individuals like walter chrysler who oversaw the skyscraper florence boom. also the creation of cultural a and architectural feats. this was hosted by the new york public library. it's about an hour and a half. >> great. thank you, lois. i want to thank the library and especially debra for organizing this event. can you guys hear me in the back? can you hear me now? no? yes? >> yes. >> all right. i'll speak loudly. okay. well, it's great to be in the city lecturing on the city that you wrote about in the very place in the city that you wrote

about, midtown manhattan, and a couple preliminaries before we roll into this illustrated talk. i like that better than power point as a term. i'm not good at power point. it's not that i'm a luddite. i'm just not good at technology. i'm just a technological idiot. well, this is not -- "the supreme city" is not the book i originally set out to write. the original idea was to do the whole city, all five boroughs, and stretch it out from world war i to world war ii, but without trying to be too cute, i took too big a bite out of the apple, and i discovered as i was doing my research that there was -- i was really drawn to a really compelling story within the larger story i had intended to tell, and it's an untold story actually. it's been told in bits and

pieces, but it's never been stitched together as a compelling historical narrative, and that story is the rise of the -- the sudden and spectacular rise i should say of midtown manhattan in the 1920s which was an urban backwater before 1919. there wasn't a single skyscraper above 42nd street, and by the end of the decade, by the end of the 1920s, almost half of new york skyscrapers were in midtown. it's one of the great building booms not only in the history of the united states but in the history of the world. this eruption almost that occurs in these years. and in the book i take on the building of this midtown manhattan. it was really a construction project and i do its offshoot as well because there's all kinds of cultural spillage. there's tremendous cultural revolution that accompanies this

revolution. ats book with a lot of characters, a lot of ins dents, and i think some interesting stories. let me begin here with this. for 300 years downtown dominated new york city, and it was only in 1919 following the war that midtown began to take off, and it kind of culminated in the building of this building which still stands. this is the fred french building on 5th avenue, and it was the first terrifically tall building north of 42nd street, and in this year, 1927, when the fred french building was completed, david sarnoff and william paley founded their networks, nbc and cbs, the first national radio

networks and radio went national, and the grand central station had been completed in 1913, but the apogee of the period i'm talking about when it really reaches its takeoff phase was in 1927. so a lot of the book centers on that year. and this is 1927, the year that lindberg, for example, his return from his solo flight from roosevelt field on long island to paris, and he triumphantly returns first to the nation's capital in washington and then to new york city where over 4 million people crowded the streets to see it. and it's also in 1927 that -- oops, hit the wrong button -- that the tempo of the city changed dramatically, and f. scott fits garlds put it really well. he said the parties were bigger in '27, the buildings were higher, the morals were loosing, the liquor was cheaper, the jazz

age raced on under its own power served by filling stations of its own money. man, i wish i could have written that. and new york then is in this year and in this decade in the vanguard of cultural and technological transformations that would make the 20th century the american century and make new york the quintessential city of the early 20th century. what was happening here? well, i mentioned one thing, the rise of commercial radio and talking movies. first talking movie was made and shown in new york city in 1927. you have the invention, although in very primitive form, of television. you have the beginning of tabloid journalism with the new york daily news founded by joseph patterson of the patterson family in chicago, the newspaper family. you have the spread through radio and phone know graphic records of this new urban music called jazz and i feature duke

ellington in this book and you have the emergence with yankee stadium with mass spectator sports, and enormously boxing matches staged at the madison square garden and other venues. ellington summed it up. the duck said new york is the capital of everything. very little happens in the country unless somebody in new york presses a button, and so it is. and it's a story, in other words, of an urban revolution, but i try to tell it -- i'm interested in people, and i try to tell this story through about three dozen characters, and i have a cast of characters like a play bill at the beginning of the book. and most of them, as lois was saying, are blazing ambitious strivers from west of the hudson and east of the danube. and it was e.b. white, the wonderful e.b. white of the new yorker who wrote about this phenomenon of outsiders coming

in and transforming the place. and by the way, i found the same thing in my book on chicago, exactly the same thing. jane adams coming in and clarence darrow and louis sullivan and daniel burnham. same sort of thing. and white writes this, e.b. white, in a beautiful little book called "here is new york" which a lot of you have probably read, it was published in 1949. he said it's the person who was born elsewhere and came to new york in quest of something that accounts for new york's high strung disposition, it's poetcle deportment, it's dedication to the arts, and it's incomparable achievements, and achievements they were. it's probably -- i quoted white, but i think maybe the most important inspiration for me was the frenchman tocqueville. the tocqueville who said every american is eaten up with a longing to rise, and my

characters, like sarnoff, arrive with that in mind. he came from a belarusian village that was so backwards it was immediate evil. couldn't speak a word of english and he becomes the founder of modern mass communications and he does it and takes over rca before he's 40 years old. you have text rick effort on the right there, a saloon keeper from the canadian klondike. he built the modern madison square garden and he taught boxing promoters a lasting lesson, that you can't have a good fight with a good audience. you can't have a mass speckscle fight unless you build it around a story. i try to deal with that in the book. and, of course, right next to tex it the great jack dempsey, the hard hitter from the western mine fields of colonerado. he's two guys turn boxing into a million dollar business. the next million dollar gate would occur in the 1970s with

ali and frazier. and you have patterson coming in from chicago founding "the daily news" on a shoestring really, and by 1927 -- it barely survived but by 1927 it's the largest selling newspaper in the world. and there he is, a true want from the baltimore docks, a police called pig town, and he transformed his spot as fundamentally as jack dempsey transformed boxing. he turned it from small ball, slicing at the ball, bunting it, hit and run, stealing, into long ball. and so like dempsey, he's a big hitter, and new yorkers seem to like the big hitters, the guys who could put them on the canvas and put the balls in the seats. and what i try to do in the book just a second on methodology is i really tried to tell the story, tried to reimagine the

city to go back then, to go back there in my mind and to describe the lives of my characters not as i seem them from the present but as they live them. to try to get behind their eyes. everyone tells me that history -- and i'm a historian -- gives you perspective because you have hindsight, but hindsight can be a killer. if you know the great depression is coming, you'll organize your book so it all leads to that when nobody in the '20s knew it was coming, and that's the problem with that kind of history. as my buddy david mccullough said, the most inaccurate phrase in the english language is "the foreseeable future." the future can never be foreseen. it can never be seen. in '27, 1927, it was actually unimaginable to new yorkers that the greatest urban building boom in modern history would soon collapse in a matter of two years and collapse with shocking

suddenness. and that, you know, this guy here, high living jimmy walker who commanded new york in these years, was the real spirit of new york, that he'd be brought low by charges of corruption and forced to resign. walker is one of the major characters in this book and he's fun to write about, but what i try to avoid is most articles on walker tend to substitute analysis or anecdote, and -- tend to substitute anecdote for analysis i should say. they don't get into him. he's really an interesting guy. heart in the right place. did a lot of important things for the city but just didn't have the energy and the moral courage to stand up to the old-fathsed tammany bosses and he got himself involved in a whole hell of a lot of corruption. they never put a single charge on -- they investigated him from his nose to his toes, and they couldn't put a charge on him that was triable in a court of law, but pressure from roosevelt, who was going to run

