by Ed O'Donnell
This accelerated way of life carried a price, of course. Nervous debility, or what doctors and pseudodoctors of that era called neurasthenia and those in our era call chronic fatigue syndrome, had emerged in recent years as an epidemic born of the modern lifestyle raised to such extremes in Gotham. As the rhythms of industrial life grew faster and more frenetic at the turn of the century, more and more men and women complained of insomnia, nervousness, and exhaustion. How could this be? many asked. The people most prone to the affliction worked at desks, not plows—why, then, were they so exhausted? Not surprisingly, it had been a New York physician named Dr. George M. Beard who coined the term and pioneered in its study. Still, neither he nor his colleagues had a true medical explanation for such symptoms and certainly no cure beyond changes in diet and extra rest. Men like Theodore Roosevelt attributed it to a lack of vitality on the part of a generation grown soft and urged men to pursue the “strenuous life,” a lifestyle that included retreats from the office and urban environment to the restorative challenges of hiking, camping, and climbing.
So no matter how infatuated with their city, virtually every New Yorker in June 1904 entertained thoughts of escape from the crowded spaces, jarring commutes, and above all, the stifling summer heat. It set in during the first weeks of June, rose to dreadful, deadly heights in July and August, then slowly began to recede through September. There was no escaping it. The heat radiated from the hard dusty ground and off the faces of buildings, making even shady spots unbearable. Horses dropped dead in their harnesses and corseted women fainted on the sidewalks. In the tenement districts, where the heat mixed with the putrid smells of overflowing privies and filthy streets, the effect was beyond description.
Nightfall brought only limited relief, especially during the breathless days of a heat wave. “It is quite the thing in the evenings,” wrote one observer in 1901, “when the stored up heat of the day begins to ooze out of the brick walls and mushy asphalt to take the wife and family from the crowded stoop to the pier. There one escapes the sullen discomfort of reflected heat, but not the crowd.” When they returned to their tenements later in the night, tens of thousands pulled mattresses onto rooftops and fire escapes in the hope of finding some relief, and every year dozens died from falls.
Electric fans were a luxury enjoyed only by the rich. The same was true of ice, though charity organizations occasionally distributed it for free during heat waves. Air-conditioning, despite the recent success two years ear lier by an enterprising Brooklyn engineer named Willis Haviland Carrier in designing an “apparatus for treating air,” was still a long way off.
For the first three centuries of settlement in New York, most city residents had few options for dealing with the heat. The very rich, of course, enjoyed the country air while reclining in their summer homes in upper Manhattan or out on Long Island. The rest stayed behind, lacking the money, time, and means to get away. But by the end of the nineteenth century, with the emergence of a large middle class, not to mention new modes of transit and a new ethos of leisure time, far greater numbers of New Yorkers looked forward to escaping what one writer called “the seething, sweating city” for at least part of the summer.
Increased leisure time was becoming the norm at the turn of the century for Americans of all classes. The wealthy enjoyed extended stays at resorts and spas on both sides of the Atlantic, not to mention cruises aboard luxury liners. For middle-class Americans, choices were more modest—a week’s vacation, perhaps even two, to the mountains, the country, or the seashore. That summer vacations had become mainstream was indicated by the explosion of ads for renting houses by the shore and hotels on the lake in the newspapers starting in early May. Nearly all the editions for Sunday, June 12, had special sections devoted to vacation options. “Wood, Stream and Field Invite the Summer Guest,” read the section’s headline in the New York Times,“Vacation Crowds Have Already Begun to Throng Resort Hotels and a Brilliant Season is in Prospect.” Page after page spread before New Yorkers a thousand choices. There were lakeside cabins in the Catskills, resort hotels in the Poconos, campsites in the Adirondacks, and cottages by the Jersey Shore, the latter being the choice of Mayor McClellan. All promised plenty of fresh, cool air and activities galore from fishing and boating to tennis and dancing. “The number of summer resorts that seek the patronage of New Yorkers,” observed one guidebook, “is legion.”
