Thursday, July 25, 1996
The Bigelow Papers, Part I
LOOKING BACK by Wally Dobelis
The T&V area has been home to many famous names in American history, arts and literature. You can read of Samuel Tilden, Peter Cooper and Edith Wharton, but often left out is a man who for many of his 95 years lived on East 14th Street, at 69 East 23rd Street and at 21 Gramercy Park, a lawyer, newspaper publisher, Union propagandist in Europe during the Civil War and founder of the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations - John Bigelow, the Forgotten First Citizen, in the words of his biographer, Margaret Clapp (Little Brown, 1947). His life is no mere dry history - it provides parallels to problems that current-day politicians wrestle with, without the benefit of a background of classics and political philosophy that John Bigelow drew upon when evaluating events and consequences. Little was new to him, he could hark back to thinkers and wits from Lucian to Jefferson who had faced similar circumstances.
John, son of Asa Bigelow, a farmer and trader in Bristol on the Hudson (now Malden), 40 miles South of Albany, was born in 1817. A bright boy, his mother took him to the Walnut Grove Academy in Troy. He distinguished himself, and was accepted at thirteen by Washington (later Trinity) College in Hartford. He worked through their 880-book library, and moved over to Union College, in Schenectady, which had a library of 13,000 books. Graduating at 17, he started reading law at Hudson, then a major center, and moved to New York, when his employers' firm dissolved. He read law until admitted to the bar at 21, taught at a girls' school, made good friends and, along with some of them - Charles Eames, Samuel Jones Tilden, Parke Goodwin - wrote articles for William Cullen Bryant's anti-slavery newspaper, the New York Evening Post, and for John O'Sullivan's Democratic Review. Law business was slow and he edited books, B.M.Norman's Rambles Through Yucatan, and Josiah Gregg's Commerce of the Prairies, and suffered when Van Buren lost his reelection bid to the Whig Harrison -Tyler ticket in 1840. An editor on the Morning News, with Tilden, he also worked on the unpopular prison reform and wrote articles advocating political reform. The poet Bryant, looking for time off, offered Bigelow the editorship of his Evening Post, and in 1848 he bought a 1/3 interest in the paper and also in the associated commercial press, with borrowed money. He ran the distinguished paper, founded by the Federalist Alexander Hamilton in 1801 (still in existence as the New York Post, subsequently associated with the names of Carl Schurz, Thomas Lamont, Dorothy Schiff and now Rupert Murdoch), on Bryant's Democratic/Barnburner principles.
To summarize XIX Century party politics, Washington's first cabinet was split, with Hamilton's Federalists advocating centralized government, encouraging industry and protecting the merchant and landowner interests. The opposing Jeffersonian Democratic Republicans (later Democrats) took over in 1800 and grew more radical under Jackson in 1828, but divided over the issue of slavery. The 1820 Missouri Compromise Act admitted Maine as free and Missouri as a slave state, and limited slavery to below 36th Parallel. Southern Democrats blocked the admission of new anti-slavery states in the West, causing a split in the party. The opposition party, anti-Jacksonite Whigs (formerly National Republicans), led by Daniel Webster and Henry Clay, also split during the 1848 slaveowner Zachary Taylor's campaign and many joined the Democrat anti-Slavery Barnburner and Free-Soiler faction. Barnburners were Democrat radicals, and took the name from a Dutch farmer who burned his barn to get rid of rats.
Bigelow opposed a third party, and broke away from the Democrats only when Senator Stephen A. Douglas introduced legislation (subsequently the Kansas-Nebraska Act, 1854) to solve the slavery issue in the territories by local decision (dubbed "squatter sovereignty" by the opponents). In "bleeding Kansas" this resulted in armed warfare, culminating in the 1856 massacre of five pro-slavers by the abolitionist John Brown. In the East anti-slavers of both parties immediately formed a Republican party, and after much dispute between the supporters of the Whig New York Sen. William H. Seward and the Free-Soiler Gov. Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, chose a political novice, a military man and the explorer of the West, California Sen. John C. Fremont, as their Presidential candidate for 1856. To help the cause, Bigelow wrote his campaign biography. But the people elected a conservative Democrat, James Buchanan. Tilden, by then a successful corporate lawyer, had stayed away, continuing to build his power in the Democratic organization of New York (an Assemblyman, he became the Democratic State Chairman, fought the Tammany's Tweed Ring in 1866 and went to Governorship in 1874).
Bigelow continued to build his paper. Having married Jane Poultney in 1850, the parents of three children (eventually there were eight, six surviving early childhood) decided to move out of their 14th Street quarters and in 1857 bought a house in Highland Falls, below West Point, with John commuting by ferry to the City. The country was prosperous, and the stock market was flush. But John was cautious, and when Erie Railroad (much plagued by the fraudulent speculators Daniel Drew, Jay Gould and James Fisk maneuvering around Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt for control) elected a new president at the unheard of salary of $25,000 a year, he editorially cautioned industry to pay good men well for their services, but not to let them play the stock market for their own profit and for the company's loss. (An interesting observation 140 years before America found out that linking corporate CEO's bonuses to the quarterly market performance of the companies' stocks can result in destructive downsizing, trimming of payrolls and selling off of low-profit subsidiaries that wreak havoc with lives for the sake of a short-term profit. What would he have thought of major stockholders like CALPERS pressuring CEOs for quick gains, and of travelling gunslinger CEOs like "Chainsaw" Albert J. Dunlap moving through paper companies with his axe, then selling off his most recent employer?). On the heels of his observations came the market crash of 1857, initiated by the collapse of the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company, which had lent bankers' deposits to the unsound railroads (an early example of bankers abusing insureds' monies that eventually led to the Glass-Steagall Banking Act of 1933, keeping the bankers away from widows' and orphans' funds. This is now under attack by the deregulators in the Congress.Imagine how many more Third World bonds Walter Wriston could have floated if he had insurance assets under his control!). Banks and railroads fell apart, and the jobless marched on Wall Street, demanding a "right to a living." The corrupt populist Mayor Fernando Wood bought 50,000 barrels of flour, to be sold to the poor at cost, much to Bigelow's distress, who worried about creating a pauper class that would never grow smaller (FDR had the same fears), and objected to government "buying up our criminals, hiring them to respect the laws, or they will rob you." With Gramercy's Samuel B. Ruggles and Peter Cooper he sponsored a series of lectures on poverty, advocating private donations to help the poor (think of Lamar Alexander). When Horace Greeley advised young men to go West and return to farming, our visionary foresaw farm overproduction, and a capitalist invasion of large scale mechanized agriculture, all overwhelming the family farmer (think of FDR's Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 and subsequent laws which have not prevented the decline of the family farm). His recommendation for the West-bound was to engage in "prosecution of the useful and ornamental arts" in the best industrially developing towns.
With the Post running smoothly, the Bigelows spent 18 months in Britain and the Continent, meeting the literati and the powerful, returning mid-1860. Six months later John sold his profitable share in the paper to Bryant's unworldly son-in-law Parke Goodwin. The sale made sense only to Bigelow, who wanted to retire (he had accumulated enough to continue to live on a modest scale), and to write a major work on the relations of Church and State through a biography of the Catholic Archbishop Fenelon. He bought a house at 69 East 23rd Street and dug into history.
But it was not to last. When Pres. Abraham Lincoln was elected in 1860, seven Southern states seceded (with four more joining later), forming the Confederate States of America (1861-65), and on April 12, 1861 the Confederacy attacked and destroyed Fort Sumter, S.C. A week later 100,000 New Yorkers met on Union Square, to express their outrage. Bigelow was one of the leaders. The war was on, the Union was in danger, and his country wanted him to serve where his talents were needed - in Europe, where agents of the Confederacy were stirring French and British public opinion towards a war against the Union.
An acknowledgment of sources will follow the 3rd installment of this series.
LOOKING BACK by Wally Dobelis
The Bigelow Papers Part II
John Bigelow and family left 69 East 23rd Street for Paris in August 1861, to do his duty in the Civil War, at the request of Secretary of State William H. Seward, a former political enemy and a subsequent friend and confidante. Even though his lowly title was that of a Consul of the U.S., John's direct instructions were to work on the French and British public opinion, counteracting Confederate propaganda in a hostile environment. He was to be the Union's spin doctor, putting the proper interpretation on sometimes contradictory Government declarations and Congressional resolutions. European cotton manufacturing industry was in a depression because of the Union blockade of Southern ports, unemployment was rampant, and Confederate agents were managing to place clandestine orders for ships with builders, while the governments closed their eyes and maintained outward neutrality. The ambassadors, Charles Francis Adams, son of President John Quincy Adams, in London, and ex-Vice Presidential candidate William L. Dayton in Paris, both ex-Whig tariff advocates, were no opinion molders, and the Confederacy was advocating free trade, much to the liking of English and French manufacturers. Dayton was not even willing to learn French. Bigelow, who had sharpened his language skills during a recent 19 month trip through Europe, knew the literati and politicians personally and through their publications during his 12-year editorship of his scholarly newspaper, the Evening Post.
