Fingy Conners & The New Century

by Richard Sullivan

  She turned to look at Hannah.

  “Come with us,” mouthed Hannah silently, beckoning with her arms.

  A sad smile came over Minnie’s face and she shrugged and mouthed back, “I can’t.” And the little group disappeared out the door.

  “We’ll have a talk with her later Jim, when she comes by to collect Molly.”

  But Jim’s mind wasn’t on Molly, but rather on the thousands of men and their families who would be thrown into financial ruin if Fingy followed through with his scheme. The cataclysm resulting from such a move would prove an unprecedented debacle for the city.

  “Let’s go home to Molly and the kids, Hannah. I got to make plans to go back out to the hospital and have a talk with JP and see if he knows anything about this.”

  Fingy In Montréal

  The following morning found Fingy Conners pondering the great Canadian river’s mighty waters, stilled now by a roof of ice. It was one of the colder winters within anyone’s memory in Québec.

  Sleighs glided effortlessly across its surface, ice bridging the Saint Lawrence from bank to bank, but standing there on rue Mill, fresh off the overnight train and surveying the imminent site of his newest obsession, Fingy Conners could vividly reimagine that which he’d initially set his eyes upon the previous summer in Old Montréal. The site was perfect for the location of the first in what was envisioned as a virtual city of towering Conners grain elevators, a project that would visit upon his enemies in Buffalo his ultimate reprisal.

  “Dem scoopers t’ought dey had it bad workin’ under me, did they now? Wait til dere ain’t nobody left in Buffalo fer ‘em t’ work fer at all. Dat’ll teach ‘em. Dey tink deir kids is hungry now? Jus’ yous wait!”

  Buffalo’s grain scoopers made up only a small measure of the intended receivers of his vicious retribution. Fingy Conners was planning on delivering a bombardment of malevolence; Alderman John P. Sullivan, Mayor Conrad Diehl, Father Patrick Cronin and Bishop James Quigley were all singled out to reap his ruthless animus.

  At the time of his first visit to Montréal the previous June, the awesome breadth of the mighty St. Lawrence had dwarfed whatever idea the maps had given Conners as to the suitability of the superb route, expansively wide and very deep at most points from the Great Lakes all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. The amply expanded possibilities offered by such a natural passage over that of the Erie Canal made Conners’ giddy.

  “Dese fuckin’ Canucks dey don’t know what dey got here, which is all the better fer me, eh, Kennedy?”

  John Kennedy just nodded, awestruck. Fingy’s carefully practiced refined diction always evaporated completely whenever he was secure in the company of his longtime First Ward intimates.

  The Québecois driver of their sleigh did not speak much English, let alone the First Ward dialect—not that Fingy had any compunctions about hurting anybody’s feelings. After all, he himself possessed Canadian citizenship, his father Peter having been born in Canada, then returning his boy there to reassert his birthright at first opportunity. Peter Conners wisely foresaw advantages of dual nationality for his son.

  The site at Montréal’s Ville-Marie offered everything Fingy Conners would need: a dominating presence on the river, undeveloped except for the shacks and shanties of Montréal’s newest immigrants from Europe littering the spot now, and offering an ideal situation for an ambitious developer such as he.

  The neighboring tenements dotting the area surrounding Ville-Marie were crowded with unemployed Irish, French and Scots, offering an unlimited and malleable potential labor force.

  The city’s environs surprised him as to their age. Montréal was two hundred years older than Buffalo, and its history was displayed especially in the merchants’ quarter with its fine customs houses, meticulously cobbled streets, and lovely European churches.

  Canada was the future. He’d come to realize this while sailing down the St. Lawrence the previous summer. The United States had been compelled by geographical circumstance to dig a sad little ditch between Albany and Buffalo at enormous expense both to construct and to operate, and requiring an army of men to upkeep and maintain. Canada on the other hand cradled the magnificent Saint Lawrence, a natural highway, God-given, awe-inspiring, ennobling, needing neither maintenance nor management, and literally flowing with possibilities. On its banks Conners would construct a metropolis of grain elevators reaching for the heavens, the first of many such complexes to come in his newest international empire.

