by James Mauro
They all gave speeches, and La Guardia declared that the Fair was now as official “as the government can make anything official.” The mayor raised the city’s flag, Lieutenant Governor William Bray raised the American flag, and Whalen raised the newly designed blue World’s Fair pennant. Then one by one they took turns with the spade, which turned out not to be such a good idea after all. “Those who used it did so with evident trepidation,” one reporter noted, “which the hardness of the caked soil did not serve to ease.”
As he scooped the ceremonial ash into a container for posterity, La Guardia noted, “This is the way7 they did it a hundred and fifty years ago.” Then he pointed to a steam shovel and announced to a delighted audience, “Over there is what we use today.” With that he climbed up into the cab, got the thing started, and proceeded to carve out a great chunk of dirt “with gusto.”
“My, she’s delicate to the touch!” La Guardia smiled as he jumped back down again to laughs and applause. Never one to be outdone, Whalen mischievously grinned back at La Guardia and mounted the steam shovel himself, showing “considerable dexterity at the controls.” Most likely, he had been tutored earlier in an effort to show that he, too, could be one of the guys.
Incredibly, a crowd of about a thousand people attended the ceremony, and while Whalen may have been overjoyed at the turnout, most of them were unemployed construction workers who had been milling about all day, hoping to land a job with Moses and his crew.
The ceremony was indeed symbolic. Moses had actually begun work on the site exactly two weeks earlier, ahead of schedule. Just after the city had officially acquired the final five hundred acres of land around Fishhooks’ original plot, Moses ordered that the homes and buildings within the area be condemned and evacuated as soon as possible. Residents were given a mere thirty days’ notice to clear out. However, when he saw that work could begin without initially tearing down these structures, he magnanimously awarded their owners an extra thirty days. After that, he called out the marshals and forcibly evicted everyone who remained, including one reluctant tombstone manufacturer who complained that he needed more time, since moving his inventory was a little more difficult.
Already, crews8 of more than one hundred and fifty men were working around the clock, three separate fifty-man groups toiling in eight-hour shifts. When night came, twelve eighty-foot towers carrying giant floodlights lit up the area, creating an eerie daylight glow that could be seen for miles around. Nearby residents began complaining to anyone who would listen that they couldn’t sleep because of the glare. Moses ignored them and went right on digging day and night. The process stopped only when all the machinery had to be oiled, and that occurred only once a day. Even the short pauses caused him heartbreak.
From the outset, the dust-covered site was like an anthill of activity: Steam shovels (minus La Guardia and Whalen) attacked the ash heaps at six different locations simultaneously, each dumping a load full of refuse into an endless line of massive trucks that carried the waste to large-scale landfill projects as far away as Staten Island, Pelham Bay, and Jamaica Bay. Enormous clouds of powder and ash flew up under their wheels, whirlpooling so heavily that the drivers had to wear handkerchiefs over their noses and mouths in order to breathe.
“The scene there9 now is like a no-man’s land in a war,” The New York Times reported, “with the dust, if not the smoke, of battle rising in clouds to blanket the steeples of Flushing beyond the valley.”
In other spots, where the ashes were to be spread out across the meadow, the land was so thick and marshy that the trucks had to unload while moving or risk sinking into a hundred feet of slime. Along the routes they traveled to get there, special macadam roadways had been laid out of the gathering of various stones and rocks unearthed from the digging. Night and day the trucks thundered along, thirty-five hundred of them every twenty-four hours. Single file, they formed an endless convoy rolling across the city, some trailing a steady stream of soot billowing out in their wake and covering whatever happened to be behind them in a fine layer of ash.
But ashes weren’t the only problem. Flushing Creek wound a snakelike path through a thick, swampy section of the grounds. Thousands of tons of goopy creek bed had to be scooped out by a slow parade of enormous dragline derricks with seventy-foot booms dredging along its bottom, scraping and storing the slop for later use in processing topsoil. After that, a new channel had to be dug in order to create a pair of freshwater lagoons, each with a tidal dam to keep out the salt water.
