“The time has arrived in our public affairs when the people will no longer sustain public officials who are governed or controlled by political bosses.”
Feldman took direct aim at Aldermen Sullivan, Kennedy, Gorman and Collins.
“The day of the gang alderman and corrupt supervisor must come to an end!”
Next he targeted Fingy Conners.
“The grafting contractor must be eliminated from our municipal affairs. The political lobbyist and heeler are leeches upon the body politic and must be cut off. Sinecures and unnecessary employments, long regarded as legitimate party spoils, must be abolished. The so-called joints—dens of iniquity, where our young people are ruined and the happiness of families destroyed—need look for no favors if I am elected. Gamblers who steal from and are a prey upon the foolish and unwary might as well understand that their nefarious vocations will be treated as such.”
He promised to actually be working in his office during office working hours—and well beyond when required, and pledged that every city official under his watch would be demanded to do the same as well.
The audience went wild.
Could it be true? Could there be an honest man alive in politics who was not someone’s puppet, who would take in hand the reckless, the greedy, the criminal and the immoral? Who would finally and at long last do away with Fingy Conners, John P. Sullivan and all the rest?
Charlie Feldman was a black and white man reaching for the highest office in a unchangeably gray city where historically for a man to get along meant that he go along, where the police facilitated the criminal contractor as enthusiastically as they did the whorehouses, where aldermen valued their little fiefdoms of power more than they did their own children, and where Fingy Conners had his four-fingered hand jammed solidly inside every citizen’s pocket in one form or another.
The Tipping Point
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The voters’ ultimate decision to support Adam for mayor over Feldman, coupled with the carrying out of city-wide election tampering the very likes of which Feldman’s allies had correctly predicted, set in motion an historic and disastrous downward spiraling of the fortunes of a once-great city.
Up until election day 1905 Buffalo’s future had yet been bright with promise despite all that had come before. But Feldman’s loss would prove to be the tipping point. It cemented Fingy Conners’ and the Aldermen Gang’s chokehold on the city. It reinforced and propelled forward a negative momentum. It solidified a crippling, unceasing, compounding tradition of political corruption inexplicably supported by the voting public from which, for the next hundred years and more, the city of Buffalo NY would never, could never, recover.
The city up to this point had managed to grow and prosper in spite of the destructive and malignant self-interested machinations of Conners and the Aldermen Gang headed by Sullivan—right up until that fateful election day. The point of no return had been reached. No more clearly defined apex nor opportunity to right the wrongs of the past and prevent future ones would ever again present itself. If the popular vote had accurately reflected the stated attitudes and beliefs claimed by the people, no amount of election fixing, it was said, could have resulted in Feldman’s loss. But lose he did. There is no explaining those who vote against their own self interests—not to mention their families’ futures. Disregarding even the most efficient carrying out of electoral fraud, the tidal wave of dissatisfied voters should have overwhelmed any chicanery by the Gang.
As an attempt to deduce some explanation of voters voting against their own and their children’s well being, it was argued that perhaps after so many years under his boot heel that much of the electorate had resigned themselves to Fingy Conners’ influence over their lives and survival despite the historic damage he continued to inflict. Perhaps they had acquiesced to Fingy like some brutal but necessary father figure who provided them employment in the form of miserably-paid dock work, erratic transportation via his railway interests, shoddy paving of city streets by way of his Vulcanite asphalt company, foodstuffs originating from his enormous Angola poultry farm and eastside cattle yard concerns, Magnus Beck beer imposed on obliged saloons via his brewery, everyday news and entertainment via his newspapers, and the availability of everyday items by way of his Great Lakes shipping interests. Even the Catholic Church, once the 1899 Scoopers Strike debacle in which they were sworn enemies had been settled, embraced Conners as a model citizen and defender of the Faith. The Church provided him solitary and effusive star billing in 1904’s deluxe volume, History of the Catholic Church in Western New York, a copy of which every Catholic family was strong-armed from the pulpit into purchasing.