  Within just a few days now, once the scheme was fully digested in Albany, the project to divert the lion’s share of America’s lake grain trade over to the St. Lawrence route would be certain to panic New York State officials as had no other scheme in the transportation field, ever. Some were sure to even become downright suicidal over it. Fingy relished the thought.

  Unquestionably, Conners’ revolutionary Montréal development would not be without profound influence on the canal commission appointed by New York Governor Teddy Roosevelt. This board would in response prepare a hurried report, that in accordance with the recommendation of Governor Roosevelt, would be quickly submitted to the state legislature. The State’s counter-plan would be to transform the shallow aqueduct that was the current Erie Canal into a ”great inland waterway,”one that would accommodate ships, rather than just barges; an artery that would rival the St. Lawrence.

  The sheer absurdity of the State’s idea would make Fingy guffaw in derision.

  New York State’s delusional plan would call for an initial outlay of at least $50 million, which included a large sum for the damming and regulating of the Mohawk River so as to supply a much increased volume of water to the improved waterway.

  Such an ambitious renovation might accomplish all that the friends of the canals would expect or hope for, opening the Erie Canal to much larger craft, facilitating navigation and enabling boats to make the trip from Buffalo to New York City very much more quickly, and at the same time carry increased cargo tonnage. This would expand the capacity and traffic of the Erie Canal and thereby cheapen transportation by water, with which transportation by rail had already caught up, but now threatened to surpass in economy.

  The problem was, although equal in some respects, there were distinct inarguable advantages to shipping by rail: the shallow Erie Canal froze over quickly in winter, completely halting traffic for as long as six months—half the entire year—whereas the rails operated year ‘round.

  Within a week, once Fingy’s plans were widely known, the New York State Canal Commission would consider the continued viability of the Erie Canal to be as equally threatened by Fingy Conners as by the railroads. Something drastic would need to be done about both if the seventy-five-year-old Canal and the vast industry it spawned were to survive.

  The Canadians themselves had as well recently been energized by Conners’ threat. Conners’ papers of incorporation had been filed, compelling the hurried organizing of a new Toronto transportation company to develop a plan to compete with Conners’ so as to keep the Americans out. Principals in this new Canadian company included Toronto M.P. George H. Bertram, Ottawa M.P. Alex Lumsden, and Montréal Senator Pierre Forget. They had first descended on Montréal the previous summer after initially getting a whiff of the Conners’ plan. Mistakenly, they were not overly concerned at first. But upon visiting Buffalo they came to realize that they had woefully underestimated the threat. Once their information-gathering efforts began revealing troubling understandings, the Canadian group scrambled to gather sponsorship.

  The Canadians’ impression, and it was a widespread one, was that the American syndicate might demonstrate too tender a regard for the commercial interests of Buffalo and the U.S.A. over those of Canada in Conners’ Montréal endeavor.

  In addition to the emerging competing Canadian syndicate, Fingy also had to reckon with the powerful hostility of the Canadian Pacific Railway, hell-bent on retaining in its own hands as much of the expanding grain business of that country as possible.<
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  Even if Fingy succeeded in his scheme to include some Canadian capitalists in his syndicate, the Canadians were going to do all in their power to prevent the infamous American’s securing of any concessions.

  Sir William Van Horne, president of the Canadian Pacific, had come out in an interview declaring that “Canadians themselves can attend to the transportation matter without American interference.” That utterance, being interpreted, revealed to Conners that the Canadian Pacific was trying to block his bid and gobble up the elevator business in Montréal for itself. There was also talk in Canada of the government stepping in and building elevators.

  Fingy as usual had everyone running around every which way in utter discombobulation like rats in a dark cellar after the lights were suddenly switched on.

