Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [668]
At the urging of environmentalists, the legislators expanded the purview of the Croton Aqueduct Department beyond its existing responsibility for water supply and sewerage to include street pavements, pumps, and privy vaults, but in leaving intact the Common Council’s cojurisdiction over public works, they thwarted the department’s ability to impose systemic reforms. In Brooklyn, however, they created a Board of Sewer Commissioners and empowered it “to devise and carry into effect a plan of drainage and sewerage for the whole city, upon a regular system,” which it did. In addition, a local Board of Water Commissioners oversaw establishment during 1856-58 of a system that tapped streams and ponds on the southern shore of Long Island (leased or purchased by the City of Brooklyn), ran the water through a brick conduit (along today’s Conduit Avenue), and pumped it up the glacial moraine (at today’s Force Tube Avenue) into Ridgewood Reservoir (in today’s Highland Park) from which it flowed down to the city in iron mains. A secondary distributing reservoir atop the higher Prospect Hill (within today’s Mount Prospect Park near Flatbush Avenue and Eastern Parkway) supplied those parts of Brooklyn above the level of Ridgewood.
State Republicans were able to make as much headway as they did because state Democrats were divided into contending factions, and those who feared Wood’s growing power—he was being talked of as the next Democratic candidate for governor—were prepared to back Republican wing-clippers. In the city itself, many Tammanyites, fearing that Wood’s ascension would help immigrants expand their base in the machine, considered him a greater threat than the Republicans, who were weak in the metropolis itself.
Among Wood’s Democratic opponents was William Tweed, who had returned from two unhappy and undistinguished years in the House of Representatives, a largely forgotten man. Determined to bid for power by striking at the existing leader, Tweed was given his chance by the Republicans, who in their eagerness to curb metropolitan power unwittingly provided him with a base of operations. In yet another reform, legislators enhanced the power of the New York County Board of Supervisors, created as a check on city government, by giving it authority to audit county expenditures, supervise public works, oversee taxation and the various city departments, and appoint the inspectors of elections. In an effort to underline the purity of their intentions, they incautiously made the twelve-person board (six elected, six appointed by the mayor) bipartisan. Among those who climbed on board in 1857 was William Tweed. Within a year he had formed a “ring,” a combination with other equally unscrupulous supervisors, which began levying a systematic 15 percent tribute on all vendors who furnished the county with supplies. Tweed also used his new status to dramatically enhance his standing among ward leaders and to promote friends to office, including, by 1858, George Barnard (recorder), Peter Sweeny (district attorney), and Richard Connolly (county clerk).
In the meantime, Republican reformers, unaware of what they had spawned, decided to press on with their campaign against the miscreant metropolis. Utterly heedless of the possible impact on even sympathetic Democrats, they proceeded to pass two acts, on April 15 and 16, 1857, that drew a moral line and provided the muscle to make the city toe it.
Their new Liquor Excise Law was an attempt to circumvent judicial decisions that had stymied their 1855 effort at straight-out prohibition of alcohol. The act required saloonkeepers