for president, franklin roosevelt, governor of new york at the time, pressure from his old buddy al smith who had been the former governor of new york, forced him eventually out of office. he's a great character. quit wit, too. brilliant guy. read learned everything through his ears, read off, here's what you do, here's what you say, here's what the issues are and he would go in and do it. good impromptu speaker, too. he would roll from polish weddings to irishfests, to jewish galas at night. one gala he walks in the room with a yarmulke on. and someone yelled, circumcision next? and he said no, i prefer to wear it off. that's jimmy walker. great parts of my book are devoted to tamini politics,. i deal a lot with prohibition,

night life, organized crime. as i said, i deal with boxing, i deal with baseball. but tonight i want to focus not on the whole book. i think if you try to summarize, you compress and you kill it. i just want to deal with the book's central drama. which is the building of midtown and this cultural revolution that accompanied it. the takeaway here is a century ago, a group of audacious strivers set out to build a modern downtown and they did it right. the story begins with grand central station. and completed in 1913. and this project, and this is the digging operation, and it is enormous, it's an operation, not quite on the scale of the panama canal, but pretty close to it. it incited the effort to build new terminal while the old

terminal still operated was set in motion, the whole movement to build it was set in motion by a crisis. the worst train disaster at that time in new york's history, a commuter train was barreling through one of the stations and immense underground tunnels and they failed to spot warning lights. and they slammed into the rear of another train that was waiting in the rail yard. and the carnage was terrible. the new york central railroad was forced by the state legislature to electrify its trains. now, at that point in time, this guy, william willgus, really the founding father, the george washington of midtown manhattan, he's the railroad's chief engineer. he's an engineer with real vision. he not only electrifies the trains but he buries the tracks. not only does that, he goes a step further. he convinces his superiors, the rulers of the railroad, mostly vanderbilts, to build a new state of the art terminal, a great people moving machine.

and shop-lined underground passageways that lead to subway stations, okay? transit stations. and also, there's a lot of smart shops along the passageways. lot of new yorkers talk about reviving these in a big way, because so many of them still exist. they connect to hotels and adjacent buildings. that's what cities need, you need to move the density, you need to move the people. otherwise you get paralysis. hence the color like roadway that runs around grand central. the ak which aqueduct that moves around it, the grand central that you can first drive through building and history of the world. for half a century, this is what the area north of 46th street looked like. all the way up to 56th street. from 42nd street, east 42nd

street to east 56th street. it's a gigantic rail yard that fans out here from the station. the pedestrians had to cross it on those iron crossways there. over catwalks as they called them. braving smoke and dust and ash and things like that. and this is the vision willgus of totally eliminating the yard. there's another shot of the yard there. there's no grid there. the manhattan grid is gone, okay? there's no streets there in manhattan. close to the river, there might be, you know, the schaefer brewing company, but that was it, that was manhattan. this is what it became. willgus said what we will do is on the roof of these smokeless tunnels, we're going to build on real estate that the railroad owns, we're going to build park avenue. straight as a sun beam, as ella fitzgerald wrote about it. her husband tried to steal the

article and put it in his name, but it was really zelda's piece. it was flanked by tall apartments. very restrained design with a lot of common cornice lines. these are the first skyscrapers built for permanent living. no people had lived this high before. new york central does this by selling something we all know about today, but people didn't know about then, because it's new, and they sold their air rights to developers. willgus put it well. he said with revenue plucked from the air we can create a veritable city. he called it terminal city, the city around the terminal. we can make money for the railroad and we can build a beautiful section of the city. now, while this is going on, there's big happenings on 5th avenue. this is 5th avenue before the war, when it was called vanderbilt alley. it's lined from 41st street all the way to central park, with

vanderbilt mansions. some of them a block wide, a block, you know, block size mansions all the way down there. here it is on easter sunday. i believe this is 1913. well, a lot of the commanding influences in the new york central railroad, a lot of the older vanderbilts had died by 1921. their widows owned these mansions and they couldn't keep them up. some of them had the money to do it, but it's hard to hire irish maids. they were doing other things. they were going into other occupations. they were there to be sold. so a group of very aggressive young real estate agents, most of them former garment workers and garment entrepreneurs from the lower east side came in and buy these mansions, and the day after they bought them, they tear them down. and they tear every single one down except one, within a year. so by 1928, vanderbilt alley is scrubbed clean of all these mansions. then what they do is bring in --

they sell the land to merchandising impresarios like saks, they transform fifth avenue into the greatest shopping emporium in the country. saks moves from herald square to fifth avenue and expands tremendously, becoming saks fifth avenue. the entire stretch of the avenue looks something like this. this is the vanderbilt mansion, the largest vanderbilt mansion. alice vanderbilt lived there. that's right across from the park. this is saks 1923, when it went up. here's another shot of the alice vanderbilt mansion. and this is what replaced it. bergdorf goodman. edmond goodman, a garment worker from rochester, new york who founded a little tailor shop with a guy named bergdorf who got out of the business because he was drinking too much, goodman took it over and he moved uptown.

they told him don't go there. tailoring has never gone this far uptown. you're close to astor and vanderbilt country up on central park east. but he leases the property and eventually buys it and controls that whole property there. and he and his wife lived in a penthouse on the top floor of the store. now, by new york law, custodians weren't permitted to live in a city's industrial building. it's an industrial building, because women made dresses on the sixth floor which were sold in the building. but jimmy walker is a friend of edwin goodman, and walker gets the goodmans listed in the city books as custodians. and i tell you, they had to be the richest janitors in the history of the world. it pays to know people. this is the regal stretch of fifth avenue as it's transformed in the '20s. and these two women that i'm going to be talking about had a

lot to do with it. they formed the newest new york business. by 1935 it's the eighth largest business in the country called the beauty business. cosmetics mostly. and it's founded by elizabeth arden, the daughter of a struggling canadian farmer, came to new york on her own. it's also founded by helena rubenstein who was born in a ghetto. her father was a kerosene dealer. they built their shops close together on fifth avenue. and they were venomous rivals. they had their shops within two blocks of each other for 40 years and never spoke to each other. and rubenstein called arden the other one. and complained that she dyed her hair. well, look at that. and before they arrived in new york, you know, only actresses and fast-living young working girls wore makeup. but by the mid-'20s, powder and

paint as it was called had become badges of independence. they not only put it on in the powder room but they put it on in public. that was a sign of real audacity. the beauty business becomes one of the largest industries in the country. american women were spending more on beauty products in 1927, mostly women's beauty products, than all of america was spending on electric power, okay? and lots of opportunities for entrepreneurship, too. if you were an average woman working in the city in 1927, you made $17 a day. that's not a lot. translated to bs $170 -- excuse me, $117 a week today. if you were an experienced graduate of one of these beauty culture schools, you could, on your own, support not handsomely, but support a family of four. and there were lots of

opportunities. they were plentiful. lots of opportunities for entrepreneurship. so, yeah, actually, one of the most enjoyable things about writing this book was getting to know these and other independent-minded women, among them successful pioneers in the dress business. like hattie carnegie who changed her name to carnegie because she saw the steel magnate coming over, an immigrant like herself, and making it. also dealing with tough, gritty jewish and italian-american women in the garment industries, and dealing with great women writers, like zelda fitzgerald and edna ferber and dorothy parker and lillian helmand. and my personal favorite, bright and beautiful lois long of the "new yorker." her columns on new york fashion industry on and off the avenue. and new york's boiling nightclub life. she wrote a column called "lipstick." they really, more than any other columns, helped to launch the