  By this time the Barnett & Record Co. of Chicago, engaged by Conners, had practically completed all arrangements for beginning work on Conners’ first elevator at Montréal. In the January 25, 1900 edition of the Marine Review, it was stated that “work will begin within the next few days.” The article elaborated further, saying that the structures were to be constructed of steel, concrete and wood, having a capacity of 3,000,000 bushels, and the bins were to be of concrete of the Pierre Monier type, as near-fireproof as possible. The entire Conners plant, the article claimed, would be completed by November that year.

  It was generally understood, both in Canada and the United States, that if full advantage was to be taken of the newly enlarged St. Lawrence canals, and if Canada was to get her share of the export trade in grain and flour over this route, that the facilities for transfer of these commodities to ocean vessels at Montréal must be greatly improved.

  Despite the grand dreams of the Canadians, no north-of-the-border powerhouse version of Fingy Conners existed there; no Canadian possessing his single-handed determination and influence, his money, his extreme self-confidence, his dominance, his violent threatenings, or his extraordinary conviction.

  Conners’ scheme was one of considerable magnitude.

  It contemplated the through-shipment of grain from the northwest to European points by way of the great river and its lately improved St. Lawrence canal route. His plan was to give to Montréal the advantage of such elevator and dock facilities as presently prevailed in Buffalo, to be accomplished by the organization of a company in Canada and by the cooperation of Canadian interests with the gentleman of Buffalo who proposed to furnish capital for the enterprise.

  Conners had already put $200,000 into the scheme to immediately construct the first elevator and steel freight houses in order to stake his claim and prove his seriousness in making Montréal the new Buffalo. This would return Buffalo to its deserved fate, to the throes of the Great Depression of 1893 or worse. He didn’t want to delay, to await the approval of the mercurial Canadians. His plan was to begin building on the site immediately to make it more awkward for the Canadians to consider disapproving his plan.

  Hungry and cold, the two former First Ward visitors elected to depart from the site of the newest Conners enterprise and have the hired sleighman drive them through the snowy cobbled streets of old Ville-Marie to find a cozy spot to enjoy a meal. As they proceeded they surveyed the existing saloons closest to the new elevator site for possible venues from which to continue Fingy’s wildly successful saloon-boss system, recently forbidden to him in the U.S. The very underpinning of his past and continued financial successes, the saloon-boss system had been newly outlawed in Buffalo, a personally devastating outcome of the scoopers strike.

  Québec, however, was virgin territory, ripe for Conners’ exploitation. Desperate, easily-intimidated, competitive, alcohol-loving immigrant laborers were the key to his fortune, and Montréal was overflowing with them.

  On the Rue de Marguerite d’Youville a certain saloon caught Fingy’s eye. The duo stopped and entered. It was of solid fabrication, soundly constructed of heavy timber and stone block, not dissimilar in floor plan to the wood frame Conners Hotel on Buffalo’s Ohio Street, it too having an equally adequate bureau attached. They handed the proprietor Conners’ Buffalo Courier business card adorned with his photo, the image picturing him much more refined and becalmed than his appearance at present, bundled, crimson-faced and angry as he was due to the biting cold.

  After grunting goodbye to the indifferent saloonkeep they drove on without any particular itinerary in mind other than finding a suitable restaurant. They passed the Bouthellier warehouses which were employed for storing potash, a bleaching agent for export to England. The warehouses were a far cry from the depressing haphazard thoughtless counterparts that existed in Buffalo, these of Montréal having façades of cut stone, pediments, and œil-de-bœuf windows. Not far away a wildly extravagant elegant and colorful building was being erected in the Flemish style, and upon asking, Conners was told that it was to be a fire station.

  “A fire station? Yous mean a hose company, fer firemen? Why, in Buffalo, we’d never throw away money on something so fancy! It’s a waste of capital dat could be put to better use!”

  Kennedy, the childhood detacher of Fingy’s digit and source of his nickname replied, “I think it’s fantastic, Fingy. Golly. Look at this place. I love this town!”

  As they proceeded they halted once more for a few minutes to observe final touches being applied to the headquarters of the Grand Trunk Railway Company on McGill Street, a masterpiece of architecture boasting majolica bas-relief glazed earthenware tiles being installed that day in the vestibule.

