J. PIERPONT MORGAN dealt himself another hand of solitaire and listened for the twentieth century. It was the night of December 31, 1899, and Morgan sat in the library of his Madison Avenue mansion. Logs crackled in the fireplace. To the left of the hearth stood a bookcase holding two metal statues of knights in armor, a clock perched between them. From time to time Morgan may have lifted his dark-hazel eyes to glance at the clock.
The hulking six-foot financier sat at his desk in his usual flat-footed position, toes turned out. With strong and well-formed fingers, he laid out the cards, playing almost automatically, as he did when he had something on his mind. A long cigar protruded from the paper cigar holder clenched in his teeth under his mustache.
Although it was almost midnight in Morgan’s mahogany study, it was the high noon of capitalism in America, and no American stood out so starkly as he. Morgan was centralizing the control of industry and credit. He was the capitalist’s capitalist. President William McKinley of the large head and barrel torso sat in the White House; but businessmen guided the nation’s destiny, and Morgan guided the businessmen. Indifferent to social reform and defiant of public opinion, Morgan felt that he owed the public nothing.
The clock began tolling the hour of midnight. Morgan may have raised his massive head at the first bong. So the twentieth century had arrived? Very well. Within a little more than a year Morgan was to create the first billion-dollar corporation in history, the United States Steel Corporation. Bong!
At the turn of the century eighteen-year-old Fiorello LaGuardia was earning $100 a year as a clerk in the American consulate in Budapest, Hungary. James J. “Jimmy” Walker was a skinny nineteen-year-old attending LaSalle Academy, a business school on Second Avenue, and working as a part-time referee at prizefights in Brotty’s Bar on Hudson Street. Alfred E. Smith was a slim twenty-six-year-old who worked for the city’s commissioner of jurors, checking applications for exemptions from jury duty. Franklin D. Roosevelt was an eighteen-year-old standing an inch more than 6 feet but weighing only 146 pounds; he sang in Harvard’s Freshman Glee Club. Robert Moses was an eleven-year-old boy, who had moved with his family from New Haven to New York in 1897; he felt that New York was too big, too crowded, too noisy, and too confused. Theodore Roosevelt, now forty-two, was governor of New York State, partly because he had become a hero of the Spanish-American War. William Randolph Hearst, at the age of thirty-seven, was cruising up the Nile in search of Egyptian art treasures.
The city, state, and nation this year of 1900 enjoyed prosperity. Never had such good times been seen from coast to coast. A New York minister exulted: “Laws are becoming more just, rulers more humane. Music is becoming sweeter and books wiser. Homes are happier and the individual heart becoming at once more just and more gentle.” Except for the Boer War in South Africa, the Boxer Rebellion in China, and unrest in the Philippines, peace reigned throughout most of the world.
Sixty percent of all Americans lived in small towns or on farms. New York City itself had more than 2,000 farms, occupying nearly a quarter of its land. But the city was in the middle of a building boom. Land and buildings on Manhattan alone were valued at $3,600,000,000, having risen $2,600,000,000 since the year 1865. The city’s 40,000 manufacturing establishments accounted for more than 60 percent of the manufacturing of the entire state. Hundreds of firms escaped taxes by incorporating themselves in other states, paid almost nothing for fire and police protection, yet asked the city for help whenever their underpaid workers struck. The shopping center had reached Twenty-third Street and was gliding north toward Thirty-fourth Street.
Wages were low. City employees put in a 10-hour day, with half an hour for lunch, but many had to work even longer. At 4 A.M. the streets were filled with people heading for their jobs, and any worker who reported late was sure to be penalized. To work from 5 A.M. to 9 P.M. was customary. Twelve-year-old boys and girls were allowed to earn wages if they went to school 80 days a year. Because of undernourishment, some children were slow to learn their lessons. Hundreds of youngsters lived on canal boats along the waterfront, seldom attended school, constantly played hide-and-seek with truant officers. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of homeless children in the city.
Nearly 7 percent of the population was illiterate, and 173,000 residents could not speak English. Of the city’s inhabitants, 37 percent were foreign-born. About 25 percent of these immigrants came from Germany; 22 percent, from Ireland; 12 percent, from Russia; 11 percent, from Italy; 6 percent, from Austria; and 5 percent, from England. The remainder had arrived here from all other parts of the world. Although most Irishmen were still members of the working class, no longer were they caricatured on the stage as living in shanties and dressing in rags. The city’s 700,000 Jews lived mainly on the Lower East Side. The 145,000 local Italians staged their first Columbus Day parade in 1900. Between 50,000 and 60,000 Negroes were residents of New York. The main Negro center was near West Fifty-third Street in Manhattan, although a large Negro community was also developing in Brooklyn.
