by Ed O'Donnell
Newspapers of every description and size emanated from the dozens of buildings that surrounded City Hall Park, but the heart of Newspaper Row consisted of an imposing assemblage of structures opposite the park’s eastern edge along a street called Park Row. Despite their varied size and age, the signs adorning their facades let it be known that all were dedicated to the same enterprise. Just south of the ramp leading up to the Brooklyn Bridge stood the mighty World tower, the tallest in the world when completed in 1890. The paper was the great organ of Joseph Pulitzer and the city’s top-selling newspaper. Adjoining it was a smaller, older building that held the offices of the New York Sun, a paper brought to literary and editorial prominence in the late nineteenth century by its editor and owner, Charles A. Dana. Towering over it was the Tribune, once the nation’s paper of record under the direction of its founder Horace Greeley and still a major player in 1904. To the south across Spruce Street on the next block stood the new American Tract Society Building wherein evangelical Christian literature in every form was published. At the far east end of the block, set back from the formal Row, was the Journal, owned by William Randolph Hearst, publisher, reformer, congressman, and presidential hopeful. Next was the Press, followed by the Evening Telegram and the Daily News. Anchoring the far end of the lineup were the old men of Newspaper Row, the Globe and Commercial Advertiser and the Post, established in 1797 and 1801 respectively.
Change, however, was in the air in 1904. Soaring high above City Hall Park at the corner of Park Row and Spruce Street was the headquarters of the Times.Founded on this site in 1851, the once prominent paper teetered on the brink of bankruptcy in 1896 when it was saved by Adolph Ochs, a wealthy German Jew from Tennessee. Determined to make the Times one of the nation’s foremost papers, he decided to move the paper uptown to Longacre Square at 42nd and Broadway. To Ochs’s delight, only eight weeks earlier the city had conferred its blessing on the bold move by renaming the location Times Square. That precedent had been set by media magnate James Gordon Bennett, Jr., who moved his Herald from Newspaper Row in 1894 to Herald Square uptown at 34th Street.
Despite these notable defections, the heart of the city’s media empire in 1904 remained firmly entrenched in Newspaper Row, and every morning thousands of editors, reporters, photographers, typesetters, graphic artists, clerks, machinists, pressmen, truck drivers, and newsboys arrived to create yet another edition of their respective papers. With city hall just across the street and Wall Street only a few blocks away, most in the industry preferred it that way. Why move uptown when all the action was in Lower Manhattan?
Through the teeming multitude of New Yorkers near Newspaper Row came Martin Green. The bright sunshine and warm air on that beautiful spring morning seemed to take the edge off the hectic scramble on the streets and sidewalks. Green’s destination shimmered before him in the early-morning sunshine like a beacon—the tall golden dome atop the New York World tower. He was minutes away from commencing another day as an assistant editor for the city’s leading paper, one man among thousands involved in the intensely competitive business of big-city journalism. His job was to assign reporters to stories and edit the result while others set type, tended presses, sold advertising, crunched numbers, drove delivery trucks, and hawked papers. For those on the inside of the business, every day the goal was the same: to get the best stories, attract more readers, sell more advertising.
Green’s readers certainly understood that journalism in New York was a business. But they also saw it as an essential service, nearly as important as the streetcar lines or the fire department. Americans of this era, noted historian Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., “had long since come to regard the newspaper as second only to the church and the school in importance.” Day in and day out, the city’s two dozen daily papers helped New Yorkers—all 4 million of them—make sense of their often topsy-turvy surroundings. Every day readers picked up a paper—or two or three—and found their confusing and tumultuous urban world captured and distilled into neat and orderly columns spread out over eight to twenty pages. Moreover, the dailies organized it all into familiar and reassuring categories— politics, entertainment, fashion, sports, business, society, and local, national, and world news. Even as they related the details of the latest political scandal, murder, crime, or tragedy, the city’s dailies provided New Yorkers with a reassurance that beneath all the chaos there was some order.
