City of Dreams (27 page)

He swallowed down his anger because, as he told his son, anger was the enemy of a clear head. Then he took the six-pound sledge from the back of his wagon, lay it over his shoulder, and set out as if he were simply walking to work. He followed the Eleventh Avenue railroad tracks to Forty-sixth Street, then he turned east and went two blocks along the row of tenements, until he came to an alley protected by a gate.

On the other side of the gate, in a little dooryard, half a dozen Irish Niners were playing poker. The pot in the middle of the table was piled high with coins and bills. A whiskey bottle stood next to the pot. It looked as if they had been playing all night.

At the squeak of the gate, Slick McGillicuddy glanced up from his cards, and a six-pound hammer struck him square in the face. Teeth, blood, and Slick himself went flying.

No one knew how many times Dick Riley swung his hammer that morning, but when he was done, all the Irish Niners lay like corpses, which some of them were. Then Dick Riley swept the poker money into his hat as payment for his horses and took a drink from the bottle. He swung the hammer one more time to smash the table . . . and left.

Word of his deed traveled quickly through Hell’s Kitchen. Men spoke of it in awestruck tones. Who would be so brave—or so insane—as to take on a gang, not with a gun or a gang of his own, but with a six-pound hammer, a clumsy weapon when compared to a good ax handle, but capable of the kind of damage that could make myth out of simple mayhem?

The Irish Niners were finished. No self-respecting gang could survive the beating that Dick Riley gave them. And the police didn’t much care, so long as it was only a few gangsters who took the beating. And the other Hell’s Kitchen gangs actually appreciated the favor that Riley had done them, especially since he showed no interest whatsoever in making any trouble whatsoever for anyone else on any side of the law.

People left Dick Riley and his family well alone after that, except to give him his nickname: Six-Pound Dick. As someone said, a man with balls that big surely must have a six-pound dick between ’em.

ii.

The hot morning of July 3 found Six-Pound Dick and Timothy taking the Riley Wrecking wagon north on Ninth Avenue.

The boy was now five foot seven, an inch taller than his father, so it was time for him to spend a summer building his muscle in the family business. For his first day on the job, he wore a T-shirt, new denim overalls so stiff that they chafed between his legs, and a black visored baseball cap like those worn by the New York Giants, his favorite team.

Winter and summer, Six-Pound Dick wore hobnailed boots, twill trousers held up with heavy suspenders, a red union suit, and a black derby.

They were plainly father and son. In the close-set eyes and the quick smile and the cock of the head, the boy resembled the man. And as they went, the man did the fatherly job of explaining all that passed.

They traveled under the El he said, “Because there’s good shade and less traffic.”

And whenever ladies crossed in front of their wagon, the father lifted his derby. “Always tip your hat to a lady,” he told his son. “It’s good manners. And tip your hat when you pass a church. It’s good for the soul. And show respect to every man, until he proves he don’t deserve it.”

At Fifty-ninth Street, the names of the avenues changed. Eighth became Central Park West. Ninth became Columbus. Tenth became Amsterdam. Eleventh became West End. The father explained that real estate men were hoping to give the neighborhood a bit of a shine by changing the names. “It’s a fine idea, but there’s still too many old farms and shanties mixed in with the fancy new places, and changin’ the names won’t keep the stockyards on Sixtieth from stinkin’.”

At Seventy-second, the Riley wagon turned onto Broadway, which followed the path of the old Bloomingdale Road. The city had widened and improved the road just after the Civil War but had only recently gotten around to paving it, so the macadam ended somewhere in the Nineties, where a dust cloud marked the work.

The Rileys had come to tear down a house. They had put in a bid and were hired by the man who had bought the block. Tear down a house, salvage the good parts, and leave the lot ready for construction. Dick Riley had done it dozens of times.

But this house was one the last remnants of old New York. It had been known as Woodward Manor, seat of a famous Tory family. It had later become the Daggett Tavern. And it had ended its life as a flophouse for day laborers.

But there was still something dignified about the old place, thought the boy. Perhaps it was the pillared front porch . . . or the ancient oak that shaded the roof . . . or the carriage drive that still formed a grand semicircle off of Broadway. Or was it the way the house just sat there staring out at a world changing so rapidly around it?

