by Michael Daly
Topsy seems to have reached her limit when it came to teasing and seized Dodero around the waist with her trunk, hoisting him high in the air and just holding him there for a moment. She then threw him down and was raising her right foot in apparent preparation for finishing the job when Emery came running over and stopped her.
However understanding Emery may have been, however extenuating the circumstances, the show’s owners had reached a limit of their own. They announced the same day that Topsy had been sold.
“Tops has not been a bad elephant except when teased by people,” co-owner Lewis Sells said. “I have decided to sell her because she has now gained a bad reputation.”
As the show continued north into New England, Topsy was transported to New York. She was led alone over the Brooklyn Bridge and across the borough to a realm whose first European settlers were governed by a matriarchy nearly as egalitarian as that of an elephant herd.
TWENTY-FIVE
From Lady Moody to
the Billion-Dollar Smile
In 1645, the Dutch governor of New Amsterdam granted a British widow named Lady Deborah Moody and thirty-nine of her fellow religious refugees a stretch of land at the far end of Brooklyn that extended to a sandy seaside isle known to the Dutch as Konijn Hok, in English literally “rabbit hutch.” The name was derived from both the area’s many rabbits (konijn) and for the Native American women and children who sometimes sought refuge there in times of intertribal conflict. Konijn Hok was translated in a formal land grant to Conyen Island.
Lady Moody derived her title from her husband, Sir Henry Moody, who died in 1632. She grew weary of living alone in their country estate in Wiltshire and, in the way of many widows, experienced an urge to move out even if she could not just move on. She was living in London when the infamous Star Chamber of judges and clerics decided that the rabble might forget their betters if the betters were not in residence to remind them. There was already a provision in the penal code forbidding subjects from living away from their rightful homes for a protracted period. This was now joined by an order aimed at all gentry and singling her out by name.
“Dame Deborah Moody and the others should return to their hereditaments in forty days, in the good example necessary to the poorer class.”
Moody refused and ended up going much farther from home, on a ship bound for the freedom that was said to await those who followed the Puritans into exile in New England. Moody became a member of the church in Salem, Massachusetts, during the years in which Nathaniel Hawthorne would set The Scarlet Letter. She came to adopt the views of the controversial Roger Williams, who had the colony abuzz with his contention that persons should be baptized only when they are of an age to knowingly make an avowal of faith. She who had come to New England as a result of one decree now found herself the subject of another. Governor John Winthrop noted in his journal that although she was a “wise and anciently religious woman,” Moody had been admonished for “being taken with the error of denying baptism to infants” and, along with “many others infected with Anabaptism,” had “removed thither,” thither being “to the Dutch.” Any hope of her returning to Massachusetts ended with her excommunication.
On Brooklyn’s outer shore, Moody divided the land into forty equal plots and granted the thirty-nine other refugees an equal voice in all decisions, her added sway derived elephant-style from her peers’ respect and deference to her position as senior female. The residents were able to live as freely and equally as they had hoped to live when they came to America.
This changed after Moody’s death, as the men of that and the next generation began to vie for bigger portions of land. The early eighteenth century saw one settler named Thomas Stillwell eventually come to own virtually all of Coney Island, whose use heretofore had been equally shared, sensibly rotated between grazing cows and cultivating tobacco and Indian corn. His holdings were subsequently acquired by various investors who revived the Native American notion of Coney Island as a refuge, but for well-to-do city dwellers looking to escape the heat and stench of a New York summer.
In 1829, a group of what Edison would have termed speculators formed the Coney Island Road and Bridge Company and held a kind of IPO of three hundred shares at twenty dollars. They thereby funded a shell road from the mainland and the isle’s first hotel, the Coney Island House. The first big crowd came after a quartet of mutineers washed ashore with a trove of stolen silver, which was promptly stolen by somebody else, who buried it in the sand but lost track of it, triggering a mass dig for buried treasure. The beach itself remained an ongoing lure, and, rather than dig, those seeking a fortune there built a second hotel, soon followed by a third and then the first bathing pavilion.