New York was the last American city of any size to establish public high schools. The De Witt Clinton, Wadleigh, and Peter Cooper high schools were opened in 1897, and in 1900 one De Witt Clinton student was an energetic Irish boy, named Grover Whalen. Only 13,700 of the 500,000 pupils enrolled in the elementary schools were graduated from the eighth grade.
Although Berlin had outstripped New York as the city of tenements, more than 1,500,000 New Yorkers lived in slums in 1900. Many European visitors, after one horrified look, concluded that the slum dwellers lived in misery worse than that in Berlin, London, or Paris. The section of Manhattan bounded by the East River, East Fourteenth Street, Third Avenue, the Bowery, and Catherine Street was probably the most densely populated area in the world. New York’s poor lived under worse conditions and paid more rent than the inhabitants of any other big city on earth.
The average New Yorker was shorter and younger than his counterpart today. The mortality rate for children was more than five times higher then than now. Life expectancy at birth was much lower. Hospital conditions were horrible by modern standards. The city’s water was first chlorinated in 1910, and milk was pasteurized for the first time in 1912.
Like artichokes, women were covered by layer after layer of clothing—chemise, drawers, corset, corset cover, and one or more petticoats. Skirts were so long that they merely showed the tip of the shoe. Ladies exposed much of their bosoms for a formal evening on the town, but during the day they wore shirtwaists with high collars. It was considered fashionable for well-dressed women to walk in such a forward-sloping position that they seemed to be falling forward. Gentlemen wore blue serge suits most of the time, and only dudes put on garters. Men’s shoes had tips as sharp as toothpicks. In hot weather, men might remove their jackets in their offices, but never, never were they allowed to take off their vests. To appear hatless, whatever the season of the year, was unthinkable. Men wore derby hats in winter and hard straw hats in summer. Policemen wore long blue overcoats with two rows of nine brass buttons, a hard gray helmet, a leather scabbard holding a nightstick garnished with a fancy blue tassel, and a service revolver. Most cops were Irish, and almost all sported mustaches. Until 1902 they spent eighteen hours a day on patrol duty and then six hours more on reserve in the station house. They got one night off every twenty days—sometimes.
With Tammany in control again, the city was a free and easy place. On March 9, 1900, the New York Times said a Tammany “commission,” consisting of a city official, two state senators, and the dictator of a poolroom syndicate, was raking in $3,095,000 a month in graft from gambling alone. New York had 25,000 prostitutes, and their come-on was: “It costs a dollar, and I’ve got the room.”
Washington and Buffalo were better paved than Manhattan. Vehicular traffic here consisted mainly of hansom cabs, victorias shaped like gravy boats, and closed carriages, called broughams. At busy intersections trolley tracks crisscrossed one another in bewildering patterns. Because of the building boom and the quickening thrust of population toward the north, streets were ripped up much of the time. Manhole explosions were commonplace, and horses and drivers often were hurt by manhole covers hurtling into the air. This was the gaslight era, which reached its peak in 1914.
The social center of the city had advanced from Thirty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue to Forty-ninth Street and Fifth Avenue. Never before had so much private wealth been concentrated in a single street as was on Fifth Avenue. In some of its mansions hostesses could serve dinner for 100 or more guests on a few hours’ notice. India was famished, so it became fashionable to send shiploads of food from New York to the stricken country.
In the winter of 1900 Bernarr MacFadden opened a restaurant, at 487 Pearl Street, where most items sold for one cent. In addition to this penny restaurant, New York had a cafeteria in the basement of the New York Life Building, on Broadway four blocks north of City Hall. At most restaurants a regular dinner cost fifteen cents. Foreign-born laborers bought six rolls for a nickel and munched them on their way to work. In the evening, by paying a nickel for a stein of beer in a saloon, they were entitled to free bread, pickled herring, salami, or hard-boiled eggs. Butter cost nineteen to twenty cents a pound, and oleomargine was available. Macaroni factories were operating in the city. Chop suey had been invented here in 1896, but the dish, unknown in China at the time, was slow to win popularity. Ice cream sundaes, only three years old in 1900, came into favor more quickly than chop suey.