Mayor Adam reveled in his victory, as did Fingy Conners and JP Sullivan and the entire Board of Aldermen, their having dodged a bullet. They were free to carry on just as before, pillaging the city and fleecing the taxpayers. The entire municipality was glad just to be rid of Mayor Erastus Knight, the corrupt and vindictive miscreant. “Anyone but him!” was the common cry throughout.
One of the first things Mayor Adam did upon taking office as the new mayor of Buffalo was to fire the preposterously corrupt and incompetent Police Superintendent Bull and replace him with Captain Michael Regan. He then reinstated the career detectives thrown out by Mayor Knight, Detective-Sergeant Jim Sullivan among them.
Cutting Ice
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From the Buffalo Express:
Alderman John P. Sullivan has the largest ice plant in the city of Buffalo. It is situated at the junction of the Hamburg Turnpike and the Buffalo Creek Railroad. He gets his ice from the lake in front of the icehouse. Under a system he has invented it is possible to harvest twenty railroad cars an hour.
—February 26, 1905
Winter quickly slammed into the city the second week in October, breaking thigh-thick branches off trees heavy with leaves as of yet unshed. The weight of the wet snow overpowered the capacity of the city’s urban forest of great elms and maples dictated by Frederick Law Olmstead’s master plan to support it. By early December there was ice thick enough to cut on Crystal Lake in Freedom NY where the Sullivan Ice Co. had a new facility, and on Lake Erie just a month after that. “Any winter you can harvest ice by New Year’s Day is a truly exceptional winter,” ecstatically beamed Iceman John P. Sullivan.
Alderman Sullivan’s initial reaction had been disappointment when eldest son Thomas requested to postpone college after graduating with honors from St. Joseph’s. JP had fully expected that Thomas would be the first Sullivan to attend university. Thomas instead had asked to work full time in the family business for an indefinite period before deciding on his academic future. Unsure exactly where his interests lay, he was certainly eager to learn all the facets of the ice business. JP decided to put up no real fight in favor of university education at least for the time being. With the many serious illnesses he’d suffered throughout his life, JP was secretly fearful that the Sullivan Ice Company might die along with him if he prematurely expired.
He knew that some or all of his sons might want to follow their own unique path in life, a path that might have nothing to do with the ice business their father had built over the previous twenty-plus years. He was determined to allow his sons to find their own way with the same freedom that he himself had been allowed in his youth.
Like most parents, JP claimed to love his eight sons and daughters equally. Yet while the boys were allowed some room to experiment with failure, the girls were allowed little. The girls were given no leeway; it was intended by the Alderman that his daughters would associate only with upstanding acquaintances so as to marry exceptionally well when of age.
“Falling in love with a rich man is as easy as falling in love with a bum,” JP liked to remind his daughters on a regular basis during his dinner-table lectures, “but wealth and the security it offers makes far more sense.”
The girls were steered toward schools, clubs and social events that would keep them in the circles of the more el
evated levels of New York State society. They were not allowed to socialize with any boy their father had not met and pre-approved. Not that JP was a tyrant in this particular instance, but more like a benevolent despot. He knew that the environment his children were nurtured in now would determine their friends, opportunities and quality of life in the future. Lowbrow activities or ill-mannered associates were forbidden to both sons and daughters. Any lenient local parent having a son or daughter in JP’s children’s school or neighborhood social circle who did not keep their child on a tight leash would receive both barrels: an uncomfortable in-home visit from the Alderman in the company of his Detective-Sergeant brother Jim in uniform.
Thomas Sullivan had always taken deliberate steps that would make his father proud as a means of attracting the attentions of his distracted and oft-absent parent. The Alderman’s firstborn had worked for years part time in the Ice Company office at 119 Chicago Street as well as at the lake front ice house. But now Thomas felt it was time to get his hands dirty, and cold, and actually cut ice with the field crew.
His mother did not support this.