"new yorker" as america's most sophisticated, first really sophisticated cosmopolitan magazine. i recently prepared for internet publication a little feature on the striving women of new york, which i have up here. and you don't have to pay for it. okay? i have to say here, though, just to pause, that while i appreciated the wonderful things the reviewer of "the new york times" wrote about my book, i was really shocked by her comment, that i quote, with few notable exceptions bike nightclub owner tex guinen and elizabeth arden, the women appear in miller's book as pliant showgirls and prostitutes. none of my characters are pliant showgirls. and there isn't a single prostitute in the book. one wonders. anyway, while this is going on, while arden and goodman and these people are transforming

fifth avenue, i don't have a slide on this, but ann vanderbilt and ann morgan, who's the daughter of j.p. morgan, move over from this area of town, fifth avenue, and they move all the way across town to sutton place. and they take a decrepit neighborhood and gentrify it, make it a community of women dedicated to philanthropy and civic causes. and then right down the way from there, fred french, you saw his skyscraper a little earlier, he builds a community -- affordable community, i should say, for in-town living. it was right around eaton place. it's still there. it's still there. as an overlooked model of affordable in-town living. these are the skyscrapers of the area. it's a park life area. it used to have a golf course, and a golf professional and all that sort of stuff. fred french's papers are here at the new york public library, and

they're very good. so this whole area then, the grand central area, fifth avenue, sutton place, all along the shore of the east river, from the queensboro bridge, all the way down past 42nd street, is all transformed at the same time. that's a shot more representative of the park-like atmosphere they tried to create there. well, about this time, walter chrysler comes to town. now, we know a lot about the chrysler building. but one of the editors at simon and shuster said, there was a walter chrysler? yeah, there was a walter chrysler. like one of my students asked me where i was going, and i said normandy. and he said why? i said d-day. he said the rock group? i said no. that's not a joke. chrysler is one of the strivers. he's born on a kansas prairie.

he's a son of a railroad mechanic. he becomes a railroad mechanic. then he gets in the auto business, takes over buick, and then forms his own company, the chrysler corporation and wants to establish its headquarters in new york. when he established his headquarters in new york, he wants to create at the capping moment, he wants to create the tallest building in the world. this is four years after introducing his first car. it was called the chrysler 6. the only thing is, at the time he's throwing up this building at the beginning of 1927, '28, others have the same idea. there's a building going on downtown at 40 wall street. that was the name of the site. and the owners there had the same aim in mind. so this instigates what i call a sky race, what the papers call the sky race. lavishly publicized competition

to see who's going to build the first building taller than the eiffel tower, tallest building in the world. now, everyone thought that as both buildings were nearing completion, everyone figured that 40 wall had won the day over the chrysler building. but chrysler ordered construction inside the building in secret of a thing called a vertex. now, that's that steel needle on the top there. it's about 185 feet high. and it's built inside the tower. and then one october morning in 1929, they raised it up. hardly anybody noticed it. it wasn't even covered in the papers. chrysler makes an announcement that, gotcha! when they threw it up, the architect then, allen, stood four blocks away and watched it and he said -- he thought it would fall down and create all kinds of casualties and he would be arrested.

when it's raised it's 77 stories high, at 1,046 feet tall, it's the highest structure ever built but only of course for 11 months when it was topped by the empire state building. it's interesting. william van allen, nobody's heard of the guy. i came across this great quote from cecil beton, the british designer. he said it's perhaps inconsistent that new yorkers who have such a love of celebrities don't know the names of their most brilliant architects. well, the chrysler building, it was called hot jazz in stone and steel. i think is a near perfect representation of mid-manhattan style and speed and romantic excess. this fits louis mumphry's idea that buildings build their biographies in the buildings they create. some buildings in turn are

biographical. they represent the ideas and aspirations of their builders. mon i cello was a classic example of that. allen used this lustrous material for the trim. a lot of you have been inside and seen that terrific ceiling mural by edward trumble right across the street from the great ceiling mural in grand central station. and on that ceiling mural are images, rare for the time, of the actual construction workers. the guys, you know, who sweated this thing out, and risked their lives laboring on the building. i think it's new york's commanding symbol, this trumble mural, to the workers who built the art deco skyscrapers. if you go diagonally across the street from the chrysler building, you're at the channon building. and this is how this whole area is beginning to emerge by 1930. and there is the channon building. it's 56 stories high. it was built just before the chrysler building and it was the tallest building on 42nd street.

now, who isser irwin channon. in 1919, he just got out of the army. he's broke. he's jobless. he's a son of immigrants from ukraine. he builds two small cottages in bensonhurst. they make a little money. he and his brother move into town, build a couple of theaters, the hotel lincoln. it's not called that anymore, but it's still here. ten years after 1919, as a very young man under 40, he's a multimillionaire builder. a master, really, of the midtown skyline. he's being touted with fred french as one of new york's hundred wonder men. the lobby of this building is terrific. it's dedicated to the theme of new york as city of opportunity, with his own life, he designed it, he's a self-made architect, his own life as an example of this as an illustrative example of this city of opportunity. he loved the theater. he built theaters.

he loved the theater. he had -- he wanted this building to be part of the city as theater. so he puts up 200 floodlights. and he installs them in one of the building's dramatic setbacks. they brilliantly illuminated the tower at night. you don't see them here. from new jersey, it looked like an island at night, floating in the sky. so -- and there's channon himself. i was giving a lecture at the new york historical society and his daughter was in the audience. it was interesting. and his granddaughter. by 1930, they're calling 42nd street the valley of the giants. and it's in commodore vanderbilt's day in the 1860s, it was a street of small factories, smelly stockyards, and by 1930, the only thing that's manufactured there, as

the "new yorker" put it were spectacular quantities of tension. this is patterson's daily news building, of course, the chrysler building, channon building, lincoln building, and so on. it's important to mention here that capitalism is driving this, but these free-standing towers are not pure products of unrestrained capitalism. are ayn rand. they're built to the specifications of zoning laws, designed to bring sunlight onto the city streets and prevent overcrowding of the land through these setbacks, as you know. and so working within these restraints created by the zoning laws, raymond hood, who designed patterson's daily news building, and other style setters, create -- i don't know what you call it, but it's a distinctly, it's not prairie

architecture, it doesn't have a name like that associated with frank lloyd wright, for example. it's a distinctly new york style architecture that's a style born of necessity. we didn't want to do it. we had to do it and we did it, it was done well. and there's hood himself, one of the great style setters in new york city. he lived up in rhode island, and commuted into the city. there you see the dramatic setbacks in the fred french building, which is, of course, on the corner of 45th. i mentioned fifth but it's on the corner of 45th and fifth avenue. a couple friends of mine worked in that building, but i never spent too much time in it. but i came across a novel called "underworld." these two characters go into the gleaming lobby and they turn to each other, a woman and her daughter, and say who on earth

was fred french? well, there's a story there. fred french was a real estate visionary, and salesman extraordinaire. what he sold, and sold it with fervor, like a revivalist preacher, was stock, not for big-time billionaires and millionaires, but stock for you and i. and he turned this stock company into a profitable real estate company as well. and sold that stock with tremendous fervor. he starts out, he's a lot like channon. these guys come out of nowhere he starts out peddling real estate years before out of a coal cellar in the bronx, where he lived with his mom. but by 1927, ten years later, he's worth $10 million. and his skyscraper, like channon's, is autobiographical. if you take the binoculars out -- my book has got a cool thing in it.