Bigelow was the right man for the job. Pictures of his middle years show a handsome tall man (over 6 ft.), with a watchful expression. (He acquired the largest mutton-chop whiskers ever seen, even among the beard-proud Victorians, in later life. The copy of the 1900 Emke portrait hung in a position of honor on the 2nd Floor balcony of the New York Public Library on 42nd Street shows the same alertness.)
Bigelow had to be active and alert. Unlike his eminent propagandist predecessors during the American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, a mere consul had no entry to high government quarters. A meager staff of two worked on passports, wills, estates and problems of destitute Americans while the Consul pursued the politicos and opinion-molders. Undaunted by a skimpy $4,000 salary, he spent personal funds for office expenses while working on the main task - Union propaganda.
He had unexpected help from the Confederacy, which declared an embargo of cotton exports, in the hope that it would force England and France to recognize their independence, threaten war and demand peace. When French and British public opinion was roused by the Trent affair - a Union warship had searched a neutral British ship and removed two commissioners of the Confederacy, James M. Mason and John Slidell, Bigelow wrote a masterful letter in the name of the most respected American then visiting Paris, Gen. Winfield Scott. It explained that the Americans had performed a legal act often exercised by the English, that of searching a neutral ship suspected of carrying contraband of war, and becried the absence of adequate international laws protecting neutrals. The letter was widely published and well received. He had other successes - paying a Fr. 600 monthly subsidy to a French journal, L'Opinion Nationale, to keep it afloat and to insure a steady stream of favorable articles that could be reprinted; supporting a British ministers' conference condemning slavery, and having Fanny Kemble's Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation 1838-1839 published. Fortunately some funds were available from the shadowy Union paymaster Henry S. Sanford, Minister to Belgium. Old friends and accessible journalists were supplied with stories; government officials and informants were cultivated, and eventually Bigelow compiled Les Etats Unis d'Amerique en 1863, a noncontroversial encyclopedia to give factual pro-Union material for writers. It made profits, was translated and reprinted in Germany and pirated in Italy and Spain. Bigelow needed some successes. The Confederate propagandist Henry de Hotze in London was unceasingly writing articles and supplying news story specifications for a newspaper that he published, The Index, ostensibly written by Englishmen for Englishmen. Its part-time writers, key contributors to popular London press, were free to rehash the material, and thus articles sympathetic to the South found their way into British, Continental and even North American periodicals. Emperor Napoleon III, who had favored a joint recognition of the Confederacy by Britain and France, in Fall 1862 formally asked Britain and Russia to join him in urging a six-month truce. And Slidell had in his corner two Members of Parliament, James A. Lindsay, Britain's largest shipbuilder, and John Roebuck of Laird Bros, who made a sham sale to M. Brave, a French Deputy and head of Brave et Cie., of a Confederacy-bound ship ostensibly built for the Pasha of Egypt. But Bigelow and the ambassadors managed to have the warships Florida, Alexandra and other Confederate purchases tied up in British and French ports by legal proceedings, thus delaying deliveries. Meanwhile, bloody Gettysburg and the fall of Vicksburg in July 1863 showed the Europeans that the fortunes of war favored the Union, and circulars distributed by Bigelow offering land to European immigrants under the Homestead Act were bringing European recruits into the States and the Union army. Nevertheless, half a dozen ships were still in the construction docks of French shipyards, under contract for the Confederacy.
In Spring 1864 Bigelow's office was elevated to Consulate General, after he had written a report to Seward about professionalization of civil servants, which in a roundabout way led to the 1883 Pendleton Civil Service Act, passed after a dissatisfied office seeker shot President James A. Garfield. When Ambassador Dayton died in late 1864, Bigelow was appointed charge d' affaires and eventually, in April 1865, Minister, three weeks before the assassination of President Lincoln. The war was over, but Napoleon's ambitions were still a problem. In 1863 he had given the crown of Mexico to Emperor Maximilian, brother of Franz Joseph of Austria. This came about because in 1861 France, Britain and Spain had invaded Mexico (the latter two soon withdrawing), to collect unpaid war bonds' interest from Benito Juarez' War of the Reform (1857-61). US Congress, otherwise occupied, did not express its opposition until April 1864 (the Dawes Resolution). Bigelow was incurring French anger for pre
ssing for troop withdrawal, and Congressional ire for being too slow. The French finally withdrew their forces from Mexico, in 1867, and Maximilian was captured and shot. Bigelow, who stubbornly clung to his beliefs that "we do not want any territory faster than it will come to us by the voluntary actions of its population; we do not mean to fight for the Monroe Doctrine, because it is illogical and absurd for a nation to attempt to propagate democracy by arms," resigned his office in December 1866, after he had obtained a withdrawal date from the French.
The T&V area has been home to many famous names in American history, arts and literature. You can read of Samuel Tilden, Peter Cooper and Edith Wharton, but often left out is a man who for many of his 95 years lived on East 14th Street, at 69 East 23rd Street and at 21 Gramercy Park, a lawyer, newspaper publisher, Union propagandist in Europe during the Civil War and founder of the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations - John Bigelow, the Forgotten First Citizen, in the words of his biographer, Margaret Clapp (Little Brown, 1947). His life is no mere dry history - it provides parallels to problems that current-day politicians wrestle with, without the benefit of a background of classics and political philosophy that John Bigelow drew upon when evaluating events and consequences. Little was new to him, he could hark back to thinkers and wits from Lucian to Jefferson who had faced similar circumstances.
John, son of Asa Bigelow, a farmer and trader in Bristol on the Hudson (now Malden), 40 miles South of Albany, was born in 1817. A bright boy, his mother took him to the Walnut Grove Academy in Troy. He distinguished himself, and was accepted at thirteen by Washington (later Trinity) College in Hartford. He worked through their 880-book library, and moved over to Union College, in Schenectady, which had a library of 13,000 books. Graduating at 17, he started reading law at Hudson, then a major center, and moved to New York, when his employers' firm dissolved. He read law until admitted to the bar at 21, taught at a girls' school, made good friends and, along with some of them - Charles Eames, Samuel Jones Tilden, Parke Goodwin - wrote articles for William Cullen Bryant's anti-slavery newspaper, the New York Evening Post, and for John O'Sullivan's Democratic Review. Law business was slow and he edited books, B.M.Norman's Rambles Through Yucatan, and Josiah Gregg's Commerce of the Prairies, and suffered when Van Buren lost his reelection bid to the Whig Harrison -Tyler ticket in 1840. An editor on the Morning News, with Tilden, he also worked on the unpopular prison reform and wrote articles advocating political reform. The poet Bryant, looking for time off, offered Bigelow the editorship of his Evening Post, and in 1848 he bought a 1/3 interest in the paper and also in the associated commercial press, with borrowed money. He ran the distinguished paper, founded by the Federalist Alexander Hamilton in 1801 (still in existence as the New York Post, subsequently associated with the names of Carl Schurz, Thomas Lamont, Dorothy Schiff and now Rupert Murdoch), on Bryant's Democratic/Barnburner principles.
To summarize XIX Century party politics, Washington's first cabinet was split, with Hamilton's Federalists advocating centralized government, encouraging industry and protecting the merchant and landowner interests. The opposing Jeffersonian Democratic Republicans (later Democrats) took over in 1800 and grew more radical under Jackson in 1828, but divided over the issue of slavery. The 1820 Missouri Compromise Act admitted Maine as free and Missouri as a slave state, and limited slavery to below 36th Parallel. Southern Democrats blocked the admission of new anti-slavery states in the West, causing a split in the party. The opposition party, anti-Jacksonite Whigs (formerly National Republicans), led by Daniel Webster and Henry Clay, also split during the 1848 slaveowner Zachary Taylor's campaign and many joined the Democrat anti-Slavery Barnburner and Free-Soiler faction. Barnburners were Democrat radicals, and took the name from a Dutch farmer who burned his barn to get rid of rats.
