The Epic of New York City (93 page)

At the beginning of the depression poor people were dependent on private charity and local government, but neither could cope with the worsening situation. New York was hit harder than any other American city because of its size. In 1931, when Walker was mayor, the city had launched its own relief program, issuing bonds to pay the cost. Mayor O'Brien had met relief needs mainly by borrowing. LaGuardia,
who wanted to put relief on a pay-as-you-go basis, received authority from the state to finance relief from current revenues. This meant that he had to find new taxes.

Although LaGuardia had opposed sales taxes while he was a member of Congress, as mayor he imposed a 2 percent sales tax, a 3 percent utility tax, and a gross business tax of 0.1 percent to meet the city's share of relief costs. The state and federal governments contributed 75 percent of the city's relief burden. Between 1933 and 1939 the United States spent more than $1,000,000,000 for relief in New York City. The peak came in March, 1936, when 1,550,000 men, women, and children in the city, or nearly 20 percent of the total population, got some form of public assistance.

The phrase “work relief” was avoided at first; relief projects were called emergency work. Officials couldn't decide whether it was work being performed or relief being dispensed. At last they faced up to the grim fact that relief was intended to keep people from starving and to boost their morale with jobs that made them feel useful. Nonetheless, there was much sneering about leafraking and loafing on the job. The efficiency-minded Moses once snapped, “The official who promises one hundred percent efficiency is taking the public for a ride!” But Moses was softhearted. After a fishing trip with friends off Long Island, he cleaned 500 flounders and gave them to the poor.

In those dark days little girls played a game called Going on Relief. One youngster would take the part of a relief worker. She would question her friends about their families; whereupon the other little girls displayed their dolls and told sad stories about how many children they had to support. Small boys, for their part, took up another game, which they called Picketing. Carrying crude signs, marching back and forth, and hooting at “scabs,” they reenacted labor clashes they had seen or heard about from their fathers.

A building boom had begun before the stock market crash, and now many of these projects continued, providing jobs for workers who had not been hired for public construction. Some new structures were finished before LaGuardia took office. The 102-story Empire State Building, the world's tallest skyscraper, opened on May 1, 1931, on the site of the old Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Will Durant, the historian, once wrote that “the Empire State Building is as sublime as Chartres Cathedral.” On October 1, 1931, a new Waldorf-Astoria opened on the block bounded by Park and Lexington Avenues and Forty-ninth and Fiftieth streets. Then came the city's most important
single architectural project—Rockefeller Center. This city within a city was erected by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., on the west side of Fifth Avenue between West Forty-eighth and West Fifty-first streets. He employed 75,000 men for 10 years. The tallest peak in this sierra of skyscrapers was the 70-story Radio Corporation of America Building, completed in May, 1933. The
New York City Guide
, written by talented relief workers, declared, “In its architecture Rockefeller Center stands as distinctly for New York as the Louvre stands for Paris.”

The construction industry and labor unions, like many other businesses and institutions, had become infested with racketeers. When Prohibition ended, bootleggers and gangsters tried to find a new way to make a dishonest dollar, so they muscled their way into control of a wide range of enterprises, such as restaurants, theaters, bakeries, the garment trade, loan sharking, prostitution, and all forms of gambling. They forced honest businessmen and labor leaders to pay them so-called protection money under fear of reprisals. After the racketeers had taken over a firm or entire industry, they fixed prices, as is done by cartels. Protection money and price boosts were passed along to consumers, already hard pressed to make ends meet.

LaGuardia, who had promised to rid the city of crooks, improved the police department, tried to make honest men of cops, cracked down on gamblers, and smashed slot machines and pinball machines. His crime-busting record was exceeded, however, by that of Thomas E. Dewey. Born in Michigan, Dewey had received a law degree from Columbia University, entered a Manhattan law firm, and had become Chief Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. In 1935 Governor Herbert H. Lehman appointed Dewey a special prosecutor and told him to run racketeers out of town.

Various gangs throughout the country had put aside their differences and organized themselves into a national syndicate. The eastern division, headquartered in New York, was known as the Big Six. Francesco Castiglia, better known as Frank Costello, was in charge of the division's gambling. Lucky Luciano headed the prostitution and narcotics rackets. Arthur Flegenheimer, called Dutch Schultz, controlled the restaurants and the Harlem policy banks. Joseph Doto, whose alias was Joey Adonis, ruled the bail bond racket and Brooklyn waterfront. Louis “Lepke” Buchalter and Jacob “Gurrah” Shapiro dominated the industrial and labor extortions. Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel and Meyer Lansky were strong-arm enforcers.

When Dewey probed the restaurant racket, Dutch Schultz began worrying. When Dewey looked into the policy racket, Schultz banged a table with his fist and screamed, “Dewey's gotta go! He has gotta be hit in the head!” But with criminals now organized in a cartel, Schultz couldn't act alone. Ranking East Coast gangsters held a summit meeting in New York to discuss Dewey's assassination. Most were against the overt act; one mobster argued that if they killed Dewey, federal agents might take up where he left off and chase the syndicate out of the country. Syndicate directors voted to let Dewey live. However, they soon heard that the furious Dutchman was going to take Dewey by himself. To protect their interests, they had Dutch Schultz murdered.

