Boss Tweed and His Gilded Age House of Corruption (Rewind)

Introducing the Tweed Courthouse

0:00Next month, we begin the road to episode 500 of the Bowery Boys podcast with a string of new shows featuring stories of fascinating New York City neighborhoods and forgotten historical figures. But for now, we're returning to a story we recorded in 2019, the tale of 19th century New York's most infamous political scoundrel and a lower Manhattan building that embodied the political system's potential for rank corruption.

0:30William Boss Tweed builds a courthouse. Enjoy. Hey, it's the Bowery Boys. Hey.

0:51Hi there. Welcome to the Bowery Boys. This is Greg Young. And this is Tom Myers. We thought it was a good time to go back to the story of one of the most notorious New Yorkers that ever lived, William Boss Tweed. This is a subject that we've discussed many times on the show. But today we're going to frame the story of Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall around a building that would actually symbolize the corruption that engulfed both him and Tammany Hall.

1:21That would be the so-called Tweed Courthouse. Now, that is the amazing thing about this structure. Today, it's a building adjacent to City Hall. Its official name back then was the New York County Courthouse. Today, they actually call it Tweed Courthouse, which is extraordinary. It's home of the Department of Education. It's fascinating to me that they have embraced this name, which actually defines the building as a temple of corruption.

1:52Yeah. No, you keep bringing this up. Yeah. This is like your favorite part of the whole story. I love it. Is that we're still calling it the Tweed Courthouse. This building is a landmark to shady spending and a world of graft and kickbacks. And ironically, it was supposed to be a courthouse that would prosecute those very things. And in a way, it would. And we'll get to that story, the ultimate ironic twist at the end of the story. Let's just say that the courthouse that sits on Chambers Street directly behind City Hall, its construction initially had a budget of $250,000.

2:32It would, however, take 20 years to construct this one building, and it would run about 50 times that amount. So how did that happen? Who made that happen? That's the subject of today's show. And could it happen again? Never. So, Greg, I think that we need to situate a couple things here. Yeah. There's a lot of situation. Right. This episode. There's a big situation at hand. We have the situation of the courthouse itself, which is located, as we just mentioned, directly north of City Hall.

3:09So that's the south side of Chamber Street between Broadway and Center Street. Okay. And we're telling the story of the construction of this building, which took place during the 1860s and 1870s. But our story today, in terms of situation, has two main characters, and those would be, of course, Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall. And so before we get into the life of Boss Tweed and the machinations of the political machine Tammany Hall, give us a little view into New York during this period.

3:45The 1860s, 1870s. Okay. What's the backdrop here?

New York City population boom

3:50Well, speeding up to this with a couple bullet points here. Let's actually pull back to the 1820s. Remember, New York is lower Manhattan. The population in 1820 is about 123,000. The commissioner's plan had just been passed in 1811, forecasting, you know, all kinds of growth on the island. But a lot of that was just aspirational. You know, hopefully someday people would live up in those farther reaches. However, in 1825, with the opening of the Erie Canal, the city's economy just exploded.

4:22You know, became the center of shipping and importing and exporting and wholesaling and banking. So that, by 1835, New York City had become the largest city in the country. Consider that. 1835 already takes over Philadelphia. And even that is before these massive waves of immigration that begin arriving through New York Harbor. That's right. By the mid-1840s, ships were filled with Irish immigrants who were escaping the Great Famine.

4:54And the city's population would swell. Consider these figures real quickly. Like, 1840, New York, again, just Manhattan, the population is 312,000 by that point. 1850, a decade later, 515,000. And a decade later, 1860, which is where our story begins, the population has jumped to 813,000. So in 20 years, the city's population has increased by 500,000 people.

5:25I would almost say this is out-of-control growth for the city and quite unplanned, obviously. Well, it's totally—the city is really struggling to accommodate all of these new arrivals, many of them Irish and German. And it put an incredible strain on the city's services. For example, fresh water needed to be brought in. The city opened the Croton Aqueduct in the 1840s. There were schooling demands, fire and police departments. They also needed to build new roads and sidewalks and parks, you know, like Central Park, for which construction would begin in 1858, all the way uptown, like beyond where people were living at that point.

6:05But by the 1860s, elevated railroads had started to appear on certain avenues in town, stretching up farther along the island, allowing people to live farther uptown, letting the city grow northward. Well, technically here, there was a lot of room to grow. It's a big island, at least back then, with lots of sparsely populated areas in upper Manhattan. Even if that land up there had just been staked out, they hadn't constructed all the roads up there from the commissioner's plan, but they were staked out, which brings us to a very important part in today's story.

