Reconstructing New York Radical Republicans seek to reform housing, health, and fire fighting and to win the black franchise.

cinders. For the insurance companies, which had to cover such losses, and for the local merchants,

who were forced to pay premiums higher than anywhere else in the United States or Europe, the

volunteer system was inexcusably inefficient. Republican reformers were also well aware that the

companies were prime recruiting resources for the Democratic Party.

Republican legislators accordingly introduced a bill to replace the forty thousand volunteers with

a thousand-man professional fire department, to be equipped with the horse-drawn, steam-powered

pumpers that brawny volunteers had long resisted. In hearings on the bill, the insurance industry

presented the damning evidence they had systematically collected that demonstrated exactly how

costly the old amateur order was to the city and its property owners. Other urban centers, the

insurance companies noted, had established professional departments, and the statistics made clear

how much more effective Baltimore and Qncinnati’s systems were. Twenty-three banks, 109

insurance companies, and thirteen thousand citizens filed petitions on the measure’s behalf.

Businessmen complained that having worker-volunteers down tools and race off whenever the fire

bells rang was “incompatible with any steady pursuits of industry.” The police commissioner testified

about rowdyism. Moral reformers charged that volunteers, who were allowed to bed down in the

firehouses at public expense, had been bedding down with prostitutes, converting stations to de facto

whorehouses.

The existing Board of Fire Commissioners offered feeble rebuttals but was ill equipped to

controvert such charges. Sputtering was no match for statistics. The bill passed, weathered an

immediate lawsuit challenging its constitutionality, and went briskly into effect. The new fire

commissioners, moving swiftly to establish discipline, replaced competition between companies with

a centralized command. The old system of summoning assistance by ringing the City Hall bell was

replaced by an extensive network of fireboxes (by 1873 there were 548 boxes on Manhattan,

connected by 612 miles of telegraph wire). Within a few years, annual losses from fire, and the

amount of settlements paid out by insurance companies, had both dropped sharply, to widespread

relief and applause.

HEALTH



Reformers also succeeded in establishing a Metropolitan Board of Health. Dr. John H. Griscom, who

first called for creating a sanitary police back in the 1840s, had kept hammering at the issue

throughout the 1850s and had been joined by other activist physicians like Joseph M. Smith, president

(from 1854) of the New York Academy of Medicine. The doctors helped organize a New York

Sanitary Association in 1859, which brought physicians together with civic-minded businessmen like

Peter Cooper to agitate for change. The Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor signed

on to the crusade, spurred like other reformers by the draft riots. “The mobs that held sway in our

city,” the Citizens Association agreed, had been generated in “overcrowded neglected quarters.”

In 1864 the Citizens Association submitted a proposal for action to the state legislature. It went

nowhere. The most vigorous resistance came, ironically, from the city inspector’s office (Griscom’s

old department), which had oversight of sanitation. Inspectors opposed further transfer of municipal

authority to Albany, partly on home-rule principle, primarily to hold on to their hefty level of funding

(some of which they apparently diverted into the pockets of legislators who voted against reform).

Antireformers also claimed that charges of unsanitary conditions were vastly overblown.

Griscom blasted his old department, noting that since he’d left twenty years earlier, its expenses



had shot up, and so had the city’s mortality rate. In terms of public health, Griscom charged, New

York had regressed to London’s position two centuries earlier. To counter opponents with solid

statistics, militant physicians organized a Council of Hygiene and Public Health and initiated a blockby-block, tenement-to-tenement survey of Manhattan. Dividing the city into twenty-nine districts, the

council assigned each a doctor, who visited every building and put to every family a written schedule

of questions. Artists went along, sketched conditions, and prepared illustrations. The mammoth study

(it ran to seventeen volumes) was then condensed to a five-hundred-page Sanitary Report, published

in June 1865.

