The Epic of New York City

by Edward Robb Ellis

  Into the dingy New York World, at 32 Park Row, walked a bearded man with snowshoes strapped to his back. Introducing himself as Richard Farrelly, he told the editors that besides having newpaper experience, he knew a great deal about cold weather because he had spent much time in the frozen north. He proposed that they hire him to cover the storm, and they did. Now a temporary World reporter, Farrelly laced on his snowshoes, buttoned his coat across his chest, and butted out into the tempest. He couldn’t be seen for very long by editors at windows of the World’s city room. Farrelly clumped across City Hall Park, checked into the Astor House, and was lucky enough to get a room to himself. Ordering up some whiskey, he sat out the storm in comfort and euphoria. Every now and then he would bundle up, lunge back outdoors, plod over to the World office, and dramatically stagger inside, his coat snow-spangled and his breath coming hard. Flicking snowflakes from his beard, he would sit down and write thrilling stories about his adventures in the blighted city. His hoax wasn’t discovered until long afterward. Even though he was a charlatan, he was so talented that later he became managing editor of the World.

  Shortly after noon that Monday, J. Pierpont Morgan closed his Wall Street office to head for home. Unlike Conkling, he had kept his cab waiting. He climbed inside, and the driver whipped up the horse; but they were just barely able to inch through mounting snowdrifts, past stalled streetcars and beer wagons and hacks and butchers’ trucks, piled with carcasses from slaughterhouses. Morgan and his driver often had to stop at a cross street to wait until an especially vicious blast of wind died down. They got as far as Fifth Avenue and Thirty-sixth Street; beyond that they couldn’t go. Morgan left his cab and struggled on foot toward home. Although this was only a block away, the heavyset Morgan was exhausted when he arrived. He crawled up the front steps and managed to ring the doorbell before collapsing. A servant pushed open the door and dragged him inside.

  At 2:45 P.M. on Monday, March 12, 1888, the wind hit a peak of 84 miles an hour. The temperature was 10 degrees above zero.

  New York was isolated from the world except for one transatlantic cable. Fortunately, a cable company had buried the wire connecting its office with the end of the submarine cable. Oliver McKee, Boston correspondent for the New York World, got in touch with his office by cabling from Boston to London, with London relaying his message to New York.

  Monday night was the wildest the city had experienced. Two-thirds of the electric light poles in Manhattan had been blown down, and in Brooklyn all of them were felled. Streetlamps still burning gas were of no help since the frost had shut off the gas supply. With hardly a soul to be seen on the streets, New York looked like a ghost town. Indoors, however, a Mardi Gras spirit ruled. Champagne parties were held in fashionable hotels, while in the Tenderloin section of town, raw liquor was gulped in great quantities.

  General William Tecumseh Sherman had taken refuge in the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Two years earlier Sherman had moved to New York and into a house at 75 West Seventy-first Street. Sixty-eight years old, his grizzled beard close-cropped, and deep lines plowing his forehead, Sherman was one of the town’s celebrities. Everyone called him Uncle Billy. The old warrior was something of a man about town, and he attended all opening nights. Now, an unwilling guest in the Fifth Avenue Hotel, Sherman wondered what lay ahead for him that tempestuous night. Understandably, the hotel manager told his assistants to shift other guests from one room to another so that Uncle Billy could occupy a room by himself. Most of the night Sherman sat up to stare out at the blizzard. War is not the only hell.

  Tenement dwellers were less fortunate. At 10 P.M., with the temperature down to 6 degrees above zero, gas jets were turned off, leaving them to grope about in darkness. When they ran out of coal and their stoves went cold, they huddled together for warmth. In Hell’s Kitchen a flower-selling giantess, called Big Six, went berserk, attacked a cop, and banged about a total of six policemen before she could be subdued. As they threw her into a cell, she snarled, “You bastards! Don’t you know how to treat a lady?”

  Five new plays were scheduled to open on Monday evening, but none did. Only four theaters held their usual shows. Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, the stars of Faust, dined leisurely in the Hoffman House, a famous hotel on Broadway between Twenty-fourth and Twenty-fifth streets. The Hoffman House bar was the most famous in town because of Bouguereau’s scandalous painting of a nude nymph surrounded by leering satyrs. Irving and Miss Terry thought that their performance at the Star Theatre had been canceled. Surprisingly, every seat in the playhouse was filled that evening, and at curtaintime a breathless messenger rushed into the Hoffman House to tell the stars that they were expected. The news was overheard by a dozen men dining in the hotel; whereupon they gallantly took turns carrying Miss Terry on their shoulders through a dozen snow-clogged streets to the theater, at Broadway and Thirteenth Street.

  Another group of hardy playgoers packed Augustin Daly’s theater on Broadway between Twenty-eighth and Twenty-ninth streets to watch Ada Rehan star in A Midsummer Night’s Dream—an ironic choice on the night of the Great Blizzard. In Niblo’s Garden, at Broadway and Prince Street, only five persons appeared, but actor-manager Daniel E. Bandmann presented Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde anyway. Tony Pastor’s Music Hall was located at Fourteenth Street and Third Avenue, near Tammany Hall. Exactly four customers arrived and bought twenty-five-cent gallery seats. Pastor invited them to occupy orchestra seats and sent word to Tammany politicians to come and see his show for nothing. Seventy Democrats accepted. At the end of the performance Pastor broke out a case of champagne, put out a spread of sandwiches, and held a midnight party for the customers, Democrats, and theater help.

  The circus known as the Greatest Show on Earth was scheduled to launch its 1888 season that Monday night in the renovated Madison Square Garden. The Evening Post’s critic, Charles Pike Sawyer, tramped through the storm to the Garden. Snowdrifts more than 5 feet high blocked most entrances, but workmen had kept one doorway clear. Sawyer sighed with relief when he found himself inside the huge gaslighted hippodrome. He and other newspapermen crowded around seventy-seven-year-old P. T. Barnum to urge him to cancel the performance since fewer than 200 spectators had appeared. However, in the best the-show-must-go-on tradition the white-haired Barnum lifted his hand in a grandiose gesture at 8 P.M., the band crashed a brassy counterpoint to the howl of the wind outside, and the circus began. In another beau geste the old impresario sent champagne to the ringside seats occupied by reporters and critics. They drank, grew merry, and finally climbed into the ring to make happy idiots of themselves, while the professional clowns took seats and cheered them on.

  About 1 A.M. on Tuesday, March 13, a fight broke out in the main bar of the Hoffman House. The temperature had sunk to 3 degrees above zero. Some actors had gathered to soak up brandy and companionship and make a stand against the storm. Among those present was the noted Irish comedian Nat C. Goodwin, whose liquid blue eyes, Apollo-like face, and personal magnetism charmed one and all; a famous English leading man, Robert Hilliard, a strapping six-footer; and the renowned tragedian, Maurice Barrymore, of the slender nose and flaring nostrils, eyes burning in his lean face. The handsome and witty Barrymore had just moved to New York and occupied a brown-stone house at Broadway and West Forty-seventh Street. Safe in bed that bitter night were his wife and three children—Lionel, ten; Ethel, nine; and John, six.

  There in the Hoffman House, his face flushed with brandy, Barrymore sprang onto a table and, as gaslights flickered on his monocle, began reciting Mark Antony’s funeral oration from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears!” Few did lend him their ears, even though this was a free performance by one of the world’s leading actors. A well-dress stockbroker, named Howard Burros, who had been chatting with a friend, turned toward the drunken declaiming actor and tried to silence him. Barrymore broke off his monologue, pointed dramatically at Burros, and snarled, “You, sir-r-rr, are an ignorant clod!” Burros snapped
an insult at Barrymore. Barrymore’s friends replied in kind, and the evening ended in a free-for-all. Barrymore had been lightweight boxing champion of England during his student days at Oxford; but he disdained to mix in the brawl, kept his perch on the table, and ignored the shattering of glasses and the smashing of furniture, his eyes flaming and his magnificent voice booming another famous line: “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!”

  At 6 A.M. on Tuesday the temperature stood at 1 degree below zero, the snow stopped falling for a few hours, and the wind eased up. The worst of the Blizzard of ’88 was over.

  More than twice as much snow fell during the storm as had fallen all winter long. The 20.9-inch deposit set no local record, for more recent storms have left even more snow upon New York’s streets. What distinguished the Blizzard of ’88 above all others was the deadly combination of an erroneous weather forecast, an unprepared city, a heavy snowfall, a ferocious wind, and a bone-chilling cold. The exact number of deaths caused by the storm is unknown. Property damage was estimated at between $20,000,000 and $25,000,000. The Dictionary of American History calls it “the most famous blizzard in American history.”

  Chapter 32

  NEW YORK’S FIRST SKYSCRAPER

  ANOTHER STORM that struck New York in 1889 is of historical interest because it dashed itself against the city’s first real skyscraper.

  Until the 1870’s none of New York’s buildings was taller than five stories. Even so, it was difficult to rent the topmost floors because few people cared to trudge up many flights of stairs. Higher structures were erected as elevators improved. Elevators changed in size, shape, and operating principle. There were screw, hydraulic, steam, and finally electric elevators. As they became faster and safer, they won wider acceptance.

  With the advent of the 1870’s the city’s five-story buildings were topped by others eight and ten stories high. Old-timers complained that they threatened “to shut out the sky,” but enterprising men went on building them. In 1882 Cyrus W. Field put up the twelve-story Washington Building at 1 Broadway. This has been wrongly called the world’s first skyscraper, but it was made of masonry, and true skyscrapers consist of steel skeletons.

  These earliest tall buildings of solid masonry needed very thick walls to support the weight of each floor. As a consequence, the lower stories had such thick walls that they wasted a great deal of rentable floor space. A solid masonry structure was limited in height by the total weight it could support. With the development of elevators came the need for a new kind of construction that would allow the use of thinner walls all the way up the building.

  The prototype of all skyscrapers was erected in Chicago, a city that was young and bold and short on precedent. After the disastrous Chicago fire of 1871 a flurry of new construction began on the shore of Lake Michigan. In 1884 an architect, named William Le Baron Jenney, built the Home Insurance Building in Chicago. It was only ten stories tall, and the Washington Building in New York soared to twelve stories. However, the Home Insurance Building was the world’s first real skyscraper because it was the first to use steel skeleton construction instead of solid masonry. Its steel frame supported the weight of the thinner walls, as well as the weight of each floor.

  The success of the Chicago landmark proved that there was no reasonable limit to the height of buildings. Besides steel construction and elevators, however, a third element was required to erect skyscrapers. This was a tough thick bed of rock on which to build. Parts of Manhattan’s stony subsoil were perfect for shouldering the enormous weight of high buildings.

  In the spring of 1887 a young New York silk merchant, named John L. Stearns, bought a lot at 50 Broadway on the east side of the street just south of Exchange Place. Its Broadway frontage was so narrow that a building only twenty-one and one-half feet wide could be erected there. Stearns wanted to put up a building that would earn him money from office rentals. If he built the conventional stone masonry structure, its walls would be so thick that he would not have enough rentable space to turn a profit. The more he pondered the problem, the more he felt that he had a white elephant on his hands. Stearns turned for help to a young New York architect, named Bradford Lee Gilbert.

  For more than six months Gilbert meditated. Then one day he realized that the solution was to erect a building like a steel bridge stood up on one end. First, he would raise a steel skeleton framework six stories high. On top of this he would place a seven-story superstructure. The walls would be only twelve inches thick and bear no weight at all. The weight of the walls and floors would be transmitted to the steel columns and then down to the cement footings of the foundation. The thin walls would provide more floor space and thus command more rentals than the usual masonry structure.

  New York’s ancient and rigid building laws, geared to solid masonry structures, dictated the exact thickness of walls in office buildings. Gilbert and Stearns agonized through long negotiations with various city officials before they were granted a construction permit by the buildings department. When newspapers heard about the plan for the radical new building, they dubbed it the Idiotic Building. New Yorkers were positive that Stearns’ building would be blown over in the first strong windstorm. An engineer even wrote an alarming letter to Stearns, who handed it to his architect. By now Stearns himself feared that his new building would topple and that he would be sued for unprecedented damages. Gilbert, whose faith in himself never wavered, said to Stearns, “I will make my offices in the upper two floors of the Broadway end. If the building falls, I will fall with it.”

  The statement satisfied Stearns, and work began on New York’s first true skyscraper. The building was so slim that it began to look like a gigantic exclamation mark. Stearns named it the Tower Building because it towered into the sky. Except for the roof, the thirteen-story structure was finished when a hurricane hit the city one Sunday morning in 1889. With gusts of wind reaching a velocity of eighty miles an hour, Gilbert and Stearns rushed from their homes to the Tower Building to share in the crucial test it was undergoing.

  By the time they arrived at 50 Broadway, a crowd had gathered—at a safe distance—to watch the fate of the building. The spectators babbled to one another that it was damned well going to blow down. Janitors and watchmen scurried out of buildings across the street, jabbering that they didn’t want to be crushed to death when it fell.

  Gilbert grabbed a plumb line and began climbing a ladder left in place by workmen when they had quit work the evening before. Stearns followed at his heels. From the crowd arose screams: “You fools! You’ll be killed!” The architect and businessman could barely hear them above the shriek of the hurricane. Stearns’ courage gave out when they reached the tenth floor. There he sprawled full length on a scaffold and held on for dear life. Gilbert, who felt that the risk of his reputation was worth the risk of his life, continued to climb the ladder, rung by painful rung, his knuckles whitening with strain and gusts of wind battering him unmercifully. When he reached the thirteenth and top floor, he crawled on hands and knees along a scaffold. At a corner of the building he tugged the plumb line from a pocket, got a firm grip on one end of the cord, and dropped its leaden weight down toward the Broadway sidewalk. He later reported, “There was not the slightest vibration. The building stood as steady as a rock in the sea.”

  In that moment of triumph Gilbert rashly jumped to his feet on the scaffold. His hat had been tightly crushed on his head. Now he snatched it off and waved it exultantly. The wind knocked him down. It scudded him toward one end of the scaffold. He gulped. He prayed. Wildly he grabbed about him. Just as he was about to be swept off the end of the board and down to certain death, he caught a rope lashing about in the wind from an upright beam of the tower. His grip held. The rope held. He steadied himself, eased down onto his knees, and carefully picked his way back to the ladder. Climbing down the ladder, he was joined by Stearns at the tenth floor, and the two men then made their way slowly back to street level.

  Spectators cheered the hero
es of the hour and gave way to let them pass. Locking arms, their chins upthrust, the architect and the businessman marched up Broadway, dumbfounding Trinity Church members just leaving the morning service, by singing in unison: “Praise God from whom all blessings flow. . . .”

  New York’s first skyscraper had passed its first test. The thin walls Gilbert designed gave Stearns $10,000 a year in extra rental. New York was to become the city of skyscrapers, a man-made Rocky Mountain range wondrous to behold. The end result was the world’s greatest concentration of the tallest possible buildings on the smallest possible site. One year after this memorable Sunday, with the opening of the sixteen-story Pulitzer Building near the Manhattan end of the Brooklyn Bridge, a guest stepped off the elevator at the top floor and asked in a loud voice, “Is God in?”

  New York needed a large hall for orchestral and choral music. The Metropolitan Opera House was inadequate for concert music because an orchestra’s best effects were lost in the vast recesses of its stage. Chickering Hall and Steinway Hall were suitable only for recitals. Theaters lacked the proper atmosphere for serious music. The Oratorio Society, founded by Leopold Damrosch in 1873, gave concerts in the showrooms of a piano store.

  Damrosch also established the New York Symphony, and before he died in 1885, he passed along to his son Walter his vision of a huge music hall in New York. After his father’s death Walter Damrosch became director of both the New York Symphony and the Oratorio Society. Serving on the society’s board was Andrew Carnegie, the industrialist and philanthropist. Young Damrosch told Carnegie that a chorus as large as that of the Oratorio Society had to have a much larger place in which to perform. Carnegie preferred pipe organs and bagpipes to symphony orchestras and choral groups, but his wife, twenty-four years his junior, urged him to give the city a great concert hall.