And then there was the problem of odor. The grounds themselves were getting a face lift, but the Flushing River had been the unfortunate recipient of the city’s raw sewage for decades, and a new drainage tunnel had to be constructed along the west shore. According to Moses’s plan, it was to be as large as a tube of the Holland Tunnel. But within a year, he promised, “the decomposition of sludge on the bay bottom will be completed, the generation of gas will stop and the atmosphere of hydrogen sulphide will be only an unpleasant memory.”
Moses knew whereof he spoke. Throughout the early stages of reclamation, men complained and then gradually grew used to the stench of rotten eggs and flatulence that seemed to emanate from the very bowels of Flushing Meadows itself.
In July 1936,10 just as Moses was doubling the size of his work crew, the city suffered its worst heat wave on record. Although the official high temperature reading of 102.3 degrees was measured at a little before three in the afternoon, readings as high as 115 degrees were noted in Times Square, where the baking sun reflected off the sidewalks. Heat waves were rising visibly from the concrete, washing everything in a watery, swirling motion.
In front of the Central Library at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street, one of the city’s busiest thoroughfares, a blue haze of automobile exhaust hung low and thick; tourists visiting the area waded breathlessly through it, “as if breasting surf.” Policemen lining the streets shed their heavy tunics and revealed sweat-soaked blue shirts; Works Progress Administration workers were let off from roadwork duty after three-thirty because the tar had reached a bubbling point. Before the men were excused, the WPA headquarters at Sixth Avenue and Twentieth Street had become so overrun with cases of heat prostration that the emergency squad stopped keeping a record of them all.
The temperature was one thing, but the intense heat produced by the blazing sun was literally broiling New Yorkers. David Morris, a meteorologist at the Central Park Conservatory, reported a reading of 145 degrees at twelve forty-five; the afternoon shade cooled that down to 106. The average high for that date was 89 degrees.
During the evening rush hour, commuters actually stayed in the subway longer than necessary, because the temperature underground was twenty degrees cooler than at street level. Police opened fire hydrants all over the city for kids to splash around in, the kids squealing in delight when they found that adults were joining in the fun. Along some avenues, cars waded through eight inches of accumulated water.
At night there was some relief, but not much. The beaches at Coney Island and Rockaway became large camping grounds for families intending to spend the night there, cooled by ocean breezes. Special police guards were detailed to keep them safe. The previous night, a large number of arrests had been made owing to an ordinance against open-air sleeping, but Mayor La Guardia dismissed all charges and suspended the edict for the duration of the heat wave. Even Robert Moses chipped in and ordered all city swimming pools kept open until midnight instead of their usual ten p.m. closing time.
For ten sweltering days, between July 5 and 15, the temperature in Manhattan hovered above one hundred degrees. Newspapers, regaling the public with some lighthearted moments, reported the tales of a woman in New Jersey who had fried an egg on the sidewalk and a gentleman in lower Manhattan who had left his dentures on a windowsill, only to return a while later and find them melted. But the effect of the heat wave was considerably more serious. The estimated death toll in the city neared one hundred. Throughout the country, record high temp
eratures remained for the entire summer; in some states, no significant relief was felt until September. When it was over, more than five thousand deaths would be recorded nationwide.
Right in the middle of it all, on July 11, the Triborough Bridge officially opened for business. At one p.m., the concrete barriers blocking entrances from the boroughs of Queens, the Bronx, and Manhattan fell in a formal dedication ceremony attended by President Roosevelt, Governor Lehman, and Mayor La Guardia, who personally collected the first twenty-five-cent toll. Even Harold Ickes showed up; he and Moses had declared an informal truce, no doubt to last only as long as the opening ceremony itself. There was an awkward tension in the air; Moses remained visibly unmoved when the president called him “Bob.” Nevertheless the project, which had begun on Black Friday in 1929, and was suspended in 1932, and then revived again in 1934 with Moses at the helm, was finally completed.
