Shortly after 10 a.m. on the first day of 1898, the final mayor of old New York arrived at City Hall to hand his office over to the first mayor of the newly consolidated Greater New York and discovered that Tammany Hall had already moved in. On William Strong""s desk sat a large Tammany Tiger made of flowers. The windows were wide open, and the winter gusts were blowing away the last whiffs of Strong""s noble, and accordingly brief, reform administration.
"Going to freeze me out, eh?" Strong murmured. "Well, I can stand it two hours longer."
At the stroke of noon, old New York and Long Island City and the City of Brooklyn and some three dozen other municipalities ceased to exist. The ceremonies were perfunctory; Tammany""s puppet mayor Robert Anderson Van Wyck pointedly snubbed Strong, Brooklyn Mayor Frederick Wurster and Long Island City Mayor Patrick (Battle Axe) Gleason, then sat down and got to work. In his first official act, he fired every one of the three former cities"" department heads.
The metropolis was the work of two men: one a visionary idealist who sought to build a mighty monument, the other a professional politician who schemed to wrest power from New York""s Tammany Hall masters. The first man succeeded. The second failed. On New Year""s Day 1898, after three years of lying low, Tammany was running things again.
Limitless were the possibilities of the fabulous invention called Greater New York, overnight a city of 360 square miles and 3.3 million souls. The newspapers boomed with the day""s great expectations: Soon there would be a subway system, and new bridges across the East, North and Harlem rivers, and tunnels to New Jersey and Long Island, and a new aqueduct, and a public library and zoological gardens and an ocean parkway. And surely now would the seaport regain its eminence. This was a most pressing matter. Amid daily calls for the immediate deepening of the East Channel and improvements to dock facilities was the new city born.
It was concern for the port that had led Andrew Haswell Green to first propose consolidation 30 years earlier. Green had saved New York""s ruined finances in the 1870s after the fall of the legendarily larcenous Tammany boss William Marcy Tweed; he had been a key player in the creation of Central Park, the Museum of Natural History and the forthcoming New York Public Library; through all these public-spirited years he had argued for an "imperial city," one unified governmental instrument that would, chiefly among other things, centralize the port""s administration and insure continued commercial importance.
Related Gallery
Notwithstanding the staunch support of New York""s mercantile leaders, Green got nowhere at all with the idea until the early 1890s, when, in the legislative corridors of the Albany he controlled utterly and absolutely, Republican State Sen. Thomas Platt looked upon Green""s proposal for a supercity and saw that it was good.
The implications were clear to GOP boss Platt: The multitudes of a much larger New York might easily outnumber the Manhattan immigrants who were forever throwing their votes to Tammany""s Democrats. Elated by the prospect of an unbroken string of Republican mayors, Platt immediately began oiling the legislative machinery to make Greater New York happen.
Local voters would have to ratify the plan, of course, and they debated it for several years. Manhattan was wildly in favor, and the Bronx was already quite happily being annexed to Manhattan anyway. Long Island City and most other Queens communities were eager to tap into Manhattan""s tax base and water supply. Staten Island liked the idea of cheap ferry transportation. In November 1894, the citizens voted yea.
Brooklyn was another story. Brooklyn was itself a major city, proud of its bedrock middle-class values, wary of patently less-civilized Manhattan, unwilling to suffer subsumption. But the overexpanded city was so deeply in debt that consolidation was really its only hope. The vote passed by just two-tenths of one per cent, and resentments long ran deep: In April 1896, when Boss Platt""s Legislature signed consolidation into law, Brooklynites rioted in the streets.
Meanwhile, presiding over business in his "Amen Corner" at Manhattan""s elegant Fifth Avenue Hotel, Boss Platt had miscalculated the strength of the separate reform movement that had driven Tammany Hall out of New York""s political equation in 1894. Tammany""s candidate Van Wyck won handily when voters in November 1897 were called upon to elect Greater New York""s first mayor. On New Year""s Eve, Van Wyck nodding at his side, Tammany chieftain Richard Croker installed himself comfortably at the Murray Hill Hotel and began receiving a long line of favor seekers. It seemed there was not a Republican mayor after all.
On Governors Island on New Year""s Eve, soldiers fired a 100-gun salute to the shining new city. In Union Square, 100,000 New Yorkers paraded under the finest display of fireworks the city had seen since the 1858 celebration of the laying of the Atlantic Cable had accidentally set City Hall afire. A team of spooked horses trampled a crowd of merrymakers. There were numerous severe injuries.
In Brooklyn, Mayor Wurster and other heartsick citizens solemnly gathered to wake the extinguished City of Churches. Hymns were sung. Brooklyn was now destined to be no more than a residential section of New York City, Wurster acknowledged. But there would be many more paved streets, he added hopefully. Also, it was noted, the merger did mean that Brooklyn men could now get a barber""s shave on Sunday without having to cross the river.
In Long Island City, Battle Axe Gleason fumed. Not for nothing was Paddy Gleason called Battle Axe: The undisputed king of his turf was a man who literally chopped down new construction that did not meet with his personal approval, and he had been a formidable early champion of consolidation. Somehow he had it in his head that he was the man who would be Greater New York""s first mayor. Having delivered Long Island City, he had now found out otherwise.
"They have taken my ship away from me, but I am still captain!" he thundered, warning that his private army of policemen and firefighters would never stand for their city""s disappearance. No violence would be necessary, he promised: "I will not be surprised," he said, "if we should suddenly learn that, legally and constitutionally, no election for such a city as Greater New York was ever held!" On New Year""s Eve, steadfastly clutching at straws, Mayor Gleason matter-of-factly approved Long Island City""s budget for the following year.
At the stroke of noon on New Year""s Day, Greater New York effectively became synonymous with Greater Tammany Hall. "The sun will rise this morning," the Tribune had written, "upon the greatest experiment in municipal government that the world has ever known."
Advertisement
First published on March 1, 1998 as part of the "Big Town" series on old New York. Find more stories about the city""s epic history here.