Original subtitles

the city presents in microcosm all the contrast of our modern life its worst

and its best aspects

here are the broad avenues and here the fetid streets whose

festering filth pollutes the atmosphere

here palaces on which self-extravagance has lavished

every artifice for luxury and display and here tenements

where in defiance of every law moral and sanitary men women and children are crowded

together like maggots and a cheese

here are the noblest men and women putting forth the most consecrated

energies in self-sacrificing labors for the redemption of their fellow men

appalled but not discouraged by the immensity of the problem which confronts them

and here the most hopeless specimens of degraded humanity

in whom so far as human sight can see the last spark of divinity has been

quenched forever

what shall we do with our great cities

what will our great cities do with us

these are the two problems which confront every thoughtful american the reverend lyman abbott

plymouth church brooklyn new york

when one is inclined to despair of the country let him go to the central park on a saturday

and spend a few hours there looking at the people not those who come in gorgeous carriages

but those who arrive on foot or in those exceedingly democratic conveyances

the streetcars new york herald

in the summer of 1865 as four long years of civil war came to an end

frederick law olmsted returned to new york and resumed work on the great

park he had begun eight years before one of his first acts was to commission

a special memorial to the union naval dead eight years later the statue was complete

rising above the bethesda fountain at the very heart of the park

and the restless city already growing up around it the artist had set a simple bronze

figure the angel of the waters drawn from the gospel of saint john symbol of the healing power

of nature

i think that angel is the most beautiful angel on earth i mean it's a it is a very american angel

i think she has a very homespun quality her dress is not completely full length

it sort of stops at her ankles in fact i think at ms stebbins the woman who sculpted her

got a lot of bad reviews when when the statue was unveiled because the

critics who were always wrong about everything said well she looks like a milkmaid

and not this is not a grand beautiful angel this is a kind of a lumpy

peasant girl angel and i think that that's true to a certain extent and

part of what makes her exquisite i love her her this this gesture as if

she's reaching out and touching something um incredibly specific and incredibly precious

and within reach

ordinary new yorkers took to the angel at once in the years to come central park would

finally become the great democratic meeting ground olmsted and vox had always dreamed of if

not always in ways they had envisioned as new elevated railways soon brought poor new yorkers

as well as rich up on weekends and carried the city itself northward

in new residential districts that soon flanked the park less than a decade after the war more

than eight and a half million people a year were escaping the noise and tumult of the city streets

and plunging into central park which had become the new york times declared a majestic

breathing space for the life of the city

here are all classes represented with common purpose

competitive with none disposing of jealousy toward none each adding by his mere presence to the

pleasure of all the others you may often see vast numbers of persons brought closely together

poor and rich young and old jew and gentile

is it doubtful that it does mean good to come together in this way

in pure air and under the light of heaven

frederick law olmsted it's an amazing thing to go there on an

afternoon and see people of all classes and races in this public square this

great public square which is what it is mingling and having fun and relaxing

together that just the experience of doing things together like that creates a common bond

a common identity a common sense of the city central park is really the thing that

makes life in new york possible new york's not a practical proposition

without central park and i think that you get that sense of juxtaposition

that you're really in a wild place and then you can look around you

and you're completely surrounded by skyscrapers office buildings

and no other city in the world i don't think would allow that much of the most

expensive acreage in the world to remain parkland

inscribed in central park was an extraordinary vision of what a great democratic city could be

yet beyond its borders tremendous tensions and conflicts

remained by 1870 the park itself had become deeply

embroiled in a bitter debate over who controlled the city's future middle class reformers

robber barons and financiers tammany hall officials

or the people themselves

in the decades to come as the forces unleashed by the civil war

brought a stunning new scale to the city and country new york would become one of the most

eerily divided places on earth caught between an insatiable greed for money and wealth

and a yearning for something higher the second half the 19th century or the

decades after the civil war do witness major change in the city first of all it

becomes a true metropolis it has a million people by 1860 and 5 million by the end of the century so

the sheer size of the city now is world-class so the problems it's encountering in terms of disease

in terms of police protection in terms of fire it's encountering as really as soon as

any other city in the on the planet

between 1865 and 1898 new york would become home to the greatest concentration of wealth

in human history it would also become home to the greatest concentration of poverty

and to the greatest divisions of rich and poor

not one city but two one dazzling and one benighted one prosperous

and one poor one city of sunshine and another of shadow

there was appalling misery in new york terrible crowding terrible slums all

kinds of disease crime prostitution children sleeping in the streets children begging

in the streets it was crowded it was dirty it smelled terrible much of it traffic was

worse than it is today if that's possible to imagine i think that that we've tended to forget

or we've perhaps ignored or not paid enough attention to how desperate life was for so many

hundreds of thousands millions of people in new york in this period um i think that

an enormous number of people especially people living in tenements

lived in life-threatening situations poverty in those days was conceived as

something that was a personal problem if you were poor the reason

probably had something to do with you know some character flaw something that was wrong with you

the opportunity to attain great wealth is within the reach of almost

every man and woman let us remember there is not a poor person in the united

states who was not made poor by his own shortcomings

it is all wrong to be poor anyhow the reverend russell h conwell

before the 19th century came to an end new yorkers would be forced to face the

most perplexing conundrum of the industrial age where material progress is most fully realized

one reformer wrote in despair there

we find the deepest poverty

pre-civil war new york was provincial pre-civil war new york was a place that you

the dickens's and the mrs trollops and so forth came and trolled up himself

came to see you know how the natives supported themselves pre-civil war new york was still in

english province in an amazingly um basic way post-civil war new york

new york was new york new york was america new york was the representation to the world and to

itself of what america was like what its difference the power and might of america

between the end of the civil war and the start of world war one great new

wealth was created in the city of unprecedented scale but it wasn't just that there was

great wealth what's so important to understand too is that the wealth was being created by new ideas

new processes a whole new kind of america with the telegraph with the advent of cheap steel

with the discovery of oil and this new money coming from new ways of

making money was creating a new city in new york because it was the point at which

all these curves all these traffic patterns were converging more than any place else

in america new york city had won the civil war supercharged by the demands of the four

year long struggle the city's industrial machine had simply exploded

making new york the undisputed financial clearinghouse of the nation

and the richest city in america the new york stock exchange operating

out of its mammoth new headquarters at broad street and wall

was soon trading more than three and a half billion dollars a year

the light of mammon one visitor reported gleams on every face in broadway and wall street

the civil war in in america marks the watershed between the mercantile world or agricultural world

and capitalism the industrial age the industrial age in a big way the age of machines

the age where fortunes are made by dominating a natural product

you define the fortunes of people in new york after the civil war in terms of

a resource oil coal or something that also needs huge capitals

something like a railroad as the age of ships gave way to the age of rail and steam

seventy-five-year-old cornelius vanderbilt sold his vast shipping empire and

reinvested in railroads ruthlessly consolidating 17 smaller lines to form a single giant system

the new york central an eccentric autocrat utterly indifferent to public opinion

vanderbilt traveled everywhere he could in his own crimson and gold railroad car

routinely terrorized his competitors and rarely gave to charity

on principle let others do what i have done he said and they need not be around here begging

new york city was based upon greed and based upon making money cornelius founded both the commodore

that what a wonderful pirate he was he never had a thought in his head except to make money