Tuesday, June 14, was no exception. As Green waded through the crowded sidewalks of Newspaper Row that morning, the fruits of his trade were everywhere on display. Every few feet groups of newsboys stood amid stacks of papers shouting out their names—“Get your Herald here!”—and announcing headlines to stories they hoped would entice buyers—“Poison Found in Popular Candies!” (World); “Legless Man Hired Cab to Go Begging” (World); “Ill Lion Attacks Physician” (Herald); “Automobile Held Up by Highwaymen” (Herald); “Nan Patterson Indicted for Murder of Young” (Times).
The latter story was the latest installment in what promised to be a major scandal. Nan Patterson, a Floradora showgirl, had been arrested several weeks earlier and charged with the murder of her lover, Caesar Young. A ne’er-do-well gambler and carouser who operated behind a veneer of respectability, Young was about to leave on a European vacation with his wife when he was found shot dead in a hansom cab. Patterson claimed he had committed suicide, but the police believed she shot him after he tried to break off their affair. It was a classic scandal story, one that Green and his fellow editors relied on to sell papers. With any luck this one would last through the summer doldrums into the fall and be capped by a sensational trial.
Martin Green read many of these headlines and no doubt many of the stories on his commute to Newspaper Row. Good newsmen, and he was widely considered one of the city’s best, read all the papers to find new stories and keep abreast of the competition. But as a reporter for Pulitzer’s World, he did so with an air of confidence that came from knowing that he worked for the city’s leading paper. That morning’s edition proudly proclaimed its supremacy in the exceedingly competitive newspaper business. The paper, its editors announced, sold an average of 556,304 papers every day, a circulation “much larger than that of any other daily morning newspaper in the United States.” And lest any reader be swayed by the notoriously inflated claims of their rivals, they noted that the World ’s numbers reflected the number of papers actually sold. All “returns, unpaid or free copies are deducted from The Morning World’s stated city circulation.”
Green had certainly come a long way in his thirty-three years. Born in Burlington, Iowa, in 1870, he managed to get a modest prairie education before dropping out to find work at the age of fifteen. After trying his hand at several jobs, he found success as an insurance agent. But when his company went bust still owing him five thousand dollars, Green took a job as a reporter for the Burlington Gazette.Four years later he moved to St. Louis to work for the Star and later its rival, the Republic. By 1896 his skillful reporting and reputation as an all-round newspaperman had caught the eye of William Randolph Hearst. The publisher offered Green a job at his latest acquisition, the New York Journal.Green took it and found New York to his liking. Five years later, in 1901, Green was lured away from the Journal by the World ’s Charles E. Chapin, one of the most feared and respected city editors.
Most reporters detested Chapin. They called him “The Pirate,” and he was known far and wide for his cruelty and autocratic manner. He seemed to enjoy humiliating reporters in public, and it was said he often waited until Christmas eve to fire them. Martin Green, however, got along with him just fine—no doubt because he was so good at his trade.
As Green and Chapin knew, the key to success in this city awash in newsprint was not simply to get the facts of a good story. Any idiot with a pencil and pad could do that, Chapin reminded his men every day. It was essential to be first, to get what Green and his fellow scribes called the scoop. Being the first to break a story about a new scandal, crime, or disaster
was what pushed tomorrow’s circulation figures higher than today’s. It’s what allowed for higher advertising rates and, who knew, maybe higher wages for reporters and editors.
For veteran newspapermen like Green, there was still one more level above the scoop. It easily surpassed the steady stream of sex, scandal, and sensation that fueled their industry, even if they did get the occasional scoop. It was the big one, the kind of story that stopped the city of perpetual motion in its tracks, if only temporarily. Such stories came along once every two years or so. Back in 1902 it was the New York Central Railroad tunnel cave-in that claimed the lives of fifteen men and injured scores more. Two years before that the city devoured edition after edition that told the horrific details of the great Hoboken pier fire in which nearly 400 workers and passengers on four steamships burned to death or drowned.