it's got a map of new york, and you press on the button, and you get to the site of the fred french building, there's a picture of fred french and a description of the building. if you go to my website, you can move that, it's interactive on the website, to your ipad and you can walk around new york and get 35 architectural spots. you know, just popping up on you. and it's free, too, okay? if you look on that slender slab, called slab construction, if you look there closely at the top, the commanding symbol is the rising sun, of course. that symbolizes renewal. that's what fred french is all about. that's the commanding theme of his life. this guy never stopped believing in himself, even when he failed. and he failed tremendously during the great depression. so many of these characters went under with the stock market crash. he died in 1936, age 53, has a

net worth of less than $10,000. i think -- and that's french. to me, some of these buildings are a little too tall. i like the building right down the street here. hood's radiator building which is now a hotel. and it's -- you'll recognize it from maybe a georgia o'keefe painting of it. this is not it. it's only 21 stories tall. it's black brick. it's right here on west 40th street built in 1924. hood's first new york skyscraper. i like it because it's built to human scale. it's open to the sun. it's open to the air. it's got a nice park. bryant park across the street. and it's across the street from a neoclassical library. and there it is at night.

new york was a gigantic construction site in the 1920s. the din of these rivet guns caused a stir. the city started to get involved in trying to control it. but like the building of a medieval cathedral, building a new york skyscraper was really a thrilling public spectacle. it's a technological show that takes place right out in the open, right in the heart of town. like in france with the cathedral. some spectators would arrive at the scene with binoculars and they would try to watch these little ant-like men up there where the birds don't fly up on the girders, sky boys they called them in the '20s, and they were heroes in a lot of the newspapers. manhattan in the '20s, it's always been this, a construction site, but spectacularly active construction site. it's street theater, this sort of thing.

you know, when you see guys doing this sort of stuff, these are the sky boys. yeah. and probably the most fascinating spectacle for people to watch, aloft, the spectacle, were these guys worked, by the way, notice without hard hats. or without a safety harness. the riveting gangs. this is one of the guys there. there's four guys in a riveting gang. there's a heater, a catcher, a bucker up and a gun. here's how it works. these guys would have charcoal heaters like you have in your backyard, and they heat the rivets in there. the guy would go in with these -- until they got a real cherry red color. in this portable oven. then a guy would go in with long tongs and flick the rivets to a catcher. and that's a catcher. okay? and he would catch it in his glove as it were. which is nothing but an old bucket, okay?

and then there is -- if the catcher misses it, by the way, it's a blazing rivet, it either hits him and scars him or falls below, this malevolent missile capable of driving a steaming hole in someone's catcher then e rivet between two beams, in the holes between two beams. the bucker up holds it in place, while the gun guy, with a pneumatic hammer, puts a lot of pressure on it, on the stem of the rivet and he holds it there. his whole body's shaking until the rivet's smashed kind of like into a mushroom-like cap, flush right against the steel. and the entire operation putting one of these rivets in takes less than a minute. it's very dangerous work. ironworkers suffered one violent death on average for every 33 hours on the job. one guy told me, we don't die, we are killed. and mohawk indians from a reservation near montreal did a

lot of this work on the channon building and chrysler building. they lived over in brooklyn. and they embraced the danger. it enhanced the men's self-esteem in a culture where women are the main decision makers. mohawk wives are still forbidden to touch their husband's or their sons' work belts and tools, which are symbols of sexual potency, especially this bolt opinion that fits into the belt directly over the crotch. there was a legend floating around new york and it's kind of racial that they did this work because they're genetically coded to do it. blik blacks can jump higher, indians aren't afraid of heights, that stupid stuff. and the fearlessness came naturally to them. but when you talk to these guys, it was all a learned trade. they came about it after years of experiences and lots of falls. the work, though, did give them a sense of ownership. that's what i wanted to get in here. i just didn't want to deal with

millionaires in this book, i deal with the dock workers, the stevedores, the roughest job in new york in many ways. and guys like this. and the women in the garment factories. and this work gave these guys at least a sense of ownership. as one said to me, we're part of this town of man-made mountains. we're mountain builders. so some of them lived across town in hell's kitchen. and where an area of disspiriting poverty -- you know, down on the east side, poverty tended to be, lower east side, especially with the jews, poverty tended to be a one generation experience. hell's kitchen was like a catch basin for people who never made it. irish and german predominantly. you rarely got out of hell's kitchen. one of the only ways you got out -- two ways, sports and crime. and i'm not going to talk at length about this, but this is big bill dwyer who runs one of the biggest bootlegging

syndicates in new york. i never heard of big bill dwyer before. i heard of rothstein, lucciano, who wasn't big until the '30s. dwyer was a former chelsea longshoreman who formed a syndicate with this fellow here, nasty man, frank costello, later named the leader of the mafia. this is before then when he hooked up with dwyer. he's an immigrant. and this other fella, madden, an irishman whose family had emigrated to the slums of the midland slums of england. prohibition gave these small town hoods the opportunity to become -- to create, i should say, a million-dollar industry with its own fleet of and they had it, ocean-going vessels. they had an arsenal of lawyers. they even had an airplane. they arrested the guy, the first prohibition pilot. he would watch out for the coast guard. dwyer, said we won't worry about

the coast guard anymore, we'll buy them off right down to washington. down there he would go with gifts of money and women and bought off the coast guard. so they could bring their booty right into the harbor. later they brought it in in coast guard boats. and guess who would unload it. new york police, in full uniform. dwyer also thanks to costello, if they unloaded it on montauk point, they paid off all of long island's police force, and just to be sure they had five sicilians with machine guns in the car. when they got to the new york border, they transferred the booze to larger trucks. the trucks, onto the running boards, they had running boards then, the trucks would pile the new york cops and they would take it to the factories where they'd cut the booze. okay? so one quart of vodka would be turned into five quarts of watered-down vodka.

they were caught occasionally. there were federal agents -- madden had a brewerery a block long and a block wide right in the middle of hell's kitchen, okay? and they could never nail him. because as soon as -- it was a fortress-like structure and when the new york cops -- the new york cops would patrol the brewery, the federal prohibition agents would come into town and the cops would arrest them for loitering or things like that. give them speeding tickets. occasionally when they broke through, this is where they slammed through the gates of the fortress-like structure, madden would open a switch and all the -- all of madden number one, this creamy lager, would go into the new york sewer system. he's protected by jimmy hines or he couldn't have pulled off something like this. an occasional raid, but that's about it. and the outlets that madden controlled, one of the biggest ones was controlled by a woman,

texas guyman, a real former texas born movie star, seven silent films. she said we never changed the scripts, we only changed the horses, one after the other. her club was in midtown. and madden owned part of it. he would ride around in his long duesenberg, stop at the club, pick up part of his profits. she ran the club. she was pretty shrewd. she didn't drink herself. she was a devout catholic. she invested her money wisely. and she helped give the lie to the idea that all american women supported prohibition. and i think that did as much to bring down prohibition as just about anybody in the country. there she is in a drawing at her club. where jimmy walker was, of course. a devotee. now, he would ride around in his big duesenberg with his friend

george raft. george raft played all those gangster films in the '30s. they were all modeled on tony. okay? and to move into a city like this -- i think it needs two things. density, diversity, yes, but density and diversity can lead to congestion. so you need movement. and while all this is going on, and this was my problem with what was going on in -- you know, the debate in the last election, about what's going to happen to the east side of midtown. do you skyscraper it. people are saying, there's not enough public transportation to build skyscrapers 110 stories high. and there isn't. but while this skyscraper boom was done -- was under way, they did it right. was under way, they did it right. they were building the sixth avenue subway. they were building the west side highway. most emphatically, they were building the holland tunnel and george washington bridge. here's the guy who built the holland tunnel.