a strange craziness is abroad in the land some mysterious spirit of evil has led

our people into the blindest wildest infatuation wild and foolish speculation

at least half the people are living beyond their means the round table 1866

wall street exploded in a frenzy of reckless unregulated and often unprincipled speculation

there were no rules all bets were off you could do whatever you want

so people made the most outrageous efforts at basically boarding and

seizing corporations and using them as as play things you know printing

stock secretly in the basement and selling it to people until it was worthless rigging the

market trying to buy up all the silver and all the gold there was an attempt to

corner the nation's gold supply and then be in a position to make enormous profits

that had zero ethical basis and zero fallout for the larger economy

in 1869 a dapper but corrupt financial genius named jay gould and his partner

jim fisk a flamboyant financier and ladies man tried to corner the market in gold using

money they had personally embezzled from the stockholders of the erie railroad

the genuine aristocracy of the city stands stunned and helpless under the new order of things

they find themselves supplanted by upstart princes of

shoddy they move into remote new streets uptown and talk feelingly of the crash which is

to come when the props are knocked from under this flimsy edifice of prosperity

mark twain the thinkers of america

the intellectuals of america uniformly were in despair at that moment they were

saying that america had taken a wrong turn and that we had saved the union but the union had then

really been given to the carpet bankers to the people who would

the new rich who had made money out of the civil war enormous fortunes being

made out of the civil war these new people were not the people that that

our thinkers had hoped were going to emerge from this fratricidal monstrous thing

instead of which it was vulgar aggressive and it was jim fisk it was gould it was it was the worst

elements it would suddenly come to the top

and still the boom went on powered by the surge of investment on wall street

the same steam and steel revolution unifying the continent now began transforming the city itself

in less than a decade four elevated railroad lines stretched the length of the island and

the upper east side and upper west side had exploded in a frenzy of construction

as block after block was filled with working-class tenements and middle-class row houses

once transit lines had followed patterns of growth now they helped create them put the road

there commodore vanderbilt declared and people will go there to live

year after year isolated farmland in the far-flung bronx along with hamlets in queens and staten

island began to be pulled into the orbit of the rapidly growing metropolis

it's the absolute south of new york which becomes so impressive in the second half to 19th century

the southern part of the bronx which is then part of westchester county

so that the bronx is beginning to explode in population all of upper manhattan that area around

central park which was empty at the time of the civil war by 1900 it's all filled up

brooklyn for example expands from being what is arguably the first suburb in the

world or certainly the united states until by the end of the century it's the

third largest city in the united states that's incredible growth march 18

1865 crossed at wall street ferry and explored sundry new districts in

brooklyn i hereby prophesy that in 1900 a.d

brooklyn will be the city and new york will be the suburb it is inevitable if both go on growing

as they have grown in the last 40 years brooklyn has room to spread

and new york has not george templeton strong

year after year new york hurdled blindly into the future with scarcely a thought for what was

being left behind

for more than 200 years a venerable pear tree had stood at the corner of third avenue

and 13th street where peter stuyvesant himself had planted it back in 1667.

now in the winter of 1867 the coldest in living memory the battle-scarred veteran of

innumerable encounters with the lorries and wagons of lower manhattan

succumbed to the ravages of time and the weather and was pulled down

the last living connection to the old dutch settlement was gone

new york is notoriously the largest and least loved of any of our great cities

why should it be loved as a city it is never the same city for a dozen

years altogether a man born 40 years ago finds nothing

absolutely nothing of the new york he knew

if he chances to stumble upon a few old houses not yet leveled he is fortunate

but the landmarks the objects which marked the city to him as a city

are gone harper's monthly

on the morning of january 23 1867 the citizens of new york and brooklyn

awoke to an extraordinary site during the night the east river had frozen over solid

locking the ferries in ice bringing traffic in the harbor to a standstill and crippling commerce

between the two cities for weeks for years people had been dreaming of a

structure that could span the turbulent river a gigantic bridge that would unite the two cities

and free transportation from the tyranny of the weather now something everyone agreed had to be

done before the ice had thawed that spring the new york bridge company

had been incorporated and charged with the task of finding someone capable of building

such a structure they built the bridge because they saw new york city running out of space

manhattan island was finite there was just so much of it and it was filling up fast but brooklyn

it seemed could expand endlessly out onto long island therefore the bridge was built

not to get to new york but to get to brooklyn and it was seen as a way of having the city expand

into that open space in brooklyn because nobody had yet imagined a city

growing upward instead of out the very thing that made the bridge so

crucial made it all but impossible to build the east river was the busiest stretch

of water in the world filled with ferries steamers clipper ships

and launches if there is to be a bridge one skeptic wrote it must take one grand flying leap

from shore to shore over the masts of ships there can be no piers or drawbridge

there must be only one great arch all the way across

there was probably only one man in the world who could build such a structure

an intense enigmatic 61 year old german-born engineer and inventor named john augustus roebling

who had already made a fortune pioneering the manufacture of wire rope

now with his son washington a former colonel in the army corps of engineers

roebling drew up plans for a structure far larger than anything ever before attempted

its central span would be 1 600 feet long half again as long as any bridge in

existence and its towers 275 feet tall seven times higher

than the four-story skyline of manhattan

by the summer of 1869 work on the giant enterprise had begun john robling himself was surveying the

foundation for the brooklyn tower on the morning of june 28th when a fairy

rammed the pier he was standing on crushing his right foot

tetanus set in then lockjaw and after three weeks of agony he died

leaving responsibility for the most ambitious engineering project of the 19th century

on the shoulders of his 32 year old son washington

in the end it would prove far more difficult and take far longer than anyone could have imagined

before it was over the twin cities washington roebling hoped it would connect

would have to descend into a maelstrom of political and financial chaos and rise again

america is known as a country of of enthusiasm and optimism

of a can-do spirit of engineering new york was built on this can-do spirit of engineering

but new york is also a place of corruption and so it's a place where people know that sometimes

the bureaucracy will let you down that you have to grease somebody's palm

so there's a different relationship to venality to mall iniquity more of an acceptance of it

that this is what people are like you know they're not perfect

they're not angelic to be a citizen of new york is a disgrace the new yorker belongs to

a community worse governed by lower and baser blackguard scum

than any city in western christendom george templeton strong

in the summer of 1871 as work on the brooklyn bridge began new york city exploded in the biggest

political scandal of its history at the center of the storm stood another

structure only a hundred yards away from the new york entrance to the bridge

an unfinished stone courthouse that by was entering its 12th year of

construction with no end in sight the revelations about to emerge from it

would show how politics worked in the sprawling commercial metropolis

they would also immortalize one man above all as the most corrupt urban

politician in american history boss william m tweed if new york was going to have corruption

if new york was going to have a corrupt politician it was going to have the biggest and most corrupt

of anybody and he was new he was a new kind of corrupt politician that too is part of it

boss tweet the name the name is associated with purely bad things now the tammany

organization really was one of those local shady organizations that also did do a

lot of good things for the people they were supposed to be representing

for years a new kind of political organization had been rising from the

streets of the lower east side it was called tammany hall and the men

who ran it had few illusions no ideology and no ideals what they had was a shrewd grasp of the

new political opportunities in the sprawling city of immigrants

reaching out to new york's despised and downtrodden irish and german newcomers

tammany alone offered them comfort and a voice in the system knowing that on election day they would

