47. Discovering New York: Three Stories

          Here are three stories of people coming to New York City in the 1950s: their first impressions, their adjustments, their adventures and misadventures.


The magical city

         My partner Bob grew up in Jersey City, which in those days was a blue-collar town and, in the sections he knew, predominantly white.  He wasn’t unhappy there, but by the early 1950s he sensed in it a certain sameness, whereas just across the Hudson was something strikingly different: a magical city, New York.  And so, at the tender age of thirteen, this inquisitive eighth grader embarked on a series of explorations.  Sometimes he took his younger brother with him, but usually he went alone.  He preferred going alone: more freedom.  So off he went, wearing a blue-and-white terry shirt and chinos or dungarees.

         The adventure began in Jersey City itself, when he took the trolley to the Hoboken dock.  The trolley, with its clanging bell, had an old-fashioned charm for him, and approached the terminal on a high trestle that was just a bit scary.  But soon he was in midstream on the ferry, with New York’s skyscrapers looming in the distance.  Landing at Barclay Street, he explored the Washington Market, a huge enclosed structure with hundreds of vendors, where carcasses of duck and pheasant and geese and venison and bear were strung up in the stalls, and buyers thronged, and stands in the corners of the market offered roast beef sandwiches and beer.  (He was underage, so no beer!)  Nothing like this in Jersey City!

        Walking on through what is now the World Trade Center site, he passed dozens of little shops and came to Saint Paul’s Chapel on Broadway, the city’s oldest church (1766), its classical Georgian portico topped by an octagonal tower, and next to the church a cemetery with hundreds of worn gravestones.  Inside he found a complete contrast with all that was happening outside: elegant architecture, chandeliers, space, quiet.  Above all, in the heart of this bustling metropolis, quiet.

                                                          Jean-Christophe Benoist

 

          Going on from there, he would come to the old City Hall, a gem of Federal architecture, and its park, with the Brooklyn Bridge looming nearby.  Often he would have coffee across the street at the Park Place automat, not noted for elegance but suited to his limited budget.  After that he went to Foley Square, where at the top of steep steps the courthouses rose impressively, fronted by Corinthian columns.

                                                                                                        TEAM TOM 

         And then to Chinatown, the most congested section of his walk, where not only the people looked different, but he was baffled by signs in a strange language, indecipherable jabberings with weird intonations, and groceries displaying hunks and slices and heaps and sprouts of foods that were totally unfamiliar.  This was his first immersion in another ethnic group, another culture.  Once again, nothing like it in the Jersey City he knew.

         Along the Bowery there were pawnshops, flophouses, pushcarts, cheap restaurants with their bargain prices conspicuously displayed, bums sprawled on the sidewalk, and – an invitation that he would some years later accept – a cabaret advertising Sammy’s Bowery Follies.  The Bowery was shabby and down-and-out – another stark contrast after the courthouses and City Hall -- but he didn’t feel threatened.

                                                Gerhard Vormwald

         From there he walked to Cooper Union, or took the Third Avenue Elevated, which he came to love – to the point of riding on the very last train in 1955.  The 
used bookstores along Fourth Avenue between 9^th and 14^th streets he also loved, and Greenwich Village as well, which was less commercial then than today and mostly residential, quieter, with an atmosphere that he considered bohemian; artists and writers would be happy there.  

          For lunch he usually resorted again to an automat, probably one of the Horn & Hardarts found all over the city, self-service restaurants where you surveyed the array of foods offered in little glass-fronted compartments, made your choice, inserted coins in a slot, raised the hinged door, took the dish out, and carried it to a table.  A bit impersonal, but convenient, quick, and cheap.

A New York automat.

(Surprisingly, the automat was not an American invention, but an import from Germany in 1902.  There were forty Horn & Hardarts in New York at one time, but in the 1970s the automats were undermined by two developments: the coming of the fast-food restaurant, and inflation that raised prices to the point where it was no longer practical to insert coins in the slots; dollars were needed.)


          Often he had another coffee in the Café Figaro at the corner of MacDougal and Bleecker.  Or sometimes he would go to the Lower East Side to see Delancey Street with the busy stands selling clothing on the sidewalk, and have coffee and a snack at Katz’s Delicatessen, which still exists today, when so much from back then has vanished, much of it to make room for the ill-fated World Trade Center.

         When he took a PATH train back to Jersey City, he was saturated with the excitement, bustle, and diversity of magical New York, though not unhappy to be going home, since he knew he would be coming back again many times.

