“James John Walker, 97th mayor of New York City”
PARTY POLITICS
https://archives.nyc/blog/2021/2/5/mayor-james-j-walker
https://avenuemagazine.com/jimmy-walker-prohibition-era-mayor-notorious-new-yorker
Jimmy Walker May Have Been NYC’s Most Corrupt Mayor, but Damn Was He Fun
Meet the night mayor / December 02, 2021
“Worst mayor ever” is a phrase that few New Yorkers, over the past eight years, can claim never to have heard. But in the city that practically invented kvetching — or at least elevated it to an art form — any reasonable burgher would allow that a similar complaint could have been heard on the streets at almost any point in the metropolis’s 397-year history. We’ve certainly had some duds, ranging from the merely venal to the outright evil. Fernando Wood, for example, was the pro-slavery mayor who, on the eve of the Civil War, proposed the city should secede from the Union in sympathy with the South. Then there was William O’Dwyer, who resigned in 1950 to become ambassador to Mexico just when the Brooklyn DA started asking questions about contributions his campaign received from organized crime. For sheer panache, however, nobody could hold a candle to one of O’Dwyer’s predecessors in the infamous Tammany Hall machine: New York’s 97th mayor, James John “Jimmy” Walker. A Prohibition-era dandy who stuffed his pockets with bribes while proving to be a remarkably effective civic manager, Walker is one of the most colorful rogues in New York City history. His reputational rehabilitation began almost the moment he was drummed out of town in 1932, hightailing it to Europe with his mistress.
“Walker’s mistress, showgirl Betty Compton, was front page news in 1932”
Walker’s life inspired a 1969 Broadway musical, Jimmy, and in 1957 Bob Hope played him onscreen as a wise-cracking bounder with a heart of gold in Beau James, based on a biography of the same name. “There’s only one reason I’d consider [running for mayor],” Hope says early in the picture, jabbing his thumb at the Manhattan skyline. “I love this cockeyed city more than anything else in the whole wide world.” His estranged wife, used to his infidelities, replies: “Maybe that’s because you haven’t met another city yet.” The script, with its one-to-one ratio of schmaltz and gags, actually wasn’t too far removed from its real-life inspiration, who was prone to saying things like, “I’d rather be a lamppost in New York City than the mayor of Chicago.” Born in 1881 as the son of an Irish immigrant carpenter, Walker’s initial goal was to make it as a Tin Pan Alley songwriter. But his one sentimental hit, “Will You Love Me in December as You Do in May,” was not enough to sustain a career, and he ended up in the New York State Assembly by way of law school. In Albany his mix of populist and progressive policies — he was for social welfare, legalizing boxing, and allowing movies and baseball games on Sundays, and against Prohibition and the Ku Klux Klan — caught the eye of Governor Alfred E. Smith, who backed him for New York City mayor. He won the 1925 election by more than 400,000 votes. Walker’s tenure in City Hall was lurid by any standards: his bribability, womanizing, and patronage of the town’s illegal speakeasies were an open secret, giving rise to another nickname: “the Night Mayor.”
“Mayor Jimmy Walker accompanies actress Colleen Moore
to the October 1928 premiere of her latest film, Lilac Time”
While his wife stayed home and out of sight, the Ziegfeld Follies showgirl Betty Compton served as something of a public mistress. He squired her around town in his $17,000, silver-trimmed black Duesenberg (with an open cab for the chauffeur), which he coyly referred to as “a gift from an admirer.” Such “gifts” were so flagrant, it was hardly surprising that under his administration, the police force became a national punchline for its perceived corruptibility. Walker was also infamous for his frequent vacations and short workdays, which often consisted of just a few hours beginning at 3 p.m. When his political opponent and eventual successor, Fiorello La Guardia, attacked him for raising the mayor’s salary from $25,000 to $40,000, he quipped in response: “Why, that’s cheap. Think what it would cost if I worked full-time!” Which perhaps makes it all the more surprising that Walker was such a superb city manager. He invested in public utilities like waterworks and subway lines; created the departments of sanitation and hospitals, and greatly improved the city’s docks, parks, and playgrounds. Even critics had to begrudgingly admit he got things done. Robert Moses, that other great remaker of New York, said of him: “Jimmy was the extrovert, the spontaneous eccentric, the sidewalk favorite, the beloved clown, the idol of those who seek companionship and mercy above and beyond justice.” By his standards, that was a compliment.