reap the gratitude of the new voters people who are just off the boat

who are looking to make a weight in the world tammany provided them

with you know an awful lot of real services in these days when so many people needed help

your kid's in trouble with the law or your child's not doing well in school

you can't pay the rent your husband's out of work or your husband has just died

you're about to be evicted you're looking for a job you know any of these kinds of things

require the intervention of someone and for an awful lot of people

that someone or something was tammany or the local tammany leader

nothing was as famous as tammany hall no american political figure has ever been

quite as famous or as infamous as boss tweed

but we need to remember why it was that the political machine had such

attraction to these immigrants an ex-fireman and one-time chairmaker from the lower east side

there had never been anyone quite like william m tweed over six feet tall and nearly 300 pounds

he was surprisingly nimble and graceful on his feet caricatured by his republican opponents

as a vulgar hard-drinking irishman he was in fact a fourth generation scots protestant

unfailingly courteous and nearly t total he was also a superb politician who took

care of his mainly immigrant constituency providing jobs for the unemployed cold in winter

and orphanages hospitals and shelters for the poor he was one of the first people for who

saw the power of mass politics in the cities and for all his thievery there was the

recognition of mobilizing this mass of people to some political end

um i think he'd be he's not remembered for that he's remembered for

the 50 million dollars that he stole which if he wanted to get the equivalent

today multiplied times 10. accelerating new york's already explosive growth still further

tweed and his associates brazenly siphoned off staggering sums from the

hundreds of city projects under their control and helped robber barons like jay gould and jim fisk

make off with still more there were lucrative contracts for grateful builders

who happily paid tammany's leaders enormous cash kickbacks to get them there were thousands of jobs

for tammany's loyal constituents who gratefully voted tammany's leaders back in power

new york's upper classes meanwhile professed to be appalled but quietly looked the other way as real

estate values in the city skyrocketed it all worked like a machine

a political machine and no one knew how that machine worked better

than william tweed who by 1870 had concentrated more power in himself

than anyone in the city's history it was twee to help maneuver the

money through the city council or the board of aldermen as well then was

for the brooklyn bridge for central park for a lot of the road repair and the the

creation of streets and avenues in uptown manhattan now he made a lot of money with that

and it was absolutely corrupt tweed's first position was commissioner public

works he was no fool and if you know where the sewer lines are going to go and if you know where

the new street extensions are going to be opened up and you get there first and

you buy up that territory all you got to do is sit back wait and boom

the price explodes so tweed in fact became one of the largest real estate

owners in the city i think there was something in him some overpowering appetite that he could

he could never slake he couldn't have one mistress he had to have two he couldn't have

one roast beef he had to have four you know and he couldn't have

two judges he had to have them all you know and finally he caught up with him and destroyed him

in 1870 as newspaper editors and indignant reformers began questioning where tweed's lavish

lifestyle came from all eyes turned to the still unfinished county courthouse on chambers

street a special project of tweeds begun in 1858

it was supposed to have cost 350 000 12 years later the price tag had reached 13 million

and kept right on rising somewhere in this one building which is actually quite a nice building

um end up costing worth the entire houses of parliament well you know

the deal is straightforward you you want to buy a lot of chairs how much does that chair cost

let's say five dollars no it says tweet you don't mean five dollars you mean fifty dollars

i do all right and you know giving the chair 50 you know 20 back for you and so forth

even the most worldly new yorkers knew that something had to be done

people begin to tire of holding their noses george templeton strong wrote

and are looking about in a helpless way for some remedy

no khalif khan or caesar has risen to power or opulence more rapidly than tweed the first

ten years ago this monarch was pursuing the humble occupation of a chairmaker he now rules the state

as napoleon ruled france there is absolutely nothing nothing in the city which is beyond the

reach of the insatiable gang who have obtained possession of it the new york times

in 1869 a german-born artist named thomas nast with close ties to the republican party

began publishing a series of political cartoons in harper's weekly week after week nast relentlessly

excoriated what he called the tammany hall ring there was peter brains

sweeney the city treasurer mayor abraham oakey hall tweed's puppet in city hall richard

slippery dick conley the comptroller and boss tweed himself whom nast depicted as a licentious

molding overfed monster literally devouring the city i don't care a straw for newspaper

articles tweed declared my constituents don't know how to read

but they can't help seeing them damned pictures he was the object of one of the most successful

campaigns by a political cartoonist in history thomas nast really did the most

extraordinary job of attacking tweed and exposing the tweed ring in harper's weekly

those pictures will live forever the way you can never separate

nixon from woodward and bernstein you can't separate tweed from thomas nest

they're wed together for the rest of history i guess

on july 8 1871 the new york times joined the fray publishing excerpts from secret

courthouse records obtained from a disgruntled city official

tweed had cheated out of thousands of dollars in kickbacks the figures were astonishing eleven

thermometers had been purchased for seven thousand five hundred dollars

dust brooms for forty one 000 one contractor had been paid five and a half million dollars

for window shades carpets and furniture it would never be clear how much tweed's

corruption had been exaggerated by the press the new york times put the final tally

at almost 200 million dollars but in the end it didn't matter

new york needed a villain equal in scale to its giant park and giant bridge and tweed fit the bill

in part because he simply looked the part

he ended up a sad tragic figure because he basically took the fall for a system

and the system involved the bankers the so-called respectable people

the the ghouls and fisks and all those guys who were not really indicted for the things that

tweed ended up doing taking the fall for

on december 15 1871 boss tweed was indicted on three counts of fraud

and grand larceny and two months later 220 misdemeanor charges

he was sentenced to 12 years in prison and though the convictions were later overturned

a civil suit stripped him of his assets and forced him into prison

gaunt and ailing he eked out his last years in jail

in the winter of 1875 he somehow slipped past his guards and escaped to spain

but he was quickly recaptured and returned to prison the spanish police it was later said had

recognized him from one of thomas nest's cartoons

on april 12 1878 he died of pneumonia in his cell in the ludlow street jail he himself had built

penniless and broken

he gets a lot of the blame probably that belongs to a lot more people

um a lot more people who we think of as legitimate politicians

there are other bosses that had a smoother style i think part of the

reason that people remember boss tweet so much was that he was so flamboyant and by the time his

downfall he was such a leftover from another age

a villain of more brains would have had a modest dwelling and guzzled in secret his successes here

will not imitate him in this but that he will have successors

there is no doubt

let us remember that he fell without loss of reputation among the bulk of poor voters of this

city who revere his memory and look on him as the victim of rich man's malice

as in short a friend to the needy and the working man harper's weekly

lost in the uproar of tweed's downfall where the needs of new york's desperate immigrant poor

which tammany alone had been addressing however imperfectly though some steps had been taken to

alleviate the worst suffering amongst the poor the ceaseless influx of new immigrants into new york

continued to outstrip the city's social services

in the wake of the tweed scandal even walt whitman's vision of the city's democratic promise

began to darken the spectacle

is appalling the official services of america are saturated

in corruption bribery falsehood mal administration the great cities wreak

with respectable as much as non-respectable robbery

and scoundrelism walt whitman

new york was not in my opinion coping with the problems of the new industrial order

but it was going to start coping with them because in 1873 al smith was born al smith's

grandparents had come to new york in 1841 and they had come to a wharf near the

bottom of the brooklyn bridge with a westmeath line docked and had taken rooms

in a rooming house they're a tenement they're just because they were too tired to walk