“This was the beginning,” wrote the historian Peter Ross in his A History of Long Island. “But it is difficult to say exactly when the modern movement which resulted in making Coney Island famous fairly set in. In one sense, no date can be definitely fixed, for, like Topsy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ‘it just grow’d.’”
In 1846, a ferry began offering the laboring classes a summer day’s escape from the teeming tenements of Manhattan. Thieves and confidence men saw much the same opportunity as offered by a circus crowd, with the added advantage of there being no police force on the beach and no show owner demanding a cut.
Numerous other bathing pavilions were joined by dance halls with singing waiters and women who hustled drinks and more. A performer known as Princess Zaza became famous for smoking a cigarette in a unique way. A “rescue house” took in a thousand “fallen” women a season. Reformers and crusading journalists railed against the rampant lawlessness and depravity of what some were calling Sodom by the Sea.
“If this advertising goes on, Coney Island won’t be big enough to hold the crowd that want to go there!” said Frederick Wurster, mayor of still-independent Brooklyn.
More innocent thrills and entertainments, as well as fewer pickpockets and con men, were offered within the confines of Boyton’s Sea Lion Park, where Edison’s crew had filmed Shooting the Chutes. Boyton’s success had inspired the latest owners of the Elephant Colossus just across Surf Avenue to build a kind of toboggan ride around the landmark that had failed even as a bordello.
On a September evening at the end of Boyton’s second season in Coney Island, passersby noticed a gleam in the 122-foot elephant’s eyes. Two minutes later, flames erupted from the howdah on top. Fire soon filled the entire structure, causing the elephant to go down on its knees with a sound eerily like a huge groan, pitch over on its side, and burn to cinders. The blaze was declared arson and there were rumors that the structure was heavily insured.
By then, a site just down Surf Avenue from Boyton’s park had been taken over by George Tilyou, who had started out in Coney Island at age fourteen, selling containers of “authentic sea sand” and “authentic sea water” to tourists. Tilyou had gone on to build a Ferris wheel after seeing the original one while honeymooning at the Chicago exposition. His was half the size, but that did not deter him from posting a sign declaring it “The World’s Largest.” He was now inspired by Boyton to build an amusement park of his own, in actual fact even bigger and even grander. The signature ride of his Steeplechase Park was a race in which a half dozen patrons at a time rode wooden horses on wheels along an undulating iron track, with gravity making the heavier, not the lighter jockey more likely to win.
Boyton struggled to compete, adding the Flip-Flap Railroad, the world’s first loop-de-loop roller coaster. He also expanded his animal acts beyond the sea lions, and to that end he now purchased Topsy. He was apparently undeterred by her record. He figured he might even be able to teach her to shoot the chutes and give him a real edge over the wooden horses of Steeplechase.
But that season, the summer of 1902, turned out to be the worst weather-wise in memory, with rain falling on seventy of the summer’s ninety-two days. Boyton had overexte
nded himself financially in his effort to keep up with his rival and his sodden park was often all but deserted. Tilyou had the good fortune to have arranged for Trip to the Moon to relocate to Steeplechase after the Buffalo exposition. This indoor ride was self-contained and immune to the perpetual downpour and did huge business, drawing 850,000 customers even as Boyton suffered financial ruin.
Tilyou had lured Trip to the Moon’s creators to his park by guaranteeing them 60 percent of the attraction’s proceeds. Now that he had them there and the attraction was proving to be such a success, he sought to invert the formula, with the 60 percent going to him. He apparently figured that Thompson and Dundy would have little choice but to consent, for they could hardly just pick up and go to some other venue without exorbitant expense on top of lost revenue.
What Tilyou did not anticipate was that Boyton would announce that he was shutting Sea Lion Park and looking for somebody to take over the site. Thompson and his partner, Dundy, leased the property and secured funding from such Wall Street figures as John “Bet-a-Million” Gates to create another, permanent White and Rainbow City. Sodom by the Sea was to become an Electric City by the Sea. There would be an electric tower and 250,000 lights. The diversions would be as spectacular as the Buffalo exposition might have been had the duo been in charge from the start.