Green knew of even greater calamities from his days in St. Louis. Just before he left to join Hearst in New York, he experienced a big one the likes of which he doubted he’d ever see again. On May 27, 1896, a massive tornado struck St. Louis with winds in excess of 250 miles per hour. Hundreds of buildings, including the offices of Green’s Journal, were destroyed and 255 people killed in what remains one of the most devastating tornados in U.S. history. Despite the loss of their office, Green and his colleagues still managed to generate small editions of the paper. “The rays of the rising sun disclosed to the view of the citizens of St. Louis yesterday morning scenes of desolation and woe unparalleled in the history of the city,” read the lead story on May 29, “marking the path of the most extraordinary and destructive tornado of modern times.” In the days that followed, Green churned out what in recent times has come to be called an “instant book” about the tragedy: The Great Tornado at St. Louis, on the Evening of May 27th, 1896. A Story of Terror, Ruin and Desolation. Illustrated by 65 Photos Taken on the Morning after the Storm. “Bruised and torn and bleeding,” the book began, “staggering from the force of the blow, but still reliant and confident in her own strength, St. Louis to-day is…a beautiful picture even in her misery and pain.” There are no records to indicate how many copies of the book were sold, but it may very well have been what caught the eye of Hearst and prompted him to bring Green to New York a few months later.
Most newsworthy calamities, from great fires to presidential assassinations, did not knock out newspaper offices as in the case of St. Louis. Speed therefore was of the utmost when it came to reporting such stories. The first journalist on the scene of a scandal or calamity would be the first to get the story and pictures back to the newsroom, where the paper’s army of workers could magically produce an “extra” in less than an hour. And as updates and new information came in, additional “extras” hit the streets until the editor deemed the story exhausted—at least until the morning when it might begin all over again.
Green knew, of course, that events such as these came without warning and at uneven intervals. There was no preparing for them, except to begin each day ready to engage should the opportunity arise. So as he approached the entrance to the great temple of Joseph Pulitzer that morning, he asked himself the familiar questions of great city editors: What stories would today bring? Would there be any big ones? Would his team of journalists get there first?
THE SHEPHERD
McClellan and Green, by virtue of their occupations, were constantly forced to see their city in all its vastness. The former was charged with governing the Empire City, the latter with telling its story. Most New Yorkers, however, lived in smaller worlds within the great metropolis. The familiar faces, family ties, and traditions found in neigh borhoods provided them with an intimacy and stability that was alien to the wider urban society. They might venture out into the general chaos of the city each day, but always with the consoling knowledge that they were never very far away from their more manageable piece of it.
Reverend George Haas understood this reality more than most. As a prominent minister and several times president of the New York Minis terium of the Lutheran Church, his work frequently required him to travel to many parts of the city on official business. But his life was fundamentally grounded in his parish, St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church on East Sixth Street in the Lower East Side neighborhood of Little Germany. As of 1904 he’d spent nearly half his life there and had come to love the neigh borhood and its people, especially the members of his congregation.
Haas’s congregation had in turn developed a deep respect and affection for him. They loved him for his gentle manner and congeniality. They valued him for his ceaseless energy and dedication to his parish. They revered him for his piety and sincerity. They marveled at his sharp mind and scholarly demeanor and wondered how they’d gotten so lucky. They loved their pastor for these reasons and still one more: he was a constant, a firm rock, a fixed point in an ever-changing urban world. For twenty-two years he’d served as pastor of St. Mark’s and at age fifty showed no signs of slowing down—or worse, moving on to greener pastures.