Despite the heat, Moses could now turn his full attention to the festering stew pot in Flushing Meadows. By mid-August, his crews numbered more than five hundred, and already they had moved more than a million cubic yards of material. After the land was cleared out and leveled came the immense job of constructing more than seventeen miles of roads, fifteen miles of gas mains, ten bridges, and two artificial lakes.
For construction of the boat basin, a giant seawall was being built and cellular sheet steel piling was sunk seventy feet deep. “No flimsy riprap11 or cheap half-hearted bulkhead could be depended on to hold back the shoreline,” Moses explained. An asphalt plant had to be built on a barge canal at the mouth of the Flushing River. Over- and underpasses had to be created for traffic flow. New bridges and arteries were springing up for all roads leading to and from the Fair. And to top it all off, the nearby North Beach Airport* was undergoing a complete overhaul, should any of its ritzier clientele desire to arrive by air.
All in all, it was a tremendous job just to reclaim the land and make it fit for habitation, if not spectacle, and the deadline for completion was April 1, 1937. After which the builders would go to work. That left only a little over nine months, a fact that was never far from Moses’s mind. Before he was through, Moses’s original plea for $7 million to begin work would balloon to around $59 million, an amount even he found “staggering.” And all of it, every dime, was spent in consideration of the ground design as being developed for what he was privately referring to as Robert Moses Park.
Scheduled opening date: sometime after October 1940.
* Later to be renamed La Guardia Airport in honor of the mayor.
Detective Ferdinand A. (Freddy) Socha
9
PANIC IN TIMES SQUARE
As with most other assignments in the NYPD, life on the Bomb and Forgery Squad involved endless cycles of boredom broken up periodically by heart-stopping tension. The division itself was an odd mix of two singular specialties and had been created only in late 1935, when Commissioner Valentine decided that the duties of the two separate squads often overlapped. The Forgery Squad, Valentine believed, largely investigated anonymous or threatening letters, and even when they didn’t specifically mention anything about explosives, it was usually the Bomb Squad that was sent out to investigate.
At first, the combined teams1 came under the command of Lieutenant Charles Newman, who had been head of the Bomb Squad. The individual staffs even shared the same office space, though it was an uneasy transition for both parties: The forgery men were not entirely thrilled with the prospect of defusing explosives; the bomb staff was already overloaded with information regarding the printed word.
For the better part2 of the previous year, the sixteen men who made up the Bomb Squad had been studying cryptography under the auspices of the United States Army’s Intelligence Service. Twice a month they trundled down to the Army Building at 39 Whitehall Street, an imposing chunk of red granite, brick, and sandstone that had been built half a century earlier.
Their instructor was Colonel George Lynch, and the course itself was exhaustive. Newman and his crew were trained in the fine art of handwriting analysis and typewriter identification. They also studied the varying idiosyncrasies of broken English used by foreigners and how to discern the nationality of the sender by common misspellings and grammatical inconsistencies. In addition, there were numerous courses in paper, perforations, and inks and even a thorough rundown of mystic symbols used by religious blackmailers, dislocated anarchists, and other libelous note writers.
This rigorous study was not well received by men who up until that point were more accustomed to their regular, and much more exciting, training in explosives, which was held at the United States Testing Laboratory in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. Those exercises, conducted by a gruff man’s man named Harry Campbell of the Bureau of Explosives, were infinitely more pleasurable, despite the nearly constant threat of losing a finger or two.
Newman himself didn’t particularly enjoy the forced combination of duties, and within a few months a brawny, brainy character named Lieutenant James Pyke3 replaced him. The new commander was already something of a legend in the force. Every man in whichever precinct he was assigned quickly learned the tale of how Pyke had been a driver for General Pershing in the Great War. Men of the Bomb and Forgery Squad were awed to learn that he had been severely burned while attempting to dismantle an incendiary device. Whatever disfigurement he carried was not evident, however; it certainly didn’t stop him from making flying tackles of fleeing suspects when the situation called for it. Pyke was fearless; the war had taught him respect for but not hesitation when it came to dangerous situations.