clifford holland. he's the chief engineer. he died of stress during the construction. it's named after him. there's a little bust of him behind a toll stand on the new york side. catch it sometime. the tunnel was begun in 1919, because the harbor froze in 1919. rarely froze. you couldn't get goods into new york. schools closed down. lights were out on broadway. no coal was brought in. riots were in the city. so they build the tunnel. it's completed in 1927. two months after ground was broken on the gw bridge, it's the first vehicular tunnel under the hudson, and for the first time it's a -- well, it's also the longest vehicular tunnel in the world. it's still longer than the lincoln tunnel. and digging it wasn't the challenge. okay? these are two guys, when the two sides met they started digging out of new jersey and started digging out of new york. they had dug railroad tunnels under the river before. it was ventilating this thing that was a problem. but cleaning out the poisonous exhaust fumes of cars and

trucks, nobody had ever had a problem like that before. they built a tunnel in pittsburgh, threw cars in there for three weeks and a couple of people died of carbon monoxide poisoning. what does clifford do? holland does this. he creates four immense wind factories. here they are. they still stand. industrial architecture. two at each end of the tunnel, one in the river, one on land. they capture the wind, like venetian blinds. they capture the wind and they have 80 or 90 gigantic fans inside and shoot it into the tunnel. not straight through the tunnel. because if you had a fire it would go like a cyclone through the tunnel. but pull it in gradually, at hubcap level, and the air comes in at your hubcap level, and the bad air is sucked out of the roof of the tunnel. so the air inside the holland tunnel and every tunnel in the world that handles cars is built like this. is changed every 90 seconds.

without this groundbreaking ventilation system, the tunnel would be a poisonous gas chamber. and engineers played such a big part in the building of this city. by the way, they let pedestrians in here first. people would go out to the sign of new york, new jersey, they would stop there and shake hands with manhattan people. how you doing, mack. okay. this is one of my heroes, swiss born. he designed almost every modern bridge in new york city. and new york city hasn't built another bridge since his last bridge. the verrazano. the most daring feat about this bridge, and here it is in construction, is it's really precariously thin deck. very slender. not many people thought it would hold the kind of traffic it had to hold. probably its most pleasing aesthetic feature to allow industrial archaeologists is

this crisscrossing bracing. now, he wanted to cover that over. he thought that the steel should be sheathed in concrete and decorated. but the port authority that subsidized it didn't have the money to do it. it was 1932. so later, he kind of got this accidental artwork he created. all of his later bridges are unsheathed like this. the french architect called it the most beautiful bridge in the world. and now, this bridge increases congestion, but also creates suburbs on bergen county. a lot of the cars poured into new york, crossed the tunnel and down the new west side highway into the hell's kitchen area before they cut a left and went into manhattan. now, at this point, death avenue, as it was called. if you've ever read the fortunate pilgrim, great novel,

about growing up in hell's kitchen. puzzo created the godfather. he has a character in there who rides a horse, like this kid here. and they're usually kids. cowboys, they called them. broadway cowboys. he would carry a lantern or a flag to warn pedestrians that a train was coming down there. because in a 50-year period, over 1,000 people were killed on 10th and 11th avenue which were collectively called death avenue. so jimmy walker pressed hard for the elevation of these tracks, so you can move cars, but most importantly, save lives. and they forced the new york central railroad, which really controlled midtown manhattan at that time, they forced it to elevate their freight line, and take some of the freight right through buildings. of course, that's done in 1934. then it becomes obsolete. and we walk on it today. the highline, the new york highline. and just near there, and there

it is, the construction effort when it's completed, okay? the west side improvement plan. not an improvement if you live under it. hell's kitchen usually got the worst of this sort of stuff. i wanted to show you this. this is the -- what happens when you have these transformations taking place, just briefly, new new york starts to deindustrialize. the biggest industry by far, it doesn't have steel mills and stockyards like chicago, is, of course, garment making. but the fashion industry, high, expensive women's dresses continue to be made in manhattan, close to where buyers come, close to the big magazines, close to specialized stores, where you can -- you're not handling a mass produced product. so that part of the industry

still remains on fashion avenue. but the making of the dresses occurs where i live, in easton, pennsylvania, polices like wilkes-barre, places like that. now, this is -- this -- i should also say this. i should also say this. another industry that stays in new york, and for the same reason -- i wasn't going to do this -- is publishing. this is horace liveright. he was one of the pioneer publishers in midtown in the 1920s. he and a whole group of mostly jewish publishers move into the city. richard simon, matt schuster, and liveright himself, who was a stockbroker from philadelphia. and they're challenging the old boston-based anglosaxon elite, they wanted to have skywriters and things like that.

sherwood anderson said i loved it. they published my book and there it was on the roof of the subway, the poster for the book. liveright was a gambler. he gambled on hemingway when he was nothing, he gambled on faulkner, on great playrights. here he is in his new office on west 48th street just off sixth avenue, right in the heart of the speakeasy district. he drank prodigiously. on some days there were probably more bootlegers in the office than writers. he's a real publisher of principles. he fought sense censorship in new york. his lawyer was the representative on the state floor before, who he was mayor, pushed hard against censorship was none other than jimmy walker. he won the day with one simple line, no woman has ever been ruined by a book. [ laughter ] livewright is a producer also of dracula, and plays like that.

he did a couple of the american tragedy and things like that. he's drawn to broadway, as a lot of people were. broadway itself finally the last district we're dealing with, broadway itself is transformed. this, of course, is the "times" building and that begins it all. it was built in 1934 on what was longachor square. a subway station is built right under it. that's why he wanted to build it there. here it is, lit up at night. and this is actually 1907 when the first ball was dropped from times square. there's supposed to be a quarter of a million people according to the newspaper, but it sure as hell doesn't look like that on the picture. there had always been the great white lights. that was broadway south of 42nd street. in the '20s, the light show is technicolor. you had multi-colored advertising lights. they moved, they whirled and they spun and bottles of beer

appeared in the fermament and rivers of peanuts fell out of the sky. a french visitor said it is a conspiracy of commerce against the night. and in the '20s, what happens on times square, and on broadway, is this. the movies take over. and they push the legitimate theaters off broadway where they still are today, on the side streets. you can only fill a theater with 1,100 people. in some of these theaters, you can pack 5,000 people and show five shows a day and have it open all night. so they're driving these people right out of business. now, new york's not making a lot of movies. they used to make them up in queens. but most of the big movies are made out in hollywood. but the big premieres are in new york. zucker said, if broadway approves, the rest of the country will approve. the most spectacular of these theaters is, this is the only good shot we could get of it. we went to a lot of archives to look at this. this is the roxie. this is opening night.

