Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [741]
But Tweed’s speculative exploits were matched by solid accomplishment. In the mid-1870s the Real Estate Record and Builders’ Guide rhapsodized that “from One Hundred and Tenth street to Harlem river, from St. Nicholas avenue to the East river, the Boulevards and cross-streets are laid out and improved in the highest style of Tammany Art—opened, regulated, curbed, guttered and sewered, gas and water mains laid, with miles and miles of Telford-McAdam pavement, streets and avenues brilliantly lighted by fancy lamp-posts.” Tammany had made the region “one of the most desirable and picturesque localities for residence.”
Tweed had done his job well but expensively, with padded contracts inflating real construction costs. Some of the money came from city-levied property taxes, authorized by Tweed’s charter, whose collection was overseen by the Tweed-dominated Board of Apportionment. Most, however, was borrowed by selling interest-bearing bonds on the open market. In 1867 New York had already owed thirty million dollars—for Croton, for Central Park, and for Civil War draft-related expenditures—but the debt tripled by 1871, to nearly ninety million dollars, with two-thirds of the increase coming between 1869 and 1871.
Much of this capital flowed from wealthy private investors—old-monied merchants and Civil War profiteers—who with stock market waters roiled by the likes of Jay Gould sought the more sheltered investment harbor of municipal bonds. City bankers were pleased to underwrite the public works program, which generated fat commissions and a hefty 7 percent rate of interest (payable, as was the principal, in gold). Trust companies and savings banks blossomed after the war, many boasting Tammany-affiliated officers, and these repositories for the spectacular fortunes accumulated during the boom bought up fifty million dollars’ worth of city and county bonds by 1871. The international capital markets were another novel source. The Houses of Belmont and Seligman were skilled at financing railroads. Now they marketed New York City, selling its bonds in London, Frankfurt, and Paris.
RAPID TRANSIT
The one piece of infrastructure upper Manhattan still sorely lacked was a transportation system that could speed uptown residents to downtown jobs. On the East Side, the old New York and Harlem line, now part of the Vanderbilt empire, was a limited and unpopular resource. Property owners along Fourth Avenue had long been dismayed by the steam locomotives chugging up and down their thoroughfare, spewing smoke and cinders, and though Vanderbilt did open stations at 86th and noth streets, rail access wasn’t nearly sufficient. Nor was the old horsecar system. By 1872 Third Avenue cars built to carry twenty-two riders bulged with sixty or more during rush hour, and it could take an hour and a half to get to Wall Street. West Siders wailed that without fast transportation their area (as one promoter put it) would remain a “howling wilderness of vacant lots and rocks and morasses” from “which only death and the tax-gatherer will extract any harvest.” Here Tweed’s ambitions were the most vaulting. He planned to build a colossal, elevated Viaduct Railroad that would run along tracks mounted on massive masonry arches, forty feet high. Starting at a grand terminal he envisioned across from City Hall, two tramways would drive northward, plowing through the middle of blocks rather than along the avenues. One would proceed up the East Side paralleling Third Avenue to Harlem, the other up the West Side alongside Sixth Avenue to Spuyten Duyvil, thus encircling Manhattan Island. The cost was projected to be millions of dollars per mile.
In 1871 the Democratic legislature and Democratic Governor Hoffman authorized Tweed to charter the New York Railway Company and provided that after an initial subscription by private capitalists, the city treasury would contribute five million dollars