6:42There's this whole mess of stuff, right, that the city has to do in order to grow correctly and accommodate all these people, all those streets and pipes and buildings and parks and schools. And those are just the things you see. Don't forget about, like, all the administration on the other side, you know, of an exploding city, you know, like City Hall, all the courts, the taxes and the spending, all of that stuff, along with this swirl of new arrivals, booming construction, exploding city government.

7:13All of this is happening at a time when there is hardly any government oversight. I can imagine how tempting it was for, say, certain opportunistic politicians. Mm-hmm. Or businessmen or anybody, really, who was interested in, you know, kickbacks or graft or just outright thievery.

Rise of Tammany Hall

7:34Which brings us to our two main protagonists here, Tammany Hall and Boss Tweed. Now, Tammany Hall, the democratic political machine that we've mentioned several times in this show, this is actually a much older organization, right? Don't they actually stretch back into the 18th century? Yeah. At the end of the 18th century, the Tammany Society was formed, operated in Philadelphia, but came to New York City in 1789. This was a time of social and political clubs.

8:06Remember, the 19th century, there were social clubs for everyone, right? And initially, Tammany was a club that attracted a lot of craftsmen and actually fought for some kind of, like, progressive new laws on their behalf. But the name, Tammany? Yeah. They took their name from Taminend or Tammany, and he was the peace-loving chief of the Leni Lenape Native American nation. But even if it started out kind of like a social club, things got pretty political pretty quickly in the early 19th century.

8:45They aligned themselves with the Democratic-Republican Party, which is a whole nother story, but that would become the Democratic Party. Tammany organized something called their general committee, which would actually start making strategic decisions about who would actually be nominated to run for the Democratic Party. So they pretty quickly became a powerful force within Democratic politics in New York state and city. They almost became synonymous with the Democratic Party, although, of course, there were other factions and other halls of different types.

9:20There was Mozart Hall, and there were other players in this, but Tammany would become the most powerful. And Tammany would support Aaron Burr. They would fight DeWitt Clinton. They were tight with Andrew Jackson. You know, they pretty quickly had a pretty major influence. But as we're getting along here in the 19th century, certainly they opened up their membership to more than just craftsmen. Well, yeah, they were quite savvy, of course, too. And they realized that the more members they had, the more power they could potentially have.

9:51Their power was derived from who they could push to turn up and vote. Sometimes more than once on Election Day. Back in the day. Yeah. So when voting rights, regulations and laws were opened up in the 1820s to allow many, many more white males to vote than before, Tammany opened up and became a little bit more progressive. And suddenly they were open to newly arriving immigrants, especially the Irish and the German.

10:22And they started to stand up against, you know, the nativist parties and factions and the anti-Catholic factions. So suddenly they were becoming more aligned with especially the Irish. So they had what seemed to be an inexhaustible supply of voters, you know, coming off the ships, coming over from Ireland, for potential voters. Yes, potential voters. This is an important point because they couldn't vote, obviously, until they had become naturalized and they were American citizens. So Tammany would help them become naturalized.

10:54They'd cover their legal expenses. They'd loan them the money. Then they'd get the promise of their support after they had become naturalized. And in that way, they kind of got their block of voters to turn out and vote for the particular Tammany candidate who was being pushed. And then that candidate, once in power, could then repay the favor by giving out hundreds or thousands of city jobs, city contracts, favors, what have you.

11:25So in this way, Tammany became incredibly powerful. They could turn out the vote and in return, Tammany Hall would accumulate the power themselves. Tammany Hall was actually providing services to especially these newly arrived immigrants that the city itself was not providing. Tammany members literally greeted arriving immigrants at the port. They fed them that many, you know, got their first good meal because of Tammany Hall.

11:56They helped them find housing often, you know, like near other people who spoke their same language or were from the same area. And they did these things at an extremely local level because the city, Manhattan Island, was was divided up into these different wards. And each ward had a ward boss that had a whole infrastructure. So that person in that in that ward was really tasked with not just getting those people to vote, but during the rest of the year, getting to know them, making sure that everybody was OK, making sure that, you know, if there was an emergency with the family that maybe they were taken care of.

12:31So you were part of a big family in a way. And you knew the rule on Election Day. You had to show up and you had to vote like they told you to. We'll be there for you if you're there for us. But there also happens to be this sort of perverse benefit that the city gets out of all this. It's the only way I can say it is, you know, if there is all of this motivation to build things throughout the city, because there's various mechanics of graft and bribery and kickbacks, then there's actually more motivation to build more of them so that they can create more opportunities for this kind of graft.

13:08Right. Yeah, totally. Like every new project brought up the possibility of new kickbacks. Right. So because the city needed to grow quickly because they needed all these new streets and pipes and infrastructure and parks and schools and buildings, Tammany, which would step into this position of power, could see to it that all those things were built. And so the city actually benefited by having them built, even if they were built at an inflated cost. At least they got it done after a while and over budget.

