TWEED’S
PLACE
They
call it the Tweed Courthouse, because only New York would name
a municipal building after the city’s greatest scoundrel.
I worked there at a low-level job some years ago, answering letters
to the mayor, in one of the throwaway city departments they liked
to store in the old courthouse, in the hopes it would never be
heard from again.
I
liked to call it The Building They Never Stopped Building, because
it never seemed that we had gotten around to finishing with it.
A weighty, classical edifice of iron and gray marble, it has squatted
behind the city’s elegant city hall like an unwanted stepchild
since the 1860s. No one quite knew what to do with the thing until
a few years ago, when it was agreed that it would serve as the
new home of the Museum of the City of New York. A brilliant, $90-million-dollar
renovation "restored" the courthouse to a luster it
had never really known, and the museum was all set to move in.
Now
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is insisting that instead he will move
the Board of Education, and maybe an experimental school, into
the Tweed Courthouse, as part of his effort to take control of
the city’s faltering school system. Ironically, the mayor’s
problems with the Board of Ed are due in no small part to the
courthouse’s old namesake.
William Marcy "Boss" Tweed was the great, Falstaffian,
Tammany sachem who became the embodiment of corrupt, machine politics.
The Tweed building—officially the Municipal Courthouse—was
the crown in his jewel. Originally budgeted at $250,000, it ended
up costing taxpayers over $13 million—more than four times
what it cost to build Britain’s Houses of Parliament, and
almost twice what it cost the United States to purchase Alaska
in 1867, while the courthouse was still sluggishly rising along
New York’s nascent skyline.
Its construction took 13 years, and served as a master class in
political graft. Favored contractors were hired to do incompetent
work, in exchange for a sizable kickback—then hired again
to make "repairs." The result was bills that were, in
the phrase of reformer Robert Roosevelt, "not merely monstrous,
they are manifestly fabulous." Andrew Garvey, soon to be
dubbed "the Prince of Plasterers," charged the remarkably
precise total of $2,870,460.06—including $1,294,685.13 in
repairs—for a plastering job estimated at $20,000. Furnishings
alone cost as much as it took to run the U.S. Post Office for
a year. Each window was an estimated $8,000. Over $41,000 was
spent on brooms. Some $350,000 was spent on carpeting—enough,
one newspaper estimated, to line a hallway from New York to New
Haven.
When good government types demanded an investigation, the Tweed-run
Board of Supervisors insisted that they already had a committee
of investigation in place. Nonetheless, the board obligingly appointed
a new, Special Committee to investigate the investigating committee.
It submitted its report within twelve days, clearing everyone
of any malfeasance—and submitting a bill for its own services
of over $18,000.
For all that, when Tweed was finally bundled off to Ludlow Street
jail in 1871, the courthouse was still not finished. The roof
was not even completed; several offices, far south of New Haven,
had no carpeting—and the plaster was peeling.
"The
whole atmosphere is corrupt," claimed a contemporary. "You
look up at its ceilings and find gaudy decorations; you wonder
which is the greatest, the vulgarity or the corruptness of the
place."
This
quickly became the general consensus, and for decades after Tweed’s
demise the state legislature busied itself dividing up the functions
of the city’s government, in an effort to ensure that no
man could gain such absolute power again. Meanwhile, the house
that Tweed built moldered under an air of disgrace. It was patched
up and put to work as a court until 1926, but after that much
of it lay empty, and there were repeated proposals in the 1940s
and ’50s to tear it down altogether.
By 1987, when I worked there, it had been divided into warren-like
offices, covered with linoleum tiles and furnished with classic,
bureaucratic metal desks and filing cabinets. Time had done nothing
to wipe away the dirt and grime of Tweed’s era, and in the
men’s room I often spied the antennae of a gigantic cockroach,
longer than my fingers, poking out from behind a urinal. I liked
to fancy that the creature was a reincarnation of the Boss himself,
putting out feelers to pick up the prevailing political winds.
For
all that, one could see that the courthouse was actually a gorgeous
old pile, endowed with all the attributes that even notorious
grafters considered mandatory for a civic building back in the
nineteenth century. The building’s magnificent central rotunda,
its beautiful cage elevator and its spacious, high-ceilinged rooms
made it a natural for what television thought a venerable courthouse
should look like, and before long crime dramas were routinely
filming their corridor scenes along its interior balconies.
It
is, as well, a natural museum space, and it would be a pity for
New Yorkers not see such a rich part of our history up close.
Putting the city’s schools directly under one man’s
authority is a worthy goal, but if the mayor’s writ does
not run to Brooklyn, where the Board of Education is currently
situated, there is probably no hope for any real reform.
Mayor
Bloomberg is indulging in the politics of symbolism, which is
a luxury we can ill afford in the wake of September 11. To move
in the Board of Ed now would be to throw away the $90 million
the city has already spent readying the Tweed courthouse for a
museum—not to mention the $3 million it is required to pay
the museum for breaking its agreement, and the millions more it
will take to move the board, and renovate the renovations so that
the building can be turned back into city offices.
Somewhere, the Boss is smiling.
©
Copyright The
New York Times