Shortly before the turn of the century New Yorkers became used to seeing automobiles. In 1890 the city granted the first charter to experiment with horseless trucks. By 1895 there were 300 motor vehicles operating in America. The nation’s first automobile accident occurred in New York City on May 30, 1896, when Henry Wells of Springfield, Massachusetts, driving his Duryea motor wagon, collided with a bicycle rider, named Evylyn Thomas. She was taken to Manhattan Hospital with a broken leg. In 1897 electric taxicabs were introduced into the city by the Electric Vehicle Company, whose office and garage were located at 1684 Broadway. At the start of the automobile age no one could tell whether electric batteries or internal-combustion gasoline engines would prove superior. By 1898 there were more than 100 electric taxicabs on the streets of New York. Tires cost $40 apiece. In 1899 cars were banned from Central Park, and those chugging around the rest of the city had to observe a 9-mile-an-hour speed limit and carry a gong.
Jacob German was arrested in 1899 for driving on Lexington Avenue at the “breakneck speed” of twelve miles an hour. The same year America’s first auto fatality occurred when a sixty-eight-year-old real estate broker, named Henry H. Bliss, was knocked down as he stepped off a southbound streetcar at Central Park West and Seventy-fourth Street. Bliss was taken to Roosevelt Hospital, where he died. Automobiles were regarded as a curiosity at first, but when the number of accidents rose, New Yorkers became critical of them. On December 27, 1900, the Tribune said editorially:
A young woman was knocked down and fatally injured by an automobile vehicle while crossing Broadway on Christmas afternoon. She was a trained nurse, and therefore presumably intelligent, prudent, and active. The vehicle was moving rapidly, just how rapidly is not reported. The engineer in charge of it saw the young woman crossing the street and rang the gong in warning. Apparently, however, he did not abate speed of the machine nor attempt to steer it out of the way. He considered his responsibility fully discharged by the ringing of the gong.
Until 1900 almost all cars were custom-made and regarded as playthings of the rich. In that year the entire United States contained only 13,824 automobiles. Probably half the men and women of America had never seen a car. The nation’s first automobile show was held in the old Madison Square Garden in 1900, 51 exhibitors displaying their latest models. Many were electric vehicles. Most were steered by rods, rather than by steering wheels. The show featured starting and stopping contests. Some cars were driven up a wooden ramp within the Garden to demonstrate how they could climb hills.
Some New Yorkers complained about the growing traffic problem. One of the best reporters in American history, Ray Stannard Baker, made this monumentally wrong prediction: “It is hardly possible to conceive the appearance of a crowded wholesale street in the day of the automobile vehicle. In the first place, it will be almost as quiet as a country lane—all the crash of horses’ hoofs and the rumble of steel tires will be gone. And since vehicles will be fewer and shorter than the present truck and span, streets will appear less crowded.”
In 1901 New York State ordered motorists to buy license plates at $1 apiece. The same year the Automobile Club of America, which had a clubhouse at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-eighth Street, sponsored a 464-mile endurance race between New York City and Buffalo. A French car won with an average speed of 15 miles an hour. On November 16, 1901, for the first time in American history, an auto exceeded the speed of a mile a minute in a race held by the Long Island Automobile Club on Brooklyn’s Ocean Parkway. Within minutes, however, the speed record was broken.
The city’s first traffic regulations for automobiles went into effect in 1903. Because the traffic situation worsened, the next year the state passed a law holding cars to a maximum speed of ten miles an hour in congested areas of the city. In 1905 the Fifth Avenue Coach Company introduced a twenty-four-passenger double-decked bus imported from France. The following year an automobile row began to develop along Broadway in the upper Fifties. In 1906 Woodrow Wilson, the president of Princeton University, said that “nothing has spread socialistic feelings in this country more than the use of the automobile” which represented “to the countryman. . . a picture of arrogance of wealth, with all its independence and carelessness.” The Fifth Avenue line was so pleased with its French buses that it bought more of them and on July 30, 1907, removed the last of its horse stages from Fifth Avenue. Taximeter cabs made their first appearance in New York on October 1, 1907.
According to a traffic study made here in 1907, horse-drawn vehicles moved at an average speed of 11.5 miles an hour. (In 1966, during the daytime, automobiles crawled through Manhattan’s central business district at an average speed of 8½ miles an hour.) The nation’s first electric traffic signals were installed in Cleveland in 1914. New York City didn’t get its first traffic towers until 1922, and by then the city was well along its way toward the automobile congestion that remains one of its most pressing problems.