The men whom John P. Sullivan hired as ice cutters were by essence seasonal workers. The Buffalo men might work on the canals or the docks at other times of the year when waters were ice-free. The Crystal Lake crew was made up entirely of local farmers from the small hamlet of Freedom N.Y. If not for cutting ice it might be a challenge to make ends meet in such a tiny farming community in the dead of winter. Removed from Buffalo, they were thus unacquainted with the boss’ family. As part of their agreement JP had instructed Thomas he was not to reveal to any of the Crystal Lake work crew that he was the boss’s son. In that case Thomas would not only learn how to do things the correct way, by making errors and taking his knocks, but he would also observe how things might get done the wrong way, by scrutinizing the work habits of his crew mates who might be of the less careful variety or less honorable persuasion.
They shook hands on it.
Daniel, the Alderman’s second oldest, decided that during his Christmas vacation from his senior year in high school that he too wanted to work at the ice house alongside his brother. Just a little more than a year apart in age, Daniel and Thomas had always been very close. Their parents had given them names of tribute. Thomas Saulter Sullivan had been named after his mother’s father, Thomas Saulter. Daniel J. H. Sullivan had been named after his father’s and Uncle Jim’s beloved younger brother Daniel J. Halloran who died of consumption in the spring of 1889, the same year his namesake was born.
On December 20th Thomas joined the first field gang for that season, driving in the company truck the fifty-one miles to Crystal Lake and being introduced simply as a new hire. JP had bought the lake and all the property surrounding it. The spring-fed waters were far purer than those of polluted Lake Erie, or any other lake source in western New York for that matter.
Already there were eleven companies in Buffalo producing artificial “pure” ice, but of these, only two produced a man-made product that was lower in bacteria count than Sullivan’s Crystal Lake naturally-harvested ice. The manufactured variety required expensive sophisticated machinery, skilled labor, and continuous consumption of electricity. The Alderman’s natural ice needed only unskilled workers. It was pretty much free for the taking, and thus significantly cheaper for the consumer to buy. Sullivan Ice’s core business remained Lake Erie ice, for its ability to be obtained in endless quantities for ravenous corporate consumers, most importantly the railroads. No artificial ice manufacturing process could come anywhere near to producing the vast stores of ice that these corporate customers required.
Crystal Lake’s small size and shallow depth, more akin to a giant pond than a lake, allowed harvestable ice to form much earlier in the season. Ice was in demand year round, no matter how cold it was outside, so the sooner they could harvest the better. Crystal Lake’s pure ice was purposed for the at-home icebox market and businesses such as ice cream parlors and soda fountains. People were being made sick from ice harvested off canals and rivers in heavily populated areas, which upon melting in their ice box contaminated their food source or caused illness. Illness could occur simply from customers handling the bacteria-laden product and not washing their hands afterward. Purer, cleaner ice equaled a lesser chance of food and personal contamination, and thus less illness.
Every year since he first took an interest in the family business,Thomas had studied the Buffalo Sanitary Bulletin for its valuable revelations concerning bacteria count in commercial water ice, as well as brand-name dairy products and ice cream. Sullivan’s Crystal Lake Ice had the lowest bacteria count of any other commercial producer of natural ice in New York State—by far—according to the Bulletin:
People’s Ice Co. Bacterial Count: 2,616 Where harvested: Chautauqua Lake
George Dill Bacterial Count: 1,200 Where harvested: Chautauqua Lake
Sullivan Ice Co. Bacterial Count: 0,080 Where harvested: Crystal Lake
Thomas Sullivan joined the freshmen cutters of the field crew supervised by two bosses for an intensive schooling on the tools and tricks of the ice harvest. Handling the horses was an important part of the job, as they did all the heavy work. There were giant-toothed saws small and large, one-man and two-man; grappling hooks, axes of different sorts, grabbers, breaking bars, canal-hook chisels, ice nets; he learned how to handle them all. The crew was taught basic safety precautions, most of which seemed like nothing more than common sense to Thomas as explained. But once he began working with the group he realized how easy it was to forget, become preoccupied or cut corners, any or all of which might place a man in a deadly situation.
