The Epic of New York City

by Edward Robb Ellis

  There was other opposition to the park. The city was built up only to about Thirty-fourth Street. Horsecar lines had reached Forty-second Street, but above that lay a wilderness. Some people thought that it was silly to convert this into a park. Fortunately, the city fathers realized that even this empty space would be lost unless they acted quickly. They appointed park commissioners, who armed themselves with guns against the squatters and with deodorizers against the stench and then tramped over 760 acres lying north of what today is Fifty-ninth Street. They decided to lay out a park running north and south 2½ miles and reaching east and west ½ mile. More than 7,000 lots lay within this area. Some were owned by the city; some, by the state; some, by private citizens. It became necessary to buy 376 acres. These were purchased in 1856 at an average price of $7,500 per acre.

  A nationwide contest was held to select the best plan for landscaping the terrain. Of the thirty-three ideas submitted, the best was prepared by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. They split the $2,000 prize money, and Olmsted was named architect in chief, while Vaux became his assistant. From 1857 to 1870 Andrew H. Green was executive officer and president of the Central Park commission.

  Work on the park began in the depression year of 1857 and provided jobs for 4,000 men. Most were Irish, since 87 percent of all foreign-born laborers in the city had come from Ireland. Olmsted, who had seen famous gardens in France and Italy, did not try to shape the rough terrain of Central Park into a formal pattern. He worked with nature, instead of against it. Vaux contributed the idea of sinking the east-west transverse roads below ground level to hide crosstown traffic from strollers in the park.

  Another city landmark was taking shape about this time. In 1850 Archbishop Hughes had announced his intention of building a second St. Patrick’s Cathedral. He asked 150 rich Catholics to give $1,000 each to pay for the initial cost. Within a few weeks 103 men donated the requested sum, while 2 non-Catholics made voluntary contributions.

  Hughes planned to build on a block bounded by the present Fifth and Madison Avenues and Fiftieth and Fifty-first streets, a knoll sloping northward toward Central Park and southward toward Forty-second Street. The site was another wilderness, and many people ridiculed the archbishop’s plan. The land had been owned by Catholics since 1828. It had been bought at a foreclosure sale by trustees of the old St. Patrick’s Cathedral and St. Peter’s Church for use as a cemetery. However, the land proved too rocky to serve this purpose.

  Hughes chose as architect thirty-two-year-old James Renwick, Jr., an Episcopalian. The son of a Columbia College professor and himself a Columbia graduate at nineteen, young Renwick was a civil engineer, not a professional architect. As assistant engineer of the Croton water system, he had supervised construction of the reservoir in Bryant Park. Renwick taught himself architecture and studied European cathedrals.

  The archbishop wanted the decorated Gothic style of the thirteenth century, like that in the cathedrals of Cologne and Rheims. Decorated Gothic is free of both the heaviness of the earlier period and the over-ornamentation of the later. Renwick changed his plans many times, but they had been completed by 1853.

  Nearly 200,000 Catholics lived in New York, with its 5,980 taverns and 2,000 beer parlors. The Tribune estimated that one-half to three-quarters of all groggeries were owned by Catholics and added, “Catholics sell much more than their proportion of the liquor drunk in this country.” Partly because of this bad publicity, the archbishop inserted in the cathedral’s building contract a clause forbidding workmen to drink on the job.

  On August 15, 1858, before an audience of 100,000, Archbishop Hughes laid the cornerstone of the new St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Work began the next day. Laborers dug through the soil to bedrock. The cathedral’s foundation stones were huge blocks of blue gneiss granite quarried in Maine. The walls were to be made of marble from Pleasantville, New York, and Lee, Massachusetts.

  New York’s fast-changing face caused Harper’s Magazine in 1856 to make a complaint that sounds familiar even now:

  The other day they were tearing down the Irving House. It is too old; it has been built at least ten years. . . . New York is notoriously the largest and least loved of any of our great cities. Why should it be loved as a city? It is never the same city for a dozen years altogether. A man born in New York forty years ago finds nothing, absolutely nothing, of the New York he knew. If he chances to stumble upon a few old houses not yet leveled, he is fortunate. But the landmarks, the objects which marked the city to him, as a city, are gone.