The report startled even those hardened by two decades of such surveys. The examiners had

discovered that smallpox—a preventable disease—was rampant in the city; they turned up fifteen

hundred cases in their first few days investigating. The Council of Hygiene called on the city to

replace its voluntary (and disorganized) vaccination efforts with a compulsory program. But smallpox

was only a small part of the story. Where Philadelphia’s death rate per thousand was twenty and

London’s was twenty-two, New York City’s stood at thirty-three. This meant that thirteen thousand

people were dying each year from diseases and conditions that were probably avoidable. And for

each death there were twenty-eight cases of disease: in some tenements, 50 to 70 percent of the

residents were sick at any given moment. This added up to a vast amount of preventable illness and—

a fact the council underscored for the business community—a corresponding loss of work hours.

By 1865 the Citizens Association had distributed two million sanitarian tracts in every part of

town, sponsored many public meetings, and once again introduced a health bill in the legislature.

Incorporating provisions of England’s public health laws, it urged that a nonpolitical board of experts

be given extraordinary powers to clean up unsanitary conditions. Union League Club members

testified on the bill’s behalf. Once again it was blocked by municipal bureaucrats and politicians and

by those who resisted giving government agencies substantial power over property rights. The

legislature did, however, authorize New York City’s Croton Aqueduct Department to devise a plan

for the systematic sewering of all Manhattan, free from interference by the Common Council.



Scavengers on the Beach Street dumping barge, Harper’s Weekly, September 29, 1866.

Here, the paper said, men, women, and children dug through “the refuse of respectable

folk” to find anything that could be used or sold to junk dealers. (Library of Congress)

At just this point, cholera tugged at the legislators’ sleeves. In August of 1865 newspapers

announced that the disease had reached Europe and was heading west. In November a steamship

arrived with sixty cases aboard. A cold winter retarded its movement, but alarmed state lawmakers

realized that in spring the plague might well scythe through New York’s tenement population and then,

as in the past, press on to devastate Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo. In February 1866, therefore,

Albany created a Metropolitan Board of Health and gave it extraordinary powers to fight the scourge.

The new board could order any person deemed a health threat removed from home to hospital. It

could order property owners to rectify unhealthy conditions. Such orders could be enforced by the

police or the board’s own officers.

When spring came the board sent an army of agents marching through town, making house-to-house

inspections and cleaning and disinfecting privies, cellars, and yards. It commissioned new streetcleaning contracts and oversaw the removal of vast amounts of filth from the city’s streets (160,000

tons of manure from vacant lots alone). It got the city’s butchers to clean up slaughterhouses and agree

to their eventual removal north of 40th Street. The water supply was improved. New standards were

imposed on the milk industry.

The mobilization helped keep New York’s death toll under five hundred—one-tenth the fatalities

of 1849, despite a one-third increase in population since then—while Cincinnati lost twelve hundred,

St. Louis thirty-five hundred. New York had erected a milestone in the history of public health, but it



was clear to reformers that securing their victory would require systematic attention to the city’s built

environment as well.

HOUSING



The war had exacerbated the city’s housing crisis. New construction had limped badly while

immigrants continued to pour in (over 150,000 in 1863 alone). With peace, demobilized veterans

swarmed back home, and steamers disgorged ever greater numbers of newcomers. The 1865 report of

the Council of Hygiene and Public Health demonstrated just how crowded the tenement districts

were. Out of New York’s seven-hundred-thousand-plus residents, 495,592 individuals were tenanted

in 15,309 multifamily dwellings, an average of roughly seven families per building. Many of these

five-or six-story tenements had each floor carved into eighteen rooms, organized like compartments

on a train, hence the expression “railroad flats.” Only two of these tiny rooms got direct sunlight (if

the facade faced south), and interior cubbyholes were without ventilation, unless an extravagant

builder included air shafts. Thousands more tenants were crammed into the back buildings landlords

continued to insert behind tenements, often jammed up against their rear wall. In the Fourth Ward, the

population density reached 290,000 per square mile.

Things got rapidly worse. In 1867 the legislature authorized another investigation. Again, statistics

were amassed. Fifty-two percent of Manhattan’s tenements were “in a condition detrimental to the

health and dangerous to the lives of the occupants.” Their deficiencies included insufficient

ventilation, absence of light, lack of fire escapes, and terrible drainage. (When the tide came in, a

basement in a filled-in swampland area could fill to a depth of twelve inches, high enough “to keep

the children of the occupants in bed until ebb-tide.”)