Haas was born on May 5, 1854, in Philadelphia. His parents, John and Anna Haas, had emigrated from Germany during the great wave of German immigration in the 1830s and 1840s. John Haas was a music teacher by profession and managed to provide a modest yet comfortable home for his wife, three children, and his elderly mother. The Haases’ Lutheran faith suffused their household and sustained them in their struggle to succeed in their adoptive America. It left a deep impression on the Haas children, as all three eventually found their home in the church. Young George, an eager and accomplished student, gained admission to the University of Pennsylvania in 1872 where he studied with an eye toward the Lutheran ministry. His younger brother John later followed in his footsteps, while Emma studied music and became a church organist.
Upon receiving his B.A. in 1876, George entered the Philadelphia Theological Seminary and graduated in 1880. The newly minted twenty- six-year-old minister came highly recommended and was hired right out of school to serve as an assistant to the Reverend Hermann Raegener, pastor at St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in New York City. It was a prestigious position and a measure of how impressive Haas was to those who met him, as St. Mark’s was a major church in America’s largest German neighborhood, known as Kleindeutschland, or Little Germany.
New York’s Little Germany had its origins in the German emigration stampede that began in the 1830s. More than 10,000 Germans arrived in America in 1832 and nearly 25,000 in 1837. Still more came in the 1840s and 1850s, with more than half a million landing on the shores of America between 1852 and 1854 alone.
As more than one and a half million German immigrants poured into the United States in the 1840s and 1850s, some followed their dream to become landowners and farmers and headed for the agricultural frontier. Hundreds of thousands more flocked to cities like New York, Buffalo, Baltimore, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Chicago, Milwaukee, and New Orleans to ply their trades as tailors, cabinetmakers, stonemasons, brewers, and cobblers. Like the Irish who came in even greater numbers in this period, they clustered into ethnic enclaves by the thousands, seeking cultural refuge from the strange new world they had entered.
As early as 1840, New York emerged as the most German city in America, with a total German population rivaled only by Berlin and Vienna. The majority of these immigrants settled in a section on Manhattan’s Lower East Side that came to be called Little Germany, or what the residents themselves called Kleindeutschland. By 1860 this neighborhood, comprised of the city’s tenth, eleventh, thirteenth, and seventeenth wards, was home to half of the city’s 120,000 Germans.
Like most immigrants, these Germans arrived with lots of ambition but little money. Thus Little Germany became not simply an ethnic enclave, but also a crowded slum with all its related problems. Tenements had no running water, and outdoor “privies” were the only means of disposing of human waste. That in combination with filth-ridden streets and poor diets provided breeding grounds for every form of deadly disease from cholera to tuberculosis. Added to thes
e miseries were high rates of crime and violence. But as poor immigrants, the residents of Little Germany had no alternative but to live in such conditions.
Still, there were hopeful signs, especially when compared to the other major immigrant group arriving in the antebellum period, the Irish. Although German immigrants were poorer than their American-born counterparts, they arrived on the shores of America in far better financial shape than the Irish. In part this had more to do with the desperate condition of so many Irish famine refugees in the 1840s and early 1850s than with German prosperity. In any case, most Germans arrived with the two things that distinguished them from the Irish: capital and skills. This meant that many Germans found better housing and began earning decent livings in the skilled trades soon after arrival. By 1855 more than half the city’s bakers, cabinetmakers, locksmiths, shoemakers, and tailors had been born in Germany. In contrast, only 9 percent of the city’s unskilled and poorly paid laborers were German-born, compared with an astounding 86 percent Irish-born. Poverty figures provided an equally stark comparison—82 percent of immigrants admitted to the city almshouse were born in Ireland versus only 7 percent born in Germany.
With each passing year the German population rose still higher. In 1871, the year the German empire was established, New York’s Little Germany would have been its fifth-largest city. Likewise it would have been America’s fourth-largest city—bigger than Detroit and Milwaukee combined. This despite the fact that Little Germany constituted only half the city’s German population.
Visitors to the area were stunned not only by the enclave’s overcrowding and poverty, but also by how thoroughly German—and therefore utterly un-American—it appeared. Little Germany, wrote one observer in the 1850s, “has very little in common with the other parts of New York.” He continued: