attacks upon tenement evils. New York City had no lack of this
particular kind of multiple-family dwelling, for in 1864 they numbered
15,511, and housed 486,000 persons. They were far from being what we
mean by tenements to-day: not until about 1879 was the first tenement
house of the now familiar type, five, six, or more stories high,
erected. The earlier buildings were comparatively low barracks, many of
them converted mansions, shops, and stables, and others “rear houses”
in the back yards of old mansions; all without airshafts, and with no
complete provision for separating families. The _Evening Post_ fitly
called them “The Modern Upas,” for they breathed upon the city the
poisons of cholera, typhus, smallpox, and crime. As early as April,
1860, six years before the first legislative inquiry into the housing
of the poor, the editors had called shocked attention to police records
showing that some 18,000 New Yorkers were veritable troglodytes,
dwellers in cellars. It spoke out at the same time against the horrible
congestion of the slums. One “rear house” on Mulberry Street had 222
persons huddled together; in Cow Bay, one of the colored quarters,
one house held 230 persons; while the notorious Old Brewery at Five
Points had sheltered 215 people before it burned. In the Sixth Ward,
surrounding the Five Points, sixty-three small structures housed 4,721
persons.
An indignant editorial attack upon the deplorable tenement-house
conditions appeared in the _Evening Post_ six months after Lee’s
surrender, inspired by a report of the Citizens’ Association. Half
the people of New York lived in tenements, and on the East Side they
were packed in at the rate of 220,000 to the square mile. The _Post_
estimated that more than 25,000 dwelt in unfit cellars, shanties, or
stable-lofts. Of the 15,000 tenements, almost 4,000 had no connection
with the sewers. One in three was a perpetual “fever nest,” in which
typhus was endemic, while not one in fifteen was what a tenement house
ought to be. A single “fever nest” on East Seventeenth Street, almost
within a stone’s throw of the Mayor’s home, had sent thirty-five typhus
patients during 1864 to the municipal fever hospital, while nearly a
hundred more had been treated in the building. The public, repeated
the _Post_ early in 1867, was astonished to awake from the war to the
vast extent of the tenement system, the immense numbers inhabiting such
places, and the horrid evils of filthiness, immorality, and sickness
engendered by them. “No man has a right to establish a nest of fever
and vice in the city,” it said, arguing for new laws and a government
agency to regulate the construction and use of tenements.
Simultaneously, the newspaper kept up its old complaints, dating from
Coleman’s day, of the lack of due sanitary regulations and activity.
Slaughter-houses continued to abound, there being twenty-three in the
northern half of the Twentieth Ward alone, some of them draining blood
and other refuse for long distances through open sewers. In Forty-sixth
Street on the East Side, a single neighborhood was blessed with one
slaughter-house, six tripe, three sausage, and two bone-boiling
establishments, and in the summer was almost uninhabitable (Sept. 2,
1865). A little later the _Post_ took notice of the nastiness of the
harbor. Many sewers emptied into the slips and under the piers, and
there being no movement of the water, the sewage decayed until it
had to be dredged out. These facts help explain an editorial of 1866
defining the typhus area block by block. It extended in irregular
strips from the Battery up the West Side to Cortlandt Street, and
up the East Side to Thirty-sixth. Smallpox was endemic throughout a
rectangle bounded by Broadway, the Bowery, Chambers, and Bleecker, and
in so many additional spots in the lower part of the city that a man
could hardly get to his work downtown without crossing infected areas.
In the spring of 1867 the Legislature hesitatingly passed the first act
to regulate the erection and management of tenements. Though it was,
as the _Evening Post_ said, “much less stringent and particular” than
the English laws on which it was modeled, it placed important powers
in the city Board of Health organized shortly before, for which the
_Post_ had also struggled. All tenants of cellars were required to
vacate them unless they could obtain special permits, and within two
years the _Post_ was rejoicing over a drastic order for the cutting
of 46,000 windows in interior rooms. Of course this legislation was
only a beginning. In 1878–79 we find the _Evening Post_ vigorously
agitating for its extension, and publishing articles upon “The Homes of
the Poor” which give a horrifying picture of Mulberry Court and other
slum sections. Half of the city’s 125,000 children lived in tenements,
and nine-tenths of the deaths among children occurred there. In May,
1878, the “Evening Post Fresh-Air Fund” was founded for the purpose of
sending slum children to country homes for summer rest and recreation.