13:45But the point here is that Tammany had an incentive to keep building things because they were going to be getting the kickbacks. So as a result, they built a lot of things that we now see as pretty important to the functioning of the city. They just wasted a lot of money and took a lot of time doing it and spending tax dollars. But also employing a lot of people in certain rooms of City Hall or even in the courthouse that we're going to talk about. They would overemploy women to clean, you know, so like they were also overemploying their patrons as well.

14:21And Tammany here was involved on pretty much every single layer of government. There would be some reform that would sort of alter that on occasion. But for the most part, Tammany had a stranglehold on New York government by the 1850s. Yes, because in the 1850s, the board that we today call City Council was actually comprised of two different groups. A group of 20 called the City Aldermen and then another 20-member Assistant City Aldermen.

14:52Okay, kind of confusing. Together, those 40 people represented all of the different wards and they basically made decisions on the city's behalf. They were so corrupt that they were referred to as the 40 thieves. So people knew that this was going on, but it was just something, you know, that as the city became increasingly democratic, people just put up with. And leading to charge by this time is one William Boss Tweed.

William Boss Tweed enters politics

15:22When does he come into the picture? He was born on the Lower East Side on April 3rd, 1823 at One Cherry Street. His father ran a chair-making business. So you could say that, you know, young William was, well, situated to take over his father's company. Although he would prove to be not terribly interested in chairs. Unless it means chairing a couple committees, of course. For which he would be handsomely compensated.

15:52Yeah, yeah. I find it interesting that he kind of got into politics through fire departments, through local fire departments. And when he was 25, he actually helped organize the Americus Engine Company because that's what you did back then. You, like, joined the local fire department. Yeah, it was before New York had an official fire department. So they were all these various volunteer fire departments that sometimes acted as though they were street gangs. They would literally fight each other while a building was burning.

16:24They would be off, like, sabotaging each other's hoses. But there was also a relationship between those fire departments and, like, the political machines. You know, but they were also a way to kind of show off your people skills. And he had those in spades. He was this large, gregarious man. He was loud, personable. He probably was a blast to be around, you know. But he got noticed by the Democratic Party officials who helped him run for assistant city alderman for his seventh ward in 1850.

16:54He lost that election. But the next year, in 1851, he won the position of city alderman, which got him into the government and let him join that group called the 40 Thieves. But if I recall, didn't he have a short stint in federal government, right? Wasn't he? Didn't he go to D.C.? Yeah, he served in Congress for two years, uneventful years. He actually hated being in D.C. He found it incredibly boring. Probably there was no, there wasn't much excitement there.

17:25So then he came back in 1854 and dedicated himself to Tammany Hall. He served on the Board of Education. And then as the 1850s would continue, he would start to serve on other various boards and take on official city positions, right? That were salaried, by the way, and that also put him in an incredibly advantageous position. He was powerful and he was perfectly positioned for corruption.

17:57Now, let's leave that thread of the story right there. Boss Tweed in the late 1850s. I want to draw your attention now to its very specific place in the city, to the location just behind City Hall to the north.

History of the City Hall park site

18:14Of course, that is the location of the Tweed Courthouse today. Now, in the early 18th century, rewinding even further back, the site of City Hall Park was a public commons or a gathering space for those who lived in the city. By the time of the Revolutionary War, there were actually several municipal structures that were built here. There was an almshouse, a debtor's prison, and on the site of what would become the Tweed Courthouse, there was a military barracks.

18:47But you just said an almshouse? It was like a poorhouse. A poorhouse, okay. Yeah, it was also actually an early hospital. Bellevue Hospital traces its roots to the first almshouse that was here on the commons. However, by 1797, this was deemed inadequate. So they built a larger almshouse here on the northern end of today's commons, here where the barracks was, and here on the spot of Tweed Courthouse. But this whole time, City Hall was still located south of here, today's Federal Hall.

19:20So when did City Hall move up? So it officially became City Hall Park, of course, when City Hall was constructed here in 1812. Now, the remarkable thing about this is it sat next to this old structure that was the old almshouse building. It seems almost odd or inappropriate that they built this super ornate, lavish, even, City Hall structure next to this almshouse. Well, yeah, it is shocking.

19:51And as a result of that, the northern side of City Hall, when it was completed, you know the front side is beautiful marble with a cascading staircase, right? But the northern side of it was actually left plain brownstone that was just painted white. Which we know from the legend was not covered in marble because, what, the city leaders didn't think that the city would ever grow up beyond it? That's true, although part of it's also because there was this older structure that was there.

