The Mad Bomber of New York (5 page)

By the mid-1930s the Hell Gate plant and some two dozen other energy suppliers would be swallowed up in a complex series of mergers and acquisitions resulting in the new and mammoth Consolidated Edison Company of New York—or simply Con Ed, as it would come to be known by millions of New Yorkers. The smaller and independent United Electric Light and Power Company—the original owner and operator of the Hell Gate plant—was to be no more.

If the massive turbine generators were the cerebral center of the power plant, it was, in fact, the catacomb of coal-fired steam boilers that represented the cardiac muscle that pumped life into the plant. In the boiler room, a dense labyrinth of steel tubes, meters, gauges, and coal transport tracks served nine aisles of steam-generating boilers—twenty-one machines in total—arranged in narrow and orderly rows like iron-clad machines of war. Millions of gallons of purified condensing water from Long Island Sound were heated to temperatures approaching 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit by the intense flames of the coal and air confection created in the heart of each boiler. The high-pressure torrent of steam thus created was then fired through ten-inch valve connections to spin the turbines of the massive generators. According to the plant owners, the boiler room was constructed for “ultimate capacity.”

Manning this 53,000-square-foot lattice of heat, water, and steel was a crew of hard and sturdy workmen who oversaw every aspect of the boiler room operation and of the plant as a whole. Engineers, dispatchers, operators, and menial workers alike labored long hours under difficult and dangerous conditions to operate and maintain the mammoth structures and equipment of the Hell Gate generating station in an effort to bring a reliable flow of current to the homes and businesses of New York. In a rather foreboding admonition that implied the dangers of the Hell Gate workplace, the standard application for employment with the United Electric Light and Power Co. contained the following “Notice to Employees Seeking Employment”: “Unless you are willing to be careful to avoid injury to yourself and fellow workmen, do not ask for employment. We do not want careless people in our employ.” Most of the men signed the contract without a thought. They just wanted to feed their families.

Joining this hardnosed and obdurate collection of plant workers in December 1929 was one shy and somewhat peculiar twenty-eight-year-old who seemed out of place. George Metesky had temporarily moved from his Waterbury, Connecticut, home to a rooming house on West Eighty-eighth Street in Manhattan to find work following his discharge from the Marine Corps. Though meticulous and painstaking in his duties, Metesky appeared rather undaunted by the strains of the enveloping Depression or the rigors of daily life at the plant.

His sheepish eyes rarely met with those of his coworkers, and his courteous demeanor was infrequently mistaken for affability or friendliness. Unlike many of the plant's workforce, Metesky established few, if any, relationships on the job, and he rarely engaged his fellow workers in idle chat or conversation. In striking contrast to the nature of his job and its surroundings and in keeping with his fastidious nature, Metesky was incessantly neat and always clean-shaven, with his hair adroitly combed into a pompadour. With a starting salary of $30.12 per week, he had counted himself among the fortunate to secure a job at the Hell Gate plant in 1929.

His position did not utilize the electrical skills that he had earlier developed, but Metesky inoffensively went about his business as a maintenance worker at the plant. His specific job titles were “generator wiper” and later “gallery man,” but Metesky dutifully performed whatever job was asked of him. Initially, his work entailed the simple cleaning from plant generators of the incessant buildup of grease, dust, and condensation, but later he received a promotion with the attendant duty of throwing switches and blocking feeders to safeguard the proper flow of electricity. As menial as many of his assigned tasks were, for nearly two years he always performed them more diligently than the job required, earning him a “top rating” at the power plant. He would later question his unfailing loyalty to Con Ed, but by 1931 George Metesky had become a model employee of the Hell Gate station.

“[He] looks like the usher who passes the collection plate in a small-town church. He would be a deacon, probably and certainly might lead the weekly sing at Rotary or Kiwanis and, in his spare time work hard for the Community Chest,” wrote one observer. Opinions of George Metesky were as diverse as the confused machinations of his inner thought process. Some found him pleasant and friendly, even jovial, while others described him as aloof and solitary—a “lone wolf,” said one co-worker. By most outward appearances, he was an introverted man with a gentle and inoffensive demeanor. He was regularly seen at Sunday mass in St. Patrick's Roman Catholic Church in Waterbury, Connecticut, and he was generally considered to be a simple, albeit odd, man. The record would ultimately reveal, however, that beneath whatever exterior he chose to exhibit on any particular day, George Metesky would soon develop a raging and deluded anger that would dominate his every breath.

He was of stocky build and medium height, and he often wore a gray fedora that covered his thin and well-oiled dark hair. Gold-rimmed spectacles accentuated studious light blue eyes, and his clothing, though modest in style, was always clean and meticulous in appearance. He would later be described as having a “spinsterish air about him,” or bearing the outward look of a “schoolteacher.”

Born George Peter Milauskas on November 2, 1903, in Waterbury, Connecticut, to Lithuanian immigrant parents, he was the youngest of four siblings. George's parents, George and Anna, settled the family in the ethnically diverse and divided community of Waterbury, where they built the family home at 17 Fourth Street. A stolid and hardworking man, George Senior worked first as a teamster then as a night watchman at the J. E. Smith Lumber Co. He would be remembered fondly by the owner of the company as “[e]fficient and well liked. He was a strong man, not big, but powerful . . . He used to leave notes for the day side after he went off duty. They were classics . . . he wrote beautifully, but spelled phonetically . . . [O]ne word he used all the time—‘desdesem.' It [meant] ‘just the same.' He wrote as he pronounced.” George Senior brought a workingman's pride and a strong respect for rules and regulations to his job. “Gangs used to break into the lumber yard,” continued the company owner. “[A]nd George would go right after then [
sic
], eight or ten at a time. He was all guts. He'd chase them too.”

