The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America's First Subway (18 page)

True to his nature, Hewitt dramatically undercharged the government for his work. But when days and days passed and he had still not received any payment, he boarded a train for Washington on March 12 to meet personally with Lincoln’s trusted war secretary, Edwin M. Stanton. Stanton explained to Hewitt that the unpaid bill was tied up in government bureaucracy, but he promised to get a note to the president, and the next thing Abram Hewitt knew he was being walked into the White House and shaking hands with Abraham Lincoln. He had seen him once before, when Lincoln delivered a speech in New York, but he was still overcome. It was quite the meeting, the six-foot-four Lincoln peering down in astonishment at the slight Hewitt, who barely stood five foot eight.

“Are you Mr. Hewitt?” Lincoln is said to have asked.

“I am,” answered his guest with his usual straight face.

Lincoln could not contain his laughter. The towering president had assumed such a heroic task had been achieved by a man of equal stature, not someone so short. “Well then,” Lincoln said, smiling, “I expected to see a man at least eight feet tall.” Hewitt did not mind, but after listening to the president he presented his problem. He had not been paid for the work he had done. Lincoln, who had no idea, was stunned. He quickly called Stanton into his office for an explanation.

“Do you suppose that if I should write on that bill, ‘Pay this bill now,’ the Treasury would make settlement,” Lincoln said to Stanton.

When Stanton shrugged his shoulders and explained how only the president could cut through the red tape holding up the payment on Hewitt’s submitted bill, the president sat down, took out a pen, and wrote “O.K. A. Lincoln” on the piece of paper, assuring that it would be paid promptly and in full. He then ordered Stanton to walk personally with Hewitt to the Treasury Department and see that the bill was paid. On March 24, 1862, Hewitt received a draft of $21,000, and he saw the impact one could have as a chief executive. Lincoln may not have been Hewitt’s mentor. And to that point, politics had not even entered Hewitt’s mind. But Lincoln was a model for him to follow if he so chose, and twelve years later he took his first step.

*   *   *

IN 1874, HEWITT CHANGED HIS
residence from New Jersey, where he lived most of the year in the town of Ringwood, to New York City, where he also owned a house and where he believed he could make the greatest difference. A short man with a brisk walk, sharp wit, and quick temper, he began to explore a run for political office, and he quickly learned of a humorous public misunderstanding that would serve him well. His first name was often misspelled in the newspapers as Abraham, and it led the significantly growing Jewish population in New York to believe Hewitt was one of them. How much of a role that played in his first race is difficult to know, but in the fall of 1874 Democrat Abram S. Hewitt was elected to Congress, narrowly beating Irishman James O’Brien by less than a thousand votes to win the Tenth District, which covered mostly the Lower East Side and Gramercy Park.

Though the House of Representatives was controlled by Democrats for the first time since 1861, the president at the time was a Republican, the same man Hewitt had helped secure victories for in key battles during the Civil War, Ulysses Grant. Hewitt set aside his emotions and went to work to help Democrats oust Grant and retake the White House in 1876. It was the beginning of a twelve-year stretch in Congress that shaped Hewitt’s politics, beliefs, and values. And when New York Democrats organized to create a single, unifying voice and stand up for change in New York City, Hewitt was a natural choice; another was the city’s corporation counsel, William C. Whitney. The election paved the way for both men to reach their own pinnacles.

*   *   *

ON NOVEMBER 2, 1886,
Abram Hewitt was elected to what many at the time believed was the second most powerful executive position in the country, mayor of New York City. On the night of his victory, he was as humble as always. “I will make no promises or confessions,” he said. “I know that it is the fashion for men elected to high office to make them, but I prefer to act as my conscience dictates. Let me be judged by my acts.”

