One Righteous Man : Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York (9780807012611) Read Online Free PDF Page A

hundred buildings stood nine or more stories tall as the invention of the elevator and development of steel skeletal construction allowed for the creation of real estate in the air. 15
    A golden dome sat atop the tower Joseph Pulitzer had built for his newspaper, the
New York World
. At a height of 309 feet, the gilded tip was meant to attract the eye, and it surely drew the look of a small-town Southern teenager with scant possessions. Surrounding Pulitzer’s pride were the chest thumpings of America’s nineteenth-century capitalist titans: John D. Rockefeller, oil; J. P. Morgan, finance; Andrew Carnegie, steel; James Buchanan Duke, tobacco; Henry Havemeyer, sugar; Jay Gould, railroads. These men had made Lower Manhattan into a landscape of seemingly limitless wealth. They competed and conspired, profited and profiteered, and then they went home to decorous townhouses or fabulous mansions. As recounted by the authors of
Gotham
, an encyclopedic history of New York up to the brink of the twentieth century: “But with outspending one’s rivals the only definitive route to preeminence, a steady inflation in extravagance ensued as members of opposing cliques scrambled to convert Wall Street revenue into Fifth Avenue social standing. Dinner parties corkscrewed upward in lavishness—black pearls in oysters, cigars rolled in hundred-dollar bills, lackeys in knee breeches and powdered wigs.” 16
    The engorgement of riches grew from America’s westward expansion and productivity-improving inventions, such as Edison’s light bulb and Bell’s telephone. Its scale was certainly beyond Battle’s understanding. So, too, the lesser world beneath the skyscrapers’ rule, one that was teeming and grimy on land and water.
    As the Old Dominion steamer chugged up the Hudson River, Battle and Anne looked out on the traffic of a world metropolis. Barges laden with crops paraded downstream in lines four, six, and eight long. Railroad cars floated improbably on flat boats. Ferryboats traveled back and forth to New Jersey like “the shuttle in the loom,” as one contemporary writer put it. After a last slow push, the ship angled cross-flow and eased toward a wharf. Shoreward, the water grew thick with oily refuse. Battle led Anne down timbered planking and onto a street spread with the manure of wagon horses and clogged with “cab drivers and expressmen whose vehicles and manners” seemed even then “to belong to a more primitive age.” 17
    He had answered the North’s call, and now his summoning dreams met inglorious reality. Turn-of-the-century New York throbbed with the white-faced, strange-tongued poverty of European immigration. Peasants from Ireland, Italy, Germany, and Eastern Europe shared the privations of life in a city that scorned help for the poor. This was the era of the tenement house, four- to six-story buildings with common bathrooms and small, dark living quarters whose windows looked out on shadowy airshafts. Here was where “the other half” lived in the chronicling of journalist Jacob Riis.
    As of 1890, Riis estimated that the city’s 37,000 tenements were home to 1.2 million New Yorkers. He took his readers into a building on the Lower East Side, a neighborhood that overflowed with more than 700 people per acre, the highest rate of population in the world:
    Be a little careful, please! The hall is dark and you might stumble over the children pitching pennies back there. Not that it would hurt them; kicks and cuffs are their daily diet. . . . All the fresh air that ever enters these stairs comes from the hall-door that is forever slamming, and from the windows of dark bedrooms that in turn receive from the stairs their sole supply of the elements God meant to be free. . . . Here is a door. Listen! That short hacking cough, that tiny, helpless wail—what do they mean? They mean that the soiled bow of white you saw on the door downstairs will have another story to tell—Oh! a sadly familiar story—before the