20:23So it was less impressive on that side. So 40 years later here, by the time of our story, is the almshouse still sitting here? Did it need to be destroyed for the courthouse? Well, the building was still there. In fact, by 1815, it was repurposed for fancier purposes. It was renamed the New York Institution of Learned and Scientific Establishments and housed several organizations that would prove important to the city later. For instance, it is here in this building that the New York Historical Society was formed.

20:57We also have Scudder's American Museum, which was, of course, the root collection of Barnum's American Museum. Hold on, hold on. Scudder's Museum was in the former almshouse? Yes, alongside the New York Historical Society. At the same time? Yes. I wonder if you could get like a two-for-one combo ticket. Well, there was a natural history museum. There were all sorts of different delights in the building. How many of them had wax figures, though? I bet all of them did, actually, if I should be honest.

21:30Well, anyway, by the 1850s, New York was, of course, was expanding greatly and all of these institutions had moved on. Additionally, it was decided that New York City needed a proper courthouse. It didn't really have a grand, imposing courthouse by this time. Wait, where were they holding trials? Most of them were still in City Hall, and so it was the smaller buildings kind of around the city, but nothing of grandeur. So in the late 1850s, they tore down the almshouse, and they prepared to build what they called at the time New City Hall, but this would become the New York County Courthouse.

Funding and building the courthouse

22:08Well, by 1860, the New York Board of Supervisors had announced plans for funding of this new courthouse construction on the site of the old New York institution with, quote, creation of a public fund or stock to be known or called as the courthouse stock. Construction on the courthouse began on September 16th, 1861. But hold on, because we are kind of fitting both of these stories together like a puzzle, right?

22:38You just said that construction began in 1861. Who approved of this project? This Board of Supervisors? Yeah. Who was this Board of Supervisors that approved of this? Well, New York City was dominated by Democrats, but New York State was controlled mostly by Republicans, and so the Board of Supervisors was actually a committee that was formed by Republicans as a way to oversee funding of new building projects, among other responsibilities.

23:08It was seen initially as a power grab, however, tables turned in 1858 when who should make their way onto the Board of Supervisors but William Tweed. William Tweed, who by this point is also working as a state senator. Yes. So he has his tentacles in all different aspects of local and state government. So Tweed is half the time in New York, running Tammany, half the time up in Albany, and he's actually on an oversight committee that has to approve what's happening in New York City.

23:49Yeah. So no surprise, it is through this perch that Tweed begins a massive graft enterprise, and although these corrupt techniques would be employed in pretty much all the construction projects in New York City, none were as infamous or as profitable as the New York County Courthouse. Okay, and I want you to break down for us how this actually works, because we just keep saying corruption. But like, where is the money coming from?

24:20They were issuing these stocks and anybody could buy them? Yes, they were public stocks, and with the income generated from these stocks, then the Board of Supervisors could authorize the purchase of the land, materials, and of course, hire people for the job. But to be clear, these were debts that the city owed to the people who had bought them, and these investors were expecting to profit on the interest of these certificates. Well, unfortunately, they had to keep adding stock.

24:51They needed more money for this project, so by 1860, it was $1 million worth of stock, and then throughout the decade, they would just continue adding more and more, until it was about $4.5 million in public funds. For this one building. For this one building. Oh, I'm sorry, that's an $1,860, okay? With inflation, today that is over $125 million. For the construction of one building.

25:21Oh yeah, Tom, I'm just getting started here, because those were only the costs that were made public. In the end, it actually ended up costing almost three times that, an estimated $13 to $14 million. Today, around $400 million in our current currency. And simply put, why did the costs swell to this level? Because the supervisors here wildly overpaid for all the materials to be used in the courthouse from these vendors,

25:56because in this negotiated under-the-table payback, the vendors would add 15% on top as a service charge, a kickback, or as Mike Wallace in Gotham actually calls it, a tribute, which is a nice word for this. And that extra charge would then inflate the price, the contractor would then be paid the normal amount, and that extra overage, if you would, would be split up and divided by the various Tammany-affiliated officials.

26:31Yes, the so-called Tweed Ring. No one in government, or few in government, were really looking skeptically at this, because they were pretty much all a part of it. A part of this cabal of corrupt government officials, politicians that were linked into this chain of graft, and pretty much all on some level and in some degree enriching themselves. And this would include, by the way, A. Oakey Hall, the Tammany Hall loyalists,

27:02who would eventually be elected mayor in 1868. There were a couple other key members too, like Peter Sweeney, who was a former New York County district attorney, and later part of Mayor Hall's administration, and Richard Connolly, who was also part of Tweed's ring as Hall's comptroller. The comptroller, who hilariously here was supposed to be in charge of making sure that money was spent correctly. And they called him Slippery Dick.

27:34And we're speaking here of how Koss got out of control for the Tweed Courthouse. The same kind of shenanigans were causing Koss to go out of control on innumerable other building and public works projects around the city. Including the Brooklyn Bridge, which was about to go under construction in the late 1860s.