Of bluey blues, bagels, and martinis

         My own discovery of the city was very different.  Growing up in a suburb of Chicago, I had often visited the Loop, so I had had many glimpses of a big city and its surging crowds.  I came to New York after two years of study in Europe, so I was constantly comparing it to European cities.  Returning by boat from France, I experienced the harbor as all new arrivals then did, and was dazzled by the skyscrapers of Lower Manhattan, looming up like nothing I had seen in Europe, and, running between them, deep, deep canyons of streets.  Clearly, this was a New World, bold, unsubtle, dynamic, unencumbered by the clutter of the past.

         I came to New York for the most practical of reasons: a scholarship for graduate studies in French at Columbia University.  So while Bob was exploring monuments and communities all jammed together at the lowest tip of Manhattan, I was experiencing the campus of a huge university and exploring a different way of life.  I was lodged on the fifteenth (the topmost) floor of John Jay Dormitory, I ate in the ground-floor cafeteria and attended classes in nearby buildings.  But I was learning a lot more than what my classes offered.

The Columbia campus today, little changed from the early 1950s.  Looking north from Butler Library
toward the classical elegance of Lowe Library, which is now used for administrative purposes.
Getty Hall

          Sartorial elegance – or at least conformity – was requisite.  “Don’t wear any browny browns or bluey blues,” a new friend advised me, when I was shopping for a jacket or suit.  “Don’t be one of those!”  “Those,” presumably, were oafish rubes from the provinces who sported gaudy colors and thus proclaimed their lack of New York sophistication.  And my friend Ken informed me imperiously, “When shopping for a shirt, you don’t go just anywhere; you go to a shirtmaker!”  By way of demonstration he took me to a pricey men’s clothing store where the well-heeled shopped; admittedly, the shirts there reeked of elegance and taste.  Ken himself, having a slight build, got most of his clothes from the boys’ department at Brooks Brothers, shrewdly combining elegance and a budget.  No such stratagem was available to me, nor was I drawn to such esoteric realms; in Brooks Brothers I never set foot.  But as a child of the Midwest whose wardrobe, after two years of student living in Europe, was, to put it mildly, shabby, I had a lot to learn, and mentors were not lacking.  This was, of course, long before the peacock revolution of the 1960s, when men’s clothing erupted – briefly -- into a rainbow of colors, and Ken himself would sport rings on all his fingers; back in the 1950s when I first experienced New York, restrained taste was still the rule.

Friends of mine, fresh baked.  But there are bagels
and bagels.  Here, as everywhere, quality counts.
Ezra Wolfe

         Another thing that struck me was the prominence of Israel in the news.  Many of my friends were Jewish, and I was soon absorbing and even using a host of phrases new to me: chutzpah, mishegosh, shicksa, goyim, and the names of all the Jewish holidays, while at the same time having my first taste of a bagel and a blintz.  And Jewish jokes abounded: the Jewish lady in Miami Beach who shouted, “Help!  Help!  My son the doctor is drowning!”  In fact, so many jokes opened with the phrase, “There was this Jewish lady whose son was a doctor,” that everyone but me would already be laughing.  So it went.  “I want to be Jewish!” I finally announced.  “Because all my friends are Jewish.”  (A slight exaggeration.)  “In that case,” said a young woman friend with a knowing smile, “you’ll have to have a bris.”  Smiles all around.  But by then I had a good idea of what was involved and could explain that, being a hospital baby, I had already undergone the procedure, albeit with a shocking lack of ritual.

My enemy.

         Imbibing was another part of the New York way of life; every social occasion required it.  Scotch and very dry martinis were in vogue and, not knowing better, I went along.  One martini, I soon learned, relaxed me; two made me everyone’s friend and a brilliant wit; three meant immediate befuddlement and, the following day, a nasty hangover. There was simply no such thing as a single martini; they were by nature serial.  As a result,  one evening I had to leave a party early and go home, and on another occasion I saw the double bill of Tennessee Williams’s Garden District and Suddenly Last Summer float by me in a haze.  In time – a very long time, alas -- I learned to shun martinis, a ban that continues to this day. 

         I was never completely a New Yorker; maybe my Midwestern roots ran too deep.  My mother once, having met my friend Ken, promptly informed me, though without a hint of censure, “He’s very New York!”  I doubt if anyone has ever said that of me.

How a naive Midwesterner was plunged into the New York art and design world

         Our friend John (for another of his adventures, see post #41) tells how, an 
innocent in every way, he left his home town of Minneapolis and came to the city in June 1951, fresh out of college with a B.A. in English and vague hopes for a writing job.  On the train he met a young woman whose sister was a designer in the city, and through the sister he heard of Interiors magazine and a possible job there.  Arriving in the city, he stayed briefly at a YMCA and then, seeing an ad in the Times where "twelve Christian gentlemen" in Jackson Heights -- wherever that was -- were looking for another roommate, he answered the ad and ended up in distant Queens, with twelve guys who shared a big apartment and had a room to let.  Then, having settled in, with the spunk of innocence and no knowledge of interior design, he rushed to apply for a job at Interiors.

