The Big Bonanza

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No cloud-hung peak, no yawning gorge, no waterfall's white and thundering precipice can astound the eye like New York. No traveler is ever prepared for it. The Big City is the work of man.

Its portals are clangorous, traffic-jammed pavements, dank, echoing tubes, and steel trestles which never cease to vibrate to the slamming progress of trains. Its lights and liver function with the noisy urgency of a tabloid pressroom. Its buses, trucks & cabs jostle through its arterial streets like stampeding steers. Torrents of humanity pour endlessly down its sidewalks. At night it glares like hell's hottest coke heap.

Once it was just an island between two rivers, with a bedrock which defied digging. But it had a magnificent, deep-water harbor and a river which led to the hinterland. Slowly its farms turned into city blocks, its mud streets grew cobblestones, its docks stuck fingers into the sea. First its sewers, then its wires, and finally its trains went underground. The higher its buildings rose, the deeper went their foundations. Its bowels became a vast catacomb laced with the ganglia of communication. It was an aggressive organism; it touched everything within reach, attached to itself everything it touched.

But it is an organism without a memory. Fifty years ago its five boroughs--Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island and The Bronx--were joined into one big city. But most of its citizens are vaguely surprised at plans for celebrating this golden anniversary--starting with a monster parade up Fifth Avenue next week. They leave this sort of historic memory to Philadelphia, at which they jeer; to Boston, which they pity; Or to Atlanta, a place near Miami, and where the Civil War was fought. New York is hypnotized by the present--which, after all, is equipped with television and a big bull market for men, foam-rubber breasts for women, and propeller-bearing caps (Macy's: 46-c-) for the young.

Biggest, Richest. In the boom year, 1948, New York is the biggest, richest city the world has ever seen. Almost eight million people live in its boroughs, almost 13 million in its metropolitan area--at least three million more than in Greater London. Its wealth is incalculable. Its physical assets are worth as much as all the real estate in the eleven western states. Its 157 banks and 94 insurance companies handle treasures which would ransom an army of maharajas.

It is the world's greatest port, the world's greatest tourist attraction, the world's greatest manufacturing city and the world's greatest marketplace. Between the Battery and the Harlem River it is possible to buy anything from a ton of powdered whey to an ounce of marijuana; both bees and locomotives are on sale within a stone's throw of City Hall.

New York is the fountain-spout of U.S. culture, the intellectual gateway to England and Europe, a pump from which ideas--both good & bad--flood out over the world. It is a citadel of opera and art; its 32 legitimate theaters are the heartland of the U.S. stage. Its rich and haughty cosmetic queens determine the type of cream with which millions of women grease their faces before retiring; its beauty salons force them to cut their hair. Its Hattie Carnegies and Nettie Rosensteins dictate fashion; its $2 billion garment industry makes 80% of all U.S. women's dresses.

Clear-Cut Corner. It is an arena in which new gladiators arrive daily to risk ulcers, anxiety, tension, loneliness, bruised shins or the awful rebuff of failure in a quest for excitement, gold or glory. It is the Big Bonanza of the western world. Wrote an anonymous poet:

But where else in the world's wide mile Were ever this piling wink of lights,

this drive of come-on vistas, These hopes around the clear-cut corner?

It is not a comfortable place. It neither welcomes pilgrims on arrival, nor says goodbye when they leave. It is seldom impressed with their triumphs and does not mourn if they choose to dive out a window. There is no lonelier sight in the world than a dead man lying on a Manhattan sidewalk, ringed by a throng of the half-curious.

Armies of people in the U.S. hate it with a consuming hatred. English writers and visitors from west of the Hudson are continually appalled by it; by its dirt, its tip-hungry doormen, its bigness, its gangs of savage street urchins, and the humid horror of its tropical summers. To Britain's Novelist J. B. Priestley, Broadway is "an angry carbuncle ... a thoroughfare in Hell where you take your choice between idiotic films . . . and shops crammed with schoolboy tricks." Jean-Paul Sartre, the high priest of France's Existentialism, spoke of "this desert of rock" and also complained that he had seen roaches galloping through the city's kitchens.

Boxes in the Air. But to its eight million people, New York is home--whether they live in Manhattan apartments ("a box in the air"), in the serried flats of Queens, or on the elm-shaded streets of stately old Brooklyn Heights. They yearn for it while they are away. They have an unspoken pride in the city's bigness, are reassured by its noise--though many, when they go to the country, find the chirping of crickets maddening. There are reasons for their fondness for its way of life.

It is an exciting place for parades, block parties, silk hats, first nights, and baseball games. Some of its sidewalks sparkle (because of mica in the concrete). Its cab drivers, individualists all, deliver wild, cheerful or threatening monologues on world affairs. Its well-barbered women worship fashion; they shop like stalking tigresses, dress like lady spies and walk with a provocative air.

A fiercely competitive marketplace, it prizes competence and rewards brilliance. It refuses to let a man take off his shirt in a park, carry a gun or smoke in the subway, but it doesn't care if he practices Buddhism, wears a pink shirt or marries and divorces six blondes.