With one and a half million people, New York City was still far bigger than the second and third largest American metropolises, Chicago and Philadelphia, neither of which had yet to reach a million residents, though Chicago would close the gap soon. Washington may have been the capital city, but it was only the fourteenth largest in the country, even behind Pittsburgh, New Orleans, and Buffalo. New York City was the cultural and financial and entrepreneurial capital, and its mayor occupied an increasingly powerful position. Hewitt easily defeated a loudmouth, corrupt, Philadelphia-born economist named Henry George, who represented the United Labor Party, and a young, aspiring, reformist Republican assembly member named Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt had initially promised Hewitt he would work for him during the race, but then changed his mind and mounted his own aggressive campaign. When he lost by more than thirty thousand votes, Roosevelt said, “This is the end of my political career,” and he set sail for London to marry his second wife. Roosevelt was twenty-eight years old.

The newspapers were supportive of Hewitt, whom they saw as an anticorruption, big-idea leader. “It is expected that it will mark the beginning of better government, of more honest methods, in our municipal affairs,”
The World
newspaper wrote on January 2, 1887, the day Hewitt was inaugurated. Hewitt, despite health issues, including sciatic rheumatism, headaches, and insomnia, jumped into city affairs with vigor, sleeping four or five hours a night and running on an endless supply of nervous energy.

As mayor, the clean-living Hewitt, a man who hated to drink and viewed the saloon as the root of many of society’s woes, but who also could be prone to bursts of anger, learned right away the limitations of his office. New York City was still merely a state entity, and therefore often at the mercy of what state legislators wanted to do, even when it was not in the best interests of the city or its residents. Undaunted, he latched on to two causes right away that stirred up deep passions inside of him. They defined his brief tenure as mayor. And they changed the way New Yorkers lived.

*   *   *

IT WAS A STRANGE AND
unsettling time for the city. The economy was strong and innovation was thriving, but if you lived in Manhattan the troubles were impossible to overlook. Corruption remained rampant, poverty was abysmal, and morality was laughable. Despite so much upheaval, the city’s culture scene was bubbling, with stage performances of
La Tosca
playing at the Broadway Theater and Shakespeare’s
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
at Daly’s Theatre. The Lyceum Theater, New York’s first playhouse to be lighted by electricity, was crowded nightly, and so were the Bijou, the Casino, the Empire, and the Abbey, all thriving in what was known as Longacre Square (soon to be Times Square). A decade earlier, it had been a largely desolate and dark stretch of the city, but now it glowed nightly and could not have been more crowded with theatergoers and diners. The hottest ticket in town cost fifty cents and provided entrance into Madison Square Garden to see P. T. Barnum’s dazzling circus extravaganza.

Sex was everywhere when Abram Hewitt took office, and he did not like it. On one of his first days in office, rather than ask the top police officials for a state of his city, he walked the streets himself and could not believe what he saw. Brothels on every block, right in plain view, making very little effort to conceal what was happening behind their doors. What was happening was commercial sex for the city’s hardworking male laborers, who would pay one to two dollars for a fifteen-minute roll. The madams who ran the sex shops took half of the income from their mostly young teenage girls in exchange for weekly room and board. The expectation was that the girls would do their business quickly and efficiently, allowing no time for pillow talk. Some of the busier houses would sometimes see lines form outside, and in a good week a hundred transactions would take place at a single operation. If, however, a man wanted a woman, and not a girl, all he had to do was make his way over to Ladies’ Mile, which stretched from Thirty-fourth Street down to Fourteenth Street on Sixth Avenue and was lined with prostitutes from dusk till dawn. And if it was a black woman he wanted, well that was one block away, Seventh Avenue, nicknamed African Broadway.

“Can they be closed up?” Hewitt asked the police superintendent William Murray one day.

“Certainly,” Murray replied. “It is only necessary to give the order to have them closed up.” Hewitt was puzzled. He asked Murray why they have never been shut down if they were so blatantly flouting the law.

“Well,” Murray answered, “you had better ask some of your political friends about that.” Murray told Hewitt that the most regular clients at the places the mayor wanted to close were not only the mayor’s friends but also his biggest donors. But the police boss, a gruff veteran of the force for more than twenty years, underestimated the morals and the values of the new mayor.

“It does not make any difference to me who they are,” Hewitt said. “The places have got to be closed up.”

