PROGRESS was the magic word in the latter nineteenth century. In New York, as elsewhere in America, the prevailing mood was an optimistic faith that everything was fated to get bigger and better, that people would become richer and happier. Science was a ringmaster taming wild nature, a horn of plenty pouring out so many inventions that progress seemed inevitable.
In this spirit, and while Boss Tweed still languished in jail, some notable New Yorkers gathered on the evening of May 11, 1877, in the Hotel St. Denis, at Broadway and Eleventh Street. They came to watch Professor Alexander Graham Bell, of Boston, demonstrate a strange new device, called the speaking telephone. He proved that he could speak to an assistant two miles away in Brooklyn. Bell’s success that night marked the beginning of New York’s place in telephone history.
Six days later the first interstate telephone conversation was held between a man in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and Professor Bell in Chickering Hall, at Fifth Avenue and Eighteenth Street. Soon the renowned vaudeville team of Edward “Ned” Harrigan and Tony Hart presented a sketch, called The Telephone, on the stage of the Theatre Comique, at Broadway near Spring Street.
The Telephone Company of New York was incorporated in August, 1877, but it failed. In the autumn of 1878 the Bell Telephone Company of New York was organized. The next March it opened New York’s first commercial telephone exchange at 82 Nassau Street, and the following autumn the city got a telephone directory, a small card bearing 252 names. The first telephone operators were boys, but soon they were replaced by bustle-wearing girls. Instead of starting a telephone conversation by saying, “Hello,” subscribers shouted, “Ahoy!”
The New York Stock Exchange got its first telephone in 1879. Five years later the first regular long-distance service in history went into operation between New York and Boston; in 1885, between New York and Philadelphia; and in 1892, between New York and Chicago. Telephone concerts became the rage, piano solos played in Philadelphia and elsewhere being heard in New York.
Rich people enjoyed the convenience of telephones, but almost everyone complained about the telephone wires cobwebbing the sky. Telegraph wires had been bad enough. In the bitter winter of 1874-75 ice had felled telegraph poles and wires all over the city, and mounted fireman, called Cowboys, patrolled the slick streets, warning pedestrians against the danger of live wires. In 1878 a British visitor wrote: “In the old or lower part of the city . . . against the sky, you look upon a perfect maze of telephone and telegraph wires crossing and recrossing each other from the tops of houses. The sky, indeed, is blackened with them, and it is as though you were looking through the meshes of a net.”
That year, 1878, William C. Whitney, the city’s corporation counsel, said that communication firms needed no special authority to bury their wires and cables under the streets, but die companies were slow to spend money for such a changeover. In 1881 the first underground telephone cables were laid in Attleboro, Massachusetts, and the next year Boston followed suit. In 1884 the New York state legislature ordered “all telegraph, telephone and electric light wires and cables” removed from the surface of New York’s streets before November 1, 1885.
The law had little effect. Telephone poles rose to 50 feet, then to 60, 70, and 80. In 1887, 90-foot telephone poles were installed along West Street, bordering the Hudson River in lower Manhattan. Each was bisected by 30 double crossarms, looking like ladders mounting toward heaven, and each was strung with 300 separate telephone wires. They remained until after the blizzard of 1888.
New York responded to the nineteenth century’s avid interest in natural science by founding the American Museum of Natural History. J. Pierpont Morgan was one of seventeen rich men who asked the state legislature for a museum charter. It was granted in 1869. The museum founders soon raised $52,000, with which they bought, among other things, a famous collection of stuffed mammals and birds owned by Prince Maximilian of Germany. This and other early collections were housed at first in the arsenal in Central Park. About eighteen acres of land were acquired along Central Park West between Seventy-seventh and Eighty-first Streets, and in 1874 President Grant laid the cornerstone of the museum’s first building.
