Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [740]
Tweed proved a perfect partner. As commissioner of the Department of Public Works, he authorized miles of sewer, water, and gas pipelines, appointed first-rate professionals to oversee the enterprise, and told them to build the best. Tammany sent civil engineer Alfred Craven to study European waste disposal systems, then sanctioned the use of technologically innovative vitrified tubing. Tweed appointed Edward H. Tracy chief engineer (he’d worked on the Croton Aqueduct under Jervis), and Tracy laid out the new underground network as a coordinated, unified system, in sharp contrast to the downtown jumble.
Next came roads. By 1873 over a thousand men in the pay of the Department of Public Works were laying out miles of hundred-foot-wide macadamized avenues (made using successive layers of stone broken into pieces of nearly uniform size) and substantial streets, at least fifty feet wide, with the key crosstown connectors (at 57th, 79th, and 86th) twice that size. The city also fostered development by leasing or giving away land to hospitals, schools, and museums—Mount Sinai, a Sisters of Mercy foundling hospital, the Normal (later Hunter) College—and encouraged Harlem’s improvement by laying out Mount Morris Park at 120th and Lenox.
Contracting firms, employing great numbers of skilled construction workers, followed behind the public works crews and began erecting speculative housing. Much of it—aimed at middle class and better-off Irish and German workers—consisted of three-story brick row houses with brownstone fronts, equipped with gas, Croton water, and indoor toilets. Even the four-story tenements lining Third, Second, and First avenues were several notches up from those blanketing the Lower East Side, though shady, marginal operators perpetrated some inferior work. Municipal expansion allowed the Democratic Party to establish solid relationships with uptown contractors, brickmasons, stonemasons and plasterers, many of them Irish-American.
New housing blotted out the old. At Dutch Hill—the shantytown on 42nd Street at the East River—the city broke up the hundreds of one-room shacks, cobbled together out of old timbers and tin roofing, that had housed over a thousand full-time residents. Old mansions tumbled. The Astors’ former estate at the foot of East 88th was torn down, as was the 1763 Beekman country home on East 51st Street. Workingmen digging the cellar for a building at Lexington and 104th Street uncovered a graveyard for British soldiers.
The construction boom sent land prices spiraling, and rumors of transit development sparked further hikes. Investors, convinced current values would be doubled or tripled in months, paid outrageous asking prices. Turnover was brisk, profits were taken quickly, and among the biggest profit-takers was William Tweed. He and his cronies bought heavily in uptown lands, especially in Yorkville and Harlem, and their properties became prime beneficiaries of—and spurs to—their many projects. In 1869, for example, Tweed and some friends bought the entire block bounded by Fourth, Madison, 68th, and 69th, had the city lay water pipes, and watched happily as their investment soared. Some bonanza hunters didn’t wait for actual construction. In 1869 Terence Farley, a contractor and well-connected Tweed alderman, acquired a corner lot at Madison and 68th; the city announced the impending arrival of sewers and water mains; and within two weeks of his purchase, Farley sold out for a substantial profit. Tweed had West Side investments too, but his East Side ventures were three times as big, which likely accounts for some of the delay in launching West Side public works. There were others who argued that progress on mapping, coordinating,