“A billion-dollar smile,” Thompson said of the amusement business they were bringing to Coney Island, sounding like he was well on the way to being the Edison of Entertainment, the Wizard of Wow.
Along with Sea Lion Park, they leased the site of the former Elephant Hotel. Dundy was a little “circus crazy” and believed elephants were good luck. He divined only good fortune in Topsy, whom he and his partner decided to keep along with Shoot the Chutes. They figured Topsy would also come in handy when they moved Trip to the Moon three blocks down Surf Avenue from Steeplechase.
A gang of workmen set to dismantling the big building that encompassed the airship. Topsy was enlisted to assist in the latter half of October, moving the exterior structure’s larger beams, which were lined up so as to constitute a pathway, then greased to facilitate dragging the Luna airship to the new site.
“Tops has performed his work well and he has attracted considerable attention as he made his way up Surf Avenue, drawing the big timbers,” the Brooklyn Eagle reported, reflexively employing the masculine.
On October 29, Topsy was fitted with a harness and hitched with stout chains to the Luna. The perpetually inebriated handyman who had been appointed her cut-rate attendant ordered her to commence pulling. The chains grew taut as Topsy strained, but the big-winged ship did not budge. The handyman, variously identified as Frederick Ault and William Alt and known as Whitey, urged her on and she repeatedly tried anew, with no result despite her strenuous efforts.
When Topsy finally refused to continue, Whitey began poking her in the sides and between her eyes with a pitchfork. She could have stopped the abuse by this boozed-up bully simply by seizing him with her trunk. But she was apparently done with that and she continued to suffer with a forbearance for which she would get no credit.
Blood began to stream down her face and flanks and a female passerby protested. Whitey told her to mind her own business and called her “vile names.” Police roundsman Bernard Clark received similar invective when he came over and ordered Whitey to cease abusing the elephant. Whitey responded by removing the harness and letting Topsy wander off into the surrounding streets. Clark arrested Whitey and the crowd of gawkers was presented with a choice. Some opted to follow the two men to the police station. The rest followed Topsy, who was eventually lassoed by other cops and brought back to her new owners. Thompson and Dundy were no doubt as sensitive as any showmen to publicity they did not control.
“Tops, the Bad Elephant, Makes Trouble at Coney,” read the headline in the Brooklyn Eagle.
Whitey was freed on $300 bond pending a hearing in Coney Island Court two weeks hence. Whitey there argued that he was only following established and accepted practice when it came to elephants. The matter was adjourned to accord the defendant time to offer proof that his treatment of the animal was “as gentle as an elephant should receive.”
Whitey remained out on bail on December 5, when an oversize wagon loaded with lumber became stuck in a monster pothole. Topsy was brought over to push the wagon out with her forehead, which she succeeded in doing despite more abuse from Whitey. The abuse continued after the job was done.
As before, a cop came over, this time patrolman Thomas Conlin, who ordered Whitey to desist. Whitey responded with characteristic obscenity, climbed onto Topsy’s neck, and rode up and down Surf Avenue, drawing an ever-growing crowd. Whitey ignored Conlin’s orders to come down, but when Topsy suddenly stopped at West Eleventh Street, the trainer’s inebriation got the better of him. He slid off.
A furious Whitey began to stab Topsy’s trunk with the pitchfork he kept handy. Conlin placed him under arrest and Whitey threatened to sic Topsy upon the crowd of onlookers. Whitey reconsidered when Conlin drew his revolver and promised to shoot Whitey if he tried to make good on his threat. Whitey fell in beside Conlin and this time the gawkers did not have to choose whom to follow. Topsy trailed along behind the trainer and the cop the three blocks to the West Eighth Street police station.