Bohola Boy. There is no such thing as a typical New Yorker; there is no single first citizen. New York has little community sense; its drive, its pride, its success spring from small groups, working toward individual ends, making full use of the city's opportunities. In a purely political sense it has a first citizen--its mayor, whose principal job is to keep the metropolis' delicately adjusted mechanism from flying apart. In the year of its anniversary, New York's mayor happens to be an ex-policeman and ex-bartender, a onetime Army general named William O'Dwyer. According to an old saw, he is a typical New Yorker in that he was not born there.

He was born in the little village of Bohola, County Mayo, Ireland, the eldest of eleven children. His mother, a strong-willed woman, was determined that he should be a priest. To please her, when he was 18, he went off to Spain and the University of Salamanca. But Spain made him restless--he steeped himself in the wild history of the Spanish conquistadors* --and after a year and a half he went to Cherbourg, and slipped off to America in the steerage of a liner.

He came to New York because he had no relatives there. "I wanted to commit sins if I felt like it," he says. He was 20, a hefty, blue-eyed, black-haired youth with $25 in his pocket. He looked up with satisfaction at the "buildings falling all over themselves," but was afraid to get into the subway. Somebody had told him that the trains stopped for only one minute, and he was afraid they would run off and leave him in some hole in the ground.

His first job was running a pushcart. Then he signed on as a coal passer on the steamship Dochra and made a trip to South America. After that, he was on his own. He worked in the fire rooms of Hudson River night boats. He "carried the hod" during construction of the Woolworth Building and many another Manhattan building, and made $19.25 a week.

"Done Up Nice." It seemed like a lot of money. He never drank--New York was so exciting that it drove his imagination crazy without it--but he "loved life, done up nice." On Saturday nights he dressed in his best and saw the city. He ate at Healy's famed restaurant on 66th Street, and watched "how the dainty people acted there." He saw every show in town. He worked hard to lose his brogue--he was determined not to go on being a gawky country boy.

As part of his plan he got a job as a bartender at the quietly aristocratic Plaza, a hotel which was frequented by many rich and famous men of the day, among them Diamond Jim Brady--"an overstuffed pig, with his stickpins all in little animal shapes." O'Dwyer stayed there three years, studying shorthand in his spare time, brushing up on his Spanish, and yearning for the export business. Then came disillusionment; the export business wanted no part of a bartender.

So, after seven years in the city, he "went on the cops." He attended the school for recruits, made the grade, and was assigned to a night beat on the Brooklyn waterfront. For the next seven years, he wore a cop's uniform. He learned many things: that it was 'often more sensible to let a drunk sleep under a signboard than to haul him to the station house; that it was always wise to whistle for aid before tackling trouble. Once he waded into a gang of roistering sailors, slipped in the snow, was beaten to a pulp.

One night he was sent to investigate a call for help in a bleak and ancient Brooklyn house. He arrived just as a woman ran out. Her half-crazed husband, with a pistol, had broken through a bedroom window, bent on killing her. The house was pitch-dark. O'Dwyer got a kerosene lamp, pushed it into the room, saw that his quarry had gotten into bed. He dived, yanked back the blankets, grabbed the man's gun hand. It was like "holding the leg of a steer." The man wrestled desperately to bring his weapon to bear. O'Dwyer warned him, then pulled his own pistol, fired once, into the man's arm. The bullet plowed on and killed him. _ The D.A. His hard but priceless education on the waterfront was augmented by another: he went to Fordham University Law School. When he was admitted to the bar he left the police force and opened a law office in Brooklyn. He discovered i) that he could make $35,000 a year, and 2) that he didn't like being a lawyer. He began to dabble in Democratic politics ; when he was appointed to the magistrate's bench, he closed his law office.

In 1938 he was elected to the County Court. A little later came the big break in his career. Brooklyn had been suffering an epidemic of murder; in two years, 20 unsolved cases had collected on the books. Democratic Leader Frank V. Kelly asked him to run for Kings County (Brooklyn) district attorney. He did, and was elected. Two years later he was a famous man; he had exposed and broken the notorious criminal ring, Murder, Inc., had sent seven of its members to the electric chair.

He was just the man with whom Tammany could challenge waspish, ebullient little Mayor Fiorello La Guardia in 1941. In a sense it was a personal feud. The Little Flower had heckled Democratic

Prosecutor O'Dwyer unmercifully, had initiated an investigation of his office. La Guardia won the election, hands down. After the votes were counted O'Dwyer went into the Army as a major in the Provost Marshal's office.

The General. But Franklin Roosevelt had no intention of letting so promising a candidate disappear. In 1944, the President wanted a man to be his eyes & ears in occupied Italy; he sent O'Dwyer to the Allied Control Commission, a brigadier general with the rank of minister.

When La Guardia decided to retire after the war there was only one real candidate for mayor: General Bill O'Dwyer. But he refused to run except on his own terms. When Tammany and the borough bosses pressed him for promises of patronage, he went stubbornly off to California. He stayed there until they capitulated. He was elected by a landslide plurality of 685,000 votes.