At the site an underground stream—one of many that lace Manhattan—cost the contractor a fortune because he had to divert it and sink foundation walls strong enough to resist the water pressure. This first building, of Victorian Gothic style and later known as the south-central wing, was opened on December 22, 1877, by President Rutherford B. Hayes. By then Morgan had been elected the museum’s treasurer, a tide he held for fifteen years. Far from being just an exhibit of old bones and stuffed birds, the museum developed into a dynamic research laboratory, a school for advanced study, a publishing house for scientific manuscripts, the sponsor of exploring parties sent out all over the world, and probably the finest institution of its kind anywhere on earth.
It was a great day for New York’s Catholics when St. Patrick’s Cathedral was dedicated on May 25, 1879. Except during the Civil War, when construction stopped, passersby for more than twenty years had gawked at laborers hard at work on the Gothic Revival masterpiece. Now that all the scaffolding had been removed and the grounds tidied up, New York newspapers hailed it as the noblest temple ever raised to the memory of St. Patrick.
Archbishop John Hughes had been succeeded by Brooklyn-born Archbishop John McCloskey, who in 1875 became America’s first Roman Catholic cardinal. On the day of dedication a host of Catholic dignitaries, headed by six archbishops and thirty-five bishops, watched solemnly as John Cardinal McCloskey walked around the outside of the Cathedral to bless it. The granite exterior resembled the Cologne Cathedral, and the interior suggested the Cathedral of Amiens—a forest of white marble piers, kaleidoscopic stained-glass windows, dominated by an impressive rose window twenty-six feet in diameter. St. Patrick’s ranked eleventh in size among the great cathedrals and churches of the world.
The year 1879 also marked the first use of the name Madison Square Garden. Several years earlier the New York and Harlem Railroad had abandoned its depot on the block bounded by Madison and Fourth avenues from Twenty-sixth to Twenty-seventh Street P. T. Barnum and another showman, named W. C. Coup, leased the property and erected a one-story building with a square four-story tower. They called it the Great Roman Hippodrome. While overseeing the construction job, Coup had a nervous breakdown. He sold his interest to Barnum, who put on entertainment combining the features of a circus, menagerie, and museum. Barnum then sold the place to Patrick S. Gilmore, official bandmaster of the Union army during the Civil War. The best-known bandleader of his day, Gilmore changed the name to Gilmore’s Concert Garden. Finally, in 1879, the name was again altered to Madison Square Garden. It was the first of four separate buildings to bear the name, two of them on the original site.
Bullfights were held in New York City in 1880. A promoter, called Angel Fernandez, built a bullring at the corner of 6th (now Lenox) Avenue and 116th Street in Harlem. Downtown New Yorkers got there by taking either the Sixth Avenue or the Third Avenue elevated. That summer billboards announced that “a first-class company of Spanish bull-fighters under the direction of the famous Spanish Espada, Angel Valdemoro,” would be brought to the city for this gala occasion. Puzzled New Yorkers had to be told that espada means swordsman.
The bulls were shipped from Texas. The general admission was $1.50, the arena doors opened at 3 P.M., and the fights began at 5 P.M. Among the 3,000 to 4,000 persons attending the first of the 3-day fights were parents who dragged along children. Admission for tots under eight was half price. Most youngsters enjoy horror scenes, but these must have been disappointed, for no gore flowed. The rosettes were glued onto the bulls instead of being stuck into them. Rubber caps were placed on the bulls’ horns, and the matadors were not allowed to kill the beasts.
More refined diversion than bullfighting was offered New Yorkers in 1880 with the opening of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At a dinner held in Paris about a dozen years earlier, John Hay had suggested that New York City establish a museum not for art’s sake, but for the sake of humanity. Hay was a man of cultivated tastes who had served as private secretary to President Lincoln, and when he made this suggestion, he was first secretary of the American legation in the French capital. His idea fired the interest of the Union League Club, and the chairman of its art committee called a meeting to discuss it. Committee members felt ashamed that New York had no art gallery to compare with those already established in several smaller American cities. Poet-editor William Cullen Bryant was named chairman of a committee of fifty to launch a campaign to raise $250,000 for a public art museum. Another patron was J. Pierpont Morgan, who now controlled the Vanderbilt properties.