“Washington ate here,” said the father.

“Then how come we’re tearin’ it down?”

“Because New York is growin’. Besides, after the squire fed Washington, he fed the British officers
chasin
’ Washington.” The father pulled the brake and jumped off the wagon. “That makes the tearin’ down easier.”

“How come you don’t like the British, Pa?”

“I have no argument with your dagoes or your darkies, and Jews is hard businessmen, just like the Irish, so we understand each other. But the Brits”—Six-Pound Dick gave a shudder—“they sent my father scurryin’ for America over forty years ago. So you just might say they killed him.”

“But he died with the Irish Sixty-ninth at Fredericksburg.”

“He left Ireland on account of rotten potatoes and rotten British landlords. It’s just good for us that he come here. And now that we give our blood for this country and our sweat for this city, it’s time we got somethin’ back.”

“Yes, sir.”

“So my son’ll work with his head, not his hands.” The father went to the rear of the wagon and pulled out a tool belt and strapped it on. “Just do me one favor. When you read, read about money. Enough with history and novels. George Washington and Will Shakespeare and all them fellers had a fine run when they was alive, but we’re in modern times now. And a boy with a good head can go far, so long as he don’t fill it with silly notions. Besides, Shakespeare was British.”

“Yes, sir.” The boy climbed down.

“Now then”—the father gave him a pinch bar—“good head or not, let it never be said that a son of mine don’t know how to work with his hands. If you can work with your hands, you’ll never go hungry.”

A
S SOON AS
the father removed the padlock and opened the front door of the old house, the boy smelled must, stale beer, and dead animals.

Inside, it was dark and clammy. A center hallway led to French doors at the back. Beyond was a patch of grass, a few fallen-down outbuildings, and a stretch of new row houses on West End, blocking what must once have been a fine view of the Hudson.

“Before the Revolution,” said the father, “this spread covered a hundred acres.”

“In New York?”

“Ain’t nothin’ compared to the Apthorp spread. We took their house down on Ninety-first last year. They owned
two
hundred acres. But that was back when New York had twenty-five thousand folks. Now there’s two and a half million.” The father cocked an eye at his son. “That’s an increase
times what
?”

“A hundred, sir.”

“See that? A fine head for figures you’ve got.”

The boy did not tell his father how easily the math came to him. He liked his father’s praise and did nothing to deflect it.

“Get out your notebook and write it down to take these French doors,” said the father. “I know an old Jew who’s lookin’ for a set, and these are as fine as any I’ve seen.”

In every dusty room, there were things to salvage—doors, moldings, bits of furniture that might bring a price, and things to avoid—rotting food, empty whiskey bottles, clumps of old newspapers that squatters had used for bedding. The boy made notes and followed his father from the hallway through the dining room into a parlor that had become a taproom. They went up the grand staircase, surveyed the second floor, then took a smaller staircase to the attic and heat so strong that the boy could smell the century-old dust baking into the floorboards and rafters.

The father looked around at the four roughed-in rooms. “Servants would have lived up here. Cold in the winter, hot in the summer.”

The boy pointed to the trapdoor and the spring-loaded ladder attached to the ceiling. “What’s up there?”

“What they call a cupola, a little glassed-in turret.” The father pulled down the ladder and dropped the trapdoor. Light flooded the ancient attic. “Let’s have a look.”

As the boy climbed, a startled pigeon exploded from the rafters, flapped around, found a missing pane of glass, and was gone. The boy, as startled as the pigeon, took a breath, then levered himself up into the little space, only to be startled again by the view.

“There it is.” The father popped up behind him. “The city of dreams.”

It lay in a thick haze of July heat, like an army uniformed in redbrick and brownstone, its forces massed below Fifty-ninth Street, but its columns advancing quickly up the avenues of the West Side.

“Men come here from all over world, son, just for a chance. And the city don’t ask where you was born or what you done in the old country. It just says ‘Be smart and work hard and you’ll be rewarded.’”

“We work hard, don’t we, Pa?”

