The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [249]
CHAPTER 19
The Biggest Man in New York
Bitter as home-brewed ale were his foaming passions.
NEW YORK’S Police Headquarters at 300 Mulberry Street was a squat, square building with a marble facade long since yellowed by the fumes of Little Italy.1 Many a stiletto victim had been carried bleeding up its steep front steps, and countless padrones awaiting indictment had glared through its barred basement windows at a little group of reporters lounging on the stoop of No. 303, across the way.
The reporters, in turn, enjoyed one of the more entertaining vistas in Manhattan. Before them stretched a cobbled street, framed on both sides by tenement buildings, and looped around with strings of brilliant laundry. It was an arena always alive with drama, or at least the promise of drama. A sudden singing of the telegraph wires, which untidily connected Police Headquarters with every precinct in the city, might signify riots in Hell’s Kitchen, or a brothel-bust in the Tenderloin; sooner or later the latest victims of the law would be delivered in shiny patrol-wagons, and the press would dash across to meet them, pencils and pads at the ready.
Even when Mulberry Street was sunk in Monday-morning calm, as around ten o’clock on 6 May 1895,2 the stoop-sitters were loath to quit their airy perch for the “newspaper offices” upstairs—actually just stifling cells of the kind that, elsewhere in the neighborhood, sheltered whole families. As long as the breeze did not blow uptown from the reeking slums of Mulberry Bend, a man could enjoy his cigar, play poker, and shout humorous insults at the cop on duty opposite. If the sun grew uncomfortably hot, he could send around the corner for iced oysters at a penny each, or stop a passing aguajolo for fresh lemonade.
“Many a stiletto victim had been carried bleeding up its steep front steps.”
Police Headquarters, Mulberry Street, New York City. (Illustration 19.1)
Lincoln Steffens, the talented young correspondent of the Evening Post, was on the stoop that day when Jacob Riis of the Evening Sun came out into the street shouting a telephone message. Theodore Roosevelt had just been sworn in as Police Commissioner at City Hall, eighteen blocks south: he and his three colleagues were already on their way to headquarters to relieve the outgoing Commissioners.3
The news came as no surprise to Steffens. Riis was an old and worshipful friend of Roosevelt’s, and had been gloating over his appointment for weeks. It was the will of God that such a reformer should be chosen to purge the notoriously corrupt New York police. Neither did Riis doubt that his man would become president of the new Police Board. “I don’t care who the other Commissioners are. TR is enough.”4
About half-past ten an interestingly varied quartet walked around the corner. Leading the way was the bull-necked, bull-chested figure of Theodore Roosevelt. Behind him came a dumpy, middle-aged man bearing an uncanny resemblance to Ulysses S. Grant, and a military-looking youth, very tall and very pale, with a nervous vein beating in his temple. The fourth man seemed to walk somehow apart from the other Commissioners, although he was obviously their coequal—a handsome, lounging, bearded dandy of about thirty-five. Steffens identified them in turn as Frederick D. Grant (R), an upstate politician and eldest son of the great general; Avery D. Andrews (D), a graduate of West Point and a rather undistinguished