit vow, as voiced by its president, Charles Eidlitz, was to fight Sam Parks to the finish, however much money or effort the fight required. They would hire detectives and lawyers to investigate Parks and his cohorts, then hand over the evidence, pre-packaged, to District Attorney Jerome. The presentation of this elaborately framed check was merely an opening salvo.

  Parks’ first arrest came at three o’clock that same afternoon. When police took him into custody at a saloon on East 54th Street, Parks seemed more amused than concerned. “I am glad that I took off my diamond stud before I left home as I have found myself in the hands of the police,” he joked. “My only regret is that I did not also leave my rings.” When told that his bail was expected to be steep, he brushed aside any worries. “Well, it can’t be too high for me.” Police escorted him to the Criminal Courts building downtown, then across the Bridge of Sighs for an overnight stay at the Tombs.

  Parks’ bondsman arrived the following morning in the voluminous form of William K. Devery—the very same “Big Chief” Devery who’d once bragged about his prodigious grafting in the police
force. Devery was one of the most colorful and crooked figures in turn-of-the-century New York, which is saying a good deal. He was an oversized man, fat, garrulous, and somewhat buffoonish, a big cigar forever stuck in the corner of his mouth under a walrus moustache. During his short but profitable tenure as chief of police, Devery enjoyed getting drunk and driving around in a hack, throwing money out the windows. He was gone from the police force by 1901, and out of favor with Tammany as well, but still very much a presence in New York politics. Now railing against the corrupt machine of which he had been such an illustrious participant, he’d launched a race for mayor of New York City. It was Devery’s hope that his friend Sam Parks, who had already arranged his honorary induction into Local 2, would deliver the labor vote. Devery, in return, had promised Parks the powerful position of Manhattan borough chief.

  “I’ve got the sugar right here,” Devery announced to the press as he arrived to bail out Parks. Devery dug his hand into his pocket and pulled out a roll of thousand-dollar bills. “I’m ready to bail him out every time he’s arrested! I’ll put up the cash for him if I have to fill up this room to the ceiling.”

  Five thousand dollars later, Devery and a liberated Parks emerged from the City Chamberlain’s office. A crowd of supporters erupted in cheers. “I am glad to help this man, because he is the friend of labor, too!” Devery exclaimed, mounting a nearby bootblack’s stand. “He has gotten higher wages for the ironworkers, who have to risk their lives twenty or thirty stories up in the air without any law to protect them!” Devery then invited everyone in sight to a corner saloon for a few drinks. “I will stick by him,” he said of Parks after standing a second round for the house. “He’s a sticker and I’m a sticker and I get stuck on stickers.”

  “I am not downcast in my predicament,” Parks told reporters as he left the saloon later that afternoon. He had been quiet and subdued since his release, and now he wanted to go home. “I have been through many hard squeezes, and I will come out all right.”

  The following day found Parks arrested on two new counts of extortion. Two days later, he was arrested on a fourth count, this one brought by a skylight manufacturer from Hoboken, New Jersey, named Josephus Plenty. Throughout June, new details of Parks’ corruption were daily fodder for the press. “There seems to be no limit to the number of charges,” D.A. Jerome told reporters. “If the laboring men knew the facts, Parks would not be trying to get out of jail on bail, but would be glad enough to avoid his associates wherever he might be kept.”

  Jerome underestimated the ironworkers’ fidelity. A faction in the union did oppose Parks, but the majority of members rallied to his support, and the more charges that were leveled against him, the more they rallied. In the middle of June, they renominated Parks as walking delegate at a raucous meeting at Maennerchor Hall, then reelected him on June 22. Three days later, in a remarkable display of influence, Parks led 40 walking delegates from various building trades on a parade through midtown Manhattan, shutting down one job after the other. It was, according to a headline in the New York Herald, “Parks’ Tour of Triumph.”

  The triumph was brief. In the heat of July, as construction stood frozen by Parks’ edict, a grand jury indicted him on all four counts of extortion. He was arrested again later that month, this time for assaulting an ironworker at a union meeting.

  One morning in early August, Parks went to buy a horse, in hopes that “fast driving” would revive his failing health. At the very least, a gallop through Central Park might stir a breeze to cool his tubercular fevers. “You don’t know who I am,” said Parks as he approached the owner of the Ben Hur Stable on East 25th Street, a man named Doc Field. “I am that notorious walking delegate that you have been reading about in the papers. I’m Sam Parks.”

  “Never heard of you,” replied Doc Field. “I never read anything but the racing news.”

  By the end of summer, even the likes of Doc Field would be familiar with the saga of Sam Parks. Two days after his visit to the stable, Parks was convicted of assault. Before he could be sentenced, he returned to court, on August 12, to face one of the extortion indictments that had been brought against him in June.