With rotten conditions came rising rents, which jumped 50 to 100 percent within a year after

Appomattox, feeding a profit stream that flowed upward to the great propertied families from whom

many slumlords leased their lands. Priced out of even tenement housing, the very poorest drifted to

uptown shantytowns or, like Jacob Riis, a young and unemployed Danish immigrant, slept in

doorways.

In March 1865 Germans near Tompkins Square held a mass meeting and called on the legislature

to regulate rents; a year later they renewed their demands. The Council of Hygiene and Public Health

called for strict public regulation of tenements. Radical Republicans supported imposition of

minimum standards. The conservative Republican Times and Democratic World agreed, with the

latter’s editor, stunned by the investigations, declaring that “of all the diabolical, horrid, atrocious,

fiendish, and even hellish systems of money-making ever invented by the mind of man, the tenementhouse system of this city, is the most horrible.”

In 1866 Albany enlarged New York’s Department of Buildings, giving it a full-time staff, and

established standards for municipal construction, creating the nation’s first comprehensive building

code. In 1867 the legislature passed the Tenement House Law, New York’s first regulation of

working-class housing. Modeled in key respects on London’s 1848 Lodging-House Act, the act

limited the number of persons permitted to reside in a given amount of space. It required that every

room in new buildings have ventilation and that transoms be installed in older ones. It decreed the

installation of fire escapes and the provision of one water closet for every twenty residents (one per

hundred then being the norm). It outlawed domestic animals (except dogs and cats). It forbade renting

out cellar apartments less than seven feet high. And it made landlords liable to a daily fine for every



uncorrected violation cited by the new Metropolitan Board of Health, which was given enforcement

responsibility.



Clearing Out a “Dive, “Harpers Weekly, July 12, 1873. Basement dwellers often

clashed with the Board of Health’s Sanitary Inspectors, who were empowered to throw

them out and dispose of their possessions. (Library of Congress)

Most landlords, builders, and real estate companies soon discovered, however, that the Tenement

House Law was loosely worded and loophole-ridden. A fire escape “or some other means of egress”

was required—a wooden ladder might do. Cesspools were forbidden—except where unavoidable.

Ventilation for a dark inner room could be provided by a window to an outer one. “Tenements” were

legally defined as buildings with more than three families, though many of the worst ones contained

only that number.

Despite these obvious concessions to real estate interests, the law was a remarkable stride

forward. Reformers had made private housing a matter of public concern and authorized government

intervention to protect tenant health and welfare. The Metropolitan Board of Health pursued its duties

vigorously, suing scores of city landlords for code violations in over three thousand units in 1868

alone, and in succeeding years managed to cut the cellar-dweller population in half. Slowly,

dilapidated wooden housing gave way to new brick tenements constructed under the reformed

building codes.



CITY BUILDING



“Generally the public works that have heretofore been carried out on this island have been conceived

on too narrow and limited a scale,” said Andrew Haswell Green in 1865, “We need not go off the

Island,” he amplified a year later, “to see lamentable results of the want of largeness of ideas in the

attempts that have been made to provide for the growing wants of a great people,” If “the planning of

a city” were to be “done with any degree of foresight,” Green insisted in 1867, it was imperative to

transfer authority to “some body with comprehensive powers.” The body he had in mind was his own

Central Park Commission, and the powers he had in mind were Haussmannesque—nothing less than

authority to plan and oversee the expansion of all city services into northern Manhattan, and even

Westchester.

Suggestions from Andrew Haswell Green commanded respect among New York’s landed wealthy,

for he had long since proven his devotion to their larger interests. Since 1844 the former wholesale

clerk had been a partner in Samuel Tilden’s law firm, where he worked closely with the eminent

corporate attorney then urging consolidation on the railroad industry. Green himself offered

investment advice and management services to owners of New York’s great estates. He won their

trust with his expertise, his pious Protestantism (a legacy of his Massachusetts upbringing), his

extreme frugality (bordering on miserliness), and his pugnacious conviction that government should

rest with the propertied, not the politicians. He himself had entered politics as an anti-Wood

Democrat, been appointed by state Republicans to the Central Park Commission in 1857, and served

ever since with distinction.

