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By Root 7410 0

and the city inspector). The Common Councilmen leased city-owned piers at giveaway rents to favorites. They sold off Gansevoort Market, among the most valuable pieces of real estate in the city, for much less than it was worth, allegedly pocketing between forty-five and seventy-five thousand dollars for themselves. Witnesses testified before a grand jury that ferry leases were awarded in return for payoffs. In the case of the Wall Street ferry, the aldermen overrode the mayor’s veto and gave the plum to Jacob Sharp, one of their favorites, for much less than other applicants were willing to pay, then lowered his rental costs still farther the following year. Council members also perfected the art of “ringing the bell”—proposing nuisance ordinances that brought the threatened parties running with payoffs.

Most significant, 1852 brought a deluge of railroad projects, and an obliging council liberally handed out charters—which were to be held in perpetuity—on terms unfavorable to the city. One line up Second Avenue went to a group that included Tweed’s father-in-law; another, up Third, was awarded to a combination that included prominent Democratic politicians. Thus did the council establish—without even minimal planning, much less coordination on a Haussmannesque scale—the transportation system that would dominate the city for decades. In addition, its charters created quasimonopolistic agglomerations of corporate power, like the Third Avenue line (capitalized at over a million dollars), whose impact on the city, including the flagrant corruption of civic politics, would long outlast Tweed and his cohort.

MUNICIPAL POLITICS INDICTED

Many businessmen pragmatically accommodated themselves to this de facto partnership with politicos. For those in a position to outbribe their rivals, the situation had the positive advantage of allowing their money to talk loudest. Councilmen were also useful at ensuring that unwanted things did not happen. Whether from principled attachment to laissez-faire dictums or inspired by more tangible inducements, aldermen routinely blocked government actions (housing codes, labor laws, horsecar construction) that might hamper favored entrepreneurs. In 1850, against the backdrop of widespread radical and union agitation, a newly established Gas Consumers Association demanded the Common Council build and operate a municipal gas plant. Hostility to the two old monopolies that divided the business had long been building. The rates of the New York Gas-Light Company (1823), which supplied districts south of Grand Street, and the Manhattan Gas-Light Company (1830), which handled territory north of Grand, were much higher than those charged by counterparts in Philadelphia. Friendly authorities quashed the program for public power, however, and indeed forestalled the chartering of any new competitors—until 1855, when powerful entrepreneurs won establishment of Harlem Gas and Metropolitan Gas. Even then, City Bank’s Moses Taylor, a Manhattan Gas director, proved able to negotiate an amicable agreement with the new outfits, forestalling potentially ruinous competition (and lower gas prices as well).

If particular enterprisers were prepared to treat corruption as a routine cost of doing business, a far broader constituency was enraged by what it considered a more pernicious consequence: higher taxes. The Forty Thieves managed to increase city spending by 70 percent in their two years—including a marked upswing in expenditures for gas and lamps, street cleaning, and the purchase of real estate (up 400 percent)—and taxes had jumped accordingly, up by 54 percent between 1850 and 1853. The Common Council had also raised money by drawing on new techniques of railroad finance to sell revenue anticipation bonds. This practice had been going on since 1843, but where it once covered just 27 percent of the city’s expenditures it now (by 1856) paid for 47 percent of a sharply higher outlay, calling into question the security of investments in city bonds.1

Lost in the outcry of property-owning taxpayers was any awareness