London opened the world’s first subway system in 1863. Ten years later Abram S. Hewitt made a speech in Cooper Union calling for city ownership of all New York’s rapid transit lines. A bill to this effect was soon introduced into the state legislature, but it was voted down. In 1877 cars hanging from an overhead rail were tried out in Brooklyn, only to prove unsuccessful. Elevated trains began crossing the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883. Three years later elevated roads carried 1,000,000 passengers a day and could hold no more. Rapid transit? It was a joke. Newspapers crusaded against indecent and inhuman congestion. Every seat was taken, and standees held onto leather straps and swayed and swore in the aisles. Pointing out that passenger traffic once again had outstripped all means of conveyance, the World asked, “Who will be die Moses to lead us through this wilderness of uncertainty?” Abram Hewitt seemed to be the man. He became mayor of New York in 1887. Appealing to the state legislature to study the problem further, Hewitt said, “The existing railroads have practically reached the limit of their capacity. Besides, though operated with great care and ability, they are not in reality satisfactory to any class of the community.”
Cable cars, a form of transit inaugurated in San Francisco in 1873, had begun running in New York by 1885. The first local cable car rattled along 125th Street. It was drawn by a moving cable housed in a slot below street level; contact was established by a gripman standing in the front vestibule of the car. But soon the Tribune was crying that “the cable car is a Juggernaut, a murderer on wheels, a maimer of men and a destroyer of women and children.”
Mayor Hewitt addressed the railway committee of the state senate and assembly on March 29, 1888. He urged that New York City be given the legal right to build its own subway system. His ideas were written into a bill introduced into the legislature, but the measure wasn’t even reported out of committee. Neither Democratic nor Republican political bosses wanted a transit system rivaling the horse-cars and elevateds in which they held a vested interest.
The mayor, the Chamber of Commerce, and others continued to agitate for a subway, and in 1891 the state passed a rapid transit act. This called for the creation of a board consisting of the mayor, city comptroller, and the city commissioner of public works. They could hold public hearings, listen to proposals, and then draft a plan for construction of a subway system. On October 21, 1891, city aldermen approved plans for an underground railway. Despite this, several powerful persons balked. Jay Gould, who partially controlled the elevated lines, was against it. Russell Sage, one of Gould’s business associates, said contemptuously: “New York people will never go into a hole in the ground to ride. . . . Preposterous!” Chauncey M. De-pew, president of the New York Central, warned that if New Yorkers used subways, they would develop claustrophobia. The Metropolitan Street Railway Company, undisputed master of surface transportation in Manhattan and the Bronx, fought its potential rival.
The city announced that it would accept bids for construction of the subway, but nothing happened; contractors were afraid to enter bids and begin construction because subway opponents might interrupt the work with lawsuits. In 1894 the state legislature created another rapid transit board, and in an election a majority of New Yorkers declared that they favored municipal ownership of subways. Over the next several decades the city built the subway system; then private companies took them over, but eventually the city got them back again.
In 1897 Boston became the first American city to inaugurate an underground railroad. The next year, while plans were being drafted for New York’s subway, Harper’s Weekly reported that the number of people commuting daily to Manhattan was greater than the total population of Cincinnati. About 100,000 commuters arrived by bridge and ferry from Brooklyn, another 100,000 or more came by ferry from New Jersey, and more than 118,000 arrived daily at the overcrowded Grand Central Station from Westchester County and from Connecticut. By 1900 New Yorkers were riding the city’s streetcars—a billion times a year—or trying to. The same year an underground railway opened in Paris.
In New York a contractor, named John B. McDonald, wrote optimistically that “surface travel will be an oddity twenty years from now.” McDonald wanted to build the subway. He had gained experience constructing tunnels in Baltimore for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. In February, 1900, he signed the first New York subway contract. For $35,000,000 McDonald agreed to build, equip, and operate the road for 50 years. He was a member of Tammany Hall and a close friend of Andrew Freedman, one of Boss Croker’s financial partners. Since New Yorkers had voted for a subway system, Croker and his colleagues decided to profit from the inevitable by helping McDonald get the contract; they hoped that this would result in fat subcontracts for themselves. They also schemed to put thousands of Tammany voters on the payroll as day laborers.
But for all of McDonald’s ability and political connections he didn’t have enough money to swing this deal. To his aid came August Belmont II, who had succeeded his father as head of the banking firm of August Belmont & Company, and had retained close business relations with the Rothschild family. Belmont became president of the Rapid Transit Subway Construction Company, and Rothschild money poured into the project. On March 24, 1900, ground was broken for the subway in front of City Hall.
Twelve thousand laborers began tunneling through the earth. Most were Italian, Polish, and Irish, but among these brawny workers was a frail poet, named Edwin Arlington Robinson. Maine-born Robinson spent two years at Harvard and moved to New York in 1899. Slender and erect, with good breeding visible in every line of his scholar’s face and his small mouth solemn and set, he peered through prim spectacles with burning brown eyes. So neurotically sensitive that he called himself “a man without a skin,” Robinson smiled a twisted Yankee smile and admitted that “the world frightens me.” When he arrived here, the only money he had earned up to then from poetry had been seven dollars for a sonnet praising Edgar Allan Poe. Threadbare and desperate, the shy New Englander took a job underground at twenty cents an hour for a ten-hour working day. Later his poems won him three Pulitzer prizes.
Robinson checked the loads of stones removed from the growing tunnels. By 1900 Governors Island had dwindled from 170 acres during the Dutch era to a mere 70 acres because of erosion by waves. Soil and stones dug from the ground were carted and barged to the island to enlarge it. Commuters saw this tangible evidence of a new kind of transportation and gave silent thanks. The subway’s popularity was reflected in an advertisement declaring that Abbey’s Effervescent Salt was “The Rapid Transit to Health.”
In 1901, while the subway was still under construction, horses were taken off streetcars, which converted to electricity. This was a mere stopgap measure, and soon the electric streetcar became a menace. So fast and confusing were Brooklyn’s trolley cars that harried Brooklynites dubbed themselves the Trolley Dodgers. A local baseball team, known successively as the Superbas, Kings, and Bridegrooms, ultimately became the Brooklyn Dodgers.
The first leg of the city’s first subway went into operation for the first time on Thursday, October 27, 1904. The weather was crisp. The official ceremony began at 1 P.M. in the aldermanic chamber of City Hall. The city’s new mayor was George B. McClellan, Jr., whose father had been one of Lincoln’s generals and his Democratic rival for the Presidency. Thirty-nine-year-old McClellan was a scholar and author with a handsome, narrow, clean-shaven face. That great day a wearisome series of speeches was made. After the benediction had been pronounced, August Belmont gave the mayor a mahogany case containing a silver throttle. Taking out the throttle and waving it aloft, McClellan cried, “I now, as mayor, in the name of the people, declare the subway open.” Then, donning a shiny silk topper and a chesterfield coat, McClelland led the procession out of City Hall.
Followed by other city fathers, Belmont, McDonald, and more than 200 whiskered and mustached Wall Street financiers, the mayor walked into a subway kiosk and down into the City Hall station. This was the southern terminus of the line. Standing in the station was the first train, 5 wooden cars sheathed in copper, their tops painted a flaming red. Each car seated 56 passengers. The front car, named the Belmont, had no doors on its sides. The celebrities had to board it via a door at the end. The mayor entered the motorman’s closet and fitted the silver throttle into place. Photographers snapped pictures of him standing rigid and frozen-faced. McClellan had never operated any kind of train.
At 2:35 P.M. a cannon boomed in City Hall Park, whistles blew, bells rang, and the celebrity-packed train began to move. It headed north under Broadway, continued up 4th Avenue to Grand Central Station, turned west to Times Square, and then followed upper Broadway toward 145th Street. With McClellan still at the throttle, the train hit a top speed of about 45 miles an hour. The distance of 9.1 miles between City Hall and 145th Street was traveled in 26 minutes—exactly on schedule.
At seven o’clock that evening any and all New Yorkers were allowed to make this exciting trip. Tickets cost five cents each. A World reporter wrote: “Men fought, kicked and pummeled one another in their mad desire to reach the subway ticket office or to ride on the trains. Women were dragged out, either screaming in hysterics or in a swooning condition; gray-haired men pleaded for mercy, boys were knocked down and only escaped by a miracle from being trampled under foot. . . .”
Times Square became so congested with people that it looked like New Year’s Eve. At the 145th Street subway station policemen struggled to control the throngs. During the confusion a passenger had his $500 diamond stickpin stolen; it was the city’s first subway crime. The first day a total of 111,000 people rode the new rails. Friday it was 319,000; Saturday, 350,000.
Because this single line of die Interborough Rapid Transit Company was far from sufficient to solve the commutation problem, in the next few years ever more subway tracks pronged through the bowels of New York. In time the city’s subway system developed into the most heavily traveled passenger railroad in the world.