The business office collected and disbursed the money raised by
almost daily appeals in the newspaper, and the Rev. Willard Parsons
took charge of the work of finding farmers to take the children, and
of transporting them. Some years later the _Tribune_ took over the
Fresh-Air Fund, and still maintains it. In 1879, after a mass-meeting
upon the tenement problem at Cooper Union, addressed among others
by Parke Godwin, then editor of the _Evening Post_, new regulatory
legislation was passed at Albany.
Every one saw that evils in housing could not be corrected without
expanding the city’s area, and in the decade after the Civil War
the city press paid little more attention to them than to the twin
perplexity of transportation. The first talk of a subway had been heard
in the early fifties, and was thin talk indeed, although the London
underground railway dates from 1853. The _Evening Post_ used to boast
that it had been the first journal to propose a steam subway, Bryant
having brought the idea home from England. But the real solution of
the transit problem, for a period which had no electric traction, lay
in the elevated railways which Col. Robert L. Stevens had suggested as
long before as 1831. The need grew more and more urgent. When the war
ended, transportation was furnished by the horse railways and by eight
omnibus companies. The horse-cars were slowly driving the buses out of
business, the great Consolidated Company, which operated a half-dozen
lines, having gone bankrupt in 1864; but there remained 250 of the
vehicles, or enough to impede other traffic seriously. The capital
invested in them was $1,600,000, for each had six $200 horses, while
wages and stabling costs had risen fast.
To find room for the growing population, and to ease the streets of
their intolerable burden--these were the two chief arguments for rapid
transit. As the _Evening Post_ said in the closing days of 1864, the
most desirable parts of the island, the sections abreast of and above
Central Park, were largely given up to pigs, ducks, shanty-squatters,
and filth. A railroad under Broadway, it thought, would soon change
all that. “When a merchant can go to Central Park in fifteen minutes
he will not hesitate to live in Seventieth or Eightieth Street; and
a resident of One Hundredth Street could reach the business section
of the city as quickly by the underground railway as those who live
in Twentieth Street do now.” Better live in Yonkers than Harlem, it
remarked later. As for the streets, it declared in 1866: “Broadway is
simply intolerable to the man who is in a hurry; he must creep along
with the crowd, no matter how cold it is; he crosses the street at the
risk of his life; and when he journeys up and down in an omnibus, he
wonders at the skill with which a wheeled vehicle is made so perfectly
uncomfortable.”
A multitude of suggestions for better transit had been brought forward
by this time. Some men proposed one or several subways; the _Evening
Post_ modestly thought that five were needed, several beginning at
the Battery and the rest at Canal Street, and all running to the
Harlem. Others favored elevated roads mounted on single pillars in
the streets, and still others called for such roads running over the
housetops. Sunken railways in the middle of certain streets were
proposed, and one powerful intellect devised a scheme for two railways,
one on each side of Broadway, running “through the cellars”! To lessen
the traffic congestion in Broadway, a college professor suggested
that the city buy the ground floor of all buildings for a space ten
or twelve feet deep on each side, and form an arcade there for foot
passengers, yielding the entire street to vehicles. Another professor
thought that horses should be banished altogether, and the freight and
passenger traffic in Broadway restricted to steam trains. To all the
plans objections were made, and were frequently as wonderful in their
way. Thus Engineer Craven of the Croton Board demonstrated at length
in February, 1866, that no subway could ever be built, because it
would interfere with the water supply; and even the _Post_ called his
argument “a knockdown blow.”