Six feet tall, jug-eared, and graying at the temples, he sometimes let forth an explosive temper to match his new duties, but he could just as easily display a generosity, warmth, and fellowship for the citizens he protected, especially those who had fallen on hard times during the straining years of the Depression. Only a few months after he took command of the Bomb and Forgery Squad, one of his detectives, Peter Hayias, introduced a rather pitiful-looking scene into his office.
Hayias had refused4 to arrest a man who had forged his name on a home relief check and instead brought his entire family back to the squad’s headquarters, hoping he had made the right decision under the circumstances. Pyke, sitting at his desk, looked up at the ragtag parade Hayias was ushering in and wondered what the hell was going on. Hayias stood in the doorway and, in addition to the forger, motioned in the man’s wife and four children, who ranged in age from a few months to six years old, and then another woman and her three children. He had driven them all here from the Emergency Relief Bureau over on Tenth Avenue. Pyke wondered how he’d gotten them all in one car. He listened as Hayias sheepishly explained the situation.
The man who was to be arrested, it seemed, had found a relief check in the amount of $11.30 on a street near his home in Jamaica, Queens. They were on home relief themselves, and eleven bucks and change was a lot of money for a family of six. He took the check home and showed it to his wife. They argued over what to do with it and then, perhaps needing some moral support for their potential crime, called the other woman, a widow, who now stood in Pyke’s office with her children. They needed the money, all agreed, so the man signed his name to the check and had it cashed. He gave the widow $5 and kept the rest for his family.
Several days later, the forgery was discovered and both families were called into the accounting office to which Hayias had been dispatched.* He didn’t have the heart to arrest them, Hayias told Pyke; they were absolutely hysterical when he’d arrived, he said, and he just couldn’t bring himself to do it.
Pyke looked them all over; they were, he noted, in a “really pathetic condition.” Hayias held his breath and waited for either calamity at his dereliction of duty or, preferably, some of Pyke’s sense of goodwill to come shining through. Typically, Pyke chose the latter. He sent Hayias out to buy four quarts of milk for the children and coffee and sandwiches for the adults. They hadn’t eaten in two days, the families told him.
&n
bsp; But the lack of arrest made it a sticky situation, so Pyke had another officer look into the man’s background and check to see if he was wanted for or had been convicted of any crime. He hadn’t. Pyke sat with the man and learned his story; he had been a hard worker before the Depression hit, and his tale hit Pyke squarely in that soft heart of his. He patted the man on the shoulder and immediately called up the Emergency Relief Bureau, arguing with an official for more than half an hour over Officer Hayias’s actions.
“I wouldn’t arrest these people,5 no matter who ordered it!” Pyke finally shouted into the phone, and promptly hung up. An Emergency Relief Bureau examiner stood in his office and was now demanding either an arrest in the case or repayment of the amount of the forged check. Pyke, by this time enraged by the bureau’s lack of sympathy in the matter, pulled out his wallet and handed him $11. The examiner waited. Pyke dug into his jacket and pulled out thirty cents in coin, asking for a receipt just to be obstinate.
Then he smiled at the two families. “You can go home now,” he told them. They each in turn thanked him profusely and began bundling up. The food, Pyke noted, seemed to bring each member back to life. Pyke wasn’t through. A late summer storm had broken out, and it was raining hard.
“Wait a minute,” he said, then called for a police car and detailed one of his men to drive them home.
From their desks in the cramped office, each man in the Bomb and Forgery Squad watched all this in silence, including thirty-two-year-old Freddy Socha, who had recently joined the team.
Socha’s real first name was Ferdinand, but nobody called him that. One of five children, he had grown up in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and now lived literally around the corner from his family home in a small apartment he shared with his wife, Genevieve, known as Jennie, on Leonard Street just off McCarren Park. Like Joe Lynch, Freddy had joined the force a few years later than the average applicant; he was already twenty-seven and had spent a couple of years working in various jobs while attending Columbia University. Before the Depression hit, he’d wanted to become a doctor.