Inflated costs and material graft

27:55But back here at this building, which starts construction in 1861. 1861. September 16th, 1861. So, after the start of the Civil War, which of course would delay construction in other ways, the building was designed by John Kellum in an Italianate style, fashioned with marble and a new building material of the day, cast iron, which was disguised to look like stone.

28:26And cast iron, of course, is one of our favorite building materials. What would New York be without cast iron or marble? This building actually has marble in it, too. Well, yes. And conveniently, Mr. Tweed had just recently bought a marble quarry in Massachusetts, soon after the announcement of this project, and wouldn't you know, most of the marble in the courthouse was taken from this quarry. What are the odds?

28:57And this illustrates another dimension to his corruption, because he was also, in so many different ways, becoming a supplier here to building materials. He also ran a printing company, a stationery company. You know, like, the city was forcing other people to buy from Tweed's own company. From Tweed's organization. It was a free-for-all. For instance, here's just, like, some of the more outrageous costs. Andrew Garvey, who the press called the Prince of Plasterers,

29:27received $133,000 for two days of work. Today, that would be about $2.2 million. Wow, for being plastered for two days. He probably was plastered for that kind of money. A furniture supplier delivered three tables and 40 chairs for the cost today of $3.8 million. A woodworker was paid $360,000 for a month of work. For woodworking, was there a lot of, there was obviously a lot of wood. No, actually, there wasn't at all.

29:58Well, there were $150 awnings. That's about $2,500 today. Awnings, by the way, that retailed back then for $12.50. Wait, how much did they pay for them? $150. Got it. Did Tweed own the awning company, too? Well, the budget for brooms, et cetera, was over $41,000. In fact, look, there was so much phoniness that some of the contractors themselves were even fictional, names that were attached to bank accounts that led back to Tweed cronies.

30:32But of course, those real suppliers, the ones that did exist, were tacking on outrageous percentages that went straight into the pocket of the ring. According to an 1878 report, quote, Almost every person who did work or furnished supplies for the county at this time were informed by some member of the ring that in order to ensure a continuance of the public patronage, increased orders and prompt payment, it would be necessary for them to add to their bill a certain percentage in excess of their true face, which increase or percentage it is understood

31:08and agreed should be paid to the corrupt combination of the board of supervisors, unquote. Well, that pretty much sums it up. So then in summary, everybody pretty much involved in the planning and construction of the courthouse, a house of law is corrupt and is participating in some level in the scheme. Yeah. But how could this persist when so many people knew that this was going on? There had to be some pushback.

31:39Where was the outrage? Well, there were some reformers in the city who did notice this as early as 1866, and they demanded an investigation. Unfortunately, the group that led the investigation was the board of supervisors who, you know what? They looked into the matter and what do you know? They found no wrongdoing. I wonder how much they were paid to look into the matter. Well, in fact, they racked up massive bills to look into their own corruption, a bill of

32:11$18,000 or almost $300,000 today, just to basically say that there was no wrongdoing when we know that there clearly is. But were they actually getting anything built? Was anything being constructed? Well, the building was partially completed by 1867 so that the Court of Appeals could move in. But I can't imagine it was a very effective court because it was a massive construction site. Oh, and also, unfortunately, there was no roof on the rotunda, which is like the main, you

32:45know, the center of the building. Of the octagonal. And when you walk in, it's this beautiful, huge space. So there's no roof on the center of the building, which, of course, let in rain and snow 365 days a year. There were no plastic tarps back then. And the stairways were only built to the second floor of the building. Oh, that certainly makes it difficult to get to a third floor courtroom. Meanwhile, Tweed is amassing more and more and more power. First, with the ascension of Tweed in 1863 as the boss of Tammany Hall, then with the election

33:20of Aoki Hall as the mayor of New York City in November of 1868. By 1870, just a couple of years later, William Boss Tweed is the most powerful figure in New York City easily and arguably in the nation. You know, he controlled a political machine at the height of its powers in an era when machines of this type, both Democratic and Republican, were shaping the nation's politics. And nothing could stop him? Well, at last, there were rumblings.

33:53There were those that were criticizing from the sidelines who were about to get their day in the sun. Charging in like the cavalry here would be the freedom of the press and reformed minded politicians focused on rooting out corruption and greed. We'll get to the completion of the Tweed Courthouse and the downfall of Tweed after this.

34:22Today's show is brought to you by Bowery Boys Walking Tours, our first ever small group walking tours that have been developed around our podcast. Check out our newest tours, book them now at BoweryBoysWalks.com and get ready to walk through time.