Bigelow opposed a third party, and broke away from the Democrats only when Senator Stephen A. Douglas introduced legislation (subsequently the Kansas-Nebraska Act, 1854) to solve the slavery issue in the territories by local decision (dubbed "squatter sovereignty" by the opponents). In "bleeding Kansas" this resulted in armed warfare, culminating in the 1856 massacre of five pro-slavers by the abolitionist John Brown. In the East anti-slavers of both parties immediately formed a Republican party, and after much dispute between the supporters of the Whig New York Sen. William H. Seward and the Free-Soiler Gov. Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, chose a political novice, a military man and the explorer of the West, California Sen. John C. Fremont, as their Presidential candidate for 1856. To help the cause, Bigelow wrote his campaign biography. But the people elected a conservative Democrat, James Buchanan. Tilden, by then a successful corporate lawyer, had stayed away, continuing to build his power in the Democratic organization of New York (an Assemblyman, he became the Democratic State Chairman, fought the Tammany's Tweed Ring in 1866 and went to Governorship in 1874).
Bigelow continued to build his paper. Having married Jane Poultney in 1850, the parents of three children (eventually there were eight, six surviving early childhood) decided to move out of their 14th Street quarters and in 1857 bought a house in Highland Falls, below West Point, with John commuting by ferry to the City. The country was prosperous, and the stock market was flush. But John was cautious, and when Erie Railroad (much plagued by the fraudulent speculators Daniel Drew, Jay Gould and James Fisk maneuvering around Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt for control) elected a new president at the unheard of salary of $25,000 a year, he editorially cautioned industry to pay good men well for their services, but not to let them play the stock market for their own profit and for the company's loss. (An interesting observation 140 years before America found out that linking corporate CEO's bonuses to the quarterly market performance of the companies' stocks can result in destructive downsizing, trimming of payrolls and selling off of low-profit subsidiaries that wreak havoc with lives for the sake of a short-term profit. What would he have thought of major stockholders like CALPERS pressuring CEOs for quick gains, and of travelling gunslinger CEOs like "Chainsaw" Albert J. Dunlap moving through paper companies with his axe, then selling off his most recent employer?). On the heels of his observations came the market crash of 1857, initiated by the collapse of the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company, which had lent bankers' deposits to the unsound railroads (an early example of bankers abusing insureds' monies that eventually led to the Glass-Steagall Banking Act of 1933, keeping the bankers away from widows' and orphans' funds. This is now under attack by the deregulators in the Congress.Imagine how many more Third World bonds Walter Wriston could have floated if he had insurance assets under his control!). Banks and railroads fell apart, and the jobless marched on Wall Street, demanding a "right to a living." The corrupt populist Mayor Fernando Wood bought 50,000 barrels of flour, to be sold to the poor at cost, much to Bigelow's distress, who worried about creating a pauper class that would never grow smaller (FDR had the same fears), and objected to government "buying up our criminals, hiring them to respect the laws, or they will rob you." With Gramercy's Samuel B. Ruggles and Peter Cooper he sponsored a series of lectures on poverty, advocating private donations to help the poor (think of Lamar Alexander). When Horace Greeley advised young men to go West and return to farming, our visionary foresaw farm overproduction, and a capitalist invasion of large scale mechanized agriculture, all overwhelming the family farmer (think of FDR's Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 and subsequent laws which have not prevented the decline of the family farm). His recommendation for the West-bound was to engage in "prosecution of the useful and ornamental arts" in the best industrially developing towns.
With the Post running smoothly, the Bigelows spent 18 months in Britain and the Continent, meeting the literati and the powerful, returning mid-1860. Six months later John sold his profitable share in the paper to Bryant's unworldly son-in-law Parke Goodwin. The sale made sense only to Bigelow, who wanted to retire (he had accumulated enough to continue to live on a modest scale), and to write a major work on the relations of Church and State through a biography of the Catholic Archbishop Fenelon. He bought a house at 69 East 23rd Street and dug into history.
But it was not to last. When Pres. Abraham Lincoln was elected in 1860, seven Southern states seceded (with four more joining later), forming the Confederate States of America (1861-65), and on April 12, 1861 the Confederacy attacked and destroyed Fort Sumter, S.C. A week later 100,000 New Yorkers met on Union Square, to express their outrage. Bigelow was one of the leaders. The war was on, the Union was in danger, and his country wanted him to serve where his talents were needed - in Europe, where agents of the Confederacy were stirring French and British public opinion towards a war against the Union.
An acknowledgment of sources will follow the 3rd installment of this series.
LOOKING BACK by Wally Dobelis
The Bigelow Papers Part II
John Bigelow and family left 69 East 23rd Street for Paris in August 1861, to do his duty in the Civil War, at the request of Secretary of State William H. Seward, a former political enemy and a subsequent friend and confidante. Even though his lowly title was that of a Consul of the U.S., John's direct instructions were to work on the French and British public opinion, counteracting Confederate propaganda in a hostile environment. He was to be the Union's spin doctor, putting the proper interpretation on sometimes contradictory Government declarations and Congressional resolutions. European cotton manufacturing industry was in a depression because of the Union blockade of Southern ports, unemployment was rampant, and Confederate agents were managing to place clandestine orders for ships with builders, while the governments closed their eyes and maintained outward neutrality. The ambassadors, Charles Francis Adams, son of President John Quincy Adams, in London, and ex-Vice Presidential candidate William L. Dayton in Paris, both ex-Whig tariff advocates, were no opinion molders, and the Confederacy was advocating free trade, much to the liking of English and French manufacturers. Dayton was not even willing to learn French. Bigelow, who had sharpened his language skills during a recent 19 month trip through Europe, knew the literati and politicians personally and through their publications during his 12-year editorship of his scholarly newspaper, the Evening Post.
Bigelow was the right man for the job. Pictures of his middle years show a handsome tall man (over 6 ft.), with a watchful expression. (He acquired the largest mutton-chop whiskers ever seen, even among the beard-proud Victorians, in later life. The copy of the 1900 Emke portrait hung in a position of honor on the 2nd Floor balcony of the New York Public Library on 42nd Street shows the same alertness.)
Bigelow had to be active and alert. Unlike his eminent propagandist predecessors during the American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, a mere consul had no entry to high government quarters. A meager staff of two worked on passports, wills, estates and problems of destitute Americans while the Consul pursued the politicos and opinion-molders. Undaunted by a skimpy $4,000 salary, he spent personal funds for office expenses while working on the main task - Union propaganda.
He had unexpected help from the Confederacy, which declared an embargo of cotton exports, in the hope that it would force England and France to recognize their independence, threaten war and demand peace. When French and British public opinion was roused by the Trent affair - a Union warship had searched a neutral British ship and removed two commissioners of the Confederacy, James M. Mason and John Slidell, Bigelow wrote a masterful letter in the name of the most respected American then visiting Paris, Gen. Winfield Scott. It explained that the Americans had performed a legal act often exercised by the English, that of searching a neutral ship suspected of carrying contraband of war, and becried the absence of adequate international laws protecting neutrals. The letter was widely published and well received. He had other successes - paying a Fr. 600 monthly subsidy to a French journal, L'Opinion Nationale, to keep it afloat and to insure a steady stream of favorable articles that could be reprinted; supporting a British ministers' conference condemning slavery, and having Fanny Kemble's Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation 1838-1839 published. Fortunately some funds were available from the shadowy Union paymaster Henry S. Sanford, Minister to Belgium. Old friends and accessible journalists were supplied with stories; government officials and informants were cultivated, and eventually Bigelow compiled Les Etats Unis d'Amerique en 1863, a noncontroversial encyclopedia to give factual pro-Union material for writers. It made profits, was translated and reprinted in Germany and pirated in Italy and Spain. Bigelow needed some successes. The Confederate propagandist Henry de Hotze in London was unceasingly writing articles and supplying news story specifications for a newspaper that he published, The Index, ostensibly written by Englishmen for Englishmen. Its part-time writers, key contributors to popular London press, were free to rehash the material, and thus articles sympathetic to the South found their way into British, Continental and even North American periodicals. Emperor Napoleon III, who had favored a joint recognition of the Confederacy by Britain and France, in Fall 1862 formally asked Britain and Russia to join him in urging a six-month truce. And Slidell had in his corner two Members of Parliament, James A. Lindsay, Britain's largest shipbuilder, and John Roebuck of Laird Bros, who made a sham sale to M. Brave, a French Deputy and head of Brave et Cie., of a Confederacy-bound ship ostensibly built for the Pasha of Egypt. But Bigelow and the ambassadors managed to have the warships Florida, Alexandra and other Confederate purchases tied up in British and French ports by legal proceedings, thus delaying deliveries. Meanwhile, bloody Gettysburg and the fall of Vicksburg in July 1863 showed the Europeans that the fortunes of war favored the Union, and circulars distributed by Bigelow offering land to European immigrants under the Homestead Act were bringing European recruits into the States and the Union army. Nevertheless, half a dozen ships were still in the construction docks of French shipyards, under contract for the Confederacy.