“Betty Compton waited patiently for Walker from the sidelines, watching as his political fortunes collapsed in 1932.”
Voters reelected Walker by a large margin in 1929, but by then the storm clouds had already started to gather. The first domino to fall was the unsolved murder of a notorious mobster, Arnold Rothstein, in 1928, which shook up the underworld and humiliated the police. It didn’t help when investigators found records indicating the late capo had been “lending” money to his honor the mayor. Next came the stock market crash of 1929, causing social unrest that swept through the city like a tidal wave. Cardinal Archbishop Joseph Hayes blamed the economic disaster on the mayor’s lax morality; the Seabury Commission, which investigated civic corruption, put him squarely in their sights; and an ambitious governor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, made removing Walker a centerpiece of his campaign for the White House.
“The dashing fashion plate, pictured here most certainly on his way to yet another vacation”
Then came the murder of a witness who had testified to the commission about police malfeasance, and the mysterious disappearance of a New York Supreme Court justice — two national scandals that heightened the perception of lawlessness in Walker’s New York. Facing pressure from Roosevelt, and questions from investigators about the various payments he received (he called them “beneficences,” not bribes), Walker resigned in September 1932. He and Compton were on a steamship to France less than two months later. While the couple married in Cannes, and adopted two children, it would not be a long union — he ended up being the third of her four husbands. Walker returned alone to the United States before the war, where he ran a record label and hosted a radio show, succumbing to a brain hemorrhage in 1946 at the age of 65. Left alone by investigators, he remained endeared to New York sports fans, and in 1992 was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame. “I have lived and I have loved,” Walker said near the end of his life. “The only difference is, I was a little more public about it than most people.”
“New York MayorJimmy Walker and his nighttime playground, the Central Park Casino”
the NIGHT MAYOR
https://newyorkerstateofmind.com/2018/06/13/let-them-eat-cake/
https://cityandstateny.com/opinion/2024/10/its-long-been-slippery-top-nyc-government
by Robert Polner & Michael Tubridy / October 4, 2024
“…Lacking the substantial personal bank account of at least one of his predecessors – Michael Bloomberg, who briefly convinced the City Council to abolish mayoral term limits – Adams is drawing comparisons most often with two New York mayors from the past: stylish Jimmy Walker of the Roaring Twenties and the mid-20th-century’s William O’Dwyer, both of whom resigned from office with a cloud of scandal over their heads. As City Hall-ologists take odds on whether Adams will sink under the weight of the federal investigation, a key difference between then and now is worth considering: In the old days, Democrats like “Beau James” and “Bill-O” served at the pleasure of the city’s powerful county leaders and were protected so long as they benefited the interests, whether nefarious or legitimate, of the hierarchical Tammany Hall machine. More than the approval of the party bosses, what matters most in our modern political era is raising enough money for political advertising, by hook or perhaps crookedness. This gives candidates who aren’t backed by the political machine a shot at winning an election that didn’t exist for them in the long Tammany era. Walker served the usually corrupt urban bosses of his era. Before becoming mayor during what F. Scott Fitzgerald dubbed the “Jazz Age,” he was a state Senate leader who championed a bill allowing baseball games to be played on Sundays, the traditional worker’s holiday. His 1925 mayoral bid was backed by the popular governor, Al Smith, who supported his protegé for mayor.
“Walker presides over the first shot in the city’s annual marble tournament in 1928”
Though an icon for fellow Irish Americans, Walker was the “Night Mayor,” as the “boys” in the press called him. Holding little fealty to the so-called Protestant work ethic, he’d change into different bespoke suits multiple times a day. Though married, he painted the town red with a Broadway chorus-girl mistress and furnished a handsome casino-club in Central Park to businessmen and cronies seeking government favors. Although Walker was known for having written the lyrics to a good old-fashioned ditty, “Will You Love Me in December As You Do in May?”, by the time of the Great Depression, the answer within Tammany Hall was a resounding “No,” and his quick humor, fine neckties and mesmerizing charisma lost their luster. Judge Samuel Seabury, a sober-sided reformer, probed his administration and magistrate’s courts, exposing gangster influence and insider graft that was extraordinarily brazen and pervasive. Having ignored Smith’s advice not to seek a second term, Walker landed in front of an administrative tribunal, with then-Gov. Franklin Roosevelt, a presidential candidate soon to be elected, presiding.