Some curmudgeonous types like financial titan Russell Sage decried the increased popularity of vacations. “During the eighty-eight years of my career,” asserted the crusty octogenarian in “The Injustice of Vacations,” which appeared in the June issue of The Independent, “I have not once taken a vacation.” He went on to decry the practice as an unjustified and expensive inconvenience to employers.
But Sage represented a fast-disappearing sentiment. At the turn of the century the annual vacation—some as long as two whole weeks—had become a standard feature of middle-class life. It indicated not merely one’s economic status but also one’s values. In the age of Roosevelt, vacations were necessary departures from the “effeminizing” tendencies of modern life, a chance to reconnect with nature and family in a healthful, vigorous setting. “Nowadays the grownup is no less cognizant of the importance of a period each year devoted to recreation and amusement,” asserted one writer, “when business cares may be forgot, and the glories of wood and stream and field enjoyed to the utmost.” Even the city’s hard-nosed financial newspaper, the Globe and Commercial Advertiser, was moved to mock Sage’s extreme stance on vacations. That morning it ran a large cartoon, “Russell Sage’s Idea of a Joyous and Rollicking Vacation,” depicting a young clerk chained to his desk on a hot summer’s day working his way through a massive stack of papers labeled “WORK.”
For working-class New Yorkers, their choice to take a vacation or not was dictated by financial, not philosophical, considerations. Most lacked the money and job security to hope for any more than a few day trips to the shore during the hot summer months. A vacation properly understood was simply out of the question. For them the coming of the summer months meant endless days and nights of stifling heat with little or no opportunity for escape. Certainly some families would manage to get a day, perhaps two, at a nearby beach. They might also enjoy a few picnics in the park. Some of the more adventurous poor, those who possessed time but not money, headed for Rockaway Beach to live by the shore in rented tents costing as little as $4.75 a week. “Just as soon as the thermometer begins to climb upward,” observed the Times in early June, “whole families migrate there from Harlem flats and from cities which are never swept by sea breezes.” But most remained trapped in the city, trying to make do while dreaming of October.
In recent years their plight had gained the attention of Progressive Era reformers who decried the lack of recreational space in the slums. On the Lower East Side, where the population density of more than 250,000 people per square mile was greater than anywhere else on earth, there were only a handful of small parks. Back in 1811, when a group of forward- thinking merchants and lawyers had devised Manhattan’s legendary street grid as a way to promote rapid, orderly urban growth and commercial development, they set aside less than 1 percent of the island’s land for parks. “It may, to many, be a matter of surprise,” wrote the planners in anticipation of some criticism, “that so few vacant spaces have been left … for the benefit of fresh air, and consequent preservation of health.” There was no need to, they explained, for “those two large arms of the sea which embrace Manhattan Island [i.e., the Hudson and East Rivers] render its situation, in regard to health and pleasure … peculiarly felicitous.” Clearly they had misjudged the degree to which the commerce they wished to unleash would utterly dominate and befoul the rivers and their banks.
So in 1904, most children simply took to the streets and back alleys for play—often far from the moral supervision of parents, teachers, and clergy. Some of the more adventurous boys swam off the piers along the East River, seemingly unaware
of either the filth in the water or the danger posed by boats and currents.
To counter this problem, reformers pushed the city government to build new public parks in working-class neighborhoods. One such park, Seward Park, had just opened on the Lower East Side at Essex Street and East Broadway. It stood as a monument to Progressive Era ideals, for it required the city to seize the land by eminent domain and demolish dozens of privately owned tenements to make way for the park.
Reformers also led successful campaigns to build public swimming pools—actually floating barges fitted out as pools—along the Hudson and East River waterfronts. Demand was so high—some 6 million swims were counted in 1903—that children were only allowed to swim in fifteen- minute shifts, but some relief was better than none at all. In the winter of 1904, Mayor McClellan signed a bill authorizing construction of ten new “floating baths” for deployment, and in June the first six were nearing completion.