  “I’m freezin’. Let’s cut the sight-seein’ crap and get us some grub,” ordered the Boss.

  The driver recommended L’Auberge du Pierre Calvet, on the rue de Bonsecours, which had been established in 1725. Fingy had been in the best private clubs in Chicago and New York, but nothing compared to the solid dignity and atmosphere of the Auberge, with its massive stone walls, fine oil paintings, huge roaring fireplace, exquisite French wines and the intoxicating aroma of roasting suckling piglet and pommes de terre au gratin. The two old friends spent four hours there, seduced as much by the brandy as the cuisine and atmosphere, and talked over plans of domination and relocation.

  “I t’ink I might could convince Mary to move her big fancy ass up here t’ Montréal,” Fingy winked.

  Mary A. Jordan Conners was a West Seneca girl, having revealed herself after her marriage to Fingy to be the quintessential social climber, the epitome of America’s nouveaux riche, a woman enthusiastically seduced by everything French. She was also quite aggressive and demanding in her husband’s achieving even more than he already had, “for the sake of the children,” she transparently claimed, rearranging one of her silk Parisian gowns, which were worn by her as daily fashion rather than reserved for special occasions.

  “Every day must be lived and enjoyed to its fullest as if it were a special occasion. What good is life if we cannot always partake of the very best?” justified the native of the little two-room frame cottage on West Seneca’s muddy Main Street.

  The two childhood First Ward allies, who had sailed aboard the Great Lakes freighters and shared dreams together as boy-stewards, gently clinked their brandy snifters together as they gazed out the window at the horse drawn sleighs gliding noiselessly up and down busy snow-covered rue de Bonsecours.

  “To Québec,” toasted Kennedy, “and to an even grander future fer us to come.”

  As Kennedy continued his enthusiastic spiel, Fingy’s mind disengaged from his friend for a moment to set to figuring out how to best gather his publicity resources so as to present his plan in its most favorable light, despite its certain terrible consequences. At every stage of his life Conners always managed to have a willing contingent of apologists and clarifiers sitting at the ready who would take whatever his latest assault on humanity was and spin it into something more or less positive.

  Fingy Conners had recently set up a charity meant to aid the poorest agonized souls of the First Ward, who of course were imprisoned in their misery to begin with pre
cisely due to his cruel business practices. He was richly praised far and wide for this new philanthropic turn by those who chose to suddenly forget exactly why such an emergency fund was needed in the first place.

  His own newspapers—the Enquirer and the Courier—of course trumpeted the news of his generosity and compassion throughout the region while his telegraphic services delivered his praises to a hundred other newspapers across North America eagerly looking for any tidbits of interest they could parrot in order to fill their pages.

  Besides his own news organs, what was perhaps more troubling was that so many others were additionally willing to take up his banner with praise, even members of the local Catholic clergy who had demonized him heatedly from the pulpits just a few months previous. They now conveniently sidestepped the evils he’d initiated, evils that they were only too well acquainted with, in order to newly paint Fingy Conners as a caring philanthropist in spite of the naked facts, as if a leopard could suddenly change his spots.

  Fingy learned that the most effective way to quell the angry voices within the Catholic Church was to become a generous contributor of cash. Cleverly, knowing that his charity was now in place and operating caused those who might benefit from it to suddenly become uneasy about riling the man. In reciprocity, despite all he had done and still planned to do, Conners would be honored in 1904 with a two-page biographical spread in Thomas Donahue’s deluxe encyclopedic History of the Catholic Church in Western New York, a copy of which almost every Catholic family in the area was urged from the pulpit to purchase.

  “William James Conners…is a remarkable example of a well-earned and well-deserved success…” begins the torrent of praise within its Catholic pages.

  Fingy Conners was a brilliant observer and manipulator of the human condition, a world-class chess player as adept at moving kings and queens as he was pawns and Catholic bishops in whatever direction most favorable to his interests.