it's on west 50th street. he called it roxie, he was a self-promoter, the cathedral of the motion picture. they used to joke a lot about it, the papers did. it was enormous. one critic called it the largest theater since the fall of rome. it's five stories high. it has 5,000, 6,000 seats. there's a "new yorker" cartoon with a kid standing in the middle of this rotunda holding his mom's hand, about 5 years old, and he looks up at his mom and says, mom, does god live here? a lot of critics poke fun at the over the top decor. but roxie wasn't out to please the critics. roxie is after the common crowd. for $1.50 a brooklyn steamfitter and his wife could take a seat anywhere. the new thing. anywhere. no reserved seats. and enjoy a four-hour show. and get treated like rajas by these guys, a platoon of

well-drilled roxie ushers. he used to be a drill sergeant, and these kids lived right in the building and trained by him. roxie's story, again, is a kind of a rags-to-riches story. here he is. simple looking guy. son of an immigrant shoemaker from germany. lives in a lumber town in minneapolis, in minnesota. he arrived in new york in 1912, and he gets a job on the road selling magazines up in the pennsylvania coal region, where my family was born. and there he runs into a girl that he really likes behind the bar. and he loves hotdogs. they serve good hotdogs in this bar. he liked the girl better. so he stayed. now, her father didn't trust him. so he said, if you want to marry my daughter, you've got to stay here for a year in town and work as my bartender under my supervision. i'll give you the cold eye and see if you're worthy of her. he stuck it out. he said, you've got a skating rink back there. because they're not selling many

originally hoped it was going to be a diner. let's turn it into a movie theater. he was fascinated with what he called flickers. one-reel movies. he walked in the snow, from the little town he was in, forest hill, and he walks to scranton, pennsylvania, rail town, picks up one-reelers and shows them in the back there. puts the white sheet down, classic thing, rolls the projector. and makes the introduction, sells the tickets, hires a woman from the church choir to come in and sing, and play a piano. he gets seats from, like the kind of seats you're sitting on, from the funeral parlor across the street. so when there was a wake, there was no movie. all kinds of crazy stuff. during the pasadena rose festival, he has a picture of the rose parade. this is so -- he tied sponges together and dips them in the rose water, and he hangs them on two electric fans and called it

smellavision. he's a wonderful character. he comes to new york, and, you know, they have the big theaters in new york but they can't produce enough movies to -- good movies to fill the theater. these capacious theaters every night. so what do you do? you create a thing called the prologue, which lasts four hours. and that precedes the film. and to roxie it was more important. he takes over the biggest theater in new york, capital theater, brings in a 100-piece symphonic orchestra. ballet company. his own. his own. a vaudeville act. clog dancers, elephantsen lions, and the film. and before sound film is invented, in '27, you can't fill the place up. i think marcus lowe, one of the founders of the movie said, he pointed out what roxie was all about. he said we sell tickets to theaters, not to movies. what roxie does then, he

starts -- he goes into radio. and he starts broadcasting these prologues with occasional commentary. people like the commentary. he puts together a variety show. made it the stars of the prologue. 1927, he moved to nbc. sarnoff's station. he's the biggest radio man in the country and the biggest radio man in the country. sarnoff starts in the communication industry, he worked for the marconi company. and that's marconi right there. marconi would come to new york, he had a lot of girlfriends in new york, and sarnoff would deliver flowers and candy to them, and got to know them well. when the marconi company creates a spin-off called rca, which turned the company from ship-to-shore communications, and to entertainment for the millions.

sarnoff said let's do this, how about creating a thing called an entertainment box. and out of it will come news and sports and all of that. and we'll put it in the living room. they thought you're crazy. five years later they're doing it. in the mid-'20s, he moves rca's headquarters from downtown, where the biggest radio industry in the world was created, up to broadway. why go up to broadway? that's where the entertainment is. that's where bing crosby is. that's where jack benny is. his life-long rival, and they were truly life-long rivals, sarnoff's, was bill paley. paley is the son of very rich cigar making family. the family started rough in the ukraine. by the time they moved from chicago to philadelphia, they had made it. he went to wharton school. his dad basically bought him the station. sarno if, ff hated him for that. and he dated non-jewish girls. these two guys would battle for

supremacy in radio, television, and then color television for the next half century. it's paley who links it permanently to advertising. the only business in the country supported entirely by advertising. somebody wrote him a letter and said i'm getting this great entertainment, great music, who do i pay. pay nobody. paid for by advertising. and paley then hooks up with duke ellington. in 1928, he signs up washington, d.c.'s duke ellington who had been playing for the midtown club right here, club kentucky. and what happened was, up at the cotton club, they had another act. and -- up in harlem. of course, this is all black entertainment, all white audience. his agent, ellington's agent, found out there was an opening right around the christmas season. the band leader had suddenly died.

so he got ellington an audition there. the club, guess what, is owned by madden. the agent is irving mills, one of the great music agents in the country here. and madden wanted ellington. here's how he got him. ellington had a contract to go out on the road for the christmas season. he found out, madden did, that ellington was in philly. so he sent word to a philly boss called boo-boo huff. boo-boo sent out one of his boys and they talked to the guy who was running the show. and they told him, be big or be dead. his name was clarence robinson. robinson was big. so he let ellington go, and the band left for philadelphia that night. left the band for history. now, ellington had just created black and tan fantasy. those recordings are making him big nationally. but this radio exposure puts the

duke's music out to the whole country and changes everything. and people called it hot jazz, but ellington said, i don't write jazz. i write negro folk music. that's how he saw it, the music of my people. two years later, this is ellington's band, he links up with lawrence zeigfeld. zeigfeld was the only one who had the guts to hire a black entertainer to go on stage with white women. okay? show girls. in a movie called "showgirl." and the big theater companies in new york city, shubert especially, write nazi-like propaganda about this and tried to shut down zeigfeld. here he is from chicago, started out as a carnival impresario.

his dad did a lot of classical music. one act was called the dancing ducks of denmark. and the cops came in and closed it down because the reason the ducks were dancing is they were -- the stage had heated gas jets underneath it. so the society for the prevention of cruelty to animals wasn't happy with this. he gets his start as you know in new york with the follies. he creates the follies. a new york sensation. even intellectuals would attend. costumes, production reviews they were called designed to, in his words, glorify the american girl. here's the thing, in '27, this master of light entertainment, stuns the country, stuns the critics by producing "showboat" an instant theater classic. several critics have pointed out broadway theater was before, b.c., before "showboat" and after "showboat." it's set in a 19th century mississippi riverboat.

play deals very sensitively with the issue of mysogination. there's a mixed black and white cast and the songs grow directly like they do later in oklahoma, out of a plot and the dialogue. it's staged by jerome kearn, and revolutionizes the movies. it was called the best musical ever written. it might still be. jules bledsoe played joe in the movie, does that stirring rendition of "old man river," brought audiences to their feet. they wanted paul robson, but he had other engagements and he would later play in the production. and that year, we conclude here, that year, zeigfeld mounts six blockbuster broadway shows. that's a feat never been he has the backing of randolph hearst. hearst gives him the money to open his own theater on sixth avenue which is later torn down. i think it was zeigfeld, not f.