Bringing stacks of bank books, letters of credit and other documents to the hearings, Seabury demonstrated that a joint stock account into which Walker had personally invested not even a penny of his own money had paid him $246,692. The estimated take overall was $1 million in 1932 dollars. A Tammany loyalist since he was first elected to the state legislature in 1909, Walker no longer had the man he called “the brains of Tammany Hall,” Charlie Murphy, to intervene for him with Roosevelt, as Murphy died in 1924. Instead, a fumbling and inscrutable organization man, John Curry, sat at the party’s helm when Walker found himself in some very hot water. Although no criminal wrongdoing was established through the tribunal, Seabury submitted a removal charge to Roosevelt on the grounds that Walker was simply unfit for office. Visibly shaken, “Beau James” pressed an injunction against Roosevelt, only to give in, removing himself to Europe.
“Mayor Walker’s affair with musical comedy and film actress Betty Compton further fueled his downfall. Walker and Compton married in France in 1933; they divorced in 1940. Walker died in New York City in 1946. Former Mayor Walker and Betty Compton on the deck of SS Normandie, June 17, 1936. NYC Municipal Archives”
FDR proceeded with his drive for the White House, with Tammany’s important backing. A similar fate – resignation – would come to befall O’Dwyer, New York’s 100th mayor, after he assailed a mushrooming investigation by Brooklyn District Attorney Miles McDonald into police corruption, which uncovered $1 million a year in cash bribes from a major-league bookie to hundreds of beat cops and high-ranking supervisors. But O’Dwyer, elected in 1945 and reelected in 1949, was no Walker. A former Brooklyn DA who busted “Murder Incorporated” – a low-rent killing-for-hire operation for the “Combination,” or mob – he showed public resolve in presiding over a wartime-depleted metropolis. Sponsored by a weakened Tammany Hall, he initiated an inoculation of all city residents after a case of smallpox showed up at the Port Authority. He built temporary homes for thousands of returning veterans and their families and sponsored an unpopular doubling of the nickel subway fare in order to give subway and bus workers a raise.
But questions about O’Dwyer’s probity had loomed ever since his time as district attorney. In 1941, his star witness against the mob, Abe Reles, was found dead on a roof extension of Coney Island’s Half Moon Hotel while under the prosecutor’s protective custody, with the cause of death never established, then or in subsequent investigations. On the eve of his overwhelming election to City Hall four years later, a grand jury convened by O’Dwyer’s interim replacement as DA, a Republican, accused the mayor of “laxity” and “maladministration” of his district attorney’s office. It was the first of many city, state and federal probes of O’Dwyer’s conduct, none resulting in a finding of criminality with regard to him, yet all adding up to a body blow to his political prospects. When Bronx leader Edward Flynn, a confidant of President Harry Truman, decided in 1950 that O’Dwyer had to resign, the mayor complied, becoming U.S. ambassador to Mexico in an apparent trade-off. A ticker-tape parade, and a great deal of public surprise and confusion, saw him off. As different as each man was from the other, Walker and O’Dwyer shared the same unhappy outcomes – exile and ostracization – once they lost the irreplaceable support of major Democratic Party players…”
“Mayor James J. “Jimmy” Walker rides in the 1932 Saint Patrick’s Day Parade.”
MOST BELOVED MAYOR
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2354337
https://thechiefleader.com/stories/walker-odwyer-adams,51523
by Bernard Whalen / November 29, 2023
“To date, two New York City mayors have left office in disgrace. If newspaper accounts are accurate, a third may soon follow.The first mayor was Jimmy Walker, a witty, dapper dan who served from 1926 to 1932. Ironically, he was one of the most beloved mayors in the history of New York City, but that didn’t protect him when the roof caved in on his administration. Although he spent many late nights in speakeasies, carousing with chorus girls, New York City thrived during his first term because the city coffers were full. When the stock market crashed in 1929, so did the city’s finances and it quickly became apparent that he was powerless to do anything to fix it. Soon after, a committee appointed by then-Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt and chaired by Judge Samuel Seabury began looking into corruption within the city criminal justice system. During the two-year investigation, a key witness, Vivian Gordon, was found murdered in Van Cortlandt Park and an infamous judge by the name of Joseph Force Crater went missing, never to be heard from again. Seabury uncovered widespread corruption in both the courts and the police department. Judges paid Tammany Hall Democrats thousands of dollars for their seats on the bench and then worked with certain police officers to solicit payoffs from innocent victims in exchange for dropping trumped-up charges against them. It was a despicable scheme that netted hundreds of thousands of dollars for the judges and police officers involved.
