Hetty_ The Genius and Madness of America's First Female Tycoon - Charles Slack [70]
At long last, Hetty was in a position to assume direct control over the fortune she had always considered rightly hers. Six weeks after Barling’s death, Hetty persuaded a New York Supreme Court judge to name a more favorably disposed replacement for Barling: Ned Green.
Not all of Hetty’s lodgings were cheap tenements. While she avoided the high-priced rent of fashionable Manhattan hotels, she wasn’t altogether averse to comfort. Tops on her list of requirements were ease of access to lower Manhattan, and a management that respected her privacy. In December of 1894, she found both at Brooklyn’s Hotel St. George. Built in 1888 and located on Henry Street in Brooklyn Heights, just a few blocks from the famous promenade overlooking the East River, the St. George was one of Brooklyn’s newer and larger hotels, ten stories tall. In contrast to the Hetty legend of living in mean flats down dingy hallways, the St. George had a large, sunny dining room decorated by live pineapple plants—Hetty’s favorite fruit. She and Sylvia occupied a fifth-floor suite. They registered under pseudonyms (“Mrs. H. Gray” and “Miss Gray”). The owner, J. W. Tumbridge, and the head clerk, Frank Niblo, went out of their way to protect their privacy, telling inquisitive reporters that Hetty and Sylvia had checked out when they hadn’t.
Hetty was accustomed to getting around Brooklyn and into Manhattan using public transportation. With nearly a million residents spread throughout Brooklyn’s horizontal vastness, the electrified streetcars were the most reliable and efficient mode of transportation. They squeaked, popped, and clanked across a network so intertwined that dodging the cars in the street became an unofficial pastime, and, as every baseball fan knows, gave the local professional team its name, the Trolley Dodgers, later shortened to the Dodgers. During that winter of 1894–95, the city came to a virtual standstill when the trolley workers went on strike. Drivers and conductors of the city’s six trolley companies were looking for concessions that by today’s standards are remarkable only for their modesty—a 24-cent-per-day pay raise on salaries that topped out at a meager two dollars per day, and a reduction in the shift length from twelve to ten hours. A sort of tense peace prevailed amid the eerie silence during the first couple of days of the strike. But soon moods turned as ugly as the January weather. Angry mobs threw stones, bottles, and garbage at the legions of scab drivers and conductors, who poured into Brooklyn from around the country. Most of the scabs were themselves desperate for work following an extended financial panic of 1893.
Charles A. Schieren, Brooklyn’s mayor, took the side of management, calling out first the police and then the National Guard to quell protests and keep the trolleys moving. He said he just wanted to keep the peace. Critics noted that Schieren’s New York-based company manufactured electric belts used by the trolley companies. An occupying force of some seventy-five hundred federal soldiers turned Brooklyn into an armed camp. Many strikers and sympathizers were arrested. Two men died; one, a roofer, was struck from his perch by an errant warning fired over the heads of protesters. A second man was shot after he approached too close to a car stable and ignored warnings to stop. In the face of overwhelming power, and with hungry mouths to feed, the strike petered out a month after it began, with the defeated drivers and conductors returning to work.
But the strike had succeeded in stirring up passionate sympathy among many observers. Theodore Dreiser, who covered the strike as a New York reporter, immortalized it five years later in his novel Sister Carrie through the eyes of a conflicted scab named George Hurstwood. Hetty, too, came out on the side of the strikers. This may seem an odd position for a famous capitalist to take, but Hetty never sympathized with management.