Thomas Nast cartoons and press exposure

34:41Well, Boss Tweed's downfall was actually due to a number of different events. The first one, critically, was that the keeper of the books in the comptroller's office was a man named James Watson. He died suddenly and unexpectedly because of a sledding accident in January of 1871, which is a really bizarre detail. But because of that, his replacement handed the books that showed all kinds of fraudulent

35:13payments over to a man named James O'Brien. And O'Brien had been a sheriff and had this like hot and cold relationship with Tammany Hall. Okay, so now the books are in somebody else's hands. And meanwhile, the New York Times and Harper's Magazine had both been kind of ramping up their pressure and their anti-Tammany reporting. Yeah, so I wanted to ask a little bit more about this. Had the press been largely silent to all of this corruption that had been sort of publicly

35:46happening? Yeah, it's kind of hard to imagine, I know, but sometimes it turns out the popular press is actually just more concerned about their own finances than reporting the truth. Tammany, after all, was buying ads, and they were also paying kickbacks to people even in the newspaper business. Those newspaper owners were in on this action, you know? And because of that, most of the city's papers were actually printing articles and editorials that were favorable to Tammany.

36:17And then the reading public, well, they were actually choosing papers that were aligned with them politically as well. And New York and the voters were majority Democratic. So the papers were actually choosing to run stories and articles that were mostly, you know, pro-Democratic Party in order to satisfy the readers. Their softball content, but not the New York Times and not Harper's? No, they were aligned actually more with the Republican Party. And so they didn't need to satisfy that reading public.

36:50Harper's had actually been publishing really, you could say, nasty political cartoons by Thomas Nast. These depicted Tweed as this like vulgar brute of a man, you know, who was like manipulating the city just to enrich his own pockets. And these Thomas Nast cartoons are amazing because these images of Tweed have become so iconic. They really kind of define how we think of him today. He manages to shape Boss Tweed's reputation in the same way that Robert Caro shapes Robert

37:25Moses's reputation in the 20th century. Right. But instead of like, you know, a thousand page book, he does it with political cartoons and cartoons that got under Tweed's skin, too, because he knew that even if his constituents couldn't read, he famously once said, they could understand pictures and they could understand that he was being portrayed as this guy who was stealing from them. Well, back to Sheriff O'Brien, the guy who inherited, you know, the books because of the

37:55sledding accident. Well, he was dangling those books in front of Tammany Hall, you know, threatening to provide them to the press if they wouldn't pay him off. The general public had started to also kind of sour on Tammany because of something totally unrelated that we should probably do a show on later. And those were called the Orange Riots, which happened over the course of two different years in 1870 and 1871. But in 1870, Protestant Irish marchers were attacked while they were parading in the city

38:29streets. They were attacked by Irish Catholics. Because of that, eight people died. Now, the next year in July of 1871, in the middle of all this other stuff, Tammany allowed that parade to happen again after saying that they didn't want to because of safety reasons. They finally acquiesced, allowed the Protestant Irishmen to march. And once again, they were attacked by a much larger mob. And like horribly, 60 people were killed in the altercation, most of them Protestants.

39:03What were the ramifications of these riots onto city politics? Well, the Republican leaders and kind of like the city elites who had up to this point just sort of like taken a kind of laissez-faire attitude toward Tammany, you know, let Tammany be Tammany. They now saw that actually Tammany could not even prevent this kind of chaos and mayhem and murder in the streets. I mean, 60 New Yorkers died in the streets in one day from this. So this is all happening as O'Brien then, the guy with the books, shows up in the Times office

39:38with these books that spell out this whole history of corruption. The Times then does its due diligence. It finds other records as well from other people and sources, including those of Watson, the man who had died in the sledding accident. And starting on July 8th of 1871, the New York Times started publishing these accounts, rolling out articles, exposing the frauds of Tammany Hall in articles that appeared day

40:10after day. Did you happen to thumb through a few of these juicy articles?

The New York Times publishes the ledgers

40:15I couldn't really thumb through. I did like fire up my Times machine. Yeah. And yes, I feasted on some of these. For example, in the Sunday, July 23rd, 1871 paper, I don't know if you saw this one on page four, they kick it off with a little bit of editorializing, quote, But then later on in this article, they laid out specific amounts that had been paid for

40:51services at various buildings, including a new armory that had been built. And then, of course, all of these charges that had been paid to certain vendors at the new courthouse. And you mentioned many of those. Yes. Outrageous charges. Yes. And in this article, they just like itemize all these different charges paid to these different vendors, putting them down by name, you know, like one and a half million dollars to this company for furniture, however much to this company for carpeting. I mean, what explosive revelation these must have been.

41:23Oh, they even itemized work that was paid for on Sundays when the building was closed and no construction could take place at all. Right. So on Sunday, January 26th, when J.A. Smith was paid thirty two thousand six hundred and seventeen dollars and thirteen cents for carpets. And it goes on and on. But, you know, even like to the point it was so ludicrous that they actually added up all those carpeting charges that allegedly took places on Sunday when the doors were locked.

