by James Mauro
“This was the logical place19 for it,” he explained, “but only on the assumption that there was to be a general reclamation of the entire surrounding area.”
Once the parkway was completed, Moses felt sure that when city government officials saw all that traffic cutting right through an unsightly garbage dump, they would allocate the funds to allow him to clean it up. They didn’t. He got the money for the road and nothing more.
“An agreement was made,”20 Moses insisted. “Construction on the parkway began. But the state work was limited strictly to work within an ordinary parkway right of way. The artery was, therefore, driven through the dump in the form of a chute, with great mountains of ash and refuse on each side.”
Clearly, this was not what Moses had in mind. Although he had cleared away fifty million cubic yards of ash, the parkway did little more than cut a tiny swath through the muck. “We fondly hoped to cover [the garbage] with a thin layer of topsoil and to plant, at a price which would not subject us to indictment,” Moses said. He couldn’t even get the money for the topsoil.
“This dream,”21 he realized, “seemed too big for the vision and means of the city in the face of competition of so many other urgent enterprises.” But then, as he later put it, “The miracle happened22—the idea of a World’s Fair.”
Even as McAneny’s words were falling from his lips, Moses heard the word Fair but thought of the word park. The World’s Fair was a hurdle, a two-year blip that would be gone in the snap of a finger. His park, on the other hand, would be one for the ages. Immediately, he drew up a lease for the land that contained the provision “from the beginning23 the project was planned so as to insure a great park” once the Fair was over and torn down. The improvements, including the infrastructure—the sewers and pipes and electrical cables—would all be constructed not for the Fair, but for what came after.
“Everything of a permanent nature must be part of the plan for the ultimate park which was to be completed once the Fair was over,” he repeatedly insisted. He also included plans for fountains, boat basins, and not one but two man-made lakes. After all, what would Versailles be without fountains?
Undeterred by the site’s squalor, Moses immediately began surveying the land, noting that he would have to transform “thirty years of24 the offscourings, tin cans, cast-off baby carriages and umbrellas of Brooklyn.” The rats, as he described them, were “big enough to wear saddles.”
McAneny knew what he was doing when he approached Robert Moses with the proposed location. Transforming it would be a tremendous job, and no ordinary person, seeing the density of refuse and the sheer vastness of such a wasteland, would believe it could be done. Moses thought otherwise. He knew how government worked. He understood that all it took was money, but that in order for the money to be committed there had to be a clear explanation of why the public was spending that money. McAneny gave it to him.
And once Moses came on board, the whole thing had a grander purpose to it. The World’s Fair would help create a permanent park for the residents of New York City; the park itself would make the expense of a Fair seem somehow more palatable to the taxpaying public. It was the perfect storm of needs and wants on behalf of the city itself. And since La Guardia had now delegated the dumps as parkland, it all came under the supervision of Robert Moses, its new landlord.
Not that there weren’t lingering doubts, even among the leaders of this steering committee. In October, Moses took the mayor and a couple of city officials out to look the site over. “All my predecessors25 have something to answer for,” La Guardia said. “[It] is the most remarkable thing I’ve ever witnessed,” with “landscaping possibilities that challenge the imagination.”
As they circled the swampy tract in an open car, La Guardia expressed his concern that the land couldn’t possibly provide a solid foundation for all the buildings to be erected. The mayor, it was reported, “did not appear to be particularly pleased at what he saw there.”
When a reporter asked Moses what he had seen, the parks commissioner smirked, held his hands about a foot apart, and replied with one word: “Rats.”26
The site notwithstanding, by the end of the month incorporation papers had been drawn up and filed, and New York World’s Fair, Inc., was born. In November, its board of directors voted George McAneny as president and another banker, Harvey Gibson, president of Manufacturers Trust Company, as chairman. Waiting in the wings, content for the time being to be elected to the executive committee, was Grover Whalen. It was a secondary and practically powerless position in the company; and, as with most of the other appointments in his career thus far, he did not stay in the background for long.