Though he shared many of the values of the reformers, professionals, and journalists then debating

the proper “arrangement and management” of cities in periodicals like the Journal of Social Science,

Green approached city building as a businessman rather than an intellectual. Well aware that property

owners balked at infringements of their prerogatives, Green argued that comprehensive and orderly

development would enhance the value of their property.

This approach resonated among members of the organized real estate “industry” that was now

emerging in New York City. Businessmen concerned with property and its purveyance formed trade

journals, like the Real Estate Record and Builders’ Guide (1868), and established landowners’

associations in various parts of town. Their goal was to systematize New York’s haphazard approach

to urban development and to discipline the city’s chaotic real estate market, in the interest of

enhancing profitability.

Such men cast envious eyes at contemporary Paris. “Despotic governments are generally bad

governments,” the Guide averred, “but when one hears of the marvels Napoleon has accomplished in

Paris. . ., it makes us wish that he, or some one like him, could be made Emperor of New York for

about ten years.” Would-be developers at the Guide were particularly enamored of the French

capital’s stunning public improvements and stated baldly that “we want a Haus[s]mann who will do

for New York what that great reconstructor did for Paris.”

Uptown boosters attracted to this vision founded the West Side Association (WSA) in 1866 to

promote extensive improvements in the area north and west of Central Park—the Badlands of

Manhattan. Craggy slopes, running streams, and malarial pools marked the bleak and rocky land. It

was barely accessible to downtown civilization: a single horsecar trudged along Eighth Avenue up to

84th Street, where it gave up, turned around, and trudged back. Intrepid travelers heading farther north

could take a stagecoach up the Bloomingdale Road (now Broadway), but there wasn’t much to see in



these parts. The hamlets of Harsenville, Manhattanville, and Carmansville. Some miniature farms.

Some squatter shacks occupied by poor immigrants, refugees from Central Park, and assorted

outlaws. Some asylums, hospitals, institutional homes, country churches.

In the collective mind’s eye of the WSA, however, the inhospitable terrain looked very different.

The elevated plateau afforded magnificent views of the Hudson to the west and the splendid new

Central Park to the east, and river breezes provided a salubrious climate. If the rugged topography

were tamed—drained, roads and sewers put through, gas and water lines installed, scenic parks and

tree-lined promenades created, centers of culture and learning sprinkled here and there—it might one

day replace lower Fifth Avenue as New York’s luxury quartier.



West Ninety-fourth Street, looking west across West End Avenue toward Riverside

Drive, c. 1889. Although real estate promoters began to target the Upper West Side

soon after the Civil War, development was slow. (© Museum of the City of New York)

To hasten such a glorious future into existence, WSA boosters, ably led by lawyerdeveloper

William Martin, petitioned the state legislature to give Andrew Haswell Green and the Central Park

Commission (CPC) authority to transform the upper western wilds into a residential gentry preserve.

Albany Republicans had already shown their willingness to expand the CPC’s powers: In 1864 it had

been asked to extend the park’s pleasure drives above its northern boundary by turning Seventh

Avenue into a shaded carriage way; in 1865 legislators charged it with fixing up upper Sixth Avenue

and making over the old Bloomingdale Road into a tree-lined, Parisian-style “Boulevard.”

In 1866, with Martin and the WSA applying the pressure, Albany gave the goahead for the CPC to

develop a street and property plan for all territory above 155th Street (ungridded in the 1811

blueprint). In succeeding months and years, the legislature steadily expanded the CPC’s mandate to

include platting streets, designing ne works of parkways and promenades (including a grand



Riverside Boulevard along the top of the bluff, and a racing lane for elite horseowners), arranging for

parks (Morningside and Riverside), laying out suburban districts, improving up-island riverfronts,

dredging a shipping canal at Spuyten Duyvil, and arranging for bridge and road connections across

the Harlem River. Not only did the CPC now dominate the citybuilding process for all of Manhattan

Island north of 59th Street and west of Central Park, but Green also took charge of forming a general

street plan for the adjacent regions of the Bronx—still part of Westchester County.