         It was a hot summer day and, having only one suit, a heavy wool one appropriate for the wintry rigors of Minnesota, he wore it and sweated profusely.  Furthermore, his blond crewcut and tie with zigzags situated him, as he now realizes, at the antipodes of New York sophistication.  Going to the magazine’s office on East 50th Street, just across from Saint Patrick's cathedral, he applied.  The magazine’s managing editor, a woman named Magda, entered the waiting room – stomp, stomp, stomp – with a heavy tread and a look of being very, very busy.  Her stomp and her appearance were, to put it mildly, formidable.  Slightly overweight with red hair in severe braids wrapped tight around her head, and plainly dressed with no attention to fashion, she exuded a kind of Old World funkiness.  With a look of having little time to waste on a lowly applicant, she led him into her office, confirmed that there was indeed an opening, gave him a book entitled Designing Tapestry, and told him, “Take this book and bring me a review in twenty-four hours!”  That said, she waved him away.  John rushed off eager to do as instructed, the only problem being that his mind was uncompromised by any knowledge of design or tapestries.

          The next day he was back in her office with his review.  Looking as busy as ever, Magda gave him a cursory look, then took the review and read it.  Nervous, John waited in suspense for the verdict.  To his surprise, her features softened.  “You write very well,” she said.  “I have others to interview, but you are definitely in the running.”  Again, she dismissed him.

         Over the next few days John was going to other interviews – none of them promising – or simply wandering about gaping at big buildings like the Minnesota naïf he was.  Then, after a week had passed, she phoned him: “John, the job is yours.  You lack experience, but we’ll train you.  You can learn.”

         John was elated: on his very first try, he’d landed a New York job that involved writing!  If the pay – fifty dollars a week -- wasn’t princely, neither were his qualifications.  His first assignment for the magazine was to write a three-or-four-page section presenting small news items from the rich and fascinating world of interior design.

         A few weeks later he learned from someone in the office that, just when he was being interviewed, there had been another applicant for a job at the magazine: a journalist named Ada Louise Huxtable, who hoped for a somewhat more elevated position than the one John got.  And why had he been hired, and not Ms. Huxtable?  Because she was overqualified and he was underqualified, and underqualified was just what they wanted: someone new to the game whom they could train, while paying an appropriately measly salary, and not the substantial sum that Ms. Huxtable would have expected.  The publisher, John learned, was stingy.

         John worked for Interiors for five years, acquiring experience and writing reviews of interior design installations.  His relations with the overbearing Magda ran smooth at first, and he noticed how, when an important visitor came calling, she could be a fountain of charm.  But when the top editor died and Magda pressured the publisher into naming her as his successor, and John was promoted to managing editor, that relationship changed.  A workaholic, Magda was desperate to keep her job, and now eyed John – and for that matter everyone else – warily, as if they were out to snatch that job away from her.  Yet John, harboring little ambition, was perfectly satisfied with the job he had.

         A byproduct of the magazine job was entry into the world of art.  The magazine had connections with prominent artists and critics – Andy Warhol did covers for them – and John got to know a number of them; to this day he is knowledgeable about the New York art world and maintains contact with several artists or their widows.  But when he got a hunk of money for an article on Playboy, he quit his job and set off to explore the Old World wonders of Europe.  Happily, in those days the dollar went far.

        

         A hopefully relevant aside:  Beginning as a journalist, Ada Louise Huxtable went on to become this country’s most noted critic of architecture and in 1970 won the first ever Pulitzer Prize for criticism.  She loved cities and was a great preservationist, lamenting the demolition in 1964 of the old Penn Station, a Beaux-Arts masterpiece, to make way for the fourth incarnation of Madison Garden.  “Not that Penn Station is the Parthenon,” she wrote, “but it might as well be, because we can never again afford a nine-acre structure of superbly detailed travertine [a kind of limestone], any more than we could build one of solid gold.  It is a monument to the lost art of magnificent construction, other values aside.”  I recall my own shock when, soon after the demolition, I saw a photograph of the station's imposing columns lying abandoned in a field in New Jersey, soon to be used in a landfill in the Meadowlands.  But the loss of this architectural treasure, probably unappreciated by most commuters as they hurried through it, gave a hearty boost to the budding preservationist movement in the city. 

