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By Root 7869 0

he was accused of fraud in 1839; although not convicted, he would be dogged from then on by a (probably deserved) reputation for duplicity. Nevertheless, Wood did well in the Gold Rush trade and parlayed his profits—and the comfortable inheritance of his second wife, Anna Richardson—into a still greater fortune by adroit land speculation. Beginning in 1848 with a substantial upper west side tract, he bought land and built and sold homes, offices, and stores in nearly every ward. (“I never yet went to get a corner lot,” Tweed said later, “that I didn’t find Wood had got in ahead of me.”) These profits in turn were pyramided into investments in banks, railroads and insurance companies, and by the end of the 1850s he was a millionaire.

In 1850 Wood ran for mayor as a “true friend of the Irish” but was beaten back, partly by allegations of business dishonesty: Wood, Philip Hone wrote, “instead of occupying the mayor’s seat, ought to be on the rolls of the State Prison.” But in 1854 he recaptured the Democratic nomination and won, despite hysterical opposition from nativists to the candidate of Rum and Rowdyism. His strongest support came from the working-class wards (particularly the Irish Sixth, where he harvested four thousand more votes than there were voters). His enemies, however— a combination of prohibitionists, Know-Nothings, and Whigs—secured control of the Common Council and many of the critical patronage-dispensing departments.

Until the very day of his inauguration, January 1, 1855, many considered Wood the incarnation of evil, a Cataline with a long and sorry record. Yet immediately on taking office, Wood became the very model of a reforming mayor. He announced his intention to establish frugal government and maintain public order. He commenced a modest crusade against prostitution in lower Broadway and violators of Sunday closing laws. He went on to call for clean streets, new stone municipal docks, effective building codes, sanitary police, market inspectors, metering of an expanded Croton water system, uptown steam railroads (and uptown development in general), a new City Hall, a full-size Central Park (resisting would-be trimmers), and creation of a great university and a free academy for young women. All in all he championed a thorough reconstitution of the city that would, he said, make New Yorkers proud of their “citizenship in this metropolis” and enable them to “say with Paul of Tarsus, ‘I am a citizen of no mean city.’”

Even beyond this astonishing advocacy of proposals advanced over the years by Griscom, Cooper, and others, Wood announced a determination to govern. Just as Louis Napoleon was beginning his top-down reconstruction of Paris, the new mayor declared he would vigorously make use of the powers provided his office by the new charter to bring efficiency and order to New York, and indeed appealed for still greater authority. “I am satisfied,” he proclaimed, “that no good Government can exist in a city like this, containing so many thousands of the turbulent, the vicious, and the indolent, without a Chief Officer with necessary power to see to the faithful execution of the laws.” In the short term, Wood set out to turn the newly reformed police department into a highly centralized and disciplined civic army, connecting all station houses to the chief’s office by telegraph. The Tribune was thrilled at the department’s new capability “of being quickly concentrated by the magical telegraph wires on any given part of the city” and pronounced it “a terrible warning to. . . the ruffianism which has so long beset our city.”

The reformers rubbed their eyes, convinced they were dreaming. But no, Wood had been transformed. He even looked the part: tall, erect, urbane, with a commanding presence. Strong was amazed that this “man whose former career shews him a scoundrel of special magnitude” had become “our Civic Hero.”

Not everyone was entranced. The more astute reformers noticed that Wood’s antivice crusades were highly selective. His men rounded up streetwalkers but left brothels alone, raided the