The first step in harvesting was to drill a hole and determine thickness by inserting a straight branch, then drawing it out and measuring down from the thumb hold to the waterline, which had to be twelve inches minimum for Sullivan Ice. Then the horses were hitched to a snow plow dragged behind them to clear the surface of the ice. After clearing, the horses were then attached to an ice scorer that etched a grid into the surface, thereby marking the ice blocks for the field crew to saw, capture, and harvest.
Initially a canal was created, wide at the outer end, but only wide enough to accommodate the passage of a single 300 pound block at the shoreline terminus for the purpose of guiding the unwieldy bergs into position to be lifted out onto the conveyor. As the blocks are cut, men positioned along the channel with canal-hook chisels keep the blocks moving toward shore and the conveyor.
Crystal Lake was an ideal setting in which to train new employees, since it was small, comparatively safe, and had fewer dangers than the vast opaque expanses of Lake Erie. Brother Daniel joined Thomas over the weekend for his first training, at which time Thomas had excelled to the point where he could help train his brother and keep watch over him. The anonymous sons of the Boss didn’t remain incognito at Crystal Lake for long. The First Ward was a cozy place where everybody was known by somebody who knew somebody else, and it didn’t take long for the truth to get out, even to a hamlet as remote as Freedom. Still, the workers respected the fact the boys were working undercover. They refrained from acknowledging what everyone already knew while at the same time keeping a close eye on them to make sure they avoided mishaps.
Local boys and girls from the surrounding countryside descended on the lake as soon as the work crew cleared the deep snow from the surface, revealing a perfectly level natural skating rink. As they cut ice and sized it down to manageable blocks next to open water, children and teenagers glided around unencumbered atop the expanse of snow-cleared ice closely adjacent, taking exuberant advantage. The company men had to repeatedly shoo them away from areas adjacent to open water.
“Yer gonna fall in, yous idiots!” barked the foreman.
After ice blocks were herded toward shore they were pulled up a simple track constructed of three two-by-fours fixed together into a waiting dray. As the workhorses impatiently waited, great clouds of steam expelled from their nostrils. T
heir horseshoes were of a singular variety having protruding bolt-like extensions that could easily dig into and grip the ice on the slippery journey uphill to the ice house. Once the dray was loaded, all the men got behind it to give it an initial push, providing the horses a much appreciated start on the short but slick journey.
Once at the ice house the dray was guided alongside a simple elevator mechanism consisting of a small tray that could accommodate a single 300-pound block. The block was slid off the dray with a pick onto the elevator tray. A burly horse, attached to the device, was then led away from the building, his forward motion pulling the rope that raised the elevator to the open door on the second level, where men inside grabbed the cake and pulled it inward onto another track of two-by-fours, guiding it to its final destination. There workers doused it with sawdust to insulate each block and to prevent the stacked cakes from freezing together.
The horse was then backed into position again to hoist the next block. The animal clearly did not favor walking backwards in the first place, as ultimately this could permanently injure tendons, but after a while, so maddened and frustrated became the steed at all the endless back and forth that he would rebel, refusing to move anymore, requiring that he be changed out for a fresh equine.
At lunch time the men stopped work and gathered at lake’s edge. The drays idled. Daniel and Thomas covered the horses, still attached, with large heavy blankets against the freezing cold. Next came their feed bags, the hungry horses impatient, trying to nudge their noses inside before the boys, fumbling and trying not to spill the contents, could secure the devices on them properly. Once tied on, the animals could devour their noon meal of oats mostly unattended.
After the horses had been situated the boys joined their mates. The workers opened their lunch pails and unscrewed the tops from their appreciated gift from their boss the previous Christmas. The new invention was presented to all company employees: a novel curiosity called a Thermos. In it, steaming coffee could be stored all morning long, ready to be enjoyed at lunch still hot. The men unwrapped sandwiches and slices of pie from their envelopes of waxed paper, stashed in their warm coat pockets so as not to freeze, and stood as they ate, mostly in silence, looking around, admiring the beautiful surroundings.
Murderers, Scoundrels and Ragamuffins Page 20