41:54And they realized that they paid enough for carpeting that they could have carpeted all of City Hall Park three times over.

42:04And I believe they also their justification was like carpets in public places just get more filthy or more worn out than regular carpets and needed. Well, actually, I think the courthouse had marble floors. That's right. But then the article concludes tomorrow morning, we shall publish the accounts of another firm to entice people to buy the next day's paper. And they did. And not just in New York. Did they buy the New York Times and read all of this? They bought it around the world.

42:35It was a really big story in other parts of the world, of course, because a lot of the debt that had been bought, a lot of those stock certificates and things were actually being held by foreign investors, many of them in Europe. This was a problem because if those investors started getting nervous, if they started thinking that actually New York was a city of fraud, they were going to come with their certificates asking for their cash back. And if that happened, the city's finances, the city's banks could all go belly up.

43:06This was a critical time. And so because of that, city leaders from both Republicans and also some non-Tammany Democrats, because Democrats were starting to kind of like detach themselves and disassociate with Tammany. They got together for a huge meeting at Cooper Union about two months later to try to resolve this crisis. They ended up coming up with a group called the Committee of Seventy to come up with ways to reform the city's government and control spending.

43:37And they did this by basically refusing to pay anyone anything, just cut the city's spending, which caused, among other things, workers showing up and demanding to get paid from Boss Tweed himself. He started actually paying for thousands of dollars worth of back salaries out of his own pocket, but he clearly didn't have the money to pay for them. And because of that, workers started turning against Tammany Hall, which finally led to Tweed's

44:08arrest on October 26 of 1871. Unbelievably, he later got out on bail and then ran for another term as state senator, which he then proceeded to win, even with all of this baggage that he was bringing into the job. Yeah, he was still popular with his core constituents in his ward, right? So state senator, like it was basically his people electing him. Although in that November's elections, Tammany lost a lot of power.

44:40So when did he actually go on trial?

Tweed trial and final escape

44:41Well, he actually went on trial three different times. The first time in 1873, it ended in a hung jury. But in the retrial, he was actually convicted on 204 counts and sentenced to 12 years in prison. And can I take a wild guess as to where that particular trial was held? Perhaps in a particular building that lacked a particular roof over a particular rotunda? That's good because I suspect this court would have blown the roof off.

45:13Yeah, no, indeed. Tweed stood trial in his own house of corruption, which was still unfinished, but of course being used for trials. And it's amazing looking through the articles from that month during the trial. It is just a mess of articles, not just about Tweed, but also about his associates, about his property getting seized, about how Tammany inflated costs and robbed people of money. Every aspect of Tammany's corruption and Tweed's corruption was being examined anew

45:47anew and just like devoured by the public that had been cheated for so long. It was like people couldn't get enough of this story. But Tweed would not serve 12 years in prison. No, he would actually, his sentence would be reduced to one year. But then when he would get out, New York State would actually come after him for a civil trial. They wanted their money back. Yeah, of course. He had taken so much money from the public that they wanted him back for a third trial

46:18to recover some of that money. He was held at the Ludlow Street Jail, at Ludlow and Grand Street, while he was waiting that trial. Although it's funny, they were very loose with him back in the day. Like, it's amazing to think that they would just let him out to go home and have dinner with his family, you know, up at Madison and 60th Street. He could just go home and have dinner, which led to him in December of 1875 slipping out the side door. He slipped off to New Jersey at one point.

46:50He also slipped off to Florida under an assumed name and then fled to Cuba and made his way to Spain. U.S. officials abroad actually knew he was coming. He was recaptured on November 23rd, 1876 and brought back to New York and locked up again. And there in the Ludlow Street Jail, suffering from a variety of ailments, including pneumonia, Boss Tweed died on April 12th, 1878 and was buried at Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn.

Completion and modern restoration

47:25And meanwhile, that courthouse still sat incomplete. Because in the midst of all of this, on July 24th, 1871, the courthouse's architect, John Kellum, had also died. Indeed, during this whole Tweed scandal here in the mid-1870s, they essentially just froze work on the courthouse. So it was an incomplete building for many, many years, finally resuming in 1876 with a new architect named Leopold Eidlitz.

48:03Eidlitz is a name that we know, right? Yeah, he's an architect who actually designed the original Brooklyn Academy of Music and also designed portions of the state capital in Albany. Now, Eidlitz continued to work here and completing the courthouse and finally wrapped up in 1881, 20 years after it had started. 20 years. Worth repeating. 20 years later, they finished this. A lot has changed.