In Spring 1864 Bigelow's office was elevated to Consulate General, after he had written a report to Seward about professionalization of civil servants, which in a roundabout way led to the 1883 Pendleton Civil Service Act, passed after a dissatisfied office seeker shot President James A. Garfield. When Ambassador Dayton died in late 1864, Bigelow was appointed charge d' affaires and eventually, in April 1865, Minister, three weeks before the assassination of President Lincoln. The war was over, but Napoleon's ambitions were still a problem. In 1863 he had given the crown of Mexico to Emperor Maximilian, brother of Franz Joseph of Austria. This came about because in 1861 France, Britain and Spain had invaded Mexico (the latter two soon withdrawing), to collect unpaid war bonds' interest from Benito Juarez' War of the Reform (1857-61). US Congress, otherwise occupied, did not express its opposition until April 1864 (the Dawes Resolution). Bigelow was incurring French anger for pre
ssing for troop withdrawal, and Congressional ire for being too slow. The French finally withdrew their forces from Mexico, in 1867, and Maximilian was captured and shot. Bigelow, who stubbornly clung to his beliefs that "we do not want any territory faster than it will come to us by the voluntary actions of its population; we do not mean to fight for the Monroe Doctrine, because it is illogical and absurd for a nation to attempt to propagate democracy by arms," resigned his office in December 1866, after he had obtained a withdrawal date from the French.
Monday, July 22, 1996
Change Your Lifestyle, Produce Less Garbage - Part III
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
No matter how the garbage situation resulting from the accelerated closing of the Fresh Kills Landfill (rescheduled for year-end 2001 instead of 2011) is resolved, the citizens will pay, because sending garbage by rail or boat out of state is more expensive than sending it by barge to good old Staten Island.
Fresh Kills today processes over 13,000 tons of garbage daily, brought in by barges. That is often expressed as 27,000,000 pounds, over three pounds for every man, woman and child in the city. The numbers do not include the New York Times and the glass, metal and plastic that go into recycling.
The 3,000 acre landfill, the size of five LaGuardia Airports, has some mountains of garbage as high as 150 feet (15 stories), covered with dirt and grass. Confusion and lesser numbers result if an older landfill area and staging areas are omitted from the count. The technology and the area is a tourist attraction, with interested experts world-wide coming to study it regularly. Current dumping is confined to 800 acres. Fresh dumped refuse is covered fast, cutting down on the gull population's breakfast. But there is a decomposition process, emitting methane gas (about 1/20 of the total national emissions), 25 percent of which is captured and converted to fuel use. Nevertheless, the odor persists. There is also leachage (a hard word to pronounce), since the 48-year old dump has no liner, and rainwater brings solubles with some toxins into the surrounding waterways. After closing, the city will spend another $775 million over a 30-year period to stabilize the landfill, which includes some plastic membrane to stop future rain penetration, capturing the leachate and removing the toxins, and capturing more of the methane (it is poison; think of New Zealand, world champion producer of lambshanks, actively suffering from the uncontrollable emanations of its 70 million sheep). Fortunately methane converts into natural gas. Will the process work? Well, the smaller Pelham Bay Landfill, actively accepting 2,600 tons a day for 15 years and closed in 1978, still brings leachate directly into Eastchester Bay at the rate of 30 to 50 gallons a minute. Note that closed landfills become parks and the responsibility for cleanup shifts to the Parks and Recreation Department.
The Mayor's committee of 12, appointed to resolve the problem of alternate ways of disposing the 13,000 tons of New York's residential garbage every day, has to come up with a solution by October 1. The end 2001 closing smells like a real estate speculators' and garbage haulers' dream, and I wish that wisdom would prevail, keeping Fresh Kills open, accelerating the continuing control of methane and leaching processes and offering buyouts to seriously afflicted Staten Islanders at current market prices. But the committee is bound to recommend export, with some pious words involving more citizenly responsibility in recycling. This is a group of professionals from city and state agencies, including ecology, health and economic development people. Names are not available, and no publicity is given to their deliberations, not to speak of hearings. Cost shifting by charging the household (building, coop) for the garbage by the bag may be proposed. Should we the taxpayers not be part of the process of deliberation?
Parenthetically, isn't it peculiar how cost shifting back to the consumer has become the government's answer to social problems? We see that when the Transit Authority charges school kids for subway and bus travel, and when the hospitals put the excess costs of Medicaid and Medicare patients on insured clients' bills, . What is government for, really? Just to pay civil servants' salaries?
The states that take our daily 12,000 tons of commercial garbage - Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Indiana - really don't want an increase in garbage imports, no matter how much a starving locality needs the funds and how environmentally acceptable the imports are.The U.S. Senate has already passed a states' rights act permitting a ceiling on garbage imports, and its counterpart is pending in the House. Guy Molinari, Staten Island's Borough President, who forced the advance in the date of closing Fresh Kills from 2010 to 2001, does not want to be tagged as the assassin who buried New York in garbage, and claims that "we will beat the states in the courts." Yes, there is a Supreme Court decision that garbage movement qualifies as interstate commerce and therefore not within the purview of state laws. States cannot discriminate against chosen exporters or set arbitrary limits. This came up when in 1987 the Long Island barge with 3,100 tons of offal traveled for months through inland waterways futilely looking for a landfill site. Will this decision stand up in today's court?
So, there we are. My recommendation to buy Liberia and ship the garbage across the Atlantic came in a moment of despair over this irresponsible politically motivated government decisions, without plans, without regard for the consequences, pushing the responsibility of digging out from under the garbage on the community. I also blame several prior generations of government who ignored the garbage problem with feeble recycling efforts. But black humor and comic relief do not solve problems. More realistically, can we dispose of New York's garbage within the U.S.?
Well, we can change our ways to produce a relatively garbage-free environment. Will the lifestyles of New Yorkers and all other urban dwellers who do not live off the land have to alter radically to avoid getting buried under reeking garbage? Yes indeed, and the means are there, let me show you.
Most non-compostable, that is non-organic residential garbage comes from packaging. It is often said "Why do we have so much wrapping?"
Packaging came as the result of mass production of agricultural goods, ease of transportation and less dependence on local products, public taste for off-season luxuries, and therefore increased need for better shelflife of food products. It killed Mom and Pop non-agribus small scale farming. As a result of more people and smaller living quarters in the cities, and therefore less shelf space in kitchens, smaller and smaller packages also became desirable.
Some of us still know of "rushing the growler," that is going to a bar to have a reusable jug filled with beer from a reusable barrel. As a young child, I recall having reusable milk bottles filled from a twenty-gallon open-top milk can by a grocery clerk using a dipper (don't shudder, he closed the can between uses, with ladle and funnel inside). And today you can still order seltzer in reusable siphon bottles from a local soda maker. There are also greenmarkets supplying fresh vegetables and fruit all through the year, by storing the harvest in their local cold storage rooms, then bringing out the requisite amount for the market day. That is the way apples are supplied all year long, and the concept can be extended to some other fruit and locally grown vegetables. No need for most frozen vegetables, canned vegetables and fruit. Juices also can be served into reusable jars from reusable barrels. And the Japanese , for centuries, have brought home takeout food in beautiful stacked lightweight lacquer vessels. With that we have the solutions for reducing the need for packaging and garbage in six major areas - beer, soda, vegetables, fruit, juice and takeout. Remember, nowadays we have the miracle of refrigeration at home. And a can of Coca-Cola can be reduced to a large pill, like Alka-Seltzer, plus water. Of course, they would have to change the refrain of their song to "Plop plop, fizz, fizz." Of course, it would hurt, but I'm willing to be brave. The real pain would be going to the Internet for the New York Times.
Of course, it would cost, more labor in the grocery store and less employment in the packaging industry. But it would also reduce destruction of forests and other natural resources. Again, refrigeration saves the day, the one great saving factor in preserving food which our forebears did not have. Everybody knows that the European discovery of the Far East was prompted by the need for spices that would help the taste of food turning rancid in the winter. Salt helped, and salt pork that kept was a major staple, as was smoked meat. This is no longer our problem.
Increasing the size of packaging of goods that cannot be sold fresh will further reduce garbage production. My cat's food now comes in a 15 oz can. In the drugstore, we can get a quart squeeze bottle of shampoo instead of a pint, and squeeze hair lotion instead of spraying it. Squeeze bottles are also reusable and refillable. Think of going back to reusable sanitary napkins and diapers, which should be not all that difficult, since we now have washing machines.
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
Help Staten Islanders, Don't Close Fresh Kills - Part II
Early closing of the Staten Island landfill is not fair to Staten Islanders and to the rest of New York's taxpayers. If that sounds paradoxical, please read to the end.