“Portrait, Mayor James J. Walker, March 2, 1932. NYC Municipal Archives”
Seabury then set his sights on the city’s highest elected official, Walker. Among the accusations was that the mayor had accepted $26,000 worth of bonds from a stockbroker, Joseph A. Sisto, who on behalf of his clients invested in a taxicab company. In exchange, Walker formed the Board of Taxicab Control to place regulations on the taxicab industry that limited the number of privately owned taxi cabs allowed to operate in the city, which in turn directly benefited the taxicab company Sisto had purchased for his investors. At first, Walker made light of the charges and maintained his innocence. When he finally appeared before Seabury, he joked, even going so far as quipping, “Life is just a bowl of Seaburys.” Apparently, he forgot about the pits cherries have. On Sept. 1, 1932, Walker resigned from office at the behest of Roosevelt, who was running for president and did not want his association with the mayor of New York to become political fodder for his opponent. Walker maintained his innocence, but Roosevelt struck a deal with Seabury to table the charges in return for the mayor’s resignation. Walker proclaimed he would prove his innocence, but never did. He and his mistress immediately set sail for Europe and did not return for three years. Roosevelt, of course, went on to become president.
William O’Dwyer was the second New York City mayor to resign from office. O’Dwyer was 20 years old when he came to New York in 1910 with just $23 in his pocket. Although he hailed from Ireland, he had spent the two years preceding his arrival studying for the priesthood in Spain. Once in America, he was determined to make good in his adopted country. After toiling at odd jobs for several years, he became a citizen and a New York City patrolman in 1916. While on the force he pursued a law degree. He left the department in 1923 to practice law. In 1931, he was appointed magistrate by the acting Mayor Joseph McKee, a Democrat, after he replaced Jimmy Walker. While on the bench, O’Dwyer became a well-regarded judge and loyal partyman. In 1939 he was elected Brooklyn district attorney. He furthered his reputation by going after mobsters associated with “Murder Incorporated,” although he never seemed to net the proverbial big Fish. After losing the mayor’s race to Fiorello La Guardia in 1941, he took a leave of absence to join the Army, rising all the way to brigadier general by war’s end. He returned to New York and won the mayoralty in 1945.
“In evasive testimony before the Senate’s Kefauver Committee on March 19 and 20, 1951, O’Dwyer denied accusations of criminal cooperation with mobsters”
His first term required him to address matters that had been put on the back burner during World War II. His success caused New Yorkers to reward him with a second term. That’s when things began to unravel, and rather quickly. O’Dwyer’s successor in the Brooklyn DA’s office, Miles O’Donald, convened a grand jury to look into the activities of a well-known gambler named Harry Gross. Wiretaps of Gross uncovered a massive network of pay-offs to police officials and public servants. Many of O’Dwyer’s closest associates were mentioned. The police commissioner, the chief inspector and the chief of detectives and 240 other officers resigned. One officer committed suicide by leaping out a six-floor courtroom window just before he was scheduled to testify about what he knew. Just eight months into his second term, President Harry Truman threw O’Dwyer a lifeline and appointed him ambassador to Mexico.
There he was protected from further inquiries into his possible misconduct because only the president can recall an ambassador. Although O’Dwyer resigned in 1952 so that newly elected President Dwight Eisenhower could name his own envoy, he remained in Mexico until 1960. Truman’s actions, though, were not as altruistic as they might have seemed. New York City was an important Democratic stronghold. It had been lost to Republican Fiorello La Guardia for 12 years after Walker’s demise. Democrats could not afford to lose it again. That brings us to Mayor Eric Adams’s current situation. There are some intriguing similarities between the three mayors. Both Mayor Walker and Mayor Adams were/are dealing with a fiscal crisis. Nothing stirs up the public’s wrath more than budget cuts to essential services. Rivals seeking higher office take the opportunity to scrutinize and then criticize the actions of those they seek to replace, in this instance, Adams.