In the spring of 1867 the _Evening Post_ was regarding hopefully
two schemes before the Legislature, one for a “three-tier railroad”
(subway, surface, and elevated), and one for a metropolitan underground
line. In 1868 the Legislature actually authorized a steam subway from
City Hall to Forty-second Street, the incorporators of which included
such substantial men as William B. Ogden, William E. Dodge, and Henry
W. Slocum, but the enterprise did nothing more than demonstrate the
immediate impracticability of the plan. Three years later the _Post_
had swung to the sensible view that an elevated would be better than a
subway, for it had been shown that the latter would cost $30,000,000,
and no one was ready to invest. Elevated construction had then already
begun, and when Bryant died in 1878 there were four lines.
Subordinate to the two main subjects of housing and transit, a great
variety of comments upon city affairs can be found in the post-bellum
columns of the newspaper. One of the most frequent topics of editorial
complaint in the years 1866–68 was the dirty and broken condition of
the streets, which New York was paying a former Tammany Judge, James
R. Whiting, $500,000 a year to neglect. Just before the war the _Post_
had contended energetically for the introduction of sweeping machines,
and now it objected to the contract system. Some city officer, it
held, should be responsible. It anticipated Col. George F. Waring
when it suggested that the city might well “engage an army officer
used to drilling and handling a large number of men and accustomed to
discipline, and put the streets in his charge, with a simple injunction
to keep them clean, constantly, under all circumstances.” Early in
the seventies we find the paper defending Henry Bergh, founder of the
S. P. C. A., against journals which attacked his efforts to protect
dumb animals as fanatical; applauding (February, 1873) the first
stirrings of the movement to unite New York and Brooklyn under one
government; and raising an agonized outcry over the postoffice which
Mullet, the supervising architect of the Treasury, was building at City
Hall Park.
That greater city toward which public-spirited men then looked was
sketched in an editorial of 1867 entitled “New York in 19--.” The
_Evening Post_ hoped that before the twentieth century was far
advanced Central Park would be really central, and the upper part of
the island as populous as the lower. Brooklyn would have been united
governmentally with New York, and physically by several bridges thrown
across the East River. There should be a great railway station in the
heart of the city, near the chief hotels, and freight stations only
on its borders. Retail trade would be scattered, and “the Stewarts of
that day will be found on broad, clean cross streets near the Central
Park”; while spacious markets would have supplanted “the filthy sheds”
in which provisions were then sold. “The streets of New York will be
no longer rough and dirty; they will be covered with a smooth pavement
like that ... now laid on a part of Nassau Street or covered with
asphaltum, like some of the pavements of Paris.” Whoever wrote the
editorial might to-day call this much of the prophecy fairly realized.
But he went on to picture an adequate system of tenements, comfortable,
sanitary, and cheap, managed by public-spirited corporations; a rapid
transit system sufficient for all needs; and a shore line equipped with
fine piers and basins, modern warehouses, and the best loading and
unloading apparatus--all of which still belongs to a Utopian vision.
II
The most important municipal questions, however, arose from Tammany
politics; and the city which was so sluggish and blundering in
sheltering itself and transporting itself was more so in governing
itself. The history of the most memorable years of New York’s
administration was condensed by the _Evening Post_ in the seventies
into a short municipal epic:
In eighteen hundred and seventy
The Charter was purchased by W. M. T.
By eighteen hundred and seventy-one
The Tweed Ring’s stealing had all been done.
By eighteen hundred and seventy-two
The amount of the stealing the people knew.
By eighteen hundred and seventy-three
Most of the thieves had decided to flee.
In eighteen hundred and seventy-four
Tweed was allowed his freedom no more.
This epic starts, as it should, in _medias res_. An enormous amount
of stealing had been done before 1870, and the disclosures of the
summer of 1871 were by no means so unexpected as we are likely to
think. When A. Oakey Hall was elected Mayor in 1868 on the Tammany
ticket, intelligent citizens knew that there existed a Ring of dual
character--a corrupt combination of leading Democratic politicians
in New York, and a corrupt alliance between them and Republicans at
Albany. They knew that the city Ring regularly levied tribute on
accounts for supplies, construction, and repairs; and that its head was
William M. Tweed, with Peter B. Sweeney, the Chamberlain, and Richard
B. Connolly, the Controller, completing its guiding triumvirate. No
paper had insisted so constantly upon these facts as the _Post_. It
may claim to have been the leader in the fight against the Ring until
the close of 1870, when, with the resignation of Charles Nordhoff as
managing editor, it relaxed its efforts, and the _Times_ stepped to the
front.
