Dark Tide (4 page)

Jell saw the weather as just one more obstacle jeopardizing the tank’s completion and one more factor conspiring to humiliate him.

The stinging wind continued to howl off the harbor, rattling the tank’s steel superstructure. Jell wriggled his toes, now numb inside his leather shoes. He clenched and unclenched his fingers to get his blood moving. Across the entire wharf area Jell saw men working; stevedores, longshoremen, and teamsters. They were big men with rough hands and strong backs, guiding horse-drawn wagons loaded with beer barrels, driving hogs from the railroad sheds to the steamers moored along the pier, or unloading heavy wooden crates from the cargo holds of those ships. He even saw a blacksmith pounding out shoes in front of the city-owned stables. Jell was not comfortable among such men or around such work, preferring the certainty of numbers and the warmth of his office to the randomness and discomfort that surrounded him on the wharf. These men earned their livings with the threat of injury, miserable weather, and erratic ship traffic always lurking. A longshoreman who wrenched his back or a stevedore who dropped a beer barrel and shattered his foot could be out of work for months with no means to support himself or his family. A teamster delivering tomatoes to the dock might see his product rot if a ship were delayed for days by a storm.

He also was uncomfortable in this neighborhood. To him, it was sooty, noisy, and crowded, filled with poor Italian immigrants speaking a strange language and practicing even stranger customs, and Irish city workers whose brashness made him uneasy. He longed for the project to be finished so he could return to his Cambridge office.

He recognized, though, that this was the
perfect
location for the molasses tank, a little more than two hundred feet from the ships, easy access to the tank for railroad cars along the spur track, and a fast one-mile rail trip to the East Cambridge distillery where the molasses would be distilled into alcohol. He had negotiated hard for this location and would bear standing in the cold now to watch the site take shape.

Behind him, Jell heard the clatter and screech of the elevated passenger train from South Station as it rumbled above Commercial Street, straining to negotiate the hard left bend in the track toward North Station. Jell did not turn, but imagined the sparks that flew when the train’s steel wheels bit into the searing cold rails. His eyes were drawn to the crews working on his tank and he watched the men wield hammers and bolt rivets, wondering how they could work in this kind of cold. Their problem, but his too. Speed was his overriding concern right now.

Arthur P. Jell had spent his entire working career in clerical, administrative, and financial positions, beginning at age fourteen when he had become an office boy with distillers Hiram Walker & Sons. In 1909, at the age of thirty, he moved to Boston to become secretary of the Purity Distilling Company. After two years as secretary, Jell was promoted to treasurer, the position he held when he was given responsibility for the molasses tank project in late 1914.

USIA president Frederic M. Harrison and vice president Nelson B. Mayer had been dangling a parent-company vice-presidency in front of him, the next logical step in Jell’s career. Such a promotion would include relocation to headquarters in New York City. When Harrison ordered him to begin work on the Boston tank project, there was more than a veiled implication that his success on this project would expedite his promotion and failure would doom his future with the company.

Jell had first contacted Hammond Iron Works in late 1914 to draw up plans for the Commercial Street tank and Hammond furnished completed blueprints in early April 1915, along with a price tag of $30,000 for the manufacture and erection of the tank. Since then, Jell had been involved in frustrating negotiations with Boston Elevated to agree on leasing terms for the site. “It looks as though the matter will be settled within a very few days,” Jell wrote to Hammond on April 9, 1915, a prediction that had proved laughable.

The leasing discussions with Boston Elevated ground to a halt over money and the details of the complicated arrangement. Boston Elevated had to assign USIA rights to build the large tank and an accompanying pump room, moor vessels alongside the wharf to unload molasses, install a 220-foot underground pipe to carry molasses from the ships to the tank, store the molasses, build a small auxiliary tank that acted as a molasses feeder between the large tank and the railroad cars, and build a “spur track” that would enable railroad cars to travel back and forth between the tank site and the main Commercial Street tracks.