To his unending regret,27 Robert Moses saw to that.
* The area would eventually become known as Bryant Park.
* In an oddly familiar assessment, Moses described the original beach site as “a mosquito-infested tidal swamp full of stagnant pools.” When Moses first brought the idea of a state park to his architects, one of them reportedly asked him, “Are you crazy?”
Grover Whalen (in top hat) escorts Charles Lindbergh in his ticker tape parade, June 14, 1927.
(© Bettmann/Corbis)
2
MR. NEW YORK
Grover Aloysius Whalen had spent his early years nurturing a singular conviction: that his life would matter. He sought the spotlight, but not in ways that others imagined for themselves. He was a born promoter, and because promotion requires something other than oneself to point out its greatness, his place, his niche, would be carved out of the secondary spotlight thrown by those around him whose aura shone greater than his own. Yet by catching those reflected rays, he instinctively knew he would manage to create a cone of his own luminescence. He was comfortable with that, and the knowledge allowed him entrance into levels of wealth and societal standing that he might not otherwise have reached if left to his own limitations.
Whalen also possessed two extraordinary gifts: He was a social climber, and he didn’t care who knew it. In the annals of American history, there may never have been a man so comfortable in his skin, with an exact working knowledge of how to use his Irish blarney and bullheadedness to get ahead in life. He was often laughed at, frequently made the butt of public jokes, and for most of his life endured left-handed digs from the press at his dapper appearance.
In an era that reveled in nicknames, reporters dubbed him “Gardenia” Whalen for the ever-present flower pinned to his finely tailored suits (though a white carnation was his preferred boutonniere). His credentials for achieving certain positions—most notably as New York City police commissioner, a position he held for just eighteen months at the close of the 1920s—were constantly questioned and sneered at, as was his effectiveness at his job. None of it mattered to him, nor did it change his outlook or his steadfast resolve to live up to what he considered his birthright. During a meteoric climb through the upper reaches of Manhattan’s power circles, Grover “Gardenia” Whalen shrugged off public opinion. He knew what he was, he knew he was right, and not caring what others thought propelled him ever further into greatness.
His was a curious boyhood.1 Born on the Lower East Side of New York on June 2, 1886, he was named after President Grover Cleveland, whose White House wedding that day made the front pages of every newspaper. His father, Michael Henry Whalen, was a prominent Civil War veteran and an enthusiastic supporter of Tammany Hall, a loyalty that served him well in his own quest for success.
“My father started out2 in the general contracting business with one horse and a cart,” Grover stated. “When he died his business kept seventy-five horses and trucks busy.”
At forty-three, Michael Whalen was already on his second family by the time Grover came around. After his first wife died and left him with three children, he married Esther DeNee, a vibrant and vivacious French Canadian who gave him hell about his Irish roots as often as she could get away with it. Before Grover was born, she promptly shipped off Michael’s two daughters, Mary
and Laura, to neighborhood convents. The third child, a boy named Harry, was left to his own devices. In the short span of five years, Esther bore three children of her own—Gertrude, Grover, and Stephen, named after Cleveland’s vice president, Adlai Stevenson. Michael was a Democrat through and through, and he wanted his sons’ names to reflect that.
Grover’s upbringing was neither privileged nor poor; in fact, he seemed to have spent his youth on the cusp of the American Dream. The family home was a brick tenement owned by his father, at 275 East Broadway, not far from the Fulton Fish Market and in the shadows of the Williamsburg Bridge. Proximity to the waterfront had a profound effect on the young boy; he spent hours watching cargo and passenger ships arrive, imagining the wondrous places they had come from and the exotic passengers and crew they carried. He attended public schools with the children of other immigrant families, but even then he showed signs of the dandy he was to become. In later years, he recalled the “ragging” he took at the hands of his classmates. At the age of seven, his father bought him a fancy brown derby from the upscale Best and Company store, which he promptly lost to a group of tough newsboys on his way home from school.