Tweed was a familiar figure to all interested in city affairs--an
enormous, bulky personage, his apparent ponderosity belied by his
firm, swift step and his piercing eyes, grim lips, and sharp nose.
He was a man of inexhaustible energy, a fighter as fresh at midnight
as at noon. From his little private office on Duane Street, where a
faded sign proclaimed him an attorney-at-law, he would sally out on an
instant’s notice to City Hall, to Albany, or to some ward headquarters
where a revolt was brewing, and assert his authority with despotic
effectiveness. By his untiring activity, his imposing physique, and
his combination of cruelty, shrewdness, and audacity, he had risen
in fifteen years from his original calling of chair-maker to be a
multi-millionaire and dictator of the city. The office on which he
chiefly founded this success was his seat on the County Board of
Supervisors, which he held continuously after 1857.
His lieutenant, Sweeney, or “the Squire,” was later called by an
Aldermanic Committee “the most despicable and dangerous, because the
best educated and most cunning of the entire gang.” Nast’s cartoons
have made us familiar with his villainous look--his low forehead, heavy
brows, thick lips, and bushy hair. Yet he was quiet, retiring, cold,
averse to mingling with the crowd or with other politicians, and in a
measure cultured; he was a ready writer, his mental operations were
keen and quick, and he was held in awe by the Tammany satellites, whom
he would pass in the street without recognizing by even a nod. Connolly
was the most respectable of the three in appearance, looking, with his
trim black broadcloth, close-shaven face, and high, narrow forehead,
the very part of a business or municipal treasurer. He was really an
ignorant Irish-born bookkeeper, who brought to the Ring plenty of low
cunning, the product of a mixture of cowardice and greed, and the
quadruple-entry system of bookkeeping which it found so useful.
As early as the municipal election of 1863, when the _Evening Post_
supported Orison Blunt as a reform candidate against the nauseous
F. I. A. Boole, the editors were denouncing “that army of scamps
which has so long fattened upon the city treasury.” The paper clearly
understood how the Ring had originated. For ten years preceding the
war, the Republicans had exercised general control of the State
government, and the Democrats of the city. The Legislature step by
step had reduced the powers of the municipality by entrusting them to
State boards and commissions. As a climax to this process, in 1857,
it established the powerful New York County Board of Supervisors, a
State body composed of six Republicans and six Democrats. But the
grafters of the two parties conspired to defeat these ill-planned
efforts at reform, and by 1860 discerning men saw that the net result
of the transfer of authority had been simply to create two centers of
corruption instead of one, and to implicate both parties. Tweed and his
fellow-Democrats on the Board of Supervisors quickly gained control by
bribing one of the Republicans, and at Albany--
a bargain [said the _Evening Post_ of Aug. 12, 1871] was made
between the most prominent factions in the two parties, the
Seward-Weed Republicans and the Tammany Democrats, by which the
offices were divided between them, and all direct or personal
responsibility for official conduct was destroyed. Tammany managed
the city vote, in accordance with this bargain; Mr. A. Oakey Hall,
the counsel of the combination, drew up the laws which were needed
to carry it out; Mr. Thurlow Weed and his lobby friends passed them
through the Legislature, and the New York _Times_ gave them all the
respectability they could get from its hearty support, in the name
of the Republican party.
Immediately after the war the _Evening Post_ asked for a new Charter
as the best cure for the evil. The city should again be allowed to
rule itself, the editors believed, and this self-government should be
exercised through one party, which could be made to answer directly
for all acts of the municipal authorities. “Make the Democratic party
clearly responsible in this city for all its misgovernment, corruption,
and waste, and the people would drive it from power in less than
three years.” The existing Charter had four great defects, said the
_Post_ in January, 1867: the lack of home rule, the division of the
city legislature into two bodies, which impeded business, the failure
to withdraw all executive functions from these bodies, and the fact
that the Mayor had little real authority or responsibility. “All the
successive changes since 1830 have been made upon the same principle of
limiting or withdrawing powers that are abused, instead of enforcing an
effective responsibility for the abuse. This policy ... has produced
the evils which it feared. Never was the administration so ineffective,
never was there so much corruption, and never were the people so little
interested in choosing their officers with any hope that one class or
set will do better than another.”