48:34Architectural styles have changed. Oh, yeah. And Eidlitz, by the way, he didn't try to make his parts of the building look like Kellum's. Eidlitz had more of a Romanesque revival, heavily medieval style, very, very heavy on the arches. It's fascinating. Even if you're just walking around outside the building, you can see the difference between the original Italianate section and Eidlitz's Romanesque edition. Just look at the windows. Yeah, it's very easy to, once you know what you're looking for.

49:05Eidlitz also, like, in the interior, was a big fan of tricolored brickwork. But it's weird because it's a mixture of styles, but somehow it actually kind of works, I think. And it kind of embodies the many twists and turns this building has gone through. We think it's a thing of beauty today, but actually, many back then kind of thought it was like an eyesore. The New York Times, in 1877, said, quote, It is also charged that the new style of architecture is wholly out of keeping with the rest of the building, and that it might be well enough in a fashionable church on Fifth Avenue or a highly decorated lager beer brewery at Yorkville.

49:44It is cheap and tawdry in comparison with the elaborate finishing and classic exterior of the present structure. Cheap and tawdry? Can you believe that? Despite the- Although, I think the Times had something against this building by this point. Yeah, I think they were still kind of holding the grudge here against this site. Well, for almost four decades, this was indeed the home of the New York County courts. However, in 1927, court would be adjourned, or at least for these county affairs,

50:16for they would move up just slightly north to the newly constructed Civic Center and to that gorgeous New York County courthouse, which is today the New York State Supreme Court building. So this moved a few blocks north. While the county courts moved out, it did become a city court for a time. Now, the most notable part of the Tweed Courthouse today is that gorgeous staircase that you've seen in countless crime television shows.

50:46But in fact, during the 1940s, the city actually decided that they wanted to widen Chambers Street, and as a result, they ripped the staircase out. And for many decades, there was no staircase at all. People were literally just stuck inside. No, there were just other entrances, just not as grandiose, not as majestic as that staircase. In 1984, the building was made a New York landmark, and in 1986, a National Historic Landmark, which is interesting because it was a historic landmark for being notorious for its connection to Boss Tweed,

51:23which I think that is fascinating. So maybe going back to the question that you posed at the beginning of the show, why do we still call it the Tweed Courthouse? It's because of this notorious connection that saved it in the end. I mean, after many decades here in the 20th century of being like a lackluster building of no particular interest to people, by the 1980s here, there was actually kind of a lot, a lot of interest, a lot of new cachet placed upon this building because of its reputation. Now, in 2001, a grand restoration was completed of the building, which included a reconstruction of that outdoor staircase.

52:02This had started under the administration of Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Rudy's intention was to actually have a brand new tenant into the building, the Museum of the City of New York. Whoa. So hold on a second. So the Museum of the City of New York, had Giuliani gotten his way, would have moved down into this building, which ironically was almost on the same spot that the New York Historical Society was founded on. Isn't that amazing? But then, of course, the next mayor, Michael Bloomberg, came in and nixed that idea,

52:35kept the museum uptown and instead moved in the Department of Education. And they are the current occupants of the Tweed Courthouse. And another Bloombergian move in that rotunda is this massive, 50-foot-tall Roy Lichtenstein sculpture called Element E, which is like weird and bizarre and also kind of works in a way because, again, all these mixture of styles and colors that the building has. Well, it's fabulous to walk into that rotunda knowing that it had lacked a roof for so many years,

53:08and now you have this beautiful installation. We should add that you actually cannot just simply stroll into the rotunda. We were actually given a wonderful tour by Mary Beth Betts, who is a tour manager at the Public Design Commission, and she plans tours for New York City Hall. But they don't do tours of the Tweed Courthouse anymore. It's now for the Department of Education. However, she gave us such a wonderful tour. And if you're interested in touring City Hall, which is right next door... And we would highly recommend that.

53:39Just Google Public Design Commission City Hall Tours, and you'll be led to the official page at NYC.gov, where you can sign up and make a free tour reservation. And of course, after that City Hall tour, you can simply walk on the other side of City Hall and check out the architecture of the Tweed Courthouse. In addition, you can come to our website, BoweryBoysHistory.com, where I'll have a great many illustrations and photographs of both Tweed Courthouse

54:09and all the people involved in the dirty dealings in its construction. Finally, we want to thank all of those who support us on Patreon. It's because of your monthly contributions that Greg and I are able to dedicate our time to producing the Bowery Boys podcast, doing research, and basically just living in the 19th century. So for all this and more, join us at Patreon.com slash Bowery Boys. Bowery Boys.

54:38My voice just actually gave out at the end of that. Patreon.com slash Bowery Boys. Well, I guess on that note, before our voices completely peter out, we just want to say thank you very much for listening and have a great New York week, whether you live here or not. See you real soon.