  

The main waiting room of the old Penn Station: 
high-vaulted classical magnificence.

    And then ...

                                                                                                              nyc-architecture.com

(c) 2013  Clifford Browder

     

46. The Great Erie War, part 2.

2

Mr. Fisk again, properly posed and sedate.
But the unwaxed mustache suggests that this
photo antedates his acquaintance with Miss
Mansfield.

            At Taylor’s Hotel in Jersey City, Jim Fisk experienced three glories tinged by one passionate longing.  It was glorious when, piqued by news of the first absconding railroad in history, lawyers, messengers, brokers, confused Erie employees, and every ragtag and bobtail of Wall Street and the press swarmed across the river to New Jersey to be met in the downstairs lobby by Director James Fisk, Jr., aflash in a waffle-weave suit with rings and cuff links aglitter, who funneled reporters to the bar, then up to the Erie suite.  Awaiting them there was a table stocked with goblets and prime Havanas. 

            “Gentlemen, we welcome that great lever of opinion, the press.  They only who do deeds of darkness shun the light.  In fighting the injustice of New York justice, we’ve vowed to show pluck to the backbone.  Our battle is a crusade against monopoly and therefore” – he waved his gem-studded hand – “in the interest of the poor!”

            It was glorious to run a railroad by telegraph, issue communiqués, and with reporters listening, to give orders, call councils of war.  And it was glorious three times a day to banquet in a special dining room on Vanderbilt’s money, munching quail on toast and oysters with champagne amid quips, jokes, puns, bursts of song, and a cry of No Surrender.  (Only Uncle Daniel sat apart.)

            The passionate longing that tinged these roils and revels concerned the person of Miss Helen Josephine Mansfield, lately installed on Twenty-third Street, from whose eyes like wet stars, and purple-black and lustrous pink-plumed hair, Director Fisk had rarely till now been parted.  Even while issuing orders, scanning telegrams, or downing woodcock and wine, he envisioned his soul and pillow mate corsaged in her carriage, promenading, bust to the breeze, or at home clad only in a crucifix, a plush-lipped, peachlike Eve.  He itched, bristled with love.

            Jay Gould, sunken-chested, with a pianissimo voice and large dark quiet eyes, either glazed and distant or fixed and piercing, betrayed no lusts or pangs as he sat through Erie’s councils, his countenance masked by the bush of an ink-black beard.  His only gesture was the tapping of a pencil, as his wiry, fine-strung mind reckoned cannily each Erie director’s share in the Vanderbilt pie.

            Daniel Drew nursed in his innards a fierce longing for comforts left behind: his slippers, his steak and potatoes, his Saint Paul’s pew, the snug back room at Groesbeck’s, and spattering over him, the scouring voice of his wife, who for forty-eight years had kept him to the mark.  He was raveled out by the jibberjabber of endless councils of war, and by Jimmy’s champagne dinners, whose songs and blasts of mirth jarred him awake as he sat off hunched in a corner, trying to doze.  (How could he join those feasts where spirits gushed and grace was never said?)

Here, at their home base in Manhattan, are the type of
characters whose presence in Jersey City so terrified
Daniel Drew.  Was his fear justified?

            On the fourth day of exile came dire news: forty man-crunching New York City roughs had arrived in Jersey City by ferry, straggled to the Erie depot, poked about.  Finding themselves outnumbered by Erie detectives and clerks, they had departed, announcing that the raid had been organized in a notorious Eighth Ward gin mill, where certain parties had offered them fifty thousand dollars to kidnap Daniel Drew!

            At Taylor’s Hotel these tidings disrupted the midday feast.  Startled awake from his doze, Uncle Daniel felt a quick, hot jab of fear.  Would Cornelius Vanderbilt – the wrastler, the thunderer of Harlem Lane – being pinched in purse and pride, stoop so low, play so foul?  Vanderbilt, who had bellowed more than once that the law was too slow for him – who, when his wife resisted moving back to Manhattan from her beloved Staten Island, was said to have locked her up in an asylum until she changed her mind?  Would that tyrant, that Samson of finance, resort to violence?  Yes, Drew concluded, yes!   The roughs, having scouted about, would return by night; he quaked for limb and life.

            While Jay Gould paled at the news, his stomach churning, and the other directors sat befuddled, Jim Fisk leaped to the fore.  “Inform the police chief!  Call up the militia!  Uncle Daniel, stand back from that window – don’t let yourself be seen from the street!”

            Couriers ran, telegraphs clicked, a conference was called.