The charges made by the paper were all general--no guilty men or
departments were specified. But it had a pretty clear conception of
the extent of the stealing. In April, 1867, it alleged that the city
was being robbed of hundreds of thousands in “the monstrous court
house swindle”; robbed by the politicians in collusion with the twenty
horse railways of the city, of which only three paid the full license
tax imposed by law; robbed in the cleaning and repair of the streets;
and robbed in the renting and sale of the city’s real estate. In
April, 1868, it estimated that the Ring during the previous year had
made a half million upon the contracts for the building, repair, and
furnishing of the city armories. The failure to name the criminals
arose from the inability of even so able a managing editor as Nordhoff
to trace the peculations. Since the district attorney, sheriff, courts,
aldermen, and even the Legislature were under the Ring’s influence,
the secrecy of its transactions seemed impenetrable. Give the city a
new government, was the view of the _Post_, and reform, though not
necessarily punishment of the criminals, would follow. “Is New York a
colony?” was the title of an editorial in June, 1867. Moreover, the
paper was the less concerned to be specific in that it believed mere
general denunciation of the Ring was having a much greater effect
than was the case. “Thieves Growing Desperate,” ran another editorial
caption of April, 1868:
The vampires of the city treasury are well aware of the growing
determination of the people to make away with them. They must
choose between two alternatives. They must either aim at prolonging
their privilege of plunder by moderating and disguising their
use of it, or they must steal so enormously for the short time
remaining as to compensate them for soon losing their chance.
If Tweed saw this utterance, he must have dropped a contemptuous
chuckle over it. He was quite resolved to steal “enormously,” but the
“short time” which the _Post_ gave him proved a good three years. Far
from being desperate, the Ring was just getting its hand in. The graft
on the armories, which the _Post_ accurately estimated at already a
half million, ultimately reached three millions, and the graft on the
courthouse, which the paper had put at hundreds of thousands, rose
steadily until it totaled $9,000,000. Tweed was attaining more and more
power as the year 1869 opened. He had just been elected to the State
Senate, and could now personally superintend every item of the Ring’s
machinations at Albany, while his friend A. Oakey Hall was just taking
his seat as Mayor.
The _Evening Post_ was quite likely right in its contention that a new
and truly good Charter would even at this date have awakened a new
interest in city affairs, and a spasm of reform; but a good Charter
it was impossible to get. With his usual shrewdness, Tweed at once
prepared to use the movement for a better form of city government to
make his position secure.
When the legislative session of January, 1870, began--the first
Legislature in twenty-four years to be controlled by the Democrats--it
was generally agreed that the city would be given another Charter.
The Tweed Ring was preparing one; the Young Democrats, an unsavory
group who opposed Tweed on strictly selfish grounds, were preparing
one; and the reform element represented by the Union League Club, the
_Evening Post_, the _Tribune_, and the _World_, wanted one. “The true
democratic doctrine of city government,” insisted the _Post_, “is that
power ought to be simple, responsibility undivided and direct.” The
proposed Charter of the anti-Ring Democrats, the so-called “huckleberry
Charter” of the “hayloft-and-cheesepress” up-Staters, was defeated.
Then, at the beginning of February, Tweed and Sweeney suddenly sprang
their own instrument, and made it clear that they would push it rapidly
through. It was patently vicious. As early as Feb. 3, the _Evening
Post_ attacked it sharply. It pointed out that it embodied none of that
simplification of powers and responsibility which the _Post_ had long
advocated; that too many city departments would be governed by boards,
not single heads; that the Common Council retained its executive
functions; and that the four-year term which it gave the Mayor and his
lieutenants was, under the circumstances, dangerous.
But four days later a far more powerful attack was published. The
_Evening Post_ would in any event have kept up its campaign with
growing vigor, but it had found an unexpected helper and adviser in
Samuel J. Tilden. Bryant later wrote: