Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [980]
The charter commissioners pleased home rulers by shifting the right to grant street railway franchises from the state legislature to the municipal assembly and permitting the city to impose conditions on owners of shoreline property. Developers and planners appreciated creation of a Board of Public Improvements, with modest powers to coordinate public works throughout the city. Housing reformers applauded the charter’s call for a commission to establish a uniform building code for all five boroughs. And charity reformers were delighted when Commissioner Seth Low wrote in a provision that explicitly banned all outdoor relief (apart for subsidies to the blind)—including the spirit-sapping free handouts of fuel supplies they had been trying to outlaw for over a decade. The charter would thus force Richmond and Queens to terminate their relief programs, and Manhattan to cut off coal.
Though New York Good Government forces assailed the final product, Brooklynites professed general satisfaction (or exhaustion), and with Croker’s support Platt got the nine-hundred-page document safely through the legislature by March 23, without, he boasted, “the crossing of a’t’ or the dotting of an ‘i.’” After one last stubborn mayoral veto from William Strong had been overcome, the Charter of Greater New York was presented to Governor Frank Black for his signature, which he affixed on May 5, 1897.
By the rainy evening of December 31, 1897, therefore, the city was poised for transformation.
TOWARD THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Marching through soggy streets, the parade of revelers poured into City Hall Park, brilliantly illuminated by five hundred magnesium lights. Bands and choral societies regaled them (while competing for silver cups, with Tony Pastor and his fellow judges straining to hear over the wind and din). As midnight approached, the rain turned to damp snow. When Trinity’s bells chimed the hour, Hearst’s coordinated cacophony rolled over the assembled merrymakers. A battery of field guns near the post office boomed out a hundred-gun salute. Red and green flares and aerial bombs soared aloft. The city’s tugs and ferries shrieked their whistles. And as the throng (led by German singing societies) joined in singing “Auld Lang Syne,” Mayor James Phelan of San Francisco pressed a button that sent a charge of electricity hurtling across the continent to unfurl Greater New York’s new blue and white flag atop City Hall. At the same moment, the glum crowd assembled outside what was now merely Brooklyn’s Borough Hall fell silent, marking their city’s passing.
A colossus had been born. Over three million strong, over three hundred square miles huge, larger than Paris, gaining on London, New York was ready to face the twentieth century. But when the fireworks faded away and the crowds dispersed, what—apart from an end to free coal for the poor—would consolidation mean for the city and its people?
Consolidation, which would take many forms other than the merely municipal, would be key to the new century’s first decades. As we will see, J. P. Morgan and his colleagues would press relentlessly ahead with the process, begun in the 1880s, of consolidating rival companies into giant corporations. A great merger movement from 1897 to 1904 would forge the modern American capitalist economy, of which New York City would be the headquarters, its ever taller skyscrapers affording the new order both shelter and symbolic expression.
Greater New York would undertake mammoth building projects, creating the infrastructure of bridges, subways, railways, water tunnels, and power lines that would make consolidation a reality, not just a constitutional artifact. Its populace, swollen by massive immigration, would move out along the new rapid transit lines, filling out Brooklyn, creating an instant city in the Bronx.
Culture wars would continue, with the