            “Wait!” cried Fisk, dabbing his chin with a napkin.  “Sudden emotions are dangerous!  Gould’s stomach is delicate.  Let him finish that quail.  He’ll need it to sustain him in the perils before us.  Vanderbilt must be desperate.  There’s bloody work to do!”  All this within the hearing of the press.

            By nine that evening the entire Jersey City police force patrolled on the alert, under instructions to rush to the hotel, should rockets be fired from the windows.  Under Fisk’s personal command, fifteen picked men armed with clubs and revolvers were presented to the object of the “grab.”

            “Uncle Daniel,” said Fisk with a grin, “these men will take care of you.  They look like they can do it.”

            Drew, eyeing the weapons with a nervous smile, thanked them faintly; the men saluted smartly.

            Backing them up, Fisk announced, were three twelve-pounders on the docks, the Hudson County Artillery in reserve, and -- unique in the annals of railroads! – a navy of four small boats on the river manned by crews with rifles.  Before those bruisers could get to their prey, Erie would fight to the very last man!

            Dazed, nodding feebly at vows of No Surrender, Uncle Daniel retired to his room, double-locked the door, and plugged the keyhole with cotton.  All Fort Taylor and all Jersey City braced for the attack.  Long hours passed.  Uncle Daniel prayed, listened intently, and finally, fitfully slept.  But no rockets burst in the sky, no rifles crackled, no cannon boomed; the night passed untroubled.

            “A most ridiculous state of excitement!” pronounced the Times; “Stuff of romance,” said the World; “A desperate attack!” insisted the usually cynical Herald.  For three days the police kept watch and Erie employees were marshaled as reserves, while Erie’s treasurer hugged the premises.  Gradually, the kidnap scare abated.  Heartened by letters of support from Erie friends and workers, on the fourth day the Old Bear ventured forth -- by daylight, well escorted -- for a short walk into town.  Crossing his path came Miss Helen Josephine Mansfield, with servants carrying luggage, parasols, and a caged canary, summoned by Fisk from New York to be installed in a room of her own smack in the Erie suite. 

            In the Erie suite?  Jay Gould and Uncle Daniel, both conventional married men, must have protested vehemently: a fancy woman planted in their midst, when they were up to their ears in a crucial struggle, with hordes of reporters nosing about!  But Jim Fisk only winked and grinned.

Miss Mansfield, whose abundant charms
enraptured James Fisk, Jr., even to the
point of importing her to Jersey City.

            Thereafter, from Miss Mansfield’s room by day  came perfume and an avian descant, and by night, perhaps catching Uncle Daniel at prayer, delicate hints of carnal festivities.  Thanks to Jim Fisk’s liberality with liquor, journalists confined themselves to veiled remarks in their articles about the home comforts with which the directors beguiled the weary hours, but the Old Bear was mortified.  Never had he dreamed that for fleecing Cornele of eight millions he would be lodged cheek by jowl with a fancy woman and all but witness the grossest fornication.  In the caverns of his mind the cry of  No Surrender, never resonant, dwindled to a whisper.

            Uncle Daniel's exile had come at the most awkward of times.  He had yet to deed the grounds and convey his endowment to the seminary, a matter he had meant to see to soon at the first formal meeting of the seminary’s board of directors – a meeting he couldn’t possibly attend, without exposing his person to the direst threats.  What must the gentle Methodists be thinking, having already thanked him abundantly for gifts that had yet to be gifted?  He wallowed in chagrin.

            The very next day came fresh warnings of an assault by New York roughs; stores closed and volunteers rushed from the suburbs, till a hundred men guarded Fort Taylor, with two companies of state militia in reserve.  On Jim Fisk’s orders Uncle Daniel was locked in his room with six hulking whiskey-scented bruisers, black cigars planted in their teeth, lest the old gentleman be snatched out the window by stealth.  All through the night, unnerved by ungodly talk and the taint of liquor and tobacco, Uncle Daniel watched, listened, quaked.  But the long night passed unvexed.

            Over the next few days, while seedy men in derbies slouched about, and Commander Fisk, strutting, barked orders, and to throngs of journalists vowed never to be taken alive, Uncle Daniel, guarded from thugs by thugs, began to suspicion a cruel and shameful hoax.  Had Vanderbilt wanted to cop him, he would have done it quick and clean.  Why then these alarms?  Didn’t Jay and Jimmy trust him?  Did they fear he might talk to Cornele?  Talk to Cornele …  Planted in his brain, the idea took quiet root.

            The next Sunday -- informed by his lawyers that under New York law no civil summons could be served on the Sabbath -- he slipped over on the Weehawken ferry, took a cab to Washington Square, knocked, was shown to an upstairs room.  There loomed the Commodore, his friend and enemy of almost forty years.  The Commodore’s blue eye ran him through.