any further by the time smith was born in 1873 the irish

sections of new york was a wilderness of tenements stretching away

from the brooklyn bridge that was the heart of the tammany machine

alfred emmanuel smith al smith one of the most beloved figures in the

history of new york politics grew up on south street playing along the waterfront

among the maze of masts bow sprints and rigging his father a genial self-employed

teamster with a big booming voice regularly put in 15 hours a day six days a week

hauling cargo around the waterfront fiercely proud of being able to keep his family

above the poverty level from the windows of his family's third

floor apartment the boy liked to watch the sweeping expanse of the east river

the traffic of horses and people on south street and especially the gigantic bridge that

was slowly filling the sky above the harbor the bridge and i

grew up together i've never lost the memory of the admiration and envy i felt

for the men swarming up stringing the cables putting in the roadways as the bridge took

shape al smith one winter sunday smith and his father

stole into the construction site and walked across the rough wooden planking of the unfinished span

for years afterward his father liked to say that he and his boy

had been the first new yorkers ever to use the brooklyn bridge

by the time smith was born the future of new york city was beginning to emerge

on the crowded streets and wards of the lower east side where immigrants by the thousands

continued to pour in looking for a chance to start over

the port culture of lower manhattan was a place in which the boundaries between one community and

the next were not tightly drawn in fact they really didn't exist in

the way i think we tend to think of them in terms of segregated ethnic enclaves in which you had

african-americans mingling with irish mingling with bowery boys mingling with women of

various kinds it was irish it was chinese people were learning about each other's

cultures there was intermarriage going on there were people living together

and point of fact all these different people were living in the same area intermingling and

having contact with each other and that's what made the downtown

cosmopolitanism that downtown everyday mixing so unusual

it was an amazingly porous and fluid process in many ways an unprecedented

mingling of people not only from europe obviously but people from all parts of the world

and it's that kind of juxtaposition that i think made that this particular

port culture so rich and so so diverse watching african americans and irish

immigrants dancing and mimicking and parodying each other in minstrel shows along the bowery

walt whitman predicted it would one day give rise to a native grand opera in america

in the years to come as al smith rose through the ranks of the tammany machine

to become one of the most powerful politicians in the city he would never forget the place he grew

up or the people he had known there

once this place begins to really be working within the rhythms of a global

and national capitalist economy you get these kind of oscillating rhythms

the city grows in surges it grows in spurts there's a boom and then there's a crash

there's a sense of optimism a buoyancy of building often of corruption

also wild speculation also of luxury and extravagance and such

and then crash the worst financial crisis of the 19th century

struck in the fall of 1873 like a cyclone a young banker named jp morgan

remembered which came upon us without an hour's warning wild competition and reckless

overbuilding on the nation's railroads had already strained wall street's

financial markets to the limit when in early september the northern pacific line went under

bringing down with it the largest private bank in the nation

september 19th 1873 panic grows on wall street

the hubbub multiplies and indications are greater than any crisis since 1857

many notable speculators have suspended among them

fisk and hash reputed impregnably strong

all this may be a mere flurry or maybe

much more george templeton strong

the next day september 20th 1873 with the entire market in free fall the new york stock

exchange closed the trading floor for the first time in its 81 year history

hoping to stem the tide it didn't work

october 27 1873 wall street continues in feverish nervous malays

faith in financial agents is gone factories and employers throughout the

country are discharging hands

working half time or reducing wages

october 29th prospects for the coming winter look darker and darker

george templeton strong the panic of 73 is just a panic but over the next four or five years you

had a whopping depression it was then known as the great depression

credit seizes up bankers are not willing to make loans to factory owners factory owners don't have

money they lay off their employees their employees have no income they can't buy goods demand

goes down demand goes down other factories start laying off workers

and you get in this tremendous downward crunch private associations

were called upon and were overwhelmed in the depression of 1873 as well i mean they really

didn't have the wherewithal to respond to the to the enormous need and in an immigrant neighborhood

where people are still just getting on their feet without all of the deep roots that you need to

survive a huge storm it was particularly hard hit

the homeless population ballooned and in those days police stations would open their

basements and these basements vermin cupboard were crammed with people

seeking shelter some people even talked about building houses in central park and elsewhere

for the people who had no shelter but there was also in fact protests and

in 1874 for instance they rallied in tompkins square park and

with a series of demands that the city should help out the victims of this

downside of the business cycle the city's response was to send the police on horseback

into tompkins square batons flailing and these people were were you know sort of dispersed

and driven out one bleak february morning as the depression stretched into its fourth year

a curious sculpture the giant amputated hand of a woman appeared on the west side of madison

square part of a towering statue the french hoped to present as a gift

to the american people if new yorkers would simply pay for the pedestal

but new yorkers refused no true patriot the new york times declared

can support expenditures for a bronze female in the present state of our finances

for five years the huge upraised hand stood on fifth avenue an embarrassment one newspaper

complained to nursemaids and mothers unable to explain to their young charges

what the surreal sculpture with its eight foot index finger and twelve inch nails was doing there

down along the east river meanwhile work on the brooklyn bridge ground on

with no end in sight battered by financial troubles strikes political corruption and a

series of nightmarish accidents for seven years washington roebling had

struggled to keep the immense project on track without the aid of his father

supervising work on the foundations deep beneath the riverbed the chief engineer himself had been

stricken by a mysterious new affliction called caisson's disease or the bends

and hadn't been seen at the site for years

but still the work went on roebling monitoring progress through binoculars from his bedroom

window and relaying instructions to the construction site through his wife emily

who had taken over day-to-day supervision of the project slowly the goldstone towers rose above

the troubled metropolis bringing an entirely new scale to the two cities

rising above the rooftops like visitors from another planet

the 120 million pound structures were the most massive man-made objects

on the north american continent

on a cold windy morning in january 1876 in the very heart of the depression a

photographer named joshua beal wrestled his cumbersome equipment up 30 flights of stairs

then stepped out onto an open platform atop the recently completed brooklyn tower

and set to work carefully exposing five glass plate negatives

to form a single giant photograph more than seven feet long the breathtaking

panoramic image showed new yorkers the city as they had never seen it before

a city that had grown too vast to be grasped or understood

in conventional terms no longer simply a city

but a teeming unknowable metropolis far as the eye can reach it stretches

away this is not even a city in the sense in which we understand the word

seen from here it is so colossal it encloses so formidable an

accumulation of human efforts

as to overpass the bounds of imagination

though few people could see it the panic of 1873 and the terrible depression that

followed had set the stage for one of the most dramatic transformations in the

history of american capitalism to a startling degree it would be driven by one man

an imperious 38 year old wall street banker who by 1876 was on his way to becoming

one of the most powerful men in america his name was john pierpont morgan and as

new york lay sunk in the depths of depression he had begun to mastermind the rebirth

of the entire american economy he had first arrived in the 1860s when it was um

really the wild and wooly days of wall street and you could get away with almost

anything and he wanted to bring order to it because he realized you couldn't have a

very successful market unless people knew what the rules were and the rules were enforced

he loved the rules he loved to play solitaire i mean this is a real window into morgan's um psyche

i mean he loved to create order using the rules of the game out of the chaos created by the shuffle