scott fitzgerald who -- fitzgerald spent more time out of new york than in new york. in the '20s. it's he who represents and embodies the jazz age of new york. it's excess, it's energy, it's dissipation, a lot of dissipation. serial adultery. it's daring. it's a fantastic run of success. he's a fascinating but not an all together appealing character. he's a man of 1,000 contradictions. he hired more and better comedians than anybody in the world but nobody ever saw him laugh. no one ever -- you know, he never smiled. he had a tremendous personal magnetism yet his favorite means of communication was the telegram. he sent 100 telegrams a day, some to staffers directly across the hall from him, 15 yards away. as one of his friends said, if this man dies, sell western union short. and they entertained, he and his

wife did, billy burke, the actress. they entertained on the big estate called berkeley crest up on the hudson. they entertained like ancient romans. they had a menagerie of animals, an elephant for their little kid, almost killed the maid one day, they had twin bears. it was a crazy place. he's a gambler. he's like zeigfeld. he's a gambler at the baccarat tables, at almost everything in life. it's a source of both his success and his ruin. like that old greek story, where your strongest trait is also your greatest weakness. a lot of these guys had that. he would lose $50,000 a night in casinos and far more on these tremendously expensive broadway flops. and when the market crashed in '29, he crashed with it and he never, never recovered. like fred french, he never recovered. once master of his own world, and he really was, he dies in '36 and he has a quarter of a

million dollars of debt and he dies tragically alone. now, the forces that brought zeigfeld down were those that brought the jazz age to what fitzgerald called a spectacular death in october 1929. i think zeigfeld contributed a lot to the extravagance of the age, to its near complete regard for -- disregard, i should say, for inhibitions. but i don't think the '20s were -- in manhattan, at least, this bleary-eyed spree that fitzgerald chronicles in a disillusioned story called "the crackup" a kind of sullen self-autopsy. i don't think any other decade in the life of that city was more alive or more enduringly creative. and it was really, these are shots from respectively the follies and "showboat." in that year, 1927-28, there

were more broadway productions than have ever been produced any one year, any one time. this is the city as it looked at the beginning of the depression. everything looks so promising but then you are facing a depression that's going to grind on until world war ii. will gri until world war ii but what they createdmagnificent. this was the ipepicenter cultur and architectural of the country. at night, the sky scraper looms in the ♪ ♪ smoke and stars and has a soul. thank you, appreciate it. [ applause ] >> okay. now we will do q and a and it kills interest here. >> yeah.

we're going to pass a mic around. if anybody has any questions, i'll be happy to stick around. >> like a lot of new yorkers, we're at the mercy of mass transit. >> hi, thank you very much. that was wonderful. thank you. >> a little louder. speak directly into it because it's really hard to hear. i was wondering how you chose your cast of characters? >> i'm sorry. >> how you chose your cast of characters. >> i didn't choose them. i didn't set out like i didn't write dunn town the characters. i just started to tell the story and the characters -- it's cliche that characters have a life of their own but this it

book did. i couldn't pick them in this process. i didn't know the story of this tre tremendously stock seller. i didn't know much about lois long. to me she was the kwiquinensent jazz woman. she was just terrific. she's right out of vassar. great character. so yeah, they just popped up on me. that's why i said i almost was getting to know them. yes, sir. >> here is the mic. did cladman who was the biggest magazine publisher, what

contributions did he make to new york city itself? >> well, he brought down the level of public taste in a big way. we have the term photo shop now so he'd take the body of another human being and then stick the head of a guy who was accused of beating a wife and there he was. his picture was in the paper. he brought journalism to a new spectacular low with a series of tabloid magazines and tabloid newspapers, i should say that tries to outsell the daily news. but the daily news was the big bear in the room. he was also a health nut so he'd have all of this stuff on his sexual exploits and how much he could lift and how well he could

er for perform. it was a sickening magazine. >> but the penny restaurants that he opened in new york and chicago. what contribution would you say he made to the city and countritious his forming restaurants. >> penny restaurants. >> i don't know much about that story. i really don't. i just know him as the tabloid -- bernarr mcfadden. yeah. >>. >> that's a wonderful question. she asked me, who's financing this whole thing. new york is both rich and poor at the same time. there's very little federal income tax. there's hardly any state tax. the big tax is property tax. here is how the real estate game works.

here is what is subsidizing the construction. that's what the city government banked on too. if i throw up a 15 story building, the most comical thec althing i could do is pull in more rents. if you have more rents, you have more tax payers there and the city gets to double its profits by building double the size of the building so the city profits. did the banks profit, of course because they are loaning money to the city throughout the city. the city is deep in debt. but it knows the banks feel that the city can may off the debt because the real estate market keeps going up and up. the early song, blue skies. it will always be blue skies. no one is predicting an end to this sort of thing. so when the hits, the banks call in their loans, the banks go under but so does the city. by 1932 new york is officially bankrupt. so that's the thing that powers

this. it's powered by an idea. confidence. this building boom is unstoppable. there would be articles occasionally in new york that would say new york is over built. in the next day there would be three articles contesting the whole idea. this city can never be over built. it's a growth driven place. it always has been. yeah. >> thanks a lot. >> okay. >> you talked about the fact that no one expected the depression to come. >> well, some people. there are profits only when it comes. >> my question is among your characters, were there any who were sort of like the sky is falling sort of characters. >> ironically, sarnaff sold all of his stock in 1928, including his rca stock. he wouldn't even explain to his

mother who asked him why did he it. he wasn't getting advice from aotoconn or any one of the big bankers or anybody like that. but he kind of sees it. aotoconn, another big financier, who was a big broad way player who said he was spending beyond his means a publisher. livright had the same philosophy that he had about the city. we will get in great debt and we will create a lot of books on the best-seller list and it will balance out at the end. ironically he had a collection of books called the modern american library. the modern library produced these things in little books that sold for .59 cents. that supported the whole firm.

one day he went to lunch with a young editor and surf said i'd like to buy the modern library. to his amazement, livright said you got it because he wanted to bet on broadway productions and also wanted to get out from under the thumb of his father-in-law who his wife hired to keep an eye on him not only with women but with money. he naugthought he could pay offe of his debts so he sold the modern library and went out and created just with the modern library, random house. by the 30s, random house takes off and gets into trade publ publicati publication. that's all it did in the beginning. that's the same kind of philosophy that's motivating these people. babe ruth, the classic example, that sort of thing. yes. >> i just want to say that

lagwardia is one of the people who foresaw the down fall. >> he's a very interesting character. he plays a big role in my book. he's the antithesis and battler against prohibition. he would really embarrass the prohibitionist. he was in congress at the time as an independent and socialist and republican. he bounced around from party to party. a lot of people thought was untrustworthy for that reason. he would say you want prohibition. he would introduce these magnificent billed to support prohibition and see the cruel irony for the people who were conservatives is that they were also fiscal conservatives and te didn't want to pay to enforce it. he would put these big appropriate -- let's enforce it. $16 million for prohibition and they would be embarrassed into voting against their own prohibition bills. he would go into drugstores and make concoctions in front of

newspaper men and say here is how you make booze. but lagwardia, he did battle corruption but he didn't see it all. even he when he ran against walker in 1930, he got beaten very, very badly. one of the reasons is tamania, as long as there was prosperity, there were so many people dependent upon tamanie, it did an awful lot of good for people in the neighborhoods. i still think one of the biggest mistakes new york has made is when they went away from the local aldermanic system. if somebody throws a rock through your window, who do you call anymore? >> chicago with that system, there's a lot of corruptions, you go down to the local alderman, he takes care of things like that. your car gets inbounded, your kid gets thrown in jail, he can

intervene. there's nobody who can do that. you know what a phone call can do in new york, nothing. okay? i think this was one the problems with the system. tamanie had people there helping the alderman. any time somebody needed help, they were there to help them. people congregated at these club houses and they provided jobs. all they asked for was your vote. so they'd say about walker, yeah. maybe he's pocketing a little bit. as i said he got most of his money not from the treasure but from private friends. it wasn't hit for tack. you give me a money and i'll help you with some bridge construction. it was just them giving him money and they could never prove the reciprocity side of it. this bribe for this project. he got nailed for taking too much money. he should have too. he should have been removed from office for running the city like that. yeah. for his own benefit.