            “Drew, you was a damn fool to skedaddle off to New Jersey!”

            “I’ll allow as how I’m circumstanced somewhat awkurd.”

            “I’ll keep my legal beagles at the lot o’ you, till you fork that money back.”

            “Naow Cornele, mebbe we kin compromise this, old friends that we be.”

            “You owe me eight million dollars!”

            “Two, Cornele, jist two.”

            So it went for an hour, the Commodore barbed and bristly, Uncle Daniel mitteny and soft.  What exactly was said is unknown, but they parted having agreed to meet again.  The Commodore was surely thinking, I'll worm little Erie secrets out of him, then big ones, then everything, and Uncle Daniel was perhaps reflecting, Them as grinds enough together ends up rubbin' smooth.  In the Great Erie War, treachery leaved and bloomed to the first scrawny hatching of the dove of Peace.

3

            After ploys and counterploys by thirty well-paid counsel in fine whack and kilter, followed through five courtrooms by clerks toting heaps of ever thickening documents tied with red tape;

            After fulminations from Judge Barnard, white topper raked at an angle as he whittled at a pinewood stick on the bench, leaving little mounds of shavings on the floor, while presiding over a legal fandango where he himself got enjoined, and being spied upon by Erie, boasted of hiring spies of his own;

            After rumors in Albany of thousand-dollar bills leaping forth from black carpetbags of lobbyists with rubicund noses into the open palms of legislators, who in deliberation did golden flipflops, then legalized the new Erie stock;

            After further meetings where Uncle Daniel whispered to the Commodore little Erie secrets, then big ones, but not everything, then pleaded tearfully to be allowed to go home, and even promised to hand over the Erie treasury;

            After Fisk and Gould, their suspicions aroused, wrenched the treasury away from the treasurer, guarded him, and kept him from the first formal meeting of his seminary’s board of directors, inducing in him an abundance of chagrin;

            After an Erie express train, leaping from a snapped iron rail, hurtled down a wilderness ravine where passengers, trapped in flaming wreckage, screamed and died in the night;

            After all this, and stealthy nocturnal parleys leading to deep scoopings into the Erie treasury to satisfy everybody’s claim, while Judge Barnard, having screeched like a jay and squawked like a parrot, huffed down and cooed like a dove, the Great Erie War was over.

             Lawyers and senators were richer, Erie poorer, and the Commodore out several millions.  “Erie?  What have I to do with Erie?” he told reporters.  “I’m runnin’ my railroads and racin’ my trotters like always.  If you needs to know more, see my lawyers.”  His lawyers were just as tight-lipped, but to his underlings the Commodore remarked with a scowl: “Never kick a skunk.” 

            Weary of tumult, Uncle Daniel resigned as treasurer and director of the Erie Railway, leaving forever his bedraggled goose that had laid golden eggs.  Having at last deeded the grounds and conveyed his endowment to the seminary, he went to his Putnam County farm to recover peace of mind and fatten up beeves for the market, thankfully inhaling clean air and the heady scent of manure.

            Jim Fisk and Jay Gould appeared before Judge Barnard, each to pay a fine of ten dollars and a clerk’s fee of twelve and one half cents.  To them alone went the railroad, its coffers unsweetened with money, its tracks two streaks of rust.  Buoyant as ever, Jim Fisk bought Pike’s Opera House, renamed it for himself, and over the astonished Jay Gould’s objections moved the Erie offices in, so that henceforth the company’s business was conducted amid sumptuous furnishings spiced by trills and a whiff of perfume.  Another Erie first: a railroad in an opera house.  (More of this in time.)

            As peace reigned with a great dying down of event, moralists inferred corruption in corporations, legislatures, and bench and bar alike.  But when Uncle Daniel, back from the country, set foot again on Wall Street and graced it with his smile, the market perked up, while men who had lately denounced him flocked round, grinned, shook his hand.  Not everyone who took on the Commodore survived.  Besides, the Old Bear had fulfilled an American dream: cheat big, get away with it.

Note:  For a note on sources, see the previous post.  Next comes Discovering New York: three stories of how Bob, our intrepid friend John, and I separately explored the city in the 1950s.  In time there will be a sequel to the Great Erie War: the Saga of Jim Fisk, whose astonishing career is at this point just getting under way.  He always thought big, so big things can be expected, with a dash of spice and scandal.  Also some sailing vessels and steamboats along the way, and a look at Monumental New York.