Green now called for the annexation of western Westchester; “unity of plan for improvements on

both sides of the river is essential,” he said. This was soon arranged. In 1873 voters were asked to

authorize the incorporation of the area, including Kingsbridge, West Farms, and Morrisania, into New

York City. Then-Mayor Havemeyer opposed the plan, which he attributed to “speculators on both

sides of the Harlem River.” Where would it all end, he asked: “Once entered on the mainland, where

can we stop?” He was voted down, however, as Westchesterites opted overwhelmingly for access to

the city’s police, fire, water, sewage, and street-building services, while Manhattanites agreed with

one newspaper editor who declared it “the manifest destiny of this great commercial emporium to

spread in ever-widening circles over adjacent counties.” And many voiced hopes of moving the

“laboring classes” to “neat and comfortable cottages,” accessable via “cheap workmen’s trains.”

With the formal acquisition in 1874 of what would long be known as the “Annexed District,” New

York entered on the first phase of its imperial expansion.

With the Central Park Commission established as the nation’s first de facto planning agency, the

Prospect Park Commission emerged as a close runner-up. In Brooklyn, Andrew Haswell Green’s

counterpart was James Samuel Thomas Stranahan. An upstate New Yorker who settled in Brooklyn in

1844, Stranahan had made a fortune as a railroad contractor, become a principal investor in the

Atlantic Docks and the Union Ferry, and served as a trustee of the Brooklyn Academy of Music and

the Long Island Historical Society.

In 1859 the Eagle had argued that if Brooklyn were “no longer to be a suburb of New York” it

needed to develop “extensive and well cultivated Public Parks.” Mayor Powell agreed the following

year, noting that “to attract a large population, it is indispensable that something else should be

provided than interminable rows of brick houses along long lines of dusty streets, for these alone can

never constitute a great city.” Stranahan, public-minded capitalist, took up the challenge. He gathered

other prominent citizens into a South Brooklyn Association and argued strongly for a mammoth threehundred-acre park, one grand enough to entice Manhattan taxpayers to Brooklyn. The group proposed

to locate it on Prospect Hill, an elevated area already a favorite with “pic-nic parties” and easily

accessible via Flatbush Avenue, Kings County’s major thoroughfare.

In 1860 the state legislature, following its Central Park procedure, created a Board of

Commissioners (headed by Stranahan), which in January 1865, again following in Manhattan’s

footsteps, invited Calvert Vaux to prepare a plan of development. Vaux, soon accompanied by

Olmsted, produced a design the commissioners believed would “hold out strong inducements to the

affluent to remain in our city” rather than be drawn away by the “seductive influences of the New

York park.” In May 1866 the two, now the landscape architects and superintendents of the park,

began directing the labor of hundreds of stonecarvers, masons, earth movers, and tree planters. Work

proceeded rapidly during the late 1860s. Portions were opened in 1867 and 1868, and the work was

essentially completed by the early 1870s, when even George Templeton Strong was forced to admit

that Prospect Park was “a most lovely pleasure” and that in trees and views it “beats Central Park ten

to one.” The Brooklyn populace was equally pleased: in 1873 the park received 6,700,000 visits.



Stranahan, now known as the Haussmann of Brooklyn, followed Green’s lead by extruding his

commission’s power beyond the park’s boundaries, moving steadily from park design to urban

planning. In 1868 Olmsted and Vaux proposed creating a “parkway neighborhood” surrounding

Prospect Park that would offer “more wealthy and influential citizens” the rural satisfactions of air,

space, and abundant vegetation. The commission was given extraordinary powers to open and

improve streets, take property, and restrict land use. Though most of the costly project never came to

fruition, it did eventually leave one major legacy: two grand “park-ways” radiating out from Prospect

Park, for which Olmsted and Vaux cited Louis Napoleon’s Avenue de l’Impératrice as precursor. To

the east, stretching to the city’s frontier, ran Eastern Parkway—a treelined dual carriageway quite

like Manhattan’s Boulevard—and the equally magnificent Ocean Parkway, which ran south to the sea.