“We do for certain.”

“Is Hell’s Kitchen our reward?”

“It’s a roof over your head and food on your table and a family who loves you in a parish that cares. That’s some reward, if you ask me. So’s a view like this.”

From up here, the streets looked as if they had been drawn with a straight edge, and the land west of Central Park was filling fast with apartments, hotels, row houses. But vegetable patches still grew behind tar paper shanties, and clumps of trees still caught the sunlight, as if to remind New Yorkers of what once had been.

The boy tried to pick out some of the landmarks to the south. The twin steeples of St. Patrick’s rose as clear as the cross of Christ. Other steeples etched the horizon, too. From a distance, New York seemed a much holier place than it was. But the steeples were disappearing behind new buildings like the Savoy Hotel, which towered twelve whole stories above Fifty-ninth Street. And soon, said the father, there would be skyscrapers of forty, fifty, even sixty stories. But the boy found that hard to imagine.

So he turned and looked past the new All Angels Church on West End, out over the stockyards and steaming train yards, out to the river itself, to the hundreds of boats skittering along, their smokestacks belching exhaust that formed what his father called “the great cloud of commerce that rains money like water on the city of New York.”

Then he looked north, past Morningside Heights and the orchards of the old Bloomingdale Insane Asylum, up toward the rising new row houses of Harlem. And somewhere beyond lay the Polo Grounds, home of his beloved Giants.

When he turned east, an owl stared up at him from a hole in the side of the old oak, but the boy barely noticed. His eye went to a train puffing smoke along the Ninth Avenue El, then to an apartment building on Central Park West. At its opening nine years earlier, people had nicknamed it the Dakota, because it stood so far from the city that it might as well have been
in
Dakota. Now a hotel called the Majestic would soon block its view to the south. And another grand structure was rising to the north.

But its easterly view reached out over the green expanse of the park itself. Somewhere beyond lay Fifth Avenue and the fabled row of rich men’s mansions, one after another, side by side, all filigreed and buttressed and gargoyled, like the ancient cathedrals and castles that the boy had read about in his novels.

“Son, in the circle you just drew with your two eyes, a man with a dream has a better chance than in all the principalities of Europe.”

“Yes, sir.”

“But there’s never been a dreamer yet who got anything out of life without hard work. So”—his father snapped at his suspenders—“let’s get to it.”

T
HEY STARTED IN
a servant’s bedroom under one of the dormers.

The father took out a pair of cotton work gloves with leather palms and told the boy to put them on. The gloves were new and stiff and a little big, but the boy liked the way that they came up around his wrists. He thought of Ivanhoe pulling on his gauntlets before a joust.

Then the father took a thick chalk from his tool belt, crouched, and drew an X on half a dozen floorboards.

“What’s that mean, Pa?”

“You put an X on what you want to save. You don’t see floorboards like these too often. Twelve-footers, fir, eight-inch wideboard, never waxed. We’ll sell ’em to Squints O’Day. He’s buildin’ water tanks these days.”

“Water tanks? To go on roofs, you mean?”

“It’s the comin’ business. With buildin’s gettin’ taller, they need tanks to keep up the water pressure above six stories. They pump water up to a tank on the roof, then—”

“We don’t have water pressure, do we, Pa?”

“No, son, we don’t. We don’t even have runnin’ water. We get our water from the spigot in the yard.”

The boy knew that his parents talked about moving to a place with a toilet on every floor, especially now that Eddie had to hobble up and down the stairs on a crutch. But those tenements cost more. So did tenements on the lower floors. And money was tight. Money was always tight.

“Now, then”—the father made a few more X marks, as if to change the subject—“we’ll load up on these and take ’em to Squints.”

“Didn’t you used to work for him?”

“Still do, when the demo jobs get slow. I learned cooperin’ at the age of fifteen. Squints used to call me the best barrel-bottom man in the business. And whenever I do a bit of part-timin’ for him, he’s after me to stay. Tells me now I’m the best
tank
-bottom man in New York, which means I can cut a lot of fitted boards into a neat circle. But I like workin’ for myself. So”—the father took the pinch bar—“let’s work.”