As in O’Dwyer’s case, associates with direct ties to Adams have been alleged to have performed serious misdeeds for which he may have to answer. In addition, Adams is rumored to have been involved in a quid pro quo arrangement with authorities tied to the Turkish Consulate. Walker was accused of a similar arrangement with the investor of a Taxicab company. Lastly, and most importantly, Adams has publicly gone after the president demanding federal aid to deal with a migrant crisis he is partially responsible for. So far, his pleas have gone unanswered. But the president is facing a tough reelection and is in no mood to be criticized by the mayor of the country’s largest Democratic city — one that practically guarantees him the state’s 28 electoral college votes. He will not put that in jeopardy. The lesson Adams can take from Walker’s and O’Dwyer’s respective predicaments is that the New York City mayor can be sacrificed in order to keep or get a Democrat elected president. The Justice Department has a reputation for picking and choosing who it investigates. Adams should be asking himself why his administration is suddenly under scrutiny, unless of course he plans to take a long European vacation or move to a country in South America.”
Bernard Whalen is a former NYPD lieutenant and co-author of “The NYPD’s First Fifty Years” and “Case Files of the NYPD.”
a CONCISE HISTORY of MUNICIPAL MALFEASANCE
https://nytimes.com/2012/recalling-central-parks-casino-and-the-roaring-twenties
https://nytimes.com/1986/a-concise-history-of-municipal-malfeasance
by Frank Lynn / March 30, 1986
“Several weeks after New York City’s municipal scandal began unfolding in January, former Mayor Robert F. Wagner had a few observations on corruption. A little is inevitable, he said; a mayor just has to ”try to keep it down as much as possible.” He also recalled that a Brooklyn minister used to compare the number of municipal employees with the population of a good-size city, then add: ”Tell me a city that size that doesn’t have a jail.” Last week, as an indictment charged that the entire Parking Violations Bureau had been operated as ”a racketeering enterprise,” it seemed as if the jail might have to be fairly big. Mayor Koch, asked whether he still thought the scandal was being overplayed, answered irascibly but firmly: ”I’m telling you it’s major. I’m telling you it’s substantial.” Mr. Koch’s integrity has not been questioned, but his administration’s predicament inevitably has invited comparisons with the past. The stories of such notorious figures as Boss Tweed, Mayor Jimmy Walker and Mayor William O’Dwyer leap to the mind. Less well known, perhaps, is James J. Moran, an O’Dwyer protege who once faced the same dilemma that Geoffrey G. Lindenauer, former deputy director of the parking bureau, resolved in a plea bargain earlier this month by agreeing to testify against his associates. Mr. Moran was convicted of presiding over a Fire Department shakedown ring that collected an estimated $500,000 a year. Where all the money went was never disclosed, and Mr. Moran spent 10 years in prison without saying. ”I came into the world a man,” he said, ”and I’m going out a man.”
The name of William Marcy (Boss) Tweed, the volunteer fireman who rose to Manhattan Democratic leader in the mid-19th century, has become synonymous with municipal scandal. The former courthouse across Chambers Street from City Hall, still known in political circles as the Tweed Courthouse, was the granddaddy of what are now euphemistically known as cost overruns. Proposed in 1858 with an estimated price tag of $250,000, it had cost $12.5 million by the time it was completed in 1872. Boss Tweed, a cartoonist’s delight with his beard and 300-pound bulk, received and dispensed millions. He and his friends are thought to have stolen about $200 million, and along the way he acquired a Fifth Avenue mansion, a Connecticut estate and a steamboat. Mr. Tweed died of a heart attack in jail at age 55, having been unable to pay a $6 million civil judgment growing out of his stolen millions.
“Mayor Jimmy Walker walking down a street. ca. 1925-1935”
James J. Walker’s administration became a symbol of corruption as a result of a far-ranging investigation led by a former Court of Appeals Judge, Samuel Seabury. Under Gentleman Jim, as Mayor Walker was known, bus franchises were awarded to companies with no buses. There was a joint brokerage account with a publisher in which the Mayor invested nothing and netted nearly $250,000. A first deputy city clerk and the King’s County Registrar were found to have hundreds of thousands of dollars in bank accounts, and Sheriff Thomas M. Farley testified about a tin box in which he kept hard-to-explain cash. The scandal came close to costing Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt the 1932 Presidential election. In mid-campaign, he was faced with the choice of removing Mayor Walker and antagonizing Tammany Hall, as the Manhattan Democratic organization used to be called, or not removing him and angering good-government groups. The Mayor rescued the Governor by resigning just two months before the election. Mr. Walker moved to Europe, where he lived comfortably. Eighteen years after the Walker scandal, Mayor William O’Dwyer resigned under similar circumstances and became Ambassador to Mexico.