As a child, the younger George attended the St. Joseph's Parochial School at the Roman Catholic Church of “Brooklyn's Lithuanians.” Later he would transfer to Duggan Elementary School, a weathered redbrick and mortar building, where he quickly gained a reputation as shy and withdrawn. A fellow student would later remark, “George would literally not step on an ant, he was that averse to hurting anything. He was a meticulous boy. Always dressed well. He wouldn't talk to you unless you made the first advances. He never went in for athletics. I should say he was quiet to the point of eccentricity.”

A teacher at Duggan School who was afflicted with a mild stutter had difficulty pronouncing George's last name. She converted “Milauskas” to “Metesky,” and ultimately the name stuck. The family surname would, in fact, prove to be a source of continuing confusion. At any given time the family would refer to themselves or be known to others variously as “Metesky,” “Milauskas,” “Miliauskas,” “Mallauskas,” “Mulesky,” or “Molusky,” and the mailbox at the front of the family home listed three of these variations.

Though he was of above average intelligence and showed proficient mechanical aptitude, Metesky managed only one year of high school. Feeling superior to his fellow students and even teachers, he dropped out of Crosby High School in 1918, later explaining, “I just had no interest in the subjects they were teaching.” Upon leaving school, Metesky worked several menial jobs as a theater usher and soda dispenser as well as a short stint as an apprentice machinist at the Farrell Foundry in Waterbury. A coworker at the foundry observed, “Well, he was a strange one. He came to work all dressed up in a suit and collar and necktie. He tried to learn the machine business dressed like that. And he hated to get his hands dirty. After a while he left the job and I lost track of him.”

In further pursuit of a technical vocation following school, he took on and ultimately completed an L. L. Coke correspondence course in electricity. Several months later, at the age of sixteen and a half, his “wanderlust” (as he called it) led him to enlist with the United States Marine Corps. In an initial two-year tour that began on April 13, 1920, at Parris Island, Metesky served eighteen months in Mexico and the Dominican Republic, where his service ultimately won him the Good Conduct Medal. In April 1922 he was honorably discharged from the Marines with an official service classification of “excellent.”

During the next three years of civilian life, Metesky worked as an auto mechanic's helper and a stock clerk, but in August 1925, yearning for the order and regimentation of the military, he chose to reenlist with the Marine Corps. His record indicated that he had grown an inch from the time of his first enlistment, now standing 5´ 9½?, with “eyes blue, complexion ruddy.” During this period, PFC George Metesky spent a year in Guam and twenty-two months at the United States consulate in Shanghai, China (and later Peking), where he received formal training as a specialist electrician—and as a chief ordnance mechanic in charge of a munitions powerhouse. Again, Metesky received high praise for his “excellent” service and character in the Marine Corps.

Following his honorable discharge from the service in 1929, Metesky, then age twenty-six, moved back into the family home at 17 Fourth Street in Waterbury. The property was situated at the top of a short but steeply inclined street in an unattractive section of town, cut off from the rest of the city by the Naugatuck River—“a dreary, shabby area of old homes falling into disrepair, weedy, rubbish-strewn lots, grimy-windowed factories and warehouses. The local name for the area was Brooklyn. Its residents were first-and second-generation Middle Europeans, Irish and Italians.” Though Waterbury had long since lost its character as a prosperous industrial center, it clung through the years to the appellation Brass City like a long-lost friend.

The Metesky home was a gray and dismal three-story frame building with faded wooden pillars that extended across the exterior of each floor. Porches, sagging at the middle, tenuously clung for the support of each pillar and gave the property the befitting appearance of an urban tenement. To the rear of the house, along a dusty and unpaved driveway, was a small garage of corrugated metal. Though the property was barren and in need of care, it was not untidy. “The house was not loved,” wrote one observer, “It was only maintained.”

Not long after he returned home, Metesky's mother, who had favored young George as the baby of the family, passed away, and in 1947 George Senior died, leaving the family home and a moderately sized cash estate to be divided among the four siblings. By this time, Metesky's brother, John, had married and moved to another part of town, leaving George alone in the house with his two gaunt and dour unmarried sisters, Anna and Mae.

The three siblings presented a strange and mysterious spectacle to the neighboring families. The top two floors of the home were rented to others, and Metesky resided on the first floor with his sisters. Following the death of their mother, Anna and Mae had taken on a maternal role and had set about to shelter, support, and pamper their younger brother, providing for his every material and financial need, often to their own sacrifice. It wasn't long, however, before dark and sinister rumors began to spread throughout the neighborhood and the moniker “crazy house” was soon ascribed to the property. Though both of the sisters held jobs in nearby factories, they were roundly thought of as stern and severe. The private and impenetrable nature of the family would serve only to heighten local suspicions.

Content with this reclusive lifestyle, Metesky remained friendless and largely alone. He showed little interest in women and, like his spinster sisters, remained unmarried. He accepted their unconditional love and admiration yet shared with them nothing of himself or his private world. Other than the short time Metesky spent in New York working at Hell Gate, this peculiar living arrangement would endure for nearly thirty years.