Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [953]
Yet where City and Suburban led, few followed, as big capital had many investment outlets far less troublesome and more lucrative than low-rent housing. By the end of the 1890s the model tenement movement had built only two thousand units, which housed no more than ten thousand people. In the same period, the housing industry built twenty thousand units into which 750,000 people were crammed.
ROOSEVELT CRACKS DOWN
Mayor Strong’s police commissioner, Theodore Roosevelt, would achieve a notoriety that equalled Waring’s, but his accomplishments would be more problematic. Since his defeat in the 1886 mayoral election, Roosevelt had kept busy. He toured Europe with his new wife, Edith, then came home to set up his Sagamore Hill estate at Oyster Bay. He took up duties as a federal civil service commissioner. He wrote history prolifically, turning out a celebratory volume entitled The Winning of the West, a biography of Gouverneur Morris, and, in 1891, a History of New York City.
Roosevelt’s municipal biography, a scholarly potboiler, was enlivened by enthusiastic “bullys” for historic virtue and stern condemnations of historic vice (the “unscrupulous rich” and the “vicious and ignorant poor” garnering almost equal opprobrium). He applauded with particular vigor the efforts of the police and troops who had attacked the Civil War draft rioters “with the most wholesome desire to do them harm,” professing his delight that “over 1200 rioters were slain—an admirable object lesson to the remainder.”
In 1895 Roosevelt added a late-breaking postscript to the second edition of his city history hailing the resurgence of the reform movement he had helped foster. If this was his way of indicating a desire to return to the metropolitan fray, his wish was swiftly granted. Mayor Strong, determined to put a strong hand at the police department tiller, summoned Roosevelt back from his long exile. He would never leave the spotlight again.
Roosevelt soon discovered his authority was nowhere near as clear-cut as Waring’s. The major legislative upshot of the Lexow exposes had been a Platt-dictated law requiring the four-man Police Board to be composed equally of Democrats and Republicans (giving Platt assured access to police patronage and the election machinery). Roosevelt was thus only one of four commissioners, though his colleagues promptly elected him president. To the public eye, however, Roosevelt seemed totally in charge, an impression the publicity-conscious politician eagerly cultivated.
Roosevelt lunged into action. First he arranged for the resignation of Lexow-disgraced Superintendent Byrnes and Inspector “Clubber” Williams. (Byrnes would launch a detective agency on Wall Street; Clubber entered the insurance business and would die a multimillionaire). Roosevelt and his colleagues established a merit system for appointments and promotions and added two thousand new recruits to the force—many from out of town, few of them Irish Catholics. In 1897 he would announce—prematurely, as it turned out—that “the old system of blackmail and corruption has been almost entirely broken up.” Roosevelt also raised morale and encouraged excellence by handing out medals for heroism and partially modernizing the department: telephone call boxes on streets allowed cops to communicate with station houses; a Bicycle Squad added mobility.
Like Waring, TR set out to exercise personal authority over a refractory workforce. He delighted in making surreptitious nocturnal tours of the city, accompanied only by his friend (and publicist) Jacob Riis (whom