and that's what he wanted to do on wall street and the railroads he was colossally arrogant he

had tremendous drive and conviction that came from precisely believing that he was a force

of of history that he was in tune with these new higher evolutionary

trends and acting for some larger good um he was terrifying i mean he had these great eyes

edward steichen caught him in a famous photograph that sort of glared through you well apparently

the force of his character was quite something there are people who

did meet him and left records that it was like watching the headlights of an oncoming train

he was a very formidable looking man very large quite bulky man he was fond of food not

fond of exercise he had a very large bulbous extremely ugly nose that he had

he suffered from a condition called acne rosier and most of the photographs of him the

nose has been retouched from his offices at number 23 wall street morgan went right to

work determined to save wall street from itself we do not want financial convulsions he

declared and have one thing one day and another thing the next wasteful competition

must be replaced by a community of interest quite surprisingly for somebody who has

been cast as the high priest of modern capitalism morgan was not really a free marketer he

he thought that there needed to be a kind of managed competition

in american industry in american society and that he would do the managing

first he forced the railroads to stop undercutting each other

putting his own partners on the board of every company he bailed out

to maintain discipline then he began buying up railroads himself eliminating redundancies and

reorganizing smaller lines into ever larger ones all of them run increasingly out of new york

it was called morganizing and what they tried to do despite all of

the theoretical glorification about free market capitalism they hate the

marketplace they hate untrammeled competition and they set out to try to rein it in and

basically what morgan and others do is they take a lot of these competing firms

smash them together and create new gigantic corporate megaliths they birth

the corporate economy few people in new york had any idea what morgan was doing

and many who did worried increasingly about the power he was accumulating

but by 1882 the depression was a thing of the past and new york was once again a wash in

money and power thanks in part to jp morgan that summer as if to signal the return

of prosperity a team of workers led by a 35 year old inventor named thomas alva edison

labored round the clock to finish assembling the first permanent

electrical power plant in the world at 257 pearl street on september 4th

1882 at 3 pm precisely an electrician through the master switch

and his current search through 14 miles of underground cable

three thousand incandescent lamps in lower manhattan began to burn

the effect one awestruck reporter wrote can scarcely be described

so weird and so beautiful it is

the era of gaslight was coming to an end

it was an amazing moment the lights actually went on at about three o'clock

so you couldn't really see them but the reporters said that by seven as natural light died away

the site of downtown manhattan with these little flickering light bulbs looking like

thousands of individual flames was breathtakingly beautiful thomas edison himself was not at pearl

street when the switch was pulled but in the headquarters of his principal financial backer j.p

morgan who had arranged the financing for edison's project then made sure his offices were the

first in the city to be illuminated by electricity night after night one man later recalled

the lights at 23 wall street shone far into the night when all else was dark over new york

it was jp morgan and his partners charting a course into the giddiest heights of capitalism

and on into the future

what is the greatest image we have in our minds of our human destiny

it's going from one short to another the story of the bible the hebrew people begins with the idea

of abraham father abraham going from from one part of the world to another

and the word hebrew used to mean for a lot of people i don't know ibrahim

the passage over the river i've always been fascinated by that phrase in whitman's home

there was always a passage over the river but we think about

our destiny as human beings we're going to die someday and we always see ourselves traveling

from one thing to another and we're always so to speak making our passage into and over

many things in the world well it sounds frightened by now but the idea of life as a journey the life

the idea of life as expectancy reaches its absolute maximum in brooklyn bridge

by the spring of 1883 seven full years after the completion of the towers and

fourteen years after work had first begun the brooklyn bridge was nearly complete

it had taken three times longer and cost nearly twice as much as its designer john robley had

estimated more than five thousand working men irish and german and italian immigrants mainly

had toiled for as little as two dollars a day to build it stone by stone wire after wire

foot by foot erecting the great towers had been impressive enough

but what came after was even more astonishing 14 000 miles of wire rope had been spun

back and forth across the river and draped over the towers in four giant cables

from them an avenue wider than broadway had been suspended across a span nearly

a third of a mile long from below the roadway seemed to float

on air supported without visible effort by its gossamer web of steel

now with the official opening set for may 24th all that remained were the finishing touches

it's the beginning of heroic new york this is where new york not only rose into the sky

for the first time in an intentional way but it was built to last it was built to stay

built to be right there at the harbor where everybody was making their entrance from the old

world to the new world standing there for all time to say we didn't come just to

spend a little while but we came here to this new continent this new world this new way of

life to stay we mean business we're here five days before the opening ceremonies

electricians finished installing 70 electric arc lamps along the suspenders

near midnight the dynamos were switched on for the first time

to test whether the lights were working commuters on the last ferries to brooklyn

looked up in astonishment as the majestic bridge shone out of the darkness

in the blue and white glow

whether they knew it or not they were seeing the future electricity and steel

the brooklyn bridge marks the beginning of what we might call the vertical city

and it's going to be able to go up it's going to be more heroic in scale

than are the towers of the brooklyn bridge because of the element of steel that's in the

bridge because of the cables you can't have high-rise buildings without

elevators you can't have elevators without cables of steel you can't have the grid work you can't

have the skeletal interior of skyscrapers without

having steel

may 24 1883 officially renamed the people's day in honor of the bridge

dawned fair and mild without a cloud in the sky

one of i think the striking events of that celebration day is the absence of the irish

it was opened on queen victoria's birthday the irish saw that as an anti-irish act

and they didn't attend and a significant number of the people who

built that bridge were irish working class hacks who didn't make a lot of money and who

never got a lot of credit by noon virtually every business in town had shut its doors

as tens of thousands of cheering new yorkers looked on president

chester a arthur and governor grover cleveland led the grand procession down broadway

and up and over the great bridge they were greeted on the other side by

brooklyn's mayor seth lowe and emily roebling standing in for her husband washington

who was still too weak to attend later the president and the governor

called on the chief engineer at his home in brooklyn heights roebling was honored by the visit

but questioned the need for all the fuss and ceremony why can't they just put up a sign saying

the bridge is open he said

the beautiful and stately structure fulfills the fondest hope

the impression upon the visitor is one of astonishment that grows with every visit

no one who has ever been upon it can never forget it

not one shall see it and not feel proud to be a man

mayor seth lowe it requires no

spirit of prophecy to foretell the union of new york and brooklyn the river which divides them

will soon cease to be a line of separation and bestowed by the colossus of commerce

will prove a link which will bind them together

all afternoon while the speech is dragged on thousands of new yorkers and

brooklynites ventured out onto the bridge for the first time astonished by the beauty of the

structure and by the glorious view and to be so high above a river

put yourself back in the place of a new yorker or someone living in brooklyn in the year 1884-85

and you went on a sunday afternoon out onto the brooklyn bridge

first of all you were up higher than you'd ever been in your life because

there were no buildings that high and you were out over the salt water over the east river

and seagulls were flying beneath you as they went underneath the bridge

and great if you were lucky great sailing ships were coming up or down

the river and if they were really some of the big ones like the clipper ships

they might be trimming their top gallons in order to get underneath

the bridge and steamboats and ferry boats and everybody out promenading on the boardwalk

incidentally a boardwalk a promenade that had never been part of a bridge before and has never

been part of any bridge since and it's built there for the purpose of giving people the experience

of the thrill the uncommon unprecedented thrill of what can happen

to you what you can see and experience in a city

at dusk the bridge was cleared and the greatest firework display in the city's history began