as it were. >> yes. >> yeah. there's a great book by a lady named mary henderson all about the growth of theater district. >> oh, that's a wonderful book. >> it's the best book on the subject. >> i want to know -- could you tell us a little bit about -- i hope that's not too loud about how this incredibly expansive theater district that was so huge during the 20s, if people had no money to go to the theater anymore or to nightclubs or what have you, how the heck did any of them stay open? >> that's a terrific question. what kept it alive is hollywood. people continued to go movies for release during the depression. far more people went to the movies in the 30s -- there were better films of course than the 20s.

so they would -- broadway was used as a testing ground for productions that could be turned into films. an awful lot of the money subsidizing broadway theater came from the west coast. that's what under wrote this. there's also this -- i found with so many people like livright there was some absolutely alluring fascination with theater and owning a play. with going to the rehearsalrehe. meeting the actors. sitting with the audience on the first night. there's this tingle about this sort of thing for people who are interested in live theater. it's a gamble. fortune magazine did a terrific thing -- founded in 1930 -- on the theater business. i highly recommend it to you. it goes through the whole idea of how these places stay alive in the throws of the worst depression that's ever hit the country. that was their driving argument

that it was largely hollywood and largely speculators who had enough money to waste if they would lose it and felt this tremendous almost magnetic draw to the theater world. and she talks about that a little bit in the book as well. >> yeah. >> anyone else. any questions. yes, sir. >> professor. one quick question. your first book, city of the century dealt with chicago post fire, i'm wondering, the similarities seem very easy to draw between new york and chicago of those respective eras. are there any differences, things that made those cities different either in the political realm or anywhere where the two arcs of the sto stories arise and thus fall. >> yeah. i'm doing a presentation in chicago about that and i better start thinking about it with the chicago historian.

we're doing a thing on gang life and politics in 1920s and the two places, capone versus maddon and thing like that. chicago made a couple of mistakes. it was the sky scraper center of the world in the 1890s. it was the best skry scrapers. then they set limits on sky scrapers. this was a little too game do t. the gang life in chicago is portrayed like it seems as. the new york gangsters, like arnold rothstein really mistrusted people like capone because he was too quick with

the gun. even costello, he never carried a gun and maddon rarely carried a gun either. of course they had their own enforcers but it wasn't part of the persona. they were fit more closely into the city. i think what gave new york more stability was tamanie. the political machines in chicago are mercurial. they form and disappear. there's never one consistent machine that can keep order in the city. this creates openings for anarchists and socialists who introduce interesting reforms as well. but it's a stew -- a boiling cauldron i should say. cities have personalities. chicago is more head long. a more reckless than new yorks, i think. i really do. they are different types of

cities. what happens is in the 19th century they are both industrial cities. new york is the biggest industrial city in the country. chicago has big industries like steel mills an stock yards and gigantic clothing factories. new york, it's the small firms in the garment industry that dominate, not the big ones. but when america moves -- see, this is the beginning of -- i do this in the book, this is the beginning of the decentralization, yes, of the city but also the beginning of the deindustrialization of the country and the electronics revolution is coming on. that's radio. that's television. mass communications and things like that. new york had always been in the forefront of that since the 19th century sending packet boats to england. the associated press going out there and picking up the news 60 miles offshore and having fast boats bring it into the city. it had always been a

communication's center with more newspapers than any city in the country. i think what you have is this wonderful siindustry. it still had the greatest port in the hemisphere. the port is very profitable. it has an industrial base but it's also moving very quickly into a new age and pioneering a new kitype of economy and new stitype of lifestyle. one is the large city of corporations and lots of labor strikes. new york in the 20s at least moving toward a different type of economy and different type of lifestyle where consumption becomes more important than production. maybe i'll make it a tale of three cities in l.a. which is a completely autocity.

still trying to figure that out. anybody else? >> i got one there and then up here. >> hello. hi. >> hi. >> hauthank you poufor your tal. i know that people continued to go to the movies and they wanted to be entertained even during the depression, well, during prohibition, they said more alcohol was consumed than the prior years before they began the whole prohibition era. so i thought that kind of connected it. but also, the gangsters didn't put their money into the banks so did they have a heart time of it during the depression. what did they do? >> no, gangsters don't write letters. they don't put money in banks. they don't write their memoirs, they invest in clubs and they

spent enormously and not very wisely but actually one of the hardest parts of the book was to try to tell the story of gang life without writing a graphic novel. do you know what i mean? because so much of crime reporting is an he ctidotal. people say don't go into that. that's quicksand. i find if you do it right, there are recordsful i went down to the new york municipal archives. i asked the director for the luciano papers. he said you're the only person who has asked for them. they are in brooklyn. we will get them for you tomorrow. i came back the next day. you have your little desk and everything. in there i thought they delivered a washer and dryer. they were big boxes. the first thing i pulled out was evidence stuff.

a revolver and i pulled out a lamp with a cord on it that was used to strangle somebody but then i pulled out all of these records. they wired these guys. they wire tap them. they have all of the wire taps. when he was hulled up in a hotel with his mistress, everyday they have his menu. they collected all the receipts from the waiters and his order slips and thing like that. despite the code, the blood thing, nobody is going to squeal. once they put heat on these guys and then you could keep people under custody for months. they took prostitutes and put them down in the woreworth building for months at a time. and then they had consecutive juries where the juries would not be released after trial and the jury would stay in session for six, seven, eight, trialsment you coutrials me. you could really go after these guy like that. so you have court testimony. you have confessions.

you have terrific crime reporters. some of the best reporters city were crime reporters. there was a lot of evidence you could compile about the life of criminals without reading these ghost written autobiographies that supposedly luciano penned himself. i think unless you do -- crime was so interwoven in new york's history and chicago's history and detroit's history that it's impossible to do politics without crime and do it right. i think historians do a big mistake by not judgmentmping int territory and making those connections. it still is that way. g.w. bridge. we can talk about that side of it. yes, sir. >> when was the first sky scraper built in the united

states and where was it built and when? the very first. >> generally, what is a sky scraper. see, that's the thing. -- before buildings were supported by wall wearing -- load bearing walls. okay? so if you go to the beach and you build a sand castle if you're going to go tall you have to build the base out so the walls get so thick you can't go any higher but with a steel frame you just hang the walls from like curtains like a cathedral, you hang them there and jenny was one of the pioneers of that. so that home insurance building which is no longer in existence. it was torn down is probably the first american -- so my mine is the first true american sky scraper.

>> what year was it? >> i don't know. i think was 1880 -- off hand, i think it was 1888. i think that's right. okay? everybody can check that on there. wiki -- yeah. i think that was the year it was built. well. thanks. i appreciate it [ applause ] >> the 2015 cspan student cam video competition is under way. open to middle and high school students to create a five to seven minute documentary on the theme, the three branches and you. showing a an action by the legislative, judicial or execive branch has affected you and your community. there's a cash prize for you totaling $200,000. to find out how to get started go to studentcam.org. >> coming up author elizabeth

hoffman asks the question, is american umpire, or an empire by looking at key turning points in history, ms. hoffman argues that the united states has played the role of umpire since 1776 but also argues that umpires can't win. it's about an hour. >> thank you so much kay. thank you all for being here. i can't tell you how pleased and honored i am to be here addressing the world affairs council an especially because what i hope we're going to discuss tonight is i think one of the most critical questions of our time. >> microphone -- >> which is -- >> you're not going to know it because i didn't turn on the microphone. >> good, you're human. >> well, where is the button here, kay?