Mr. O’Dwyer, an Irish immigrant laborer, became a policeman, a lawyer and a prosecutor on his way to the Mayor’s office. Corruption charges and his alleged organized crime connections figured prominently in Senate committee hearings that propelled Estes Kefauver into a Vice-Presidential nomination. No charges of personal dishonesty ever touched Mayors Robert F. Wagner or John V. Lindsay, but both administrations had embarrassing episodes. A series of scandals in Mayor Wagner’s third term, including slum clearance land deals and the bribing of building inspectors, led indirectly to Mr. Lindsay’s election as one of the city’s few Republican mayors. L. Judson Morhouse, the Republican State Chairman, made an issue of 14 ”major scandals” in Mayor Wagner’s Democratic administration – Mr. Morhouse called them ”advantageous to the Republican good-government movement” – before he was jailed himself for selling liquor licenses. Mayor Lindsay’s administration was sullied by a scandal involving James L. Marcus, the Commissioner of Water Supply, Gas and Electricity. Along with others, including organized crime figures, Mr. Marcus was convicted of accepting kickbacks on an $840,000 contract to clean the Jerome Park reservoir in the Bronx. He served 11 months of a 15-month jail sentence. Carmine G. DeSapio, one of New York’s top political leaders in this century, was convicted in December 1969 of conspiring to bribe Mr. Marcus and to extort contracts from Consolidated Edison. He served two years.”
CENTRAL PARK CASINO
https://blog.mcny.org/2013/09/10/the-central-park-casino/
https://newyorkalmanack.com/central-park-casino-epitome-of-jazz-age-new-york-city
Central Park Casino: The Epitome of Jazz Age New York City
Holley Snaith / July 5, 2023
“The Central Park Casino, situated at Fifth Avenue and 72nd Street, was a premier New York City restaurant and nightclub, epitomizing the era of the Jazz Age. The Casino, with its grand dining room and perfectly polished dance floor, entertained some of the most prominent names in New York, from Tammany Hall politicians to Broadway stars and even royalty. Yet this exclusive, glamorous, and somewhat dangerous, appeal that was the Casino’s trademark, led to its demise during the darkest days of America’s great financial crisis. The Central Park Casino first opened its doors in 1864 as the Ladies’ Refreshment Salon, a place for single women to relax and enjoy the pristine views that Central Park offered. Famed architect Calvert Vaux, who, along with Frederick Law Olmsted, designed Central Park, created the elegant Victorian stone cottage. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Ladies’ Refreshment Salon had expanded into a refined restaurant that welcomed both men and women known as the Casino.
The Casino quickly became regarded as a high-class New York restaurant, boasting an extensive wine list and a costly sirloin steak. With its prime location in Central Park, guests clamored to be seated outside to impress the passers-by. But by the early 1920s, the Casino had lost much of its luster, and the wealthy patrons who had kept the restaurant afloat were now frequenting other affluent restaurants. Throughout the city, the sounds of jazz rang out and the era of Prohibition led to the creation of around 32,000 speakeasies. Women were now sporting bobbed hairdos, wearing short skirts, and emitting bold and flirtatious attitudes. The refined Victorian restaurant that was originally intended for more conservative single women no longer had a place in society. Yet when a winsome Democrat named Jimmy Walker was elected mayor of New York City in 1925, he brought new life to the Casino.
The vivacious Walker was more than a politician. In 1905, he composed the lyrics for a hit song titled “Will You Love Me in December as You Do in May?,” and a few years later, he decided to try his hand at politics and entered the New York State Assembly. Walker, who never shied away from having a good time, fully embraced the Roaring Twenties. With the support of the formidable political machine, Tammany Hall, behind him, Walker was easily elected mayor of the nation’s most populated city. As mayor, Walker continued living his bon vivant lifestyle, largely leaving Tammany Hall to carry out his mayoral duties. Rarely did he appear at City Hall before midday, and he had a private “hangover room” for him to use to recover from particularly raucous nights. Still, Walker passed legislation that allowed for sports to be played on Sundays and subway fares to remain low, leading him to enjoy a high favorability amongst New Yorkers during his first term.