  Peter Cooper did not hold with such old-fogy notions. He favored progress—the more the better. By this time his glue factories and ironworks had made him $2,000,000, but his attitude toward wealth differed from that of his rich contemporaries. Cooper wrote: “I cannot shut my eyes to the fact that the production of wealth is not the work of any one man and the acquisition of great fortunes is not possible without the cooperation of multitudes of men.” Having been denied a technical education, and being interested in the welfare of the working class, Cooper announced in 1852 that he planned to build his own college.

  Five years later he incorporated the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. It had two main objectives: (1) free education for all without regard to race, creed, color, sex, or economic status; and (2) the furthering of adult education. In 1859 the state legislature authorized Cooper’s college to grant degrees and certificates in all its courses.

  For many years Cooper had been buying lots in the vicinity of what became Cooper Union. Today the site is bounded on the north by East Ninth Street, on the west by Fourth Avenue, on the east by Third Avenue, and on the south by Astor Place. It stood just east of the Astor Place Opera House, which in 1854 became the Clinton Hall Library.

  Cooper erected a seven-story brownstone building as massive as it was plain. To support the floors, he used wrought-iron beams arranged in grids, and by replacing heavy stone arches with thin piers, he increased the usable space. Cooper Union’s Great Hall was located in the basement. Cooper put it there for safety, reasoning that if fire and panic broke out, fewer people would be hurt scampering upstairs than stampeding downstairs. He installed a gigantic fan that circulated air through small vents under the seats. The ventilating system continued to work well for the next hundred years.

  When the Great Hall opened in 1858, the New York Times, which had begun publication on September 18, 1851, said that it was “not equalled by any room of a similar nature in any city of the United States.” Down through the decades the vast auditorium, seating 2,000 persons, was the scene of meetings which led to formation of such organizations as American Red Cross, the Volunteers of America, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

  Cooper spent $630,000 to build his college, which opened on November 2, 1859, in the year that Washington Irving died. Although he gave it to the city’s workers forever, Cooper failed to set up an endowment fund for its operation, counting on rents and outside help to keep the place going. The first two floors were set aside for shops; but their rental was inadequate, and the public was slow to contribute money to the college.

  It was the nation’s first free private college and the first to provide adult education. Cooper never ran the institution with an iron hand, for he believed in striking sparks by rubbing one mind against another. As a result, the phrase “a Cooper Union audience” became proverbial to describe intellectuals. Cooper himself often met with students in nearby McSorley’s Ale House, which had opened in 1854 at 15 East Seventh Street. For his famous white-haired customer, McSorley kept a special chair with an inflated rubber cushion and a pewter mug with Cooper’s name engraved on it. Cooper Union men (women were and still are excluded from McSorley’s) enjoyed hoisting a drink with the old boy.

  In some ways Peter Cooper was as naïve as Little Red Riding Hood. A loyal Tammany member, he was slow to realize that the Democrats were plunging the city ever deeper into corruption. A man of goodwill, he found it d
ifficult to penetrate the disguise of a wolf named Fernando Wood.

  Chapter 22

  THE POLICE RIOT

  FERNANDO WOOD was born in Philadelphia in 1812 and moved to New York City with his parents as a lad of nine. At the age of twenty he opened a “Wine and Segar Shop” at 322 Pearl Street but failed because he spent too much time dabbling in politics.

  After he had managed a tobacco factory in Virginia, where he picked up Southern sentiments, Wood came back to New York and established a grocery-groggery one block from the waterfront. He made a fortune selling bad liquor to drunken sailors and struck up friendships with underworld characters. He invested this money in five sailing ships, one becoming the first to reach San Francisco after the discovery of gold in California. Wood next made a killing in Manhattan real estate. All this time he and his brother, Benjamin, ran local lotteries as licensed gamblers under a Louisiana charter. By 1849, when Wood was thirty-seven, he had become so rich that he retired from business to devote himself entirely to his greatest love—politics.

  Known to all as “Fernandy,” Wood pretended to be just one of the boys. Twinkly were his blue eyes, and soft was his voice. A slender graceful man standing five feet eleven inches, his head crowned with a shock of dark-brown hair, Fernando Wood was as handsome as a Greek god. In the election of 1854 bullyboy Isaiah Rynders was for him. The underworld was for him. Saloonkeepers were for him. Tarts were for him. Abortionists were for him. And enough decent, but hoodwinked, people were for Wood to elect him mayor, although he bought votes.

  Taking office on January 1, 1855, he declared in his inaugural message that he was “a man of honor, a friend of labor and industry, and a protector of the poor.” An intelligent man with a real knowledge of government, “Fernandy” Wood instituted some reforms during his first two-year term of office. However, after his reelection in 1856 he dropped his mask. His true nature was revealed in his mishandling of the police riot.

  In 1844 Mayor Harper had tried to put the cops into uniform, but they had balked. As freeborn Americans, they argued, they would not wear “livery” and look like servants. By 1853 they had given in and donned a uniform, consisting of a blue coat with brass buttons, a blue cap, and gray trousers. This was the first completely uniformed, tax-supported, full-time police force in the city’s history, but citizens complained that their police were “the worst in the world.” Among other things, Police Chief George W. Matsell took bribes from the city’s leading female abortionist. Corruption became so flagrant that the state stepped in and took over the police.

  In 1857 the legislature created a new police district from the counties of New York, Kings, Richmond, and Westchester. In those days Westchester included what is now the Bronx. The governor appointed five police commissioners to run the new state police district—with the mayors of New York and Brooklyn serving as ex officio members. Frederick Tallmadge was named police superintendent. The new state force was called the Metropolitan Police; the old city one, the Municipal Police.

  The state now ordered the city to disband its force. Mayor Wood refused, declaring that the act creating the Metropolitan Police was unconstitutional. He urged the Municipal Police to stand by him. Its 1,100 members voted, and 800 of them—all Democrats—affirmed their loyalty to the mayor. The other 300 resigned to serve as a cadre for the new Metropolitan Police force, which opened headquarters in White Street and recruited new men to fill its ranks. The state went through the motions of trying the 800 cops who stood by Wood. The city did the same with the 300 who deserted him.

  New York now had two police departments, each of equal strength and each regarding the other as an outlaw force. Five Points criminals danced in the streets to celebrate the vacuum of law enforcement. Decent people walked warily and knew that sooner or later the two hostile groups would clash, leaving them utterly without protection. This fateful day fell on June 16, 1857.

  The street commissioner had died. His deputy claimed the right to succeed him. However, the deputy wasn’t rich enough to bribe Wood, and the mayor rejected him. The Republican governor then appointed a Republican, Daniel D. Conover, to the post. Meantime, after a Democrat, named Charles Devlin, had paid $50,000 to Democratic Mayor Wood, he too was named street commissioner.

  With the governor’s commission in his pocket and accompanied by a dozen friends, Conover walked to City Hall to take over the office. Wood’s police threw them out. Conover and his friends fought back but were overwhelmed. Conover then marched to a Republican judge and swore out two warrants for the arrest of the mayor. One charged Wood with assault, the other with inciting to riot. The captain of the Metropolitan Police, George W. Walling—one of the 300 men who had deserted the mayor—was ordered to serve one warrant upon Wood. By now the mayor had posted 500 of his Municipal Police outside City Hall, keeping a reserve force inside.

  Despite this imposing array and despite the mob that gathered in front of City Hall to sympathize with the mayor, Captain Walling walked alone up the front steps. He was permitted to enter the mayor’s office, where Wood sat behind a desk, one hand clutching his ornate staff of office. The captain said that he had come to arrest the mayor. Wood refused to recognize the warrant’s legality or the captain’s power. The captain smiled, walked around one end of the desk, and grabbed the mayor by the arm. Twenty Municipal Police swarmed into the room, seized the captain, dragged him through the corridors of City Hall, and threw him out into the park. The obstinate captain tried again and again to get back into City Hall but was blocked each time. He was still arguing with a captain of the Municipal Police when fifty Metropolitan Police arrived on the double to rescue him and serve the second warrant on the mayor.

  The mob—described by G. T. Strong as “a miscellaneous assortment of suckers, soaplocks, Irishmen, and plug-uglies”—hissed and booed the Metropolitan Police. The state cops wore plug hats and frock coats, and their new badges glistened in the sun. But they were outnumbered by the mayor’s “Municipals” in their blue coats, armed with revolvers, slingshots and locust clubs.

  The “Mets” advanced toward the main entrance of City Hall. The Municipals fell on them. There, on the steps of the official seat of government of the largest city in the United States, two rival police forces clashed in combat. Clubs whirred through the air. Skulls cracked. Fists thudded into faces. Bloodied men, knocked off their feet, rolled helplessly down the steps. Disabled Mets were beaten and kicked by the crowd as they lay on the ground. A few hardy Mets bulled their way into City Hall. The Municipals battered them outdoors again. Some bruised and bloody Mets fled, leaving companions writhing on the earth under a hail of blows from cursing gangsters. When the fracas was all over, most of the Mets had been injured, twelve of them seriously, and one remained a cripple the rest of his life.

  Mayor Wood and his cohorts now gathered in his office to celebrate their victory. Meantime, Captain Walling had prevailed on the city recorder to order Sheriff J. J. V. Westervelt to arrest the mayor. The sheriff consulted his attorney, who said that it was his duty to take the mayor into custody. Walling, Westervelt, and the lawyer strode to City Hall and pushed their way through the threatening mob. The sheriff walked with dignity, face grim, head crowned with plug hat, and sword clanking at his heels, holding aloft his own staff of office. Under orders from Wood the Municipals fell back and let the three men enter the mayor’s office. The trio told him to submit to arrest. Wood shouted, “I will never let you arrest me!”

  Just then the beating of drums was heard through the windows of City Hall. The national guard’s Seventh Regiment, flags flying, was marching down Broadway toward the waterfront to board a ship for Boston to help celebrate the anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill. Met officers ran to the soldiers and cried for the attention of their commanding officer, Major General Charles W. Sanford. He halted his men. The Mets excitedly asked him to come to their aid. This, after all, was what the militia was supposed to do when the city’s peace and dignity were threatened.

  Gener
al Sanford marched his men into City Hall Park and surrounded the building. Now some Metropolitan Police commissioners appeared. Standing in the sun, the general, sheriff, and commissioners conferred. Then the general barked an order. Soldiers clicked bayonets onto muskets. They fell into place behind their general as he strode fierce-faced up the steps into City Hall. Entering the mayor’s office, the general announced that he represented the state’s military power, that he was going to take the mayor into custody, and—glaring menacingly about him—that he would brook no interference. The mayor submitted.

  However, Wood was released on bond and never stood trial. Civil courts held that the governor had no right to appoint a city street commissioner and that Mayor Wood’s appointee was entitled to the office.

  But which of the two rival police forces was legitimate? While the issue was argued in courts, members of both departments strode New York’s sidewalks, more concerned with their private feud than with the public weal. Local criminals ran wild, robbing, murdering, and looting. During the summer of 1857 respectable people were held up at gunpoint in broad daylight on Broadway and other thoroughfares. A Met would arrest a robber. A Municipal would attack the Met, while the holdup man ran away to sin some more. Then the Met and the Municipal would fight it out between themselves.

  Into this power vacuum rushed gang members, who staged the biggest gang fight in the city’s history on July 4 and 5. The Dead Rabbits and the Bowery B’hoys, deadly antagonists, tried to settle their ancient grudges. Barricades were thrown across streets. Between 800 and 1,000 toughs battled so ferociously that 2 regiments of militia were required to put down the disturbance. When it was all over, 10 men were dead, and more than 100 wounded.