As mayor of New York he is almost the antithesis of the man he succeeded. La Guardia, the imaginative, tireless, dictatorial little crusader, was also a spiteful petulant exhibitionist with a passion for speeding through the city in police cars and making faces at cameramen. At 57, Bill O'Dwyer is a calm, controlled and sentimental man; when his temper rises he talks bluntly and profanely, but softly and with a cop's cold and quiet eye.

He is a natural vote-getter; he has an Irish gift for phrase. But he refuses to indulge in dramatics. His automobiles--a black Cadillac and a black Plymouth sedan--bear no special licenses, no big red lights. "I don't like topside in government getting special favors," he says, "the peasants jumping out of the way and all that. I think people sort of like that stuff-but it's bad for them. Government should permeate. It shouldn't crush."

House at Hell Gate. As head of the city's government, he lives at Gracie Mansion, a fine, 15-room Colonial house built in 1799 by one of the city's early merchant princes, a Scot named Archibald Gracie. Like many another New Yorker, O'Dwyer loves the house. It sits amid sweeping lawns just above the East River Drive near Hell Gate, a spot which General George Washington once fortified against the British. He is served by a maid, a cook, a gardener, a police chauffeur and a butler with an Irish brogue and a gift for mixing fine Martinis.

But he has little chance to relax. Next to the President of the U.S., he has the most difficult and trying political job in the land. Three months ago he almost collapsed with nervous exhaustion, the occupational ailment of the New York executive. He spent eight days in Bellevue Hospital, began taking a relaxing drink of Scotch before dinner, went off to California for a rest. But he came hurrying back after four weeks to ward off a strike which threatened to tie up the bus lines. "There's no use kidding," he says. "You can't take it easy in this job. You can just try to get away from it once in a while."

Last week he got away by reading a book on 2nd Century Rome. "It's fascinating," he said. "Did you know that the traffic was so bad in Rome that they had to make all deliveries at night to relieve the congestion?"

Incubator Baby. As mayor, Bill O'Dwyer governs more people than live in many a sovereign nation. New York is still a melting pot. It has more Irish (500,000) than Dublin, more Jews (2,000,000) than Palestine, almost as many Italians (1,095,000) as Rome. It has 412,000 Poles, 57,000 Czechs, 54,000 Norwegians, 53,000 Greeks. Half a million Negroes are jammed into New York, alongside almost a quarter-million Puerto Ricans. Mayor O'Dwyer can never be free of the fear of a bloody riot in Harlem. He has other enormous responsibilities. He is the commander of a sizable army--19,000 policemen, 11,000 firemen, 120,000 other municipal employees.

The vast organism of the city is as helplessly dependent on its servants as an incubator baby. In a single day it uses over one billion gallons of water, imports 23,500 tons of food, spews out one billion gallons of sewage and over 8,000 tons of garbage. In winter it needs 20 million gallons of fuel oil. Six million people travel daily on its 237 miles of subway and elevated lines, 1 1/2% million on its surface transport lines. Some 400,000 commuters stream into Manhattan daily from the suburbs of Long Island, New Jersey, Westchester County and Connecticut--a train arrives in its stations every 50 seconds, day & night. Its Departments of Health and Sanitation must eternally anticipate the threat of epidemics.

In his three years in office O'Dwyer has met many a crisis. Probably the greatest was the great snowstorm of Dec. 26, 1947, when 25.8 inches blanketed the streets, stopped all traffic, barricaded fire engines, halted garbage collections. Fleets of borrowed tractors, sanitation trucks, snowplows removed 99 million tons of snow, and opened 5,000 miles of streets. He created a successful agency for mediating labor disputes. He engaged in an uphill battle to encourage housing construction. The new trend: great groups of apartment houses like the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co.'s Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town. After backing and filling for months, he screwed up his courage to raise subway fares from a nickel to a dime.

Outmoded? But new problems and unfinished old ones rushed in on him. The piers need modernization. The city needs a new subway line under Second Avenue; its old lines and underground stations are in ramshackle disrepair. Problems of smoke control, traffic control, street cleaning await solution.

Eyeing this never-ending struggle to make the jammed, misshapen city run, many of its critics wondered if it were an outmoded mechanism--or an incurable growth. It had burgeoned into its present, enormous, throbbing form through three great influences--its port, its position as the financial center of the nation, and the great waves of immigration from Europe. All had declined in importance. Was New York going downhill? To Bill O'Dwyer--and to millions of his fellow citizens--the mere suggestion would be blasphemy.

To him, the Big City was far more than buildings and businesses--it was the most dramatic manifestation of the vitality and imagination of the people of the U.S. He could not believe it could ever lose its greatness. Said he fervently, listening to it rumble: "It's a hell of a town." -

* In the years since, he has retraced their footsteps everywhere in the New World except in Puerto Rico; last week the press of duties forced him to cancel a tramp-steamship trip on which he planned to go there, too.

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