Shortly after taking office, Walker was introduced by a prominent hotelier named Sidney Solomon to a stellar personal tailor. Taking great pride in being one of the most well-dressed men in town, Walker agreed to do Solomon a favor in return. Seeing promise in the increasingly lifeless Casino, Solomon asked Walker if he could take the helm and turn it into a preeminent restaurant. The new mayor agreed and pulled the right strings to make it happen. Solomon compiled a board filled with men with prominent names such as Broadway impresario Florence Ziegfield, film producer Adolph Zukor, banker Robert Lehman, and William K. Vanderbilt. When it came to making alterations to the building itself, Solomon decided to maintain much of Vaux’s original exterior, but he hired Austrian-American designer Joseph Urban to modernize the interior. After the renovations were complete, the Casino featured an illustrious black-glass Art Deco ballroom, a silver conservatory, and a vibrant tulip garden.
When the Casino had its grand reopening on June 25, 1929, there was not a seat left vacant in the restaurant that could hold six hundred guests. Naturally, Walker was one of the invited guests, and as soon as he entered the restaurant, the orchestra began playing his signature tune, “Will You Love Me in December as You Do in May?” Instantly, the Casino became known for entertaining the cream of the crop in New York society. From Tammany Hall bigwigs to the beautiful Ziegfeld Follies showgirls and revered composers like George Gershwin, the Casino was the place to be seen. In her autobiography, Ginger Rogers remembered the “soft lights and floral and spice aromas in the air” and dancing with her future co-star Fred Astaire to Eddy Duchin and His Central Park Casino Orchestra. The New York Times wryly stated in 1929 that the Casino “had never been noted for catering to the poor,” but now it was exclusively for the elite.
“The mayor gets his own police escort during corruption hearings in 1931”
To avoid the pitfalls of Prohibition, the Casino’s high-class patrons would stock up their Rolls-Royce with champagne and leave it parked outside the restaurant. Inside, when the tables began to run low on alcohol, a waiter would offer a signal to the nearby chauffeur. Then, the chauffeur would retrieve the champagne from the car and discretely present it to the waiter. After the stock market crashed in October 1929, critics began fervently attacking the Casino, arguing that, since so many New Yorkers were struggling to feed their families, it was abominable for the wealthy to continue to pay elaborate prices to dine and dance at the Casino. New York City Parks Commissioner Robert Moses was the chief denunciator, proclaiming that such an exclusive restaurant should not be in a public park. However, Moses’s primary motivation in speaking out against the Casino lay in his dislike of Mayor Walker, who he had viewed as a nemesis for years. Moses found a strong ally in Representative Fiorello La Guardia, the 1929 Republican candidate for mayor who was running against Walker. La Guardia decried the Casino as a “whoopee joint” and professed that it was a source of revenue for Walker and Tammany Hall. Walker won reelection by a landslide, and the Casino’s future was temporarily secure.
One night in June of 1930, federal Prohibition agents raided the Casino. Around 500 diners were in attendance to witness the arrest of ten patrons and five employees, including Solomon, for violating the Eighteenth Amendment. Among the distinguished individuals present to watch the raid unravel were Helen Astor, Princess Alice Obolensky, and representatives of the Cuban and Brazilian governments. The renewed public interest in the Casino led Moses and La Guardia to reignite their arguments against the establishment. Moses presumed that demolishing Walker’s prized playground would lead to the erasure of his memory in the city. Instead, evidence of political corruption within his administration led to Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt removing Walker from office. The ousted mayor moved to Europe, where he resided for the next eight years, and in an instant, the Casino lost its most stalwart champion.
To appease Moses, Solomon agreed to lower prices and make the Casino more inviting to the middle class. But the Parks Commissioner could not be persuaded, and he moved forward with his plans of destroying the building and replacing it with a playground. A group of New Yorkers protested the plans, arguing that the Casino was a historically significant building that should be preserved. Courts ruled in favor of Moses, and within one day of receiving approval, he had the wrecking balls in place. Ed Sullivan wrote in his column dated May 18, 1936, “The people who never get into Central Park Casino, the working-class, are in it now,” only they were wielding picks and shovels. Soon, all that was left of the Casino were stained-glass windows that, for a time, were housed in a nearby police station. Eventually, they too were lost to history. The year after the Casino was razed, the Rumsey Playground was dedicated, and today, the site plays host to SummerStage. Before the Great Depression brought shanty towns to the nation’s most renowned public park, the Central Park Casino represented that carefree decade that we have come to know as the Roaring Twenties. But this majestic and historic building was much more than a lavish nightclub that catered to New York’s elite, it was a prominent symbol of an unmatched era.”
PREVIOUSLY
HONEST GRAFT
https://spectrevision.net/2016/11/25/honest-graft/