The museum’s first full-time director was Italian-born, American-naturalized Luigi Palma di Cesnola. While serving as American consul to the island of Cyprus from 1865 to 1877, he had excavated Greek and Roman ruins and put together the Cesnola Collection of Cypriote Antiquities, the largest of its kind in the world. His stone sculptures, bronzes, pottery, and the like were bought by the new museum.
Its trustees had acquired property in Central Park along the west side of Fifth Avenue from Eightieth to Eighty-fifth Street. This had been a disgraceful area; nearby Seneca Village, the largest and foulest squatter camp in the park, had stunk up the neighborhood. Now there rose the first permanent wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Until the building was completed, the museum occupied two temporary homes. The first was at 681 Fifth Avenue, in a place once known as Allen Dodworth’s Dancing Academy. The large skylighted dance hall was converted into a picture gallery whose walls were hung with 175 paintings, mostly of Dutch and Flemish masters, brought from Europe. When the growing collection began to overflow the renovated dance hall, the museum moved into its second temporary home, a mansion on the south side of Fourteenth Street just west of Sixth Avenue.
In 1880, when the city’s shopping center reached Fourteenth Street, the museum was able to move into its permanent home. The first wing, set well back from Fifth Avenue, was a red brick structure designed in the Tuscan Gothic style. As New York City dedicated one new institution after another, American Presidents were kept busy shuttling back and forth between the national capital and New York. On March 30, 1880, President Hayes formally opened the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It became one of the greatest museums of art on earth.
In the early part of the 1880’s New York streets flickered under the glow of gaslights more picturesque than efficient. At twilight it was pleasant to watch lamplighters making their rounds, using a long stick to poke open one side of each square gas lamp, turn on the jet, and set it aflame. But the lights were dim, costly, and troublesome.
A scientist, named Charles Francis Brush, had invented an electric arc light, and by 1879 his creation was illuminating Cleveland’s Public Square. In December of that year the first Brush arc lights were installed in New York on Broadway from Fourteenth to Twenty-sixth Street. By July, 1880, Brush had erected one 6,000-candlepower lamp atop a 160-foot pole in Madison Square and another in Union Square. They could be seen from the Orange Mountains of New Jersey 16 miles away, but their dazzling brilliance was unbearable at close range. Women complained that the lamps made their faces look ghostly white.
At this time Thomas Alva Edison was “fired with the idea of an incandescent lamp as opposed to the arc lamp,” as he expressed it. Born in Ohio of a Dutch father and Scottish mother, young Edison had only three months of formal schooling. He was tutored by his mother and at the age of twelve read The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He went to work as a tramp telegraph operator but vowed that he would become an inventor. In late May or early June, 1869, he arrived in New York for the first time, nearly penniless and deep in debt. The only friend he had here was not at home, so the boyish-looking twenty-two-year-old trudged the streets the whole night through.
The next few days he lived on 5-cent meals of apple dumplings and coffee. That infamous Black Friday when Gould and Fisk tried to corner the gold market, Edison stood on a telegraph booth to watch in wide-eyed wonder as men went mad and fortunes were lost. Amid the frenzy a telegraph operator held out his hand and cried, “Shake, Edison! We’re okay. We haven’t a cent.” Edison later said, “I felt happy because we were poor.” By the time of his death his many inventions had spawned business interests worth more than $25,000,000,000; the New York Times declared that this gave Edison’s brain the highest cash value in history.
The quality, utility, and volume of his brainchildren quickly brought financial independence. By 1876 Edison had taken out 122 patents. By 1878 he had a home and laboratory at Menlo Park, 7 miles northeast of New Brunswick, New Jersey. He searched 13 long months for an incandescent lamp to replace the arc lamp. At last he discovered carbonized cotton filaments and produced a light bulb that burned 40 hours.