One place that drew growing numbers of New York’s working class was Coney Island. First established as a seaside entertainment spot for the upper class in the 1860s, it gradually came to cater to the multitudes. By the 1880s, Coney Island was drawing thousands of visitors to its hotels, beaches, restaurants, amusements, and outdoor concerts. Located in Brooklyn just eight and a half miles from the southern tip of Manhattan, Coney Island was easy to reach by some combination of streetcar, elevated train, and ferry. By the 1890s, writers commented on the astonishing scenes on weekends when tens of thousands descended upon the place to find relief from the unrelenting heat and din of the city. It is, wrote one admirer in 1896, “our homeopathic sanitarium, our sun-bath and ice-box combined, our extra lung, our private, gigantic fan.”
The rise of Coney Island was not greeted by everyone with such glee. For it was a well-known fact that much of the activity there was decidedly immoral. Dozens of saloons along the waterfront and on side streets slaked the thirsts of working-class men, while nearby an equal number of brothels and gambling houses catered to other needs and wants. This aspect of Coney reflected the attitude of the ruthless local chieftain who dominated it, John Y. McKane. What struck many observers as especially outrageous was the fact that such activity went on in broad daylight without the slightest attempt to conceal it. “Coney Island, our popular summer resort, has been a suburb of Sodom,” railed Rev. A. C. Dixon. “Indeed, Sodom bore no comparison to this place for vileness.” To critics like Dixon, McKane offered no apology. “This ain’t no Sunday school,” he once quipped.
In 1895, after McKane was packed off to jail for election fraud, Coney Island passed into the hands of a new generation of entertainment entrepreneurs. They looked at Coney Island and envisioned something even larger. They would take Coney’s original concept of seaside escape and expand it beyond anyone’s comprehension. If tens of thousands came on a typical summer day, why not hundreds of thousands? If the public craved amusement, why not build them an entire city of rides, sights, fantasies, and exhibitions? Indeed, why not build several of these cities?
The one impediment to this vision was Coney Island’s unsavory reputation. So long as drinking, whoring, and gambling remained at the top of the list of amusements at Coney Island, untold numbers of people—and their money—would stay away. Simply put, they recognized, in the words of one contemporary, that “vice does not pay as well as decency.” Coney Island was thus reformed. By the turn of the century one could still find a shot of whiskey, a hooker, and a game of faro at Coney, but only on the periphery and in places far more discreet.
Most important was not what the new Coney entrepreneurs did away with, but what they built in its place. In 1895, Capt. Paul Boyton constructed Sea Lion Park, the first of several enormous amusement parks at Coney Island. Two years later George Tilyou, a local entrepreneur, opened Steeplechase Park. As these parks and their vast array of rides and amusements drew larger and larger crowds each year, still more visionaries entered the fray. In 1903, Frederic Thompson and Skip Dundy bought out Boyton and transformed his park into the spectacular Luna Park, which opened in May 1904. That same year William H. Reynolds opened his $3 million park, Dreamland, across the street.
Opening night on May 14, 1904, was an event that drew nationwide attention. “There were more dazzling, wriggling, spectacular amusements offered than had ever before been collected together at any one place at any time,” gushed one reporter. Luna offered the Trip to the Moon, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and Whirl-the-Whirl, not to mention boxing horses and snake charmers. At Dreamland, a city drenched in a sea of dazzling electric lights, patrons could choose from dozens of attractions, including Dwarf City, home to one thousand midget residents going about their daily lives in shops, schools, firehouses, and farms. If that were not enough, there was the Incubator Building full of tiny premature babies being nursed to health. All this and more for a pocketful of nickels.
Later that evening, as patrons left Luna Park, they were handed copies of the first issue of the park’s very own daily paper, the Evening Star. It included an interview with Police Commissioner William McAdoo, who pronounced the new and improved Coney Island “clean, moral, and magnificent.” Tilyou, Reynolds, Thompson, and Dundy could scarcely have hoped for a more ringing endorsement of their effort to remake Coney into a wholesome entertainment mecca. The next day the New York Times confirmed it. “Coney Island is regenerated,” read a front-page story, “and almost every trace of Old Coney is wiped out.”