“My father was so grieved3 and disgusted,” he said, “that from that time on I don’t believe he ever bought an article of clothing for me as a present. He took it for granted I’d … have it taken away from me.”
To toughen up his son, or maybe to show him the true immigrant roots he had been spared by being part of this second wave of Whalens, his father gave him a job collecting rents at several of the other dilapidated tenements he owned. “I remember one house4 on Madison and Gouverneur Street that had six families in it as well as some extra boarders,” he recalled in his autobiography, Mr. New York. “When I went there to collect the rent, I found the bathtub had been filled with coal and a board laid on top of the coal. A mattress placed on top of the board served as an extra boarder’s bed.”
On a later visit, he found that “a second tier had been built over the tub bed, and our tenant was now able to take in no less than two day and two night boarders.”
The boy reflects the man, it has been said, and in Grover’s case that appears to go double. For one thing, Michael Whalen had an insatiable love of parades. But he was never content to stand on the sidewalk and watch them; whenever he got word that a group of marchers was gathering, Michael would hitch up two of his smartest horses to his finest wagon, wait until it was too late for anyone to object, and then take his place in the procession, all the while smiling and waving and bowing to the crowd as if he alone were the subject of tribute. He wasn’t; it was always someone else’s party, but who cared when the throngs were cheering so loud and so lovingly.
For Grover, the message was clear: His father may not have been the guest of honor, but everyone knew his name.
That singular fact made a lifelong impression: Michael Whalen was popular. Throughout Grover’s childhood and on into his high school years at DeWitt Clinton, he watched the old Irishman sitting with his cronies on the sidewalk in front of their home on warm summer evenings; watched as he accepted handshakes from passing city workers, always offering a cigar and greeting them by name; watched as his Tammany connections allowed his father to buy building after building in the neighborhood, growing his wealth and his reputation.
But somewhere he must have known there was a limit to the old man’s potential. An Irish immigrant, Michael Whalen was six feet tall and sported a handsome handlebar mustache, but he also carried the essence of his roots as a one-horse street peddler. Grover felt no such limitation, and he vowed that none would ever be placed upon him. He learned from his father the importance of friendships, of relationships with people in power, but his reach would be further, higher. To accomplish this he needed a mentor, a benefactor, someone who not only could introduce him to a world beyond his own experience, but who would guide him in his quest, whispering in his ear the secrets of attaining favor among the rich and powerful.
He found it in the son of another successful businessman, one whose wealth went way beyond a stable of horses, trucks, and multiplanked tenements.
The man he chose was Rodman Wanamaker, and the choice he made was deliberate. After graduating high school, Grover was impatient for the future to deliver on its promises of wealth and fame. In 1904, he entered New York Law School, and it was there that destiny delivered. In need of pocket money, he took a job as a part-time clerk at Wanamaker’s, the largest department store in the world at the time. Its owner and founder, John Wanamaker, was nearing seventy years old, but Whalen set out to impress him anyway. Almost immediately, he began a campaign to befriend his son.
“I came to know5 Mr. Wanamaker well through his son Rodman, who became my friend and sponsor,” Whalen said. “Mr. Rodman used to send me books that he knew his father was reading.”
More likely, Whalen pressed him for the information, wanting to make an impression on the old man. The ruse worked. The founder, Whalen recalled with obvious glee, “remarked that I seemed to be exceptionally well read! Perhaps this was one of the little things … that helped me move up from clerk to executive, then to Director of executive administration, and eventually to General Manager of John Wanamaker, New York, in the next few years.”