The first public demonstration of Edison’s new electric lamp was held at Menlo Park on December 31, 1879. Two days later the “Wizard of Menlo Park” held a special preview for New York City aldermen. He had strung his lamps along wires so that he could light or extinguish any bulb without affecting the others. Although the aldermen were impressed, they did not care to spend city money to subsidize Edison’s plan to light the sidewalks of New York. After all, the Brush Electric Illuminating Company of New York was already doing that job.
Edison appealed to private investors, and soon the Edison Electric Illuminating Company was incorporated with a capitalization of $1,000,000 to light stores and homes. Officials of the various gas companies, aware of Edison’s great reputation, watched his every move with glum eyes, hoping that he would fail. The creation of a central power station and commercial lighting system was the biggest project Edison had ever undertaken. All the equipment had to be “home-devised and home-made,” as Edison put it.
J. Pierpont Morgan, the financier, always welcomed new ideas. In January, 1881, he went to New Jersey to find out for himself if Edison’s fights could be used to illuminate private homes. (Back in 1859 a professor, named Moses Gerrish Farmer, had lighted his own parlor in Salem, Massachusetts, with lamps powered by a galvanic battery in the cellar.) Edison convinced Morgan that an electric lighting system could be installed in a house. The banker promised that when he moved to 219 Madison Avenue, he would buy an Edison system. Before Morgan changed residences, however, James Hood Wright had installed a generating plant in his home in the Fort Washington section of Manhattan.
In the autumn of 1882 Morgan moved his family to Madison Avenue and Thirty-sixth Street, and soon thereafter the renovated house was wired for electricity. Morgan’s son-in-law, Herbert L. Satterlee, said in his biography of the banker:
This apparatus was one of the very first ever made. . . . A cellar was dug underneath the stable. . . in the rear of the house, and there the little steam engine and boiler for operating the generator were set up. A brick passage was built just below the surface of the yard, and through this the wires were carried. The gas fixtures in the house were wired, so that there was one electric light bulb substituted for a burner in each fixture. Of course there were frequent short circuits and many breakdowns on the part of the generating plant. Even at the best, it was a source of a good deal of trouble to the family and neighbors. The generator had to be run by an expert engineer who came on duty at three P.M. and got up steam, so that at any time after four o’clock on a winter’s afternoon the lights could be turned on. This man went off duty at 11 P.M. It was natural that the family should often forget to watch the clock, and while visitors were still in the house, or possibly a game of cards was going on, the lights would die down and go out. If they wanted to give a party, a special arrangement had to be made to keep the engineer on duty after hours. The neighbors complained of the noise of the dynamo, and Mrs. James M. Brown next door said that its vibrations made her house shake. . . .
Edison, too busy to give the Morgan house personal attention, promised his stockholders that his commercial generating station would begin operations almost any day. To impress the men who counted most, he chose to light offices in the financial and communications center of the city. This was an area bounded by Spruce Street on the north, Nassau Street on the west, Wall Street on the south, and Pearl Street on the east. Realtors, aware of the capital Edison had raised, charged him $75,000 for two old four-story buildings at 257 Pearl Street.
He commissioned engineer Charles T. Porter to build six 240-horsepower engines capable of running at a maximum of 700 revolutions per minute. Edison himself went to work on the first of six 110-volt dynamos—“built them by guesswork,” he later admitted. Sensitive to the public anger at overhead wires, Edison elected to run his electric wires under the streets, and in the summer of 1881 gangs of laborers began digging. Electricity was such a strange new phenomenon that most people believed it was a liquid that might flow into their basements. To educate his own workers, Edison opened a night school for them at 65 Fifth Avenue. While his underground tubes were being laid, Edison was summoned to the office of the city commissioner of public works, who snapped, “You are putting down these tubes. You need five inspectors to look after this work. Their salary is five dollars a day. Good morning!”