(c)  2013  Clifford Browder

45. The Great Erie War, part 1

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            Wall Street buzzed:  Dan Drew had been smitten by one, two, three injunctions, was suspended as treasurer of Erie, must issue no new stock.  So ordered the fiercely mustached Justice George G. Barnard, a ruffle-shirted magistrate drowsy on the bench in the morning from revels long past midnight -- a friend of wealth and brandy whom the Vanderbilt attorneys appealed to with learned arguments and canny compliments.  From all accounts Dan Drew, the wiggliest figure on the Street, had been nailed down and trussed up by the full force and majesty of Law.

            But when Dan Drew stepped from his one-horse chaise to enter his broker’s office on William Street, he did so with a buoyant tread and looked chipper and blithe.  As did other Erie directors assembling there, all smiley smiles while grim-faced Vanderbilt brokers bought every share of Erie on the market.  Wall Street buzzed again: what was Erie up to?

Jay Gould, Jim Fisk's buddy, whose fertile brain
may have hatched the epic rascality of flooding
the market with quantities of new Erie stock.

            It may have been Jim Fisk’s new crony Jay Gould, a small, quiet man with scalpel eyes and an abundance of dark whiskers, and an appetite for grandiose schemes, who proposed a way to handle Vanderbilt.  Certainly Jim Fisk agreed: give the old hog all he wants.  But Dan Drew may well have hesitated: it meant cheating the mightiest, wrathiest man on the Street – one who for decades had mocked his whiny twang, made him feel puny because he hadn’t wrastled in his youth, and once, having nipped him for a million in the market, squelched his pleas: “Dan’l, don’t plead the baby act anyhow – settle up like a man!”  Cheat Cornele Vanderbilt?   And on a grand scale like this?  Unthinkable!  Or was it?  Dangerous, to be sure.  But maybe ... just maybe ... thinkable.  In fact, delicious.  And the whole board agreed.

            Lawyers harangued.  In two, three, five courtrooms Erie counsel answered Vanderbilt counsel injunction for injunction, got the courts all bollixed up.  Then, one weekend, while Judge Barnard in a white top hat made the rounds of his favorite saloons, eyeing the tasseled garters of the waiter girls, and Cornelius Vanderbilt, hot from Harlem Lane, at a fancy club played euchre with millionaire cronies for the highest stakes, the Erie conspirators convened.  At Dan Drew’s brownstone residence at 41 Union Square, behind drawn blinds and locked doors, the flowery carpets of the front and back parlors (witnesses of late to teas for ministers and the founding of a seminary) took the furtive imprint of the soles of brokers, lawyers, directors.  They were conferring with their host, who sat slouched down in an easy chair, tickled by mazes of whispers like the rustle of beach grass before a storm.

            And storm there was.  In those days stocks were not all traded simultaneously at the Stock Exchange; to ensure an orderly market, they were called up and traded one at a time.  But when the Exchange opened on Monday, and it came the turn of Erie to be traded, pandemonium ensued.  The Vanderbilt men were suddenly engulfed by an avalanche of Erie stock and, as ordered, bought every share offered.  But thousands – tens of thousands – were offered, far more than anyone anticipated.  When the Exchange, following its usual procedure, ended trading in the stock, the traders spilled out onto the street, gesticulating wildly and uttering grunts and shouts and squeals like a rout of hogs to the trough, buying, buying, buying.

Trading at the New York Stock Exchange, where stocks were called out one at a time.

 It took courage and nerve to cross swords
with this man in the market.

            In his office on West Fourth Street, watched by ranks of flunkies, Cornelius Vanderbilt examined Erie certificates of stock just delivered to his brokers on Wall Street: immaculate sheets of paper dated only two days before.  He was forking out millions for virgin squares of paper, the biggest fraud the Street had ever seen.  Erie, he would learn in time, had converted ten millions in convertible bonds – intended for other purposes, but no matter – into one hundred thousand shares of stock.  Clerks, brokers, lawyers, sons-in-law, and son all braced for claps of oaths, but heard only a wisp of a whisper: “Thievin’ bastards …”  Gouged by his enemies, even now he was being deserted in the market by his friends, who dumped their Erie shares in a panic, forcing him to buy them, too.  He could almost hear the rumors spreading that his nerve, his fortune had cracked; he stood alone.

            “Shall we sell, sir?” stammered a broker.

            “No, you fool, buy!  If we don’t, the whole damn market’ll bust to smithereens.  Whatever they’ve printed, buy!”