The two men parted, and by March police were shutting down the worst offenders and ordering the rest to straighten up or suffer the same fate. Harry Hill’s popular saloon, a notorious host of criminals, changed into a dairy restaurant. At 27 Bowery, a dirty, popular spot called Plymouth where prostitutes could always find clients, a shooting gallery filled the space. De Lacy’s, one of New York’s most popular and shady pool halls, didn’t even put up a fight and just closed its doors.

*   *   *

HEWITT NEXT TURNED HIS EYES
to his other annoyance, the filthy, smelly, overcrowded streets. On January 25, 1888, Hewitt received a short letter from Boston. An inventor there by the name of Joseph V. Meigs had been trying to convince Boston to adopt the steam-powered elevated monorail he had invented, but so far he’d been unable to get it built. It was unproven, but Meigs told Hewitt that his invention was safe, powerful, and able to move a great number of passengers. It is “an absolute solution of the problem of rapid transit,” Meigs wrote.

Hewitt was not convinced. And four days later, on January 29, 1888, he laid out his own vision for New York’s transportation crisis in his annual message to the Board of Aldermen. “The time has come,” Hewitt said, “when the growth of the city is seriously retarded by the want of proper means of access to and from the upper and lower portions of the city.” With 94 miles of elevated railways; 265 miles of tracks on the streets, where cars were pulled by horses; and another 137 miles of old omnibus routes still clogging up the city, New York claimed by far the world’s largest network of urban transit. It was time, Hewitt said, to modernize.

He proceeded to lay out a plan that reflected his thinking as a businessman with an engineer’s mind and a politician with a citizen’s heart. It was visionary and yet practical, so simple that the only thing more striking than the plan was that nobody had proposed it sooner. It was equal parts transportation and economics, because Hewitt, after studying for years all of the failed efforts to build a cohesive transit system, knew that nothing ambitious would ever be built unless it was clear to everyone—citizens, politicians, railway companies—how it would be paid for and how nobody would be left in financial ruin. Most important, he told the aldermen, it would reaffirm New York’s “imperial destiny as the greatest city in the world.”

His plan was rooted in the belief that New York had to find a way to take greater advantage of its vast land north of Eightieth Street, into Harlem and Washington Heights and especially north of the Harlem River. Unless that area was developed more, with rapid transit providing a way for the people to get from there to downtown, the lower portions of the city were doomed to unbearable overcrowding, and New York was sure to lose people to New Jersey, Long Island, or anywhere else they could easily move. The first half of his message he dedicated to improving and rebuilding New York Harbor and the docks and then paving and smoothing the streets. He described the lower part of the city, south of Canal Street, as being in “deplorable condition” and in need of being “entirely repaved.” It was from there that he turned to “rapid transit,” and said that he would waste no time explaining how “inadequate” the facilities were.

His first point was speed. Rapid transit, he said, must live up to its name, and that meant forty to fifty miles per hour, something that makes the horse-pulled carriages and even the elevated trains look as if they were crawling. Next, he said, no longer can the rails be linked from one pillar to the next with no guardrails to protect derailments. The speed of what he desired would not allow it. The only way rapid transit will work is if the rails are “laid below the surface of the streets” or if they rest on an embankment above so that it’s no less sturdy than the underground surface. Any routes, he said, must be designed to take people where they want to go and “not on a route that takes them away from the centres of business.” In what was surely a dig at the men who were convinced that elevated tracks would solve the city’s woes for decades, not merely a few years, he wrote that any plan must factor in future population and ridership growth. And whatever it costs, it must be built in such a way as to not raise fares from the existing five cents. That was the populist mayor speaking.

To solve the economic conundrum, Hewitt proposed an imaginative solution. The city would pay for construction of the system, but it would be built by a private enterprise, hired through a bidding process by the city. The winning company would then lease the tracks from the city to control and operate the trains and pay for any necessary equipment. Additionally, the company would pay the city interest on the bonds that were used to pay for the work, plus 1 percent every year from the revenues generated by the system. It was brilliant. Everybody would win. The city would not go bankrupt building the system. A private company wins an expensive contract to construct and operate it. And when thirty-five years expired, the debts would be gone, the bills would be paid off, and the city would take ownership of the system with the hope that it becomes and remains a source of revenue.