for over an hour fireworks streamed skyward from the bridge itself

from boats below and from both shores while still more were launched from gas balloons

at the astonishing finale 500 rockets were touched off simultaneously

blossoming in the night sky above the

gorgeous structure

when the perfected east river bridge shall permanently and

uninterruptedly connect the two cities the daily thousands who cross it will

consider it a sort of natural and inevitable phenomenon

such as the rising and setting of the sun and they will unconsciously overlook the

preliminary difficulties surmounted before the structures span the stream

and will perhaps undervalue the indomitable courage the absolute faith

the consummate genius which assured the engineers triumph

thomas kinsella the brooklyn eagle the mistake is to take a structure like that for granted

to assume that it's always been there it just happened what did it take to build that

think of new york if you don't want to think of the brooklyn bridge think of all of new york

as a metaphor for effort spectacular unprecedented

often very original effort work good work

which is one of the promises of america you come here you can do good work and you will be

judged by the work you do you can find pride and self-respect

and identity through the work you do you can be an actor you can build a bridge

you can write the poem you can make a million that's the promise doesn't mean the

promise will be fulfilled for everybody but that's the promise and no other

society no other place in the world had ever offered all of that

new yorkers and brooklynites took to the bridge at once as if no one could

remember what life had been like without it on its first full day of traffic nearly 2 000 vehicles

and more than 150 000 pedestrians streamed between the two cities

then on may 31st 1883 memorial day just one week after the opening ceremony

disaster struck twenty thousand people were out on the bridge enjoying the pristine weather

when a woman tripped on a narrow staircase packed with people someone screamed that the bridge was

falling and panic ripped through the dense surging crowd

in the confusion and terror that followed 12 people were crushed to death

on the packed stairway and hundreds more trampled in the stampede

among the horrified onlookers was ten-year-old al smith whose ailing father had worked as a

watchman on the bridge during construction he and a group of friends were playing

below the manhattan tower when a dark cloud of coats hats parasols

and pocket books began to rain down upon them from the roadway above

that was my first view of a great calamity he later recalled i did not sleep for nights

in the years to come smith would be no stranger to tragedy

and when al smith was a child his family was poor his father was a big brawny trucker but he got

very sick when smith was very little and at the when smith was 13 he died

he died penniless and when they were walking back there was smith his sister mary and his mother

and when they were walking back from the funeral the dread in their hearts were that they

were going to be split up because in those days if a widow said i need a pension i can't need

welfare i can't support my children what the state did in most cases was

take them away and put them in an institution and as they're walking back from the funeral

al smith's mother said i don't know where to turn and alan smith said i'm here i can take

care of you and smith went to work at the age of 13.

first he had jobs as a runner for trucking companies but about the age of

17 he went to work for the fulton fish market rolling heavy barrels of fish up

the ramps from the ships you know used to say i only have one degree ffm fulton fish market

and the hours he worked were interesting he worked from five in the morning

till 6 30 at night six days a week the only other day the only day he

didn't work those hours was saturday then he worked from three in the morning

till 6 30 at night but he took care of his family started running errands for tammany worked his

way up through the machine

though the hours were long at 12 a week the job paid enough to keep the family together

and soon smith had begun to rise within the tightly knit community of new york's fourth ward

befriending members of the downtown tammany club and running errands for a popular district leader

named tom foley in the evenings he sang old irish favorites in a local

saloon owned by foley himself sitting in the audience some of the older tammany bosses began

to take notice of the energetic and affable young man whose strong distinctive voice they said

might one day make him a good candidate for office

though the east river had been spanned other chasms remained

which in the years to come would grow ever wider and deeper and prove even more difficult to span

as immigrants in numbers greater than ever before poured into new york

fueling the most dynamic industrial economy on earth another migration was underway of

millionaires as the nation's wealthiest citizens now converged on manhattan

which had become the mecca of all who sought power and prestige in america from pittsburgh

came steel magnates andrew carnegie and henry frick from chicago philip armour who had made

a fortune packing meat from cleveland john d rockefeller the oil magnate

well on his way to becoming the richest man in the world it was like a magnet for capital and for

people who were having ideas that were going to increase capital

you had to talk to your bankers you had to talk to other people who were doing things and

eventually most of them did have houses in new york as well even if they kept residents as

elsewhere it was the center of the american universe the one thing i know after 81 years of

life is that the world's divided between insiders and outsiders and everybody everybody

wants to be an insider and so you come to the city in which there are more

opportunities there are more open doors there are more ways to become an insider than probably

anywhere else on earth by 1890 nearly half the millionaires in america

1800 in all had flocked into the city and its suburbs bringing with them a scale of

extravagance startling even by the standards of new york along fifth avenue once lined with

somber brownstones a parade of opulent mansions soon stretched more than two and a half miles

each more extravagant than the next the interminable succession of luxurious

mansions proclaims a wild abundance this avenue has visibly been willed and created

by sheer force of millions which has left not an inch of ground

untouched it's the place to make it and the place to flaunt it and in the

19th century as in the 20th century the difference between the 1880s and the

1980s is when people flaunted it in the 1880s they put on a public display

the city became a great big beautiful outdoor museum a kind of urban paradise

that public display was fantastic the vanderbilts were not embarrassed

to get into their equippages in front of their houses and ride up and down fifth avenue and

anybody if he had just a daring do the temerity could stand there and be part of this urban

drama

it is only a matter of three miles from madison square to hester street

but who would dream who had not seen it that the same town held within so short a distance

scenes and people so contrasted up as monthly

though the gap between them grew wider with each passing year

rich and poor alike were greeted now as they came into the city

by an astonishing sight rising like an apparition from the middle of the bay

on the rainy windswept afternoon of october 28 1886 the gift the french had been trying to

give for more than 20 years was finally unveiled its pedestal paid for

in the end by the nickels and dimes of hundreds of thousands of ordinary new yorkers

the promised land flies before us like the mirage material progress does not merely fail

to relieve poverty it actually produces it this association of progress with

poverty is the great enigma of our times it is the riddle which the sphinx of

fate puts to our civilization and which not to answer is to be destroyed

henry george

five days after the statue was unveiled new yorkers went to the polls

on the ballot was a brilliant social theorist named henry george

committed as no candidate before him to closing the gap between rich and poor

and running on a platform that called for a land tax better housing and working conditions

and free public transportation for the poor why should there be such abject poverty

in this city george demanded we are toiling perhaps for mrs astor or

the heirs of some dead dutchman we have to remember that there's been a

counter vision of what new york city should be and it's been emerging out of the

working class and immigrant quarters an odd test moment of this

takes place in 1886 when henry george a land reformer runs for the mayoralty of new york city

and he puts together an astonishing coalition of the disaffected and the outcast

but in the end henry george's united labor party was no match for tammany hall frightened

by the strength of george's support amongst the immigrant poor who kept it in power

tammany threw its immense machine behind a moderate democratic businessman

named abram hewitt who attacked george's party as the enemies of civilization and order

on election day he was resoundingly defeated and the gulf he had hoped to bridge grew

wider

one summer afternoon as the 19th century came to a close an irish-american vaudeville singer

named charles lawler asked his friend james blake a salesman in a hat shop

to come up with the lyrics for a tune that had been rattling around in his head

for some time something about new york lawler said

between serving customers blake found himself thinking of the old neighborhood on 18th street