In 1870 the legislature embarked on its last and most ambitious venture into urban reconstruction

by appointing a Staten Island Improvement Commission to transform the malaria-plagued and hard-toreach territory into New York’s premier suburb. A “committee of experts,” including Olmsted (an old

Staten Island hand) and architect Henry Hobson Richardson, offered a fourteen-point, multimilliondollar scheme to drain lowlands, improve ferry service, and build a comprehensive network of roads

and parks, as well as suburban domestic neighborhoods, for the “class of people . . . able and willing

to pay an advanced price for land and for improvements.” The island’s far-flung villages, however,

proved unwilling to underwrite the experts’ approach, and though piecemeal improvements were

undertaken, the grand plan was never implemented.

WHITE MEN SHALL RULE AMERICA!



New York radicals’ boldest intervention in civic affairs involved political rather than physical

reconstruction. In tandem with Republican initiatives in the South and other states, New York’s

radicals pressed for giving the black population the right to vote. African Americans, in their

churches, newspapers, and state conventions, had been demanding the suffrage as a fair return for

their war service, and many radicals agreed a debt was due. The elimination of the existing $250

property qualification, moreover, might add eleven thousand blacks to the rolls, virtually all of whom

would vote Republican. This was a bloc of considerable consequence, given that Republican

Governor Reuben Fenton had won by only eight thousand votes in 1864 and that Democratic

presidential candidate Horatio Seymour would carry the state by just nine thousand votes in 1868.

The bulk of these potential Republicans, moreover, lived in the Democratic strongholds of New York

City and Brooklyn.

Radicals first raised the issue at the state constitutional convention in 1867. Democrats,

spearheaded by Henry C. Murphy of Brooklyn, resisted furiously. Playing a “scientific” race card,

Murphy trotted out a “craniological” analysis that purported to prove the existence of superior and

inferior breeds of man. Giving blacks the vote, Murphy argued, would lead to social equality, race

mixing, and the collapse of civilization. Republicans countered that granting political rights would

lessen the likelihood of amalgamation—which they too rejected—by granting blacks dignity. “There

is no danger,” one radical argued, “of the intermingling of the race by a man who respects his own

blood.”

Democrats pressed their racist campaign during the November 1867 elections. Banners at

Tammany campaign rallies read NO SUFFRAGE NOR NEGRO EQUALITY! WHITE MAN’S GOVERNMENT FOR

WHITE MEN! WHITE MEN SHALL RULE AMERICA! Riding the backlash, Democrats handily captured the

state assembly and missed retaking the state senate by a mere two votes. When a proposed state



constitutional amendment authorizing black suffrage was finally submitted to the electorate, in

November 1869, the Daily Eagle asked the white man in the street: “Are you willing to declare by

your vote that you are exactly and precisely the equivalent of a negro, neither more nor less?” The

answer was a resounding no. New York repulsed black voting by 70.4 percent.

THE END OF RADICAL RECONSTRUCTION IN NEW YORK



The same 1869 election that defeated black suffrage gave Tweed Democrats control of both the

Assembly and the Senate, completing their conquest of the state (Tweed’s protege, New York Mayor

John Hoffman, had captured the governorship in 1868). Tammany’s forces, marshaled by Grand

Sachem Tweed, a state senator since 1867, now proposed a new city charter that would restore home

rule to the metropolis by abolishing all the new state commissions and transferring their functions to

ten departments controlled by the city (and Tweed). After thirteen years, power over the police force

would be returned to the municipality, along with dominion over its own health, fire prevention,

education, public works, charities, buildings, and docks. The proposed charter further strengthened

City Hall, making all department heads mayoral appointees, and further hedged the Common Council,

requiring it to muster a three-fourths vote on all bills involving expenditures. The charter also

allowed the city virtually unlimited borrowing power for specified improvements.

Reformers were surprised but delighted. Tweed had proposed a simplified, centralized, fiscally

responsible, and potentially effective city government. Peter Cooper of the Citizens Association

strongly urged passage. So did the Union League Club, Horace Greeley, and a long list of prominent

businessmen headed by banker James Brown and rentier John Jacob Astor. Even the Republican

minority supported it, either reassured by promises that a strong voter registration law would be

enacted or won over by hard cash—some six hundred thousand dollars’ worth, Tweed later admitted.

Governor Hoffman signed the charter into law in April 1870. In May Democrats easily won chartermandated special elections for the Common Council, sweeping all fifteen aldermanic slots (one going

to a budding politico named George W. Plunkitt).

Despite their acquiescence on the charter, Republicans, like their Klan-beleaguered southern

counterparts, were not prepared to accept Tammany’s electoral triumph without protest. Since 1868

Republicans had been compiling statistical evidence of Tammany wrongdoing. They leveled charges

of straight-out fraud (some wards had more voters than residents), and they accused Tammany of

mass-producing new citizens. Tammany Judge McCunn naturalized 2,109 petitioners in one day, a

rate of three per minute—with “as much celerity,” the Tribune observed caustically, “as is displayed

in converting swine into pork at a Cincinnati packing house.”

Republicans appealed to Washington, where their party still reigned. A sympathetic Republican

Congress investigated in 1869 and agreed that “crimes against the elective franchise” had been

committed. The “crimes” were only metaphorical, however, because Tammany practices contravened

no existing law. Congress closed this loophole in 1870 with two pieces of legislation. An

Enforcement Act—aimed at crushing both Ku Klux Klan resistance to southern Reconstruction

governments and Tammany-style practices in northern cities—imposed penalties for obstructing or

intimidating voters and authorized federal marshals or troops to supervise elections. A second law,

the Naturalization Act, extended the waiting period between naturalization and voting by six months

and established machinery to supervise voter registration.

New York Republicans used the new legislation to full effect in 1870. Federally appointed



officials scrutinized registration proceedings and clapped some Democrats in jail even before

election day. On October 25 President Grant ordered several regiments to the city’s harbor forts and

dispatched two warships to the East and Hudson rivers.

Democrats portrayed themselves as martyred defenders of civil rights and home rule. At a

torchlight parade, Tweed told fifty thousand partisans to scrupulously obey the law on November 8.

Tammany more or less followed orders—the courts created only two thousand new citizens,

compared to the sixty thousand they’d turned out two years earlier—and Republicans had to admit it

was a fair election. Which made the results—a total Democratic sweep—all the more galling.

The new charter had established a powerful municipal government, but that power belonged to

Tweed. The trio of Tweed and his comrades Mayor A. Oakey Hall and Comptroller Richard

Connolly constituted the new Board of Supervisors that controlled city finances, and Mayor Hall

swiftly appointed his colleagues to high offices as well. Tweed himself presided over the Department

of Public Works, a consolidation of the former Street Department and Croton Aqueduct Board. And

one of Tweed’s closest advisers, Peter Sweeny, took charge of the powerful Central Park

Commission, now folded into a Department of Public Parks.

With control over parks, public health, and tenement regulation now removed from their hands, the

elite stewards, who in their own minds stood for professional expertise, moral refinement, and the

public welfare, worried that their regulatory state would be dismantled. In some cases, they were

right. The new Metropolitan Board of Health became a haven for hacks and rapidly waned in

effectiveness, and the Tenement House Law, easily evaded by bribing compliant inspectors, went

largely unenforced.

Yet Tammanyites didn’t scuttle all their predecessor’s initiatives. In particular, they made the citybuilding project their own, though turning it to their own purposes. The reformers had seen their

primary constituency (in the words of one association) as the bourgeoisie in general—“the class who

have the largest pecuniary stake in the good order of the city and who also command its moral

forces.” The politicians were certainly prepared to extend municipal benefits to businessmen who

were willing (or forced) to pay for them, but they also sought power and profit by dispensing

patronage to working-class clients and siphoning off benefits for themselves.

Democrats backed public works projects far more grandiose than anything the Republican

planners had promoted, to maximize the jobs they could hand out and the money they could pull in.

Embracing a far more comprehensive and centralized approach to wielding municipal power than the

laissez-faire Democratic Party had been accustomed to, Tammany politicians together with their

bourgeois allies set out to reshape the urban landscape once again.