Still, Coney’s reputation as a “Sodom-by-the-Sea” lingered in 1904, especially among families concerned about the wayward tendencies of youth in an era of plummeting moral standards. They might not be able to shelter their children from the many moral pitfalls of contemporary American life, but they were not about to invite an encounter with a destination described by one outraged reformer as “a place where humanity sheds its civilization and becomes half child, half savage.” So when the committee at St. Mark’s charged with organizing the seventeenth annual Sunday school outing sat down to discuss their many options, Coney Island was not one of them. Their fellow parishioners could go there on their own—many had—but they would not go with the blessing of the church, its council, or pastor. Not when more refined options, like the many picnic grounds that dotted the shores of Long Island Sound, beckoned.
SAFELY HOME
At about 5:00 P.M. the mayor pushed his chair away from his desk and stood up. He’d worked all day, with an hour off for his ritual lunch at his specially reserved table at the Hardware lunch club, and still his desk was full of papers related to matters demanding his attention. Nonetheless, it was time to go, for his commute to the cottage at Long Branch would take at least ninety minutes if the ferries were running on schedule. After conferring with his secretary John O’Brien, he left city hall and walked southwest toward the river. It was a beautiful evening and the sight of the ferry—his means of escape from the stress and strain of the job—lifted his spirits. In a few minutes, as the ferry pushed across the Hudson toward the setting sun, he would see the city slowly grow smaller and less overwhelming, if only for twelve hours or so.
The ambitious mayor had a lot on his mind these days, especially the matter of the presidential nomination. When he took office six months earlier, he thought himself wiser and stronger than the man who put him there, Charles Francis Murphy. Over the boss’s objections, McClellan ignored Tammany loyalists and instead appointed men of his own choosing to key departments, including the police. He then instructed the latter to begin a major effort to root out graft and corruption—vital sources of Tam- many’s power.
Initially the mayor’s show of independence seemed to have the desired effect. In February, talk of McClellan for president had been commented upon favorably by several major newspapers. In keeping with his gentlemanly bearing, McClellan pooh-poohed such talk and protested that he wasn’t the least bit interested. “I have been paying no attention to matters political,” he declared, “and have steadfastly declined to discuss politics since I t
ook my present office.” Privately, however, he confided to friends that he wanted the nomination badly.
But soon his troubles began. Within a few months of his inauguration he came to realize that he’d greatly underestimated Murphy’s strength and resourcefulness. By the early spring, rumors abounded that Murphy, annoyed by McClellan’s unwillingness to be bossed on crucial matters such as appointments and by his police commissioner’s zealous enforcement of the liquor laws, was considering dumping the mayor at the nearest possible opportunity. The presidential nomination seemed to be slipping from his grip.
To make matters worse, even if McClellan suffered for his resistance to Murphy’s demands, he continued to get slammed by the Republican press for being a slave to Murphy’s whims. “Whatever pretense of devotion to the public welfare Mr. McClellan may make,” went a snippy Tribune editorial that morning, “it is evident that he has no courage to resist any demand, however outrageous, that Charles F. Murphy may be disposed to make.” Somehow he’d managed to alienate both the machine and the reformers. He couldn’t win.
Still, as the young mayor stood on the ferry that evening, there was room for a shred of optimism. In the days before political conventions were slick, prepackaged coronation spectacles, they occasionally produced unexpected nominees. McClellan could still hope he might emerge as a “dark horse” candidate. Only a week and a half earlier the Times carried an encouraging article about a meeting in the city of high-ranking Democrats who opposed the nomination of the front-runner, Judge Alton B. Parker of upstate New York. “Say Guffy Is Out For McClellan Now,” blared the front-page headline, referring to Democratic national chairman James M. Guffy of Pennsylvania. And just that very morning the Sun carried an encouraging story of continued interest in a McClellan-for-president boon. “The undercurrent of sentiment in favor of Mayor George B. McClellan of New York,” one Indiana delegate was quoted as saying, “is becoming perceptively stronger.”