  The trial took just over a week. A team of prominent lawyers, led by a former magistrate named Brann, defended Parks, who carried himself with “impudent swagger” and a sneer on his pale face throughout. Ironworkers were gathered at the courthouse when the verdict came late on the evening of the 21st. As Parks stood, gripping the railing in front of him, the foreman stood and pronounced him guilty. Parks swayed slightly, then immediately recovered his composure. “With the old time swing of the shoulders,” reported one newspaper, “he passed down the aisles, stopped for a moment to smile at friends among the spectators, and then waved his hands with the air of one who merely says ‘good night.’”

  For all of his public bravado, Parks sank into moroseness the moment he entered his old cell in the Tombs. He refused to receive visitors, with the exception of William Devery, who later issued a statement on his behalf. The statement condemned the D.A. and the employers. It also faulted the press for its misleading portrayal of Parks as a crook. And it included an epitaph that Parks had written for himself: “Here lies the friend of labor, crushed by capital.” Those who wished to see Sam Parks as a martyr didn’t have to wait long for more evidence of persecution. The same day Devery released that statement, the D.A. announced five more indictments against Parks, bringing the total to eight outstanding charges.

  When Parks entered the courtroom for sentencing on August 26, the press noticed a deterioration in his condition. His complexion appeared a “ghastly hue.” His eyes were sunken, his cheeks were hollow, and beads of perspiration gathered on his brow. The judge took the bench and announced the sentence: two and a half years in Sing Sing.

  Local 2 happened to be meeting that night. When word of the sentence got back to the hall, the ironworkers exploded in an uproar. “It’s a lie!” somebody shouted. Less vocally, though, some dared to welcome it as good news. “There will be many happy homes in New York tonight,” one ironworker told a reporter from the Daily Tribune. “Some of us have been out since April, and the feeling has been among many of us that if Parks was out of the way work would start up at once.”

  Parks’ wife, Dora, happened to be visiting him at the Tombs when guards came to remove him. She had spent most of his trial ill in bed, too anxious to appear at court. Now she broke down and threw herself onto her husband, weeping. He held her in his arms and soothed her and told her to be brave. After he was gone, she became so distraught that two prison attendants had to escort her home. It was all over for Sam Parks. Or so it seemed.

  HIS LAST RIDE

  The headlines must have seemed a cruel joke to his adversaries: “CROWDS CHEER PARKS BACK FROM SING SING; Wild Ovation for Walking Delegate Released on Bail.” Like a creature in a horror movie, assumed to be slain and dispatched to hell but suddenly jumping from the shadows for one last scare, Parks was out of Sing Sing only a week into his sentence. His attorneys, asserting that negative press ruined Parks’ chance for a fair trial, won a Certificate of Reasonable Doubt from a sympathetic judge. Parks was granted a new trial. In the meantime, he was free.

  A large and rambunctious crowd gathered at Grand Central Terminal to welcome Parks back from Sing Sing. No one recognized him as he stepped off the Albany Special. His hair had been shorn, his moustache shaved, and he’d lost considerable weight in the week he was away. His face, according to the Times, “was absolutely without color.” But then somebody saw him—“Here he comes—there’s Sammy!”—and the crowd erupted in “wild shouts of exultation.” A man in a white cap pressed a bouquet of roses into his hands. Parks put them to his nose, sniffed, and smiled.

  A few days later, a reporter paid Parks a visit at his home, a six-room flat over a drugstore. He found the walking delegate lying in his bed in a small room looking gaunt and weak. Parks’ eyes only lit up when he railed against the D.A. and the press for pilin
g up on him. “Everything in this city goes to extremes,” he complained. “They either slobber over a man or are ready to crucify him.” The opulent lifestyle usually ascribed to Parks was nowhere in evidence. The apartment was small and simply decorated with cheap prints instead of oil paintings. Dora Parks was not out on the town shopping or getting her nails manicured. She was cleaning house in a plain dress with the sleeves rolled up, looking “fagged and tired.”

  On September 7, less than a week after his release from Sing Sing, Parks mounted a white mare at the corner of 59th Street and Fifth Avenue. Rather than rebuff Parks after his conviction, the Board of Building Trades had chosen to honor him as Grand Marshal of its annual Labor Day parade. Parks wore a white cowboy hat and a gold-trimmed sash. Against the dazzle of his costume, his eyes appeared flat, his face haggard, his broad shoulders stooped. He was battling seven indictments, with many more promised by the D.A. He was in the later stages of tuberculosis and probably suffering from fever, nausea, and an overwhelming urge to lie down. And yet here he was, leading a parade down Fifth Avenue. Whatever else you thought of him, you had to admire the man on the white horse for his endurance.

  If one of the mysteries of Sam Parks is why he self-destructed—why he let his contempt get ahead of his reason and greed—the other mystery is why the ironworkers stayed loyal to him for so long. It was a mystery that perplexed the D.A. and the press. After all, the ironworkers who were called to strike on Parks’ behalf were his real victims. They lost their jobs. Their families were reduced, in some cases, to living on bread and tea. And yet they stuck by him through that long summer. Why?