Dewey's investigators found damaging evidence about James J. “Jimmy” Hines, a Tammany leader who acted as the principal link between the underworld and Tammany Hall. Hines had protected Schultz's policy racket and guarded the interests of a host of other criminals. Dewey got an indictment from a grand jury, and Hines was sent to Sing Sing. Dewey also masterminded the arrest and conviction of Lucky Luciano on a charge of compulsory prostitution. During his two years as special prosecutor, Dewey obtained seventy-two convictions out of seventy-three indictments.

A girl living in Jackson Heights read in her history book that George Washington had been sworn in as the first President of the United States in 1789. The year 1939 would mark the 150th anniversary of the historic event, and the youngster thought that the city should celebrate by staging a world's fair. The city fathers and civic leaders agreed. Various sections of each borough wanted the fair, but the arguments ended when Park Commissioner Moses refused to cooperate unless Flushing Meadow was selected. The meadow had served as a city dump the last quarter century, and Moses hoped to use a temporary fair to create a permanent park. Groundbreaking ceremonies were held in 1936, and the two-year fair opened in 1939.

It was the greatest world's fair ever held up to that time, attracting a total of nearly 45,000,000 visitors and costing $157,000,000, but it was a financial failure. New York had not had a world's fair since 1853, when the city's population had stood at 581,018. In 1939 New York was a metropolis of 7,434,346 persons. This was more than the combined populations of Arizona, Colorado, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Idaho, Maine, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New
Mexico, North Dakota, Rhode Island, Utah, Vermont, and Wyoming—plus all the foreign-born white males of Oklahoma. More people lived in New York City than in Australia or Bulgaria or Peru or Greece or Sweden or Morocco.

The day the fair opened, Mayor LaGuardia said, “May I point to one exhibit that I hope all visitors will note, and that is the city of New York itself.” He had cause to be proud of the city and of himself as well. He was completely honest. He was the best mayor New York ever had. He served longer than any mayor since Richard Varick, who held office from 1789 to 1801. Not since Mayor Mitchel's time had any city administration been so vigorous. He instituted more reforms than any mayor of any city at any time in the nation's history. He improved and expanded municipal services, secured the adoption of a new city charter, reformed the civil service, attacked the slum problem, bettered housing conditions, resumed the construction of schools, unified the subway systems, stimulated cultural affairs, made the city an aviation center, and opened the nation's first free port. He cleaned up the magistrates' courts. He abolished the Tammany-controlled board of aldermen and established a city council elected by proportional representation. Grateful New Yorkers reelected him in 1937 and again in 1941.

The Japanese had put up a lovely pavilion at the World's Fair. Modeled after an ancient Shinto shrine, it included a dainty garden with reflecting pools, tiny waterfalls, and dwarf evergreen trees. One part of the pavilion was dedicated to the long friendship between Japan and the United States. At a dinner held on the eve of Japan Day ceremonies at the fair the Japanese ambassador to this country had hissed politely and assured the guests that Japan intended to stay out of the European war, which had begun in 1939, and “to keep the war out of Asia.”

Ah, so? On December 7, 1941, two Japanese envoys had an appointment to see Secretary of State Cordell Hull in Washington. This was a Sunday, and here in New York the weather was mild. A White House switchboard operator opened emergency lines to Washington offices of the United Press, Associated Press, and International News Service. “This is the White House,” she said. “Stand by for a conference call.”

Arthur DeGreve was almost alone in the U.P.'s Washington office that Sunday afternoon. Muscles tensed, he crushed the phone against his ear. Then came a simultaneous flash from the White House to the
three wire services. DeGreve scribbled notes on copy paper. The teletypes, as Joe Alex Morris explained in
Deadline Every Minute
, had not yet been readied for the Sunday night report. DeGreve hung up the phone to the White House and grabbed another. He called the international headquarters of the United Press on the twelfth floor of the New York Daily News Building, at 220 East Forty-second Street in Manhattan. Phil Newsom took the call.

“This is DeGreve in Washington—Flash!—White House announces Japanese bombing of Oahu!”

“Bombing what?”

“Oahu, dammit! Oahu!”

“Spell it, for Pete's sake!”

“
O-A-H-U
—wahoo! We've got a war on our hands!”

Chapter 47

L
AGUARDIA
had called Hitler a “perverted maniac.” A little later Hermann Goering, the Nazi minister of aviation, ordered the German aircraft industry to produce planes capable of carrying five-ton bombs to New York to “stop somewhat the mouths of the arrogant people over there.” Goering's experts also made a special map of lower Manhattan, painting a bull's-eye at the corner of the Bowery and Delancey Street. Concentric rings drawn around the dot showed zones of primary and secondary damage. This map, later captured by the Allies, proved that Goering hoped to inflict destruction as far north as Rockefeller Center and as far south as Governors Island.

Just before noon on December 9, 1941, an alarm sounded at the
Air Defense Command located at Mitchel Field, twenty-eight miles east of New York. A siren shrilled like an anguished nightingale, while under it could be heard the bullfrog warble of a foghorn. In the staff building, officers looked up with puzzled frowns. They jumped out of chairs, rushed to windows, and stared out. Soon they had the word: enemy planes approaching the east coast. A major snatched up a phone on his desk. Oddly, he
whispered
his order: “Load the B-25's with thirty- and fifty-caliber machine guns.”