The Fresh Kills Landfill may well be one of the world's more efficient garbage disposal operations. Functioning on a 3000 acre area since 1948, along Victory Boulevard, traversed by the West Shore Expressway and crisscrossed by Arthur, Fresh, Main and Richmond Creeks, the 2,200 acre actual landfill has four sections, of which two (3/4 and 1/9) are closed and covered, and two (1/9 and 6/7) are active.
Every day some 20 barges (of a fleet of 103), covered with nets to keep the loose bits of their 700 ton payloads confined, arrive from the eight marine transfer facilities in four boroughs (Staten Island delivers by truck) and are guided by their tugs to one of two identical unloading facilities in Fresh Kills, to be emptied with superbooms into containment pits. There front-end loaders move the refuse into huge payhaulers, to be moved to the site, sprayed with pine oil deodorants, compacted by bulldozers and covered, nowadays reportedly within a day. The 1994 deposits of 7.9 billion pounds are a half of the deposits seven years ago, mainly thanks to the recycling program, which, though receiving only 14 percent (of the legally required 25) from New York's 3 million households' waste, compares favorably with L.A.'s 9 percent and Chicago's 3 percent. That's not great - 60 percent of municipal solid waste is deemed recyclable. The 6,700 cities and towns with active curbside recycling programs recover 45 million tons of trash per year, and New York's daily 2,200 ton recovery constitutes 1.4 percent of that, even though we make up 3 percent of the U.S. population. But then there is also the business recycling program. The city's 250,000 businesses do create over 12,000 tons of waste daily, nearly the same as the residential 13,200 tons, which are exported.
to Ohio, Michigan, Virginia, Indiana, Pennsylvania and elsewhere.
The nature and philosophy of garbage has also changed. Until recently New York used refuse to reclaim land from swamps and create commercial and recreational land. Lower Manhattan doubled in size through landfills - remember Battery Park City. Fifty years ago 40 percent of refuse was ashes and cinders from coal burners; now paper is number one, over 30 percent. Since the 1970s and the Environmental Protection acts, incineration in the U. S. is down to one percent of municipal solid waste; over 60 percent is landfilled, and the rest divided between recycling and conversion to energy. Dumping in the ocean was stopped after a federal law banned it in 1934.
In the Kills, skimmer boats patrol the waterways to pick up stray litter. A crushing facility daily converts 750 tons of construction debris into cover and roadbuilding material for the site. [Please note that commercial construction and demolition material is hauled by private carters to private landfill sites. This is an area where governmental control is needed; some of these sites will cost the nation huge cleanup fees if not watched. The famous billion-dollar Superfund is not sufficient even to handle the legal fees incurred in trying to settle the responsibilities for cleaning industrial waste sites. Private waste carters are not very trustworthy, look at the medical waste disposed on Jersey Shore and dioxin dumped on rural roads, and sneaky deals with impoverished landowners abound.] That could have been worse, because the Barnwell, S.C. low level radioactive waste dump closed in 1994. It reopened, after tripling its charges, in 1995, for 10 years only. But hazardous waste is another topic.
At Fresh Kills, tree branches, leaves and Christmas trees are converted into compost (there is a 40 acre composting facility; you can get some for your garden free of charge) and used with cover material for landscaping. The landfill will be a wildlife habitat. There are methane gas venting pipes and recovery facilities, expected to be enlarged. Refined gas presently brings in $1 million a year when sold to Brooklyn Union Gas Company. But that will not pay for the treatment of wastes, some toxic, emanating as leachate. A new treatment plant is expected to clean 200,000 gallons a day (to be enlarged to 1,000,000 gallons) to prevent surface and ground water contamination. The cost of treating emanations from the landfill over the next 30 years will exceed $775 million.
People who do illegal dumping of toxic and medical waste can be fined. The 150-member Environmental Police Unit in 1994 issued 1/4 million summonses and impounded 295 vehicles for dumping, or stealing recyclables.
It takes nearly 600 engineers, operators, administrators, chemists and geologists to operate Fresh Kills, six days a week, 24 hours a day. The Sanitation Department, founded in 1880, has 7,300 uniformed workers and supervisors, out of a total of 9,500 employees, working out of 59 districts. There are nearly 2,200 collection trucks, of which some 1,000 are out in the streets daily; there are over 1,500 street sweepers, specialized collection trucks, salters/sanders and front end loaders; there are 2,200 support vehicles and nine boats - and 26,000 street corner baskets. The department's budget is $575 million for the upcoming year, and the Commissioner is John J. Doherty, who started with the department in 1960 as a sanitation worker.
Replacing the efficient Fresh Kills Landfill operation will increase the actual garbage disposal costs to between double and quadruple the present figure. "Bail and rail" is the costliest; an efficient disposal via water transportation is best, but who will accept it? Maybe up North, the poor Maritime Provinces of Canada will provide the space (hint: start cranking up Henry Kissinger). Remember the unsuccessful 6,000 mile Long Island garbage barge journey down into the Southern states, in 1987? Knowing Mayor Giuliani's and Governor Pataki's bent for privatization, it may well be that industry rather than government will be called upon to solve the disposal problem. Let's hope not, that would be a cheap trick to avoid the responsibility of governance. The lobbyists of the garbage giants, Browning Ferris Industries, US Waste and WMX Technologies (a/k/a Waste Management) must be rubbing their hands in glee, not to speak of the Mafia, who, despite a series of City and Federal indictments for conspiracy still hold considerable sway in the private carting industry.
Now that the City and the State have declared their intentions, prices for landfills will certainly go up. That was a real smart move, and the New York taxpayer will, as usually, pay for it. We may also have the privilege of footing direct charges per bag or bale from each building, as they do in San Francisco, Seattle and Minneapolis and hundreds of other municipalities. The 26,000 corner baskets will disappear, and people will sneak garbage down to the street at midnight, or throw bags out of car windows. We may yet erect monuments for Messrs. Molinari, Giuliani and Pataki, for burying us in refuse. These monuments will not be in marble.
If the committee of 12 government representatives selected by the Mayor and the Governor has any gumption, it should rescind the decision to advance the closing of Fresh Kills by the year end 2001, and, instead, have the city offer to buy out the residents who need immediate relief from the emanations. The Sanitation Department, as recently as two years ago, saw 20 years worth of landfill space still left in Staten Island. The odor will not cease within appreciable time after the closing. Improvements, such as the increased capturing of the methane and other odor-reducing measures can go on while the landfill is operating, and the Sanitation people, by daily covering of the fill, have reduced the smells and the hungry gull population. It would be much more humanitarian to buy out and resettle the business offices and residents who find the odors unendurable, rather than having them wait for 30 years for the smell to subside. The relief would be immediate, and the cost would be fractional. People who bought property at Fresh Kills did it with their eyes open and accepted its shortcomings because real estate was less expensive. It is common, to buy near an airport or swamp and put up with the problems for the sake of saving money; I spend my vacations in the country next to the township's gravel storage, for the same reason. Do we complain - yes! Did we enter into the agreeement with our eyes open - yes! Do we get community help? No, unless there is a health hazard. Nobody in Staten island has sued sued for misrepresentation, nobody has collected for health damages. If people who bought real property cheap now want to increase their property values at the cost of the rest of New York taxpayers, it is not fair. But the politicos have decided, the political client and, apparently, big business interests have been served, and the public can go hang, both the people on Staten Island who want fair and immediate relief from the odor, and the people of New York City who cannot afford the ever-increasing costs of governance and cost shifting. The solution stinks, I claim foul play. Let's hear from you, City and State, and taxpayers!
Wally Dobelis thanks Lucian Chalfen, Sanitation Department's Assistant Commissioner For Public Affairs, for producing the departmental facts and figures. The speculations and conclusions of the continuing articles are the product of Wally's fertile (some say febrile) imagination, with no official assistance.
No matter how the garbage situation resulting from the accelerated closing of the Fresh Kills Landfill (rescheduled for year-end 2001 instead of 2011) is resolved, the citizens will pay, because sending garbage by rail or boat out of state is more expensive than sending it by barge to good old Staten Island.
Fresh Kills today processes over 13,000 tons of garbage daily, brought in by barges. That is often expressed as 27,000,000 pounds, over three pounds for every man, woman and child in the city. The numbers do not include the New York Times and the glass, metal and plastic that go into recycling.
The 3,000 acre landfill, the size of five LaGuardia Airports, has some mountains of garbage as high as 150 feet (15 stories), covered with dirt and grass. Confusion and lesser numbers result if an older landfill area and staging areas are omitted from the count. The technology and the area is a tourist attraction, with interested experts world-wide coming to study it regularly. Current dumping is confined to 800 acres. Fresh dumped refuse is covered fast, cutting down on the gull population's breakfast. But there is a decomposition process, emitting methane gas (about 1/20 of the total national emissions), 25 percent of which is captured and converted to fuel use. Nevertheless, the odor persists. There is also leachage (a hard word to pronounce), since the 48-year old dump has no liner, and rainwater brings solubles with some toxins into the surrounding waterways. After closing, the city will spend another $775 million over a 30-year period to stabilize the landfill, which includes some plastic membrane to stop future rain penetration, capturing the leachate and removing the toxins, and capturing more of the methane (it is poison; think of New Zealand, world champion producer of lambshanks, actively suffering from the uncontrollable emanations of its 70 million sheep). Fortunately methane converts into natural gas. Will the process work? Well, the smaller Pelham Bay Landfill, actively accepting 2,600 tons a day for 15 years and closed in 1978, still brings leachate directly into Eastchester Bay at the rate of 30 to 50 gallons a minute. Note that closed landfills become parks and the responsibility for cleanup shifts to the Parks and Recreation Department.
The Mayor's committee of 12, appointed to resolve the problem of alternate ways of disposing the 13,000 tons of New York's residential garbage every day, has to come up with a solution by October 1. The end 2001 closing smells like a real estate speculators' and garbage haulers' dream, and I wish that wisdom would prevail, keeping Fresh Kills open, accelerating the continuing control of methane and leaching processes and offering buyouts to seriously afflicted Staten Islanders at current market prices. But the committee is bound to recommend export, with some pious words involving more citizenly responsibility in recycling. This is a group of professionals from city and state agencies, including ecology, health and economic development people. Names are not available, and no publicity is given to their deliberations, not to speak of hearings. Cost shifting by charging the household (building, coop) for the garbage by the bag may be proposed. Should we the taxpayers not be part of the process of deliberation?
Parenthetically, isn't it peculiar how cost shifting back to the consumer has become the government's answer to social problems? We see that when the Transit Authority charges school kids for subway and bus travel, and when the hospitals put the excess costs of Medicaid and Medicare patients on insured clients' bills, . What is government for, really? Just to pay civil servants' salaries?
The states that take our daily 12,000 tons of commercial garbage - Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Indiana - really don't want an increase in garbage imports, no matter how much a starving locality needs the funds and how environmentally acceptable the imports are.The U.S. Senate has already passed a states' rights act permitting a ceiling on garbage imports, and its counterpart is pending in the House. Guy Molinari, Staten Island's Borough President, who forced the advance in the date of closing Fresh Kills from 2010 to 2001, does not want to be tagged as the assassin who buried New York in garbage, and claims that "we will beat the states in the courts." Yes, there is a Supreme Court decision that garbage movement qualifies as interstate commerce and therefore not within the purview of state laws. States cannot discriminate against chosen exporters or set arbitrary limits. This came up when in 1987 the Long Island barge with 3,100 tons of offal traveled for months through inland waterways futilely looking for a landfill site. Will this decision stand up in today's court?
So, there we are. My recommendation to buy Liberia and ship the garbage across the Atlantic came in a moment of despair over this irresponsible politically motivated government decisions, without plans, without regard for the consequences, pushing the responsibility of digging out from under the garbage on the community. I also blame several prior generations of government who ignored the garbage problem with feeble recycling efforts. But black humor and comic relief do not solve problems. More realistically, can we dispose of New York's garbage within the U.S.?
Well, we can change our ways to produce a relatively garbage-free environment. Will the lifestyles of New Yorkers and all other urban dwellers who do not live off the land have to alter radically to avoid getting buried under reeking garbage? Yes indeed, and the means are there, let me show you.
Most non-compostable, that is non-organic residential garbage comes from packaging. It is often said "Why do we have so much wrapping?"
Packaging came as the result of mass production of agricultural goods, ease of transportation and less dependence on local products, public taste for off-season luxuries, and therefore increased need for better shelflife of food products. It killed Mom and Pop non-agribus small scale farming. As a result of more people and smaller living quarters in the cities, and therefore less shelf space in kitchens, smaller and smaller packages also became desirable.
Some of us still know of "rushing the growler," that is going to a bar to have a reusable jug filled with beer from a reusable barrel. As a young child, I recall having reusable milk bottles filled from a twenty-gallon open-top milk can by a grocery clerk using a dipper (don't shudder, he closed the can between uses, with ladle and funnel inside). And today you can still order seltzer in reusable siphon bottles from a local soda maker. There are also greenmarkets supplying fresh vegetables and fruit all through the year, by storing the harvest in their local cold storage rooms, then bringing out the requisite amount for the market day. That is the way apples are supplied all year long, and the concept can be extended to some other fruit and locally grown vegetables. No need for most frozen vegetables, canned vegetables and fruit. Juices also can be served into reusable jars from reusable barrels. And the Japanese , for centuries, have brought home takeout food in beautiful stacked lightweight lacquer vessels. With that we have the solutions for reducing the need for packaging and garbage in six major areas - beer, soda, vegetables, fruit, juice and takeout. Remember, nowadays we have the miracle of refrigeration at home. And a can of Coca-Cola can be reduced to a large pill, like Alka-Seltzer, plus water. Of course, they would have to change the refrain of their song to "Plop plop, fizz, fizz." Of course, it would hurt, but I'm willing to be brave. The real pain would be going to the Internet for the New York Times.
Of course, it would cost, more labor in the grocery store and less employment in the packaging industry. But it would also reduce destruction of forests and other natural resources. Again, refrigeration saves the day, the one great saving factor in preserving food which our forebears did not have. Everybody knows that the European discovery of the Far East was prompted by the need for spices that would help the taste of food turning rancid in the winter. Salt helped, and salt pork that kept was a major staple, as was smoked meat. This is no longer our problem.
Increasing the size of packaging of goods that cannot be sold fresh will further reduce garbage production. My cat's food now comes in a 15 oz can. In the drugstore, we can get a quart squeeze bottle of shampoo instead of a pint, and squeeze hair lotion instead of spraying it. Squeeze bottles are also reusable and refillable. Think of going back to reusable sanitary napkins and diapers, which should be not all that difficult, since we now have washing machines.
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
Help Staten Islanders, Don't Close Fresh Kills - Part II
Early closing of the Staten Island landfill is not fair to Staten Islanders and to the rest of New York's taxpayers. If that sounds paradoxical, please read to the end.
The Fresh Kills Landfill may well be one of the world's more efficient garbage disposal operations. Functioning on a 3000 acre area since 1948, along Victory Boulevard, traversed by the West Shore Expressway and crisscrossed by Arthur, Fresh, Main and Richmond Creeks, the 2,200 acre actual landfill has four sections, of which two (3/4 and 1/9) are closed and covered, and two (1/9 and 6/7) are active.
Every day some 20 barges (of a fleet of 103), covered with nets to keep the loose bits of their 700 ton payloads confined, arrive from the eight marine transfer facilities in four boroughs (Staten Island delivers by truck) and are guided by their tugs to one of two identical unloading facilities in Fresh Kills, to be emptied with superbooms into containment pits. There front-end loaders move the refuse into huge payhaulers, to be moved to the site, sprayed with pine oil deodorants, compacted by bulldozers and covered, nowadays reportedly within a day. The 1994 deposits of 7.9 billion pounds are a half of the deposits seven years ago, mainly thanks to the recycling program, which, though receiving only 14 percent (of the legally required 25) from New York's 3 million households' waste, compares favorably with L.A.'s 9 percent and Chicago's 3 percent. That's not great - 60 percent of municipal solid waste is deemed recyclable. The 6,700 cities and towns with active curbside recycling programs recover 45 million tons of trash per year, and New York's daily 2,200 ton recovery constitutes 1.4 percent of that, even though we make up 3 percent of the U.S. population. But then there is also the business recycling program. The city's 250,000 businesses do create over 12,000 tons of waste daily, nearly the same as the residential 13,200 tons, which are exported.
to Ohio, Michigan, Virginia, Indiana, Pennsylvania and elsewhere.
The nature and philosophy of garbage has also changed. Until recently New York used refuse to reclaim land from swamps and create commercial and recreational land. Lower Manhattan doubled in size through landfills - remember Battery Park City. Fifty years ago 40 percent of refuse was ashes and cinders from coal burners; now paper is number one, over 30 percent. Since the 1970s and the Environmental Protection acts, incineration in the U. S. is down to one percent of municipal solid waste; over 60 percent is landfilled, and the rest divided between recycling and conversion to energy. Dumping in the ocean was stopped after a federal law banned it in 1934.
In the Kills, skimmer boats patrol the waterways to pick up stray litter. A crushing facility daily converts 750 tons of construction debris into cover and roadbuilding material for the site. [Please note that commercial construction and demolition material is hauled by private carters to private landfill sites. This is an area where governmental control is needed; some of these sites will cost the nation huge cleanup fees if not watched. The famous billion-dollar Superfund is not sufficient even to handle the legal fees incurred in trying to settle the responsibilities for cleaning industrial waste sites. Private waste carters are not very trustworthy, look at the medical waste disposed on Jersey Shore and dioxin dumped on rural roads, and sneaky deals with impoverished landowners abound.] That could have been worse, because the Barnwell, S.C. low level radioactive waste dump closed in 1994. It reopened, after tripling its charges, in 1995, for 10 years only. But hazardous waste is another topic.
At Fresh Kills, tree branches, leaves and Christmas trees are converted into compost (there is a 40 acre composting facility; you can get some for your garden free of charge) and used with cover material for landscaping. The landfill will be a wildlife habitat. There are methane gas venting pipes and recovery facilities, expected to be enlarged. Refined gas presently brings in $1 million a year when sold to Brooklyn Union Gas Company. But that will not pay for the treatment of wastes, some toxic, emanating as leachate. A new treatment plant is expected to clean 200,000 gallons a day (to be enlarged to 1,000,000 gallons) to prevent surface and ground water contamination. The cost of treating emanations from the landfill over the next 30 years will exceed $775 million.
People who do illegal dumping of toxic and medical waste can be fined. The 150-member Environmental Police Unit in 1994 issued 1/4 million summonses and impounded 295 vehicles for dumping, or stealing recyclables.
It takes nearly 600 engineers, operators, administrators, chemists and geologists to operate Fresh Kills, six days a week, 24 hours a day. The Sanitation Department, founded in 1880, has 7,300 uniformed workers and supervisors, out of a total of 9,500 employees, working out of 59 districts. There are nearly 2,200 collection trucks, of which some 1,000 are out in the streets daily; there are over 1,500 street sweepers, specialized collection trucks, salters/sanders and front end loaders; there are 2,200 support vehicles and nine boats - and 26,000 street corner baskets. The department's budget is $575 million for the upcoming year, and the Commissioner is John J. Doherty, who started with the department in 1960 as a sanitation worker.
Replacing the efficient Fresh Kills Landfill operation will increase the actual garbage disposal costs to between double and quadruple the present figure. "Bail and rail" is the costliest; an efficient disposal via water transportation is best, but who will accept it? Maybe up North, the poor Maritime Provinces of Canada will provide the space (hint: start cranking up Henry Kissinger). Remember the unsuccessful 6,000 mile Long Island garbage barge journey down into the Southern states, in 1987? Knowing Mayor Giuliani's and Governor Pataki's bent for privatization, it may well be that industry rather than government will be called upon to solve the disposal problem. Let's hope not, that would be a cheap trick to avoid the responsibility of governance. The lobbyists of the garbage giants, Browning Ferris Industries, US Waste and WMX Technologies (a/k/a Waste Management) must be rubbing their hands in glee, not to speak of the Mafia, who, despite a series of City and Federal indictments for conspiracy still hold considerable sway in the private carting industry.
Now that the City and the State have declared their intentions, prices for landfills will certainly go up. That was a real smart move, and the New York taxpayer will, as usually, pay for it. We may also have the privilege of footing direct charges per bag or bale from each building, as they do in San Francisco, Seattle and Minneapolis and hundreds of other municipalities. The 26,000 corner baskets will disappear, and people will sneak garbage down to the street at midnight, or throw bags out of car windows. We may yet erect monuments for Messrs. Molinari, Giuliani and Pataki, for burying us in refuse. These monuments will not be in marble.
If the committee of 12 government representatives selected by the Mayor and the Governor has any gumption, it should rescind the decision to advance the closing of Fresh Kills by the year end 2001, and, instead, have the city offer to buy out the residents who need immediate relief from the emanations. The Sanitation Department, as recently as two years ago, saw 20 years worth of landfill space still left in Staten Island. The odor will not cease within appreciable time after the closing. Improvements, such as the increased capturing of the methane and other odor-reducing measures can go on while the landfill is operating, and the Sanitation people, by daily covering of the fill, have reduced the smells and the hungry gull population. It would be much more humanitarian to buy out and resettle the business offices and residents who find the odors unendurable, rather than having them wait for 30 years for the smell to subside. The relief would be immediate, and the cost would be fractional. People who bought property at Fresh Kills did it with their eyes open and accepted its shortcomings because real estate was less expensive. It is common, to buy near an airport or swamp and put up with the problems for the sake of saving money; I spend my vacations in the country next to the township's gravel storage, for the same reason. Do we complain - yes! Did we enter into the agreeement with our eyes open - yes! Do we get community help? No, unless there is a health hazard. Nobody in Staten island has sued sued for misrepresentation, nobody has collected for health damages. If people who bought real property cheap now want to increase their property values at the cost of the rest of New York taxpayers, it is not fair. But the politicos have decided, the political client and, apparently, big business interests have been served, and the public can go hang, both the people on Staten Island who want fair and immediate relief from the odor, and the people of New York City who cannot afford the ever-increasing costs of governance and cost shifting. The solution stinks, I claim foul play. Let's hear from you, City and State, and taxpayers!
Wally Dobelis thanks Lucian Chalfen, Sanitation Department's Assistant Commissioner For Public Affairs, for producing the departmental facts and figures. The speculations and conclusions of the continuing articles are the product of Wally's fertile (some say febrile) imagination, with no official assistance.
Change Your Lifestyle, Produce Less Garbage - Part III
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis 7/22/1996
No matter how the garbage situation resulting from the accelerated closing of the Fresh Kills Landfill (rescheduled for year-end 2001 instead of 2011) is resolved, the citizens will pay, because sending garbage by rail or boat out of state is more expensive than sending it by barge to good old Staten Island.
Fresh Kills today processes over 13,000 tons of garbage daily, brought in by barges. That is often expressed as 27,000,000 pounds, over three pounds for every man, woman and child in the city. The numbers do not include the New York Times and the glass, metal and plastic that go into recycling.
The 3,000 acre landfill, the size of five LaGuardia Airports, has some mountains of garbage as high as 150 feet (15 stories), covered with dirt and grass, and surrounded by flights of seagulls. The technology is a tourist attraction, with interested experts world-wide coming to study it regularly. Current dumping is confined to 800 acres. Fresh dumped refuse is covered fast, cutting down on the gull population's breakfast. But there is a decomposition process, emitting methane gas (about 1/20 of the total national emissions), 25 percent of which is captured and converted to fuel use. Nevertheless, the odor persists. There is also leachage (a hard word to pronounce), since the 48-year old dump has no liner, and rainwater brings solubles with some toxins into the surrounding waterways. After closing, the city will spend another $775 million over a 30-year period to stabilize the landfill, which includes some plastic membrane to stop future rain penetration, capturing the leachate and removing the toxins, and capturing more of the methane (it is a pollutant; think of New Zealand, world champion producer of lambshanks, suffering from the uncontrollable emanations of its 70 million sheep). Fortunately methane converts into natural gas. Will the process work? Well, the smaller Pelham Bay Landfill, actively accepting 2,600 tons a day for 15 years and closed in 1978, still brings leachate directly into Eastchester Bay at the rate of 30 to 50 gallons a minute. Note that closed landfills become parks and the responsibility for cleanup shifts to the Parks and Recreation Department.
The Mayor's committee of 12, appointed to resolve the problem of alternate ways of disposing the 13,000 tons of New York's residential garbage every day, has to come up with a solution by October 1. The end 2001 closing smells like a real estate speculators' and garbage haulers' dream, and I wish that wisdom would prevail, keeping Fresh Kills open, accelerating the continuing control of methane and leaching processes and offering some buyouts to seriously afflicted Staten Islanders at current market prices. But the committee is bound to recommend export, with some pious words involving more citizenly responsibility in recycling. This is a group of professionals from city and state agencies, including ecology, health and economic development people. Names are not available, and no publicity is given to their deliberations, not to speak of hearings. Cost shifting by charging the household (building, coop) for the garbage by the bag may be proposed. Should we the taxpayers not be part of the process of deliberation?
Parenthetically, isn't it peculiar how cost shifting back to the consumer has become the governments' answer to social problems? We see that when the Transit Authority charges school kids for subway and bus travel, and when the hospitals put the excess costs of Medicaid and Medicare patients on insured clients' bills, . What is government for, really? Just to pay civil servants' salaries?