Both sides also had to agree to language governing charges for gas, water, and electricity onto the property, as well as liability for any damages that occurred during USIA’s regular commerce. All of this took time, much more time than Jell or his company had estimated. “We regret very much that we are still unable to give you any definite shipping date for the 90-foot tank,” Jell wrote to Hammond on May 6, 1915. “We are far more anxious than you are to commence work on this, and we can assure you the delay has been unavoidable.”

The pressure on Jell to finish the tank project increased the very next day, May 7, when the British luxury liner
Lusitania
was sunk by a German submarine in the North Atlantic. America was outraged when the press reported that nearly 1,200 people had been killed, including 128 Americans, and sentiment began building for the United States to enter the war against Germany. Even the normally temperate
New York Times
editorialized on May 8, 1915: “From the Department of State, there must go to the Imperial Government at Berlin a demand that the Germans shall no longer make war like savages drunk with blood.” If America entered the war, the War Department’s demand for munitions, and therefore for industrial alcohol produced from molasses, would grow exponentially.

Even now, the demand for industrial alcohol from the big munitions companies—du Pont, Hercules Powder, Aetna Explosives—was hard to keep up with as they worked to feed the British and French war machines. The French and Canadian governments also placed large orders directly, and alcohol shortages were becoming commonplace. The production of munitions, quite simply, was America’s number one growth industry.

For USIA to get its fair share of this booming trade, Arthur P. Jell needed to finish the molasses tank on the Boston waterfront no later than the final day of 1915.

On September 24, 1915, after months of haggling, Jell had signed a twenty-year lease with Boston Elevated to rent the seventeen-thousand-square-foot waterfront parcel at 539 Commercial Street, sandwiched between the North End residential neighborhood and the inner harbor, for an annual fee of $5,000. The lease was to commence on November 1. “We are extremely anxious to have the work proceed as rapidly as possible and are quite willing to pay any additional expenses there may be in pushing the work forward so that the tank can be completed promptly,” Jell wrote to Hammond on October 1, 1915. Then on October 19: “We confirm the understanding whereby you are to furnish sufficient men to complete the tank by December 15th and we agree to pay … any additional expenses which may be necessary in order to hurry the work as much as possible.”

The Hugh Nawn Construction Company began work on the three-foot thick concrete foundation during the first week of November, and Hammond Iron Works shipped the steel plates to Boston around the first of December. When Hammond suggested that it might lose some time applying for proper permits from the Boston Building Department, Jell wrote back promptly: “You apparently did not understand that we had arranged so that it would not be necessary for your foreman to take out a permit in Boston, as the contractors who are building the foundation will allow us to erect the tank under their permit.” The building department considered the tank a “receptacle” and not a “building,” so the permit for the foundation was all that the city required.

Before the flood, the molasses tank towered over adjacent structures and the elevated railroad tracks.

(The Bostonian Society/Old State House)

With his deadline approaching like a locomotive, Jell made an executive decision in late December. The contract with Hammond called for the fifty-foot-high tank to be tested for leaks upon its completion by filling it with water. Jell knew that the amount of water he would need to fill the tank would be so vast that he would have to tap into the municipal water supply, an expense he refused to authorize. Jell also knew it would have taken many days, perhaps weeks, to fill the tank. It was time he did not have. Instead, Jell ordered crews to run only six inches of water into the tank, enough to raise the water level above the first angle joint at the base of the structure. When no leaks occurred, Jell pronounced the tank sturdy, sound, and ready to use.

On December 29, 1915, two days before the Cuba Distilling Company molasses steamer arrived with seven hundred thousand gallons of molasses to off-load, Hammond Iron Works posted a letter to Jell along with a final invoice for the tank. “… In order to include it in this year’s business, and even if the tank is not, technically speaking, completely finished by December 31, we trust it will be satisfactory that our invoice is rendered under this date.”

Two mornings later, the huge tanker arrived in Boston and disgorged her molasses cargo smoothly, filling the tank to a level of about thirteen feet.

Nearly a year of frustration had ended. Arthur Jell had met his impossible deadline and USIA was in business on the Boston waterfront.