            Out millions, he needed cash, and quickly; to get it from the banks, he would twist arms, make  threats.  Having issued orders, he called for his trotting wagon.  Departing not a jot from his daily routine, tight-lipped, chin set, and with every eye on him, he raced on Harlem Lane.  Meanwhile,   when his emissary demanded that the banks give the Commodore a loan using Erie stock as collateral, they refused, but offered to do it with his own New York Central stock instead.  Adamant, Old Sixty Millions threatened to dump tons of Central stock on the market and cause a panic; the banks, holding Central stock themselves, crumbled, and the Commodore got his loan.

A New York Central stock certificate, with a picture of
you-know-who at the top.  In the banks' eyes, as solid and
safe as Erie stock was flimsy and risky.

            Judge Barnard fumed.  Sitting in court with his top hat cocked at an angle and his feet propped up on the bench, he had just learned that Treasurer Drew and the Erie board of directors had flouted his every injunction.  He sipped a brandy, scowled.  The majesty of Law had been insulted, his pride skinned, his dignity gored.  He throbbed with rage.

            The Erie crowd were in high cackle.  And why not?  Before them on a table in the Erie offices on West Street, stacked in bales and bundles, sat eight millions of Vanderbilt cash.  About to send it for safety to New Jersey, they gazed, gloated.  Never had the Commodore been so clipped; they were the envy and awe of the Street.  Suddenly a messenger puffed in: Barnard had ordered their arrest for contempt, vowing by nightfall to clap every one of them in jail!  Well lawyered, they had looked for suits and countersuits to be fought with Vanderbilt’s money, plus bribes to the solons of Albany, but never this.  How could Barnard take it so personally?  Jail!   They must get themselves, the money, and the company’s books out of the state of New York!

A greenback of 1862, front and back: our first national currency,
printed by the Treasury Department to finance the Civil War.
This is the stuff the Erie boys were in high cackle over  --
some eight million dollars' worth -- courtesy of Commodore
Vanderbilt.  He got some, but not all, of it back.

            The patrolman on West Street gaped, as from the Erie offices came a flurry of top-hatted gentlemen and a whirl of clerks clutching documents tied with red tape, as well as account books, desks, and drawers, their pockets stuffed with what looked like securities and cash.  Moments later, reassured and richer by a greenback, he watched as they made for the docks, one old gent leaping into a hackney cab with bank notes packed in bales.

            By luck, the fugitives reached the docks unmolested and boarded a ferry bound for the blessed Jersey shore, and as they passed the midpoint of the crossing, breathed a collective sigh of relief: out of New York at last!  Soon they were lodged in Taylor’s Hotel, Jersey City, hard by the Erie depot, where Erie trains bound for New York deposited their passengers, so they could proceed by ferry to the city.  Not for anything would Uncle Daniel set foot again in New York, but Fisk and Gould had affairs to wind up in the city and hankered for one last dinner at Delmonico’s, whose sumptuous fare no restaurant in provincial Jersey could match; so they went back, risking arrest.  In mid-feast at Delmonico’s, getting word of their imminent arrest, they exited in hot haste, hurried by cab to the docks, obtained a small rowboat and two hands to row them to New Jersey, got lost in fog on the river, finally managed to clamber aboard a passing ferry, and so, soaked and bedraggled, finally made it back to New Jersey.

            Bedraggled or not, the younger fugitives, safe with Vanderbilt’s money in the blessed sanctuary known as New Jersey, saw it all as an inconvenience and a lark.  But Daniel Drew, a distinguished churchman of seventy and the founder of a theological seminary, was stricken with dismay.  He was a fugitive from the state of New York!  What would Wall Street say?  And the Methodists?  And his wife?  Nothing like this had ever happened to him in his life.

            Source note:  Again, this post and the next one are somewhat fictionalized in details, but close to historical fact.  Much of the dialogue is taken from contemporary sources.  The story is told in more detail in my out-of-print biography, The Money Game in Old New York: Daniel Drew and His Times (University Press of Kentucky, 1986), of which used copies are available online, and in other sources as well; I have often simplified and streamlined.  (I wish someone would digitize the Drew book's illustrations; I could use them in posts.)  The story will be concluded in the following post, with treachery, secret meetings, a train disaster, and the dove of peace.

            Note:   Another colorful New Yorker died last week, former mayor Ed Koch, who ruled the city from 1978 to 1989.  A native of the Bronx, he was a real New Yorker, feisty and abrasive, but fun-loving as well.  Credited with pulling the city out of a financial crisis, he finally wore out his welcome as mayor, but continued to play a public role until his death, and wrote a best-selling autobiography that inspired an Off Broadway musical.  His trademark query was "How'm I doin'?" -- a risky gesture since New Yorkers, like Koch himself, are notoriously unsubtle of tongue; they squawk.  Loved or hated, Hizzoner will be long remembered.

(c)  2013  Clifford Browder