where he had grown up and of the people he had known there jakey krauss the baker and his friend

little jimmy crow and mimi o'rourke who had first taught

him how to dance set to the lovely lilting two-step lawler had composed

blake's haunting memories of the sidewalks of new york would go on to become an enormous hit

across the country and one of the most popular songs ever

written about new york city

side all around the town the tarts

sang ring around rosie london bridge is

falling down

boys and girls together

me and me

tripped the light fantastic

on the sidewalks of new york

things have changed since those times

some are open g others they are on the

hog but they

all felt just like me

they would part with all they've got

could they but once more walk with their

best girl and have a twirl

on the sidewalks of new york

though few people knew it the heartbreaking tune marked the end of an era in the city's history

and the beginning of another in the years to come the irish and

german immigrants whose experience it commemorated would begin to move on even as a new and

far larger influx of peoples began to overtake the old transforming forever the sidewalks of

new york

walt whitman said i chant the divine average whitman wrote so movingly about talking

about the immigrants i sing of the immigrants 15 to twenty thousand a day

pouring ashore and of course whitman's vision was of a democratic society transforming their lives

bringing them together and transforming it but the fact is that in the gilded age in my opinion

whitman's optimism wasn't happening what was happening was with lincoln

stefans and jacob reese wrote about new york was the new york of child labor

and the sweatshops i mean we don't even think of what child labor was it was

little children working next to their mothers six and sometimes seven days a week in

rooms in which there were no windows because the factory owners didn't want them distracted

working all the days of their youth away

in october 1890 a curious volume went on sale in the bookstores of new york

called how the other half lives it had been written by a 41 year old

danish-born police reporter named jacob reese it would change

forever the way people thought about the city rhys had come to new york in 1870 when

he was just 21 with 40 in his pocket the money soon ran out and he had learned firsthand what

immigrant life could be like in the sprawling metropolis homeless

often hungry and out of work he had drifted into the crime infested world

of the five-point slum dozing on the cold filthy floors of police lodging houses more than once

he considered killing himself eventually he landed on his feet and managed to find work as a police

reporter for the new york tribune and spent the next 10 years exploring the densely crowded slums

of the lower east side the sights he later said gripped my heart until i felt that i

must tell of them or burst determined to show the world what he had seen

reece began publishing magazine articles but they seemed to make no impression

he wrote he thought of taking pictures but the tenements were too dark for the

photographs to come out then in 1887 a breakthrough came

with the invention of a new photographic device a magnesium flash powder

that flooded even the deepest shadow with a brilliant flash of light

armed with the new apparatus reese and his assistants plunged into the five points

with their way illuminated by spasmodic flashes as bright and brief as those of lightning itself

a mysterious party has lately been startling the town

denizens of the dives tramps and bummers in their lodgings

have marveled at the phenomenon

what they saw was three or four figures in the groom

a ghostly tripod some weird and uncanny movements

the blinding flash and then the patter of retreating footsteps

and the mysterious visitors were gone

the new york sun february 12 1888 they would go into places especially at

night with the brand new flash powder attachment and surprise people

sleepers and these kind of collective sleeping rooms

or drinkers and these rock gut saloons

the images reese brought back brought wealthy and middle class new yorkers face to face

with a reality most had long sought to avoid their city one of the wealthiest in the

world had become home to more than a million overworked and undernourished people

often living in conditions of unspeakable horror he went everywhere carrying his camera

down obscure courtyards and back ways with names like ragpicker's row

blind man's alley and bottle valley in a place called bandit's roost he photographed a dozen men

all said to be wanted for murder

he was especially moved by the plight of the young the ragged street arabs

who sold newspapers by day and slept in alleys by night

the child laborers who often worked seven days a week in stifling factories and sweatshops

and the tens of thousands of abandoned and orphaned children

who had been left to fend for themselves but what horrified him most was the

unspeakable conditions in which so many new yorkers were forced to live

you have a vast influx of new immigrant groups so that whereas in 1860 it was essentially a city of

small homes by 1900 the most crowded neighborhoods in the world we're in new york city especially

on the lower east side but also in east harlem we have the rise of tenement housing

which is really worse than anything that was ever seen in the united states

and it's probably about as bad as anything that's ever been put up anywhere in the world

a tenement briefly defined as simply a building that concentrates as many

people into as little space as possible with the lowest overhead costs for the landlord

the tenements began sometime in the middle of the 19th century and

there were no laws governing the tenement so it really stuffed people into

six or seven floors of rickety walk-up jammed into as many rooms as possible many of which were

interior rooms with no light of any sword or air i went up the dark stairs in one of

those tenements and there i trod upon a baby and is the regular means of introduction

in the old dark houses but i was never able to get used to it

i photographed the baby standing with its back against the public sink

and a pool of filth that overflowed on the floor i do not marvel that one in five

children in the rear tenement into which the sunlight never comes was killed by the house

it seems strange rather than any survived

take a breeze many of the tenements were life-threatening

literally that is to say that the threat of disease infectious bacterial diseases like

dysentery for example was always there and epidemics could spread rapidly

the high death rate the high sickness rate this was the reality for many many

hundreds of thousands millions of new yorkers in any given moment

ill-fed and ill-clothed packed into buildings with few sinks or toilets

and sometimes with no plumbing at all tenement dwellers were prey to every kind of disease

diphtheria influenza typhoid pneumonia worst of all was the disease

called the white plague tuberculosis every year

20 000 new cases were reported in the slums every year 8 000 people died of the

disease july and august spell death to the army of little ones

whom the doctor's skill is powerless to save sleepless mothers walk the street in the

gray of the early dawn trying to stir a cooling breeze to fan

the brow of the sick baby there is no satisfied than this patient devotion against

fearfully hopeless odds little coffins are stacked mountains high on the decks of the charity

commissioner's boat when it makes its semi-weekly trip to the city cemetery

take a breeze

how the other half lives awakened new yorkers to the condition of the poor

as nothing else had it was a new way of seeing the world a modern way and reese used it not only

to underscore his outrage but to spur people to action the slums were not inevitable he

insisted they had been built by men and women and men and women could change them

one of the things that rhys is trying to do in this book i think is to get away from

some of the older victorian notions of of poverty why are some people poor why do some

people live in such in such terrible conditions and his answer is more along the lines of a modern

sort of environmental view of poverty what he's basically arguing is that um

if people are going to live in these terrible tenements if people are going

to be deprived of the basics of light and air decency we can't be surprised if

these people become criminals or depraved or alcoholics or what have you

so that there's a way in which reese's i think the opening shot if you will

or you know the first chapter in a reformed tradition because it was a book that made a lot of

people want to get involved in improving life in the city

not long after the book was published new york's energetic young civil service commissioner

theodore roosevelt called on reese at his office on printing house square the writer was out

but roosevelt left his calling card with a note on the back i have read your book it said and i have

come to help

new york on the one hand is a place where free market capitalism has been given its widest

latitude and yet it's also the place where the consequences of that system

have been called most sharply into question and efforts made to rein it in

i think new yorkers have taken the lead in proposing an alternative social logic

a different ethical calculus one that says that new yorkers are

entitled to certain things whether or not they can afford to pay for them

by virtue of being new yorkers and that includes pure water it

includes public health it includes affordable housing education at a variety of levels civil

liberties religious liberties it says that social justice

is a commensurate good with the accumulation

of a private profit

the shapes arise

shapes of factories arsenals foundries markets

shapes of the two threaded tracks of railroads shapes of the sleepers of bridges vast frameworks

girders arches

the main shapes arise

shapes of democracy total result of centuries

shapes ever projecting other shapes

shapes of turbulent manly cities

shapes bracing the earth and braced with the whole earth

walt whitman

in january 1892 walt whitman now the most celebrated poet in the

country sent an announcement to the new york herald notifying his readers that leaves of

grass the book of poems he had lovingly rewritten for almost 40 years was now complete

two months later on march 26 1892 the most visionary poet the city had

ever seen died

i bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass i love he wrote

in lines that were written on his grave

if you want me again look for me under

your boot souls

i did feel there was a tingling beneath this huge city of ours

a restlessness that promised we knew not what we could literally

see new york expanding growing reaching out

charles hansen town

by 1892 the city whitman had loved so deeply and imagined so vividly in advance had

spread its wings far wider than even he could have imagined the transformation from merchant city to

industrial metropolis sparked by alexander hamilton a hundred years before

was all but complete the city now sprawled as dewitt clinton had predicted

almost the whole length of manhattan island on wall street money was flowing in as never before

as the frenzy of corporate mergers begun by j.p morgan 20 years before

began to accelerate and even greater changes lay in store as

new yorkers now try to prove they could do something more

than just make money and with all the money that was converging and with all the

creative ecology of the city many people began

realizing that they had to do more than just stand by and watch so it became one of the great

founding times in our whole country for some of our most important admirable and long-lasting

public institutions in little more than 10 years an astonishing array of cultural

institutions would be brought into existence in new york or vastly expanded including the immense

cathedral of saint john the divine madison square garden and carnegie hall

the american museum of natural history and the metropolitan museum of

art and at the very heart of the city on the site of the old croton reservoir

at 42nd street and fifth avenue the new york public library

the range of wall street is to convert all baser things into gold

one curator said but ours is the higher ambition to convert your useless gold into things

of living beauty that shall be a joy to a whole people for a thousand years

old new york has been torn down and our critic wrote as the century came to a close

and another city has arisen on its side

it was an extraordinary time there was there was this extraordinary amount of

wealth and this and also this notion that one had an obligation to use part of one's wealth

to help everybody and to glorify your own city all of our museums were built with

private money i mean the natural history museum the metropolitan the modern the

whitney the guggenheim you know the glories of london and paris are paid for by

the british nation or the french nation the glories of new york have been paid for by

new yorkers it was critical for a city like ours the greatest city in the country but also the city

which had to turn immigrants into americans overnight as fast as we could

to give them not only some give them a sense of what did they come to from

that little sicilian hill town or a miserable little irish village somewhere

and this was theirs they went into these lobbies they went into these great pillared buildings

and it was thrilling for them and something that they could identify with

what kind of building are you going to give the people to give them reassurance

to make them feel that something was stable when plainly nothing else is stable in the world

what london is to the continent what rome in its imperial day was to the empire

new york is to the immense domain of the american republic

a natural stage for the great drama of civilization on this continent

henry clues

there was one last consolidation to come for 250 years new york city had been

confined to the slender island of manhattan now on the very threshold of the new

century a hundred years of unprecedented growth and extra-territorial ambition came to a

stunning climax at the stroke of midnight on january 1st

after three decades of intense political maneuvering by business leaders

city planners and republican politicians the city suddenly threw back its borders

and dramatically expanded its domain annexing brooklyn itself the third largest city in america

along with 38 villages in queens staten island and the bronx to create a gigantic five

borough metropolis now called greater new york well i think in retrospect it's amazing

that consolidation ever happened indeed there is no parallel to the

consolidation of new york in 1898 anywhere in the world buddha and pest

come together that's a kind of a thing but it's much smaller than in new york chicago

annex is the south side but in every one of those cases it's really a much smaller less

significant place that's being added the idea that a giant city like brooklyn

let alone the big areas in the bronx and queens and staten island

should all come together in one enormous city that's hard to get our minds around at

the end of the 20th century let alone in the 19th century

as midnight approached on december 31 a hundred thousand people crowded into

city hall park in a pouring rain for the biggest celebration the city had ever seen

it was the tribune said the biggest noisiest and most hilarious new year's eve

celebration that manhattan island had ever known with the crash of cannon and the roar of

exploding bombs the flag of greater new york was officially unfilled over city hall

at midnight and the second city of the world

came into existence the new york times manhattanites had voted enthusiastically

for the idea so had the sparsely populated communities in outlying areas of queens

staten island and the bronx which stood to gain enormously in city services

by consolidating with manhattan only brooklyn had held out fiercely proud of its independence

and mistrustful of the crowded immigrant city just across the river

in the end consolidation won there by only 277 votes

out of more than 129 000 cast in truth brooklyn and new york were combined long before

consolidation in 1898 they were combined economically they're combined socially

they're combined religiously from the early 19th century manhattanites regularly crossed the east

river even before there was a bridge when you had to take the old ferry system

to hear lectures in brooklyn and to visit brooklyn's great ministers

and so the two cities were culturally and economically tied long before consolidation but

there is a sense of regret that sweeps brooklyn right after consolidation because the

city of brooklyn is no more i remember there were old-timers around when i was a kid

you know who would mutter about it you know the 1898 mistake

they called it and so they forced this thing through the legislature this greater new york

plan and the people in brooklyn were so angry with this that they promptly

turned democrat and voted democrat ever since i don't think they've they voted

republican and maybe for eisenhower but

for virtually nobody else ever since but whether they liked it or not new

yorkers had with the stroke of a pen turned their city into the second

largest metropolis in the world it now encompassed 327 square miles

and over three and a half million people more than twice the size of chicago

its closest american rival it was now bigger than berlin paris and moscow bigger than any city in

the world except london and at the rate it was now growing london itself

would soon be eclipsed well consolidation was like a

magic event for new york probably many of the things that did happen after 1900 in terms of the

physical expansion of the city would have happened anyhow but i think consolidation made it all

easy and logical and almost a kind of manifest destiny for the city

the banners were struck the crowds went home and the next day everyone went back to business

out in the harbor ships moved back and forth across the bay

freighters loaded with raw materials and manufactured goods

bound for every port in the world barges filled with oil and coal and big

ocean-going steamships packed to the rails with passengers businessmen returning from abroad

and thousands upon thousands of immigrants by 1898 a new immigration

far larger than the tide of irish and germans 50 years before had long since overtaken the old

the start of the greatest movement of peoples in world history it would soon swell to a flood of

inconceivable proportions bringing new people from new places

and challenging new york as never before to make a home

for all its people

this alien flood is the poorest the most vicious the most holy

undesirable peoples that have ever come to american shores

the wall street journal

the entrance into our political social and industrial life of such vast masses of peasantry

degraded below our utmost conceptions is a matter which no intelligent patriot

can look upon without the gravest alarm these people have none of the inherited

instincts which made it comparatively easy to deal with immigration in olden times

they are beaten men from beaten races representative of the worst failures in

the struggle for existence professor francis walker yale university

the floodgates are open the dam is washed away

the sewer is unchoked

europe is vomiting

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