Edison was constantly on the go, supervising each detail of his monumental project, watching as each connection was made, and trusting no one to do things right. At night he stretched out on piles of pipes in the growing power station and fell asleep instantly. By October 1, 1882, he had strung wires into the homes of 59 customers, and although the power had not yet been turned on, there was a great demand for securities in his company. Issued with a par value of $100 per share, this stock advanced rapidly—sometimes as much as $100 an hour. It rose to $500 a share, then $3,000, then $5000, then $8,000. Gashouse workers grumbled that soon they would lose their jobs. But by the time Edison inaugurated his commercial lighting system, he had only 85 homes fully wired with a total load of 400 bulbs.
Having postponed the premiere many times and fearful that it might be a fiasco, Edison shunned any fanfare that great day. He stayed up all the previous night to rehearse his men in their new jobs after the first switch had been thrown. Despite his precautions, reporters for the metropolitan papers and for some scientific Journal’s were on hand. Monday, September 4, 1882, they gathered in the dynamo room at 257 Pearl Street, along with some directors of the Edison company.
All eyes were on Thomas Alva Edison. The thirty-five-year-old inventor was of less than average height and was already beginning to flesh out. A handsome man, he had gray eyes, a sturdy chin, a large and sensitive mouth, a prominent nose, and large ears. Locks of hair hung in careless disarray over his domed forehead. When he concentrated on a theoretical problem, his eyes were those of a dreamer; in an emergency they were the eyes of a man of action; in moments of relaxation they were as boyishly mischievous as those of Tom Sawyer. Tom Edison spat on the floor. He swore manfully. He said “git” for “get.” He pronounced “does” as “doos.” But on this day of days in his life he did not wear his usual baggy pants and rumpled jacket. Instead, he had struggled into a Prince Albert coat, a white cravat, a starched shirtfront, and a white derby hat.
At 3 P.M., with summer sunlight smiling on downtown Manhattan, Edison signaled his chief electrician, John W. Lieb, to pull the master switch and thus light offices and homes with his electricity. The effect was anticlimactic, like striking matches in the glare of a bonfire. Not until the descent of velvet dusk could the radiance of this man-made illumination be appreciated.
The New York Times Building, at 41 Park Row, had been wired. The next day a Times article said:
To each of the gas fixtures in the establishment a bronze arm was attached, and the electric lamps were suspended from the ends of these arms. . . . The light was more brilliant than gas, and a hundred times steadier. To turn on the light nothing is required but to turn on the thumbscrew. . . . As soon as it is dark enough to need artificial light, you turn the thumbscrew and the light is there, with no nauseous smell, no flicker and no glare.
Only one dynamo went into operation that first day, but Edison declared that it would run forever, provided there was no earthquake. It did function eight years with only one minor stoppage. But other small troubles occurred that first day—such as the blowing out of underground safety catch boxes—and Edison raced from the plant first to one spot and then to another to make repairs. Soon his collar had been torn off, and his white derby hat was stained with grease.
A few days later a policeman rushed into the central station to report trouble at Ann and Nassau streets. Edison and a helper trotted to this corner and found a junction box leaking onto the moist street. Later Edison said:
When I arrived I saw a ragman with a dilapidated old horse come along the street, and a boy told him to go over to the other side of the road—which was the place where the current leaked. The moment the horse struck the electrified soil he stood straight up in the air, and then reared again. The crowd yelled, the policeman yelled, and the horse started to run away. . . . We got a gang of men, cut the current off . . . and fixed the leak.
Aware of J. Pierpont Morgan’s influence, Edison personally oversaw the installation of lights in the white marble Drexel Building, at Wall and Broad streets, where Morgan had his private office. On that notable day of September 4, 1882, Edison scurried down to the building to turn on the lights himself.
The first few months after the Edison system went into operation, no customer received a bill. Fourteen months later there were 508 subscribers and 12,732 bulbs, but each bulb cost $1. Trouble of one kind or another was forever developing. If it wasn’t a leak from an underground junction box, it was a fire in a house or shop wired for electricity. New Yorkers were pleased with Edison’s invention and agreed that it was superior to either gas or arc lights, but in the following decade they were slow to adopt it.