There was no “perhaps” about it. Before he even entered the political arena, Whalen apparently knew how the game was played. In fact, he was already a master at it. Law school exited the picture when Michael Whalen died in 1907, but by then it didn’t matter. His star was rising fast at Wanamaker’s, as was his salary and his taste in clothes. In forty-four-year-old Rodman, the twenty-something Grover had found the father figure who would take him out of the Lower East Side and into the palatial store on Broadway and Ninth Street. Still, he needed another ticket to get farther uptown, “into the social stratum that used to be known as lace-curtain Irish.”
This time, Anna Dolores Kelly fit the bill. He married her on April 23, 1913, at the Tiffany glass–domed Church of St. Ignatius Loyola, on upper Park Avenue. At twenty-six, Grover Aloysius Whalen had officially arrived.
There was more to do.6 In 1917, Rodman’s influence forced Preston Lynn, the fussbudget general manager of Wanamaker’s, to name Whalen as secretary of his Business Men’s League—an organization devoted chiefly to ousting John Purroy Mitchel, the current “Boy Mayor of New York.” Mitchel had been elected on the Fusion ticket after the murder of an infamous gambler named Herman Rosenthal and the anti-Tammany shake-up that ensued. But that was four years ago, and now Tammany Hall, the once powerful Democratic organization, wanted its influence back. The Business Men’s League was determined to get it, and the man they chose to defeat Mitchel was Preston Lynn.
Rodman again interceded, with the help of his father. According to Whalen, “They sent for Mr. Lynn7 and told him they hoped he would not consider running for mayor, as they needed him to run their New York store.” Under the circumstances, it was an astounding request to make: preventing a man from becoming mayor of New York City because you couldn’t spare his talents as a floorwalker. Despite the fact that his name had already made the papers as the Democratic choice, Lynn reluctantly declined the offer.
The nomination went instead to a little-known judge named John Francis Hylan, a publicity-shy stooge whose main qualification seemed to be that he would follow orders if elected. Tammany had chosen carefully, sending a glorified garbage man—one Fishhooks McCarthy—to “look over” Judge Hylan. Fishhooks had a reputation as a pretty good “talent scout,” and his assessment, approved by the extremely frustrated Preston Lynn, was that “John F. Hylan may not be8 the most learned and distinguished jurist in the City of New York, but I am sure that if he is nominated for Mayor, he will be elected.”
He was. Whalen saw to that. Effectively taking charge of the Business Men’s League in the wake of Lynn’s rejection, Whalen was put in charge of a secret steering committee that made all the decisions for Hylan. Throughout the campaign, Whalen used his sartorial skil
ls to polish the self-conscious candidate “till he glistened.” Shortly before taking office, the mayor-elect asked Lynn for one more favor—that Grover be allowed a leave of absence from Wanamaker’s in order to serve as his secretary. Lynn threw up his hands and agreed, and in this case Rodman apparently had no qualms about losing one of his trusted executives.
“He advised me9 to take the post of Secretary and promised it would not change his plans for my future in the Wanamaker organization,” Whalen said.
By the end of World War I, Whalen’s admiration for Rodman had grown into a desire to be just like the man. In 1918, Rodman was named chairman of two committees, one to organize a series of massive celebrations for General John J. Pershing and the returning doughboys, the other to greet distinguished guests from around the world. He wasted no time naming Grover as executive vice chairman of both.
“The various parades10 and celebrations lasted nearly a year,” Whalen recalled. “The city turned out en masse.”
A familiar image burned in Whalen’s mind: Rodman Wanamaker smiling and waving and bowing to the crowd as if he himself were a returning hero. Only this time Grover saw that the cheering throngs weren’t made up of the immigrant neighbors of his youth, but numbered in the tens of thousands, and from every level of New York society. Rodman was no doubt Whalen’s idol, but this he wanted for himself.
When President Woodrow Wilson returned from a peace conference on July 8, 1919, Grover got his chance at glory. Rodman, a fierce Republican, could not be seen riding in an open car with the Democratic president. Whalen took his place. The son had now come full circle, surpassing both fathers in the admiration of the masses.