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systems—was costing the city its competitive edge. But efforts to coordinate port administration, build new bridges, and improve city services were thwarted by divided political jurisdictions. The chamber considered competition between the area’s municipalities to be annoyingly irrational, much as big businessmen were rethinking the virtues of economic competition. As an aid to planning piers, wharves, warehouses, and transportation, the chamber urged putting “New York and its environs under one general scheme of municipal rule.”

In 1888 the Real Estate Record and Builders’ Guide, organ of New York’s propertied interests, also came out for consolidation. Only a centralized authority, it argued, could push through the improvements that would boost land values and provide insurance companies, savings banks, and estate trustees with profitable investment opportunities.

That same year Mayor Hewitt, himself a Chamber of Commerce stalwart, issued a proposal for a vast and coordinated program of public improvements and sketched a grand vision of New York’s future. “With its noble harbor protected from injury, and the channels of its approach straightened and deepened”; with its wharves and docks improved and its streets paved and cleansed; with “cheap and rapid transit throughout its length and breadth” and “salubrious and attractive parks” sprinkled throughout the area; and with a system of taxation “so modified that the capital of the world may be as free to come and go as the air of heaven”—then, Hewitt said, “the imagination can place no bounds to the future growth of this city in business, wealth, and the blessings of civilization.” Indeed New York’s “imperial destiny as the greatest city in the world is assured by natural causes, which cannot be thwarted except by the folly and neglect of its inhabitants.”

For all its upbeat energy, this “imperial” urban vision—like those of nationalist jingoes, railroad magnates, and corporate financiers—was also fueled by fear. Inaction might leave the field to rival empire builders, which in New York’s case meant Chicago. In 1889 Chicago swallowed up 133 square miles of suburban terrain, and when the 1890 census was tallied, the results showed the midwestern metropolis (population 1,100,000) gaining fast on Manhattan (1,515,000).

The Real Estate Record assessed the threat bluntly: “New York would undoubtedly lose a great deal in prestige the world over—and in actual dollars and cents, too—should Chicago or any other city on the continent count a larger population.” European banking and export firms might shift their American branches to the heartland; corporate headquarters would soon follow, taking professional firms along; the market prices of stocks and commodities would get set in the interior; manufacturing would steal away; New York’s property values would scud downward. Doomsayers recalled how the power and prestige of Philadelphia, once America’s chief city, had slowly bled away once it was surpassed numerically by its Hudson River rival.

If Chicago became the first city in population, moreover, it might relegate New York to secondary status in other spheres—those of arts, culture, and politics. This fear took tangible form in 1890, when Congress gave the midwesterners the go-ahead to host a giant celebration of the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s voyage. The idea of a World’s Fair had been broached back in 1882, and ever since the two colossi had been competing for it furiously. Defeat seemed another doleful indicator of metropolitan decline.

How to hold the front rank? Immigration was important but inconstant and slow. Green underscored the fact that Chicago, like Paris and London (which had obtained a regional government with establishment of the London County Council in 1888), had “become great and prosperous, not alone by accumulation of number, within their first restricted bounds, but by expansion, annexation, and consolidation”—and the city’s leading businessmen agreed.

GREEN’S DREAM OF NEW YORK

With the Chamber of Commerce opting for decisive measures,