A surprise came when Conlin escorted his prisoner inside. Topsy ascended the five granite steps and sought to enter right behind them. She became wedged in the doorway and began to trumpet at full volume, causing the crowd outside to scatter in panic and the cops inside to seek refuge upstairs and in the cells. A sergeant named Levis ducked behind the front desk in terror and beseeched Whitey to get Topsy to remove herself.
Whitey eventually complied, but subjected the police to further humiliation by ordering them to get various sweets for Topsy and to keep the crowd back. That ended when the co-owner Thompson arrived. He instructed Whitey to take Topsy back to what was in the process of becoming Luna Park.
Conlin came along and once Topsy was in her quarters the officer moved to complete the arrest for disorderly conduct. Whitey sought to prevent this by wrapping his arms around the very trunk he had so viciously stabbed a short time before. Whitey challenged Conlin to go ahead and try to take him away. Conlin drew his revolver again and soon he and Whitey were walking into the station house, this time minus Topsy.
The damage to the doorway was easily repaired, but the injury to the cops’ pride was more severe and made all the worse by headlines such as the one in the New York Times: “Elephant Terrorizes Coney Island Police.”
One thing a new amusement park in rough-and-tumble Coney Island definitely needed was the goodwill of the police. Conlin and his comrades may not have been actually terrorized, but they surely did not like anybody saying they were. Sergeants in particular tend to dislike being embarrassed.
The proprietors of fledgling Luna Park could not make things right simply by firing a drunk they should not have hired in the first place. And there was also the distinct possibility that Topsy could figure in another incident involving the cops, who likely felt they had tolerated enough.
Then there was the cost. Topsy was eating about twenty-five dollars’ worth of hay a week. They were paying Whitey twenty dollars a week, not counting bail. And in building their Electric City they were already extending themselves to where every penny mattered.
There was also the question of publicity. The Brooklyn Eagle had just run a huge feature about the construction of Luna Park and Thompson had been quoted saying, “Our motive power is furnished by steam engines, electric motors, horse, and the famous elephant Topsy, who easily does the work of a dozen horses in moving buildings or heavily loaded wagons.” He had further suggested that once the work was done and the park was opened, the elephant would be among the animals available for children to ride, according “the little folks . . . no end of enjoyment.” The papers were now talking about
infamous Topsy, the man killer.
On the plus side, the incidents had brought Luna Park and its “bad elephant” considerable public notice. Simply killing Topsy would not necessarily generate much added attention in the newspapers. Such executions were losing their novelty. The Barnum & Bailey show had put five troublesome elephants to death during its most recent European tour and received scant attention even when it executed a sixth on board ship after docking in New York in March. The unlucky elephant had been the once-renowned Mandarin, sire of the first baby elephant actually born in America. He had been strangled with a rope hitched to a steam-powered winch called a donkey engine, after which his body had been weighted with three tons of pig iron and dumped off a seagoing tug.
And in October there had been hardly an outcry when Snyder, the keeper at the Central Park Zoo, killed another elephant who had supposedly tried to kill him. A whistling Snyder had presented a tray of poisoned bran to Big Tom such as had been presented to Tip.
“Here’s your breakfast, Tom,” Snyder said.
Tom collapsed after eight minutes.
“Dead,” a witness announced.
But thirty seconds later Tom suddenly rose to his feet. Another dose and a total of fifty-four minutes of convulsions were required to finish the job.
“He’s a hard one to kill,” Snyder observed.
Snyder added without apparently intending any irony, “Anyway, I’m glad it’s over, for we were good friends once.”
That execution had drawn only a handful of gawkers, no more than an everyday streetcar accident. The ASPCA had not bothered to attend, much less express the kind of outrage that makes the papers.
At the same time, Thompson and Dundy surely recalled the press attention as well as the crowd at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo at the prospect of the public electrocution of Jumbo II. They just as surely remembered the laughter when the attempt failed, and they would not likely have risked a repeat. The one person whose advice they would have trusted was the Wizard, who had so effusively praised Thompson for his “electric miracles” in Buffalo.