Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [739]
With control over parks, public health, and tenement regulation now removed from their hands, the elite stewards, who in their own minds stood for professional expertise, moral refinement, and the public welfare, worried that their regulatory state would be dismantled. In some cases, they were right. The new Metropolitan Board of Health became a haven for hacks and rapidly waned in effectiveness, and the Tenement House Law, easily evaded by bribing compliant inspectors, went largely unenforced.
Yet Tammanyites didn’t scuttle all their predecessor’s initiatives. In particular, they made the city-building project their own, though turning it to their own purposes. The reformers had seen their primary constituency (in the words of one association) as the bourgeoisie in general—“the class who have the largest pecuniary stake in the good order of the city and who also command its moral forces.” The politicians were certainly prepared to extend municipal benefits to businessmen who were willing (or forced) to pay for them, but they also sought power and profit by dispensing patronage to working-class clients and siphoning off benefits for themselves.
Democrats backed public works projects far more grandiose than anything the Republican planners had promoted, to maximize the jobs they could hand out and the money they could pull in. Embracing a far more comprehensive and centralized approach to wielding municipal power than the laissez-faire Democratic Party had been accustomed to, Tammany politicians together with their bourgeois allies set out to reshape the urban landscape once again.
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City Building
William Martin of the West Side Association was delighted with Tweed’s rise to power, convinced that under a Democratic regime “the great public works on this Island would be vigorously pushed forward.” Yet in his part of town, the pace of progress remained languorous at best. Olmsted was not asked to submit a plan for Riverside Park until 1875, and work began only in 1877. Masses of laborers did begin transforming the old Bloomingdale Road into the grand new Boulevard, laying out two fifty-foot-wide carriageways, broad sidewalks, and a thirty-foot-wide planted median, but that project alone wasn’t enough to transform the drowsing countryside. In 1876 a Herald reporter found its lower extremities lined with saloons and shanties and its upper reaches, around looth Street, used mainly by the occasional cowherd leading his charges to pasture.
There were many reasons for the sluggish pace of West Side development, but the most critical was the Tweed men’s fixation on the opposite side of Central Park, a function in part of their heavy real estate investments in the area. The property owners who formed the East Side Association in 1868 had several things going for them. What their territory lacked in grandeur, it made up for in lower construction costs. The terrain from 59th to noth, between Fifth and Third avenues, was relatively easy to grade, dig up, and build upon, and the Harlem Plains (north of 110th) were more accessible still.
Tendrils of civilization, moreover, had already climbed higher up Manhattan’s East Side than its West. The New York and Harlem Rail Road up Fourth Avenue had opened up the area in the 1830s. In the 1850s horsecars came to Third Avenue, and by the 1860s it was lined with detached frame buildings, shops, and occasional groups of row houses. Horsecars ran along Second Avenue too, all the way up to 122nd, providing access to Harlem’s modest cottages. By Tweed’s time, with newcomers spilling westward along 125th Street, Harlem seemed ripe for full-scale development.
The East Siders’ battle plan was straightforward: settle working-class families in brownstones and tenements along the arterial