Sublime

Once the avenue had been a place for people; Robert Moses had made it a place for cars. And as the avenue’s roadway became more crowded, its sidewalks began to empty.

And if it was for any sort of a fine handsome woman, but for a little fistful of a woman like Kitty Keary, that’s not four feet high hardly, and not three teeth in her head unless she got new ones!

“Ha! Forget it. Central Park itself isn’t safe, these men of vision, they dream about CPW to Fifth Avenue solid with gracious residences. Meantime the Newspaper of Record goes around in a little pleated skirt shaking pompoms, leaping in the air with an idiot grin if so much as a cement mixer passes by. The only way to live here is not to get attach

There were, in 1914, 50,000 city employees and this meant 50,000 men and women who owed their pay checks—and whose families owed the food and shelter those pay checks bought—not to merit but to the ward boss. Patronage was the coinage of power in New York City.

Reform was in the air when Murphy took control of Tammany, and he put the organization at the head of the parade. As he saw it, reform had too many ramifications to be left to the reformers. Under Murphy, Tammany became the most potent force for effecting economic and social change in New York.