The states that take our daily 12,000 tons of commercial garbage - Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Michigan and Indiana - really don't want an increase in garbage imports, no matter how much a starving locality needs the funds and how environmentally acceptable the imports are.The U.S. Senate has already passed a states' rights act permitting a ceiling on garbage imports, and its counterpart is pending in the House. Guy Molinari, Staten Island's Borough President, who forced the advance in the date of closing Fresh Kills from 2010 to 2001, does not want to be tagged as the assassin who buried New York in garbage, and claims that "we will beat the states in the courts." Yes, there is a Supreme Court decision that garbage movement qualifies as interstate commerce and therefore not within the purview of state laws. States cannot discriminate against chosen exporters or set arbitrary limits. This came up when in 1987 the Long Island barge with 3,100 tons of offal traveled for months through inland waterways futilely looking for a landfill site. Will this decision stand up in today's court?
So, there we are. My recommendation to buy Liberia and ship the garbage across the Atlantic came in a moment of despair over this irresponsible politically motivated government decisions, without plans, without regard for the consequences, pushing the responsibility of digging out from under the garbage on the community. I also blame several prior generations of government who side-stepped the garbage issue with feeble recycling efforts. But black humor and comic relief do not solve problems. More realistically, can we dispose of New York's garbage within the U.S.?
Well, we can change our ways to produce a relatively garbage-free environment. Will the lifestyles of New Yorkers and all other urban dwellers who do not live off the land have to alter radically to avoid getting buried under reeking garbage? Yes indeed, and the means are there, let me show you.
Most non-compostable, that is non-organic residential garbage comes from packaging. It is often asked: "Why do we need so much wrapping?" Packaging came as the result of mass production and wide distribution of agricultural goods, ease of transportation and less dependence on local products, public taste for off-season luxuries, and therefore increased need for better shelflife of food products. It killed Mom and Pop non-agribus small scale farming. Smalled packages became desirable as a result of more people and smaller living quarters in the cities, and therefore less shelf space in kitchens.
Some of us still know of "rushing the growler," that is going to a bar to have a reusable jug filled with beer from a reusable barrel. As a young child, I recall having reusable milk bottles filled from a twenty-gallon open-top milk can by a grocery clerk using a dipper (don't shudder, he closed the can between uses, with ladle and funnel inside). And today you can still order seltzer in reusable siphon bottles from a local soda maker. There are also greenmarkets supplying fresh vegetables and fruit all through the year, by storing the harvest in their local cold storage rooms, then bringing out the requisite amount for the market day. That is the way apples are supplied all year long, and the concept can be extended to some other fruit and locally grown vegetables. No need for most frozen vegetables, canned vegetables and fruit. Juices also can be served into reusable jars from reusable barrels. And the Japanese , for centuries, have brought home takeout food in beautiful stacked lightweight lacquer vessels. Consequently, we have the solutions for reducing the need for packaging and garbage in six major areas - beer, soda, vegetables, fruit, juice and takeout. Remember, nowadays we have the miracle of refrigeration at home. And a can of Coca-Cola could be reduced to a large pill, like Alka-Seltzer, plus water. Of course, they would have to change the refrain of their song to "Plop plop, fizz, fizz." Of course, it would hurt, but I'm willing to be brave. The real pain would be going to the Internet for the New York Times.
Of course, it would cost, more labor in the grocery store and less employment in the packaging industry. But it would also reduce destruction of forests and other natural resources. Again, refrigeration saves the day, the one great saving factor in preserving food which our forebears did not have. Everybody knows that the European discovery of the Far East was prompted by the need for spices that would help the taste of food turning rancid in the winter. Salt helped, and salt pork that kept was a major staple, as was smoked meat. This is no longer our problem.
Increasing the size of packaging of goods that cannot be sold fresh will further reduce garbage production. My cat's food now comes in a 15 oz can. In the drugstore, we can get a quart squeeze bottle of shampoo instead of a pint, and squeeze hair lotion instead of spraying it. Squeeze bottles are also reusable and refillable. Think of going back to reusable sanitary napkins and diapers, which should be not all that difficult, since we now have washing machines.
"Kia ora" (pronounced kiora) is the Maori for "hello," a bit classier than the Aussie "ay mate" (pronounced mite). Hands across the ocean and all that. This may be a local paper, but we are not provincial.
No matter how the garbage situation resulting from the accelerated closing of the Fresh Kills Landfill (rescheduled for year-end 2001 instead of 2011) is resolved, the citizens will pay, because sending garbage by rail or boat out of state is more expensive than sending it by barge to good old Staten Island.
Fresh Kills today processes over 13,000 tons of garbage daily, brought in by barges. That is often expressed as 27,000,000 pounds, over three pounds for every man, woman and child in the city. The numbers do not include the New York Times and the glass, metal and plastic that go into recycling.
The 3,000 acre landfill, the size of five LaGuardia Airports, has some mountains of garbage as high as 150 feet (15 stories), covered with dirt and grass, and surrounded by flights of seagulls. The technology is a tourist attraction, with interested experts world-wide coming to study it regularly. Current dumping is confined to 800 acres. Fresh dumped refuse is covered fast, cutting down on the gull population's breakfast. But there is a decomposition process, emitting methane gas (about 1/20 of the total national emissions), 25 percent of which is captured and converted to fuel use. Nevertheless, the odor persists. There is also leachage (a hard word to pronounce), since the 48-year old dump has no liner, and rainwater brings solubles with some toxins into the surrounding waterways. After closing, the city will spend another $775 million over a 30-year period to stabilize the landfill, which includes some plastic membrane to stop future rain penetration, capturing the leachate and removing the toxins, and capturing more of the methane (it is a pollutant; think of New Zealand, world champion producer of lambshanks, suffering from the uncontrollable emanations of its 70 million sheep). Fortunately methane converts into natural gas. Will the process work? Well, the smaller Pelham Bay Landfill, actively accepting 2,600 tons a day for 15 years and closed in 1978, still brings leachate directly into Eastchester Bay at the rate of 30 to 50 gallons a minute. Note that closed landfills become parks and the responsibility for cleanup shifts to the Parks and Recreation Department.
The Mayor's committee of 12, appointed to resolve the problem of alternate ways of disposing the 13,000 tons of New York's residential garbage every day, has to come up with a solution by October 1. The end 2001 closing smells like a real estate speculators' and garbage haulers' dream, and I wish that wisdom would prevail, keeping Fresh Kills open, accelerating the continuing control of methane and leaching processes and offering some buyouts to seriously afflicted Staten Islanders at current market prices. But the committee is bound to recommend export, with some pious words involving more citizenly responsibility in recycling. This is a group of professionals from city and state agencies, including ecology, health and economic development people. Names are not available, and no publicity is given to their deliberations, not to speak of hearings. Cost shifting by charging the household (building, coop) for the garbage by the bag may be proposed. Should we the taxpayers not be part of the process of deliberation?
Parenthetically, isn't it peculiar how cost shifting back to the consumer has become the governments' answer to social problems? We see that when the Transit Authority charges school kids for subway and bus travel, and when the hospitals put the excess costs of Medicaid and Medicare patients on insured clients' bills, . What is government for, really? Just to pay civil servants' salaries?
The states that take our daily 12,000 tons of commercial garbage - Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Michigan and Indiana - really don't want an increase in garbage imports, no matter how much a starving locality needs the funds and how environmentally acceptable the imports are.The U.S. Senate has already passed a states' rights act permitting a ceiling on garbage imports, and its counterpart is pending in the House. Guy Molinari, Staten Island's Borough President, who forced the advance in the date of closing Fresh Kills from 2010 to 2001, does not want to be tagged as the assassin who buried New York in garbage, and claims that "we will beat the states in the courts." Yes, there is a Supreme Court decision that garbage movement qualifies as interstate commerce and therefore not within the purview of state laws. States cannot discriminate against chosen exporters or set arbitrary limits. This came up when in 1987 the Long Island barge with 3,100 tons of offal traveled for months through inland waterways futilely looking for a landfill site. Will this decision stand up in today's court?
So, there we are. My recommendation to buy Liberia and ship the garbage across the Atlantic came in a moment of despair over this irresponsible politically motivated government decisions, without plans, without regard for the consequences, pushing the responsibility of digging out from under the garbage on the community. I also blame several prior generations of government who side-stepped the garbage issue with feeble recycling efforts. But black humor and comic relief do not solve problems. More realistically, can we dispose of New York's garbage within the U.S.?
Well, we can change our ways to produce a relatively garbage-free environment. Will the lifestyles of New Yorkers and all other urban dwellers who do not live off the land have to alter radically to avoid getting buried under reeking garbage? Yes indeed, and the means are there, let me show you.
Most non-compostable, that is non-organic residential garbage comes from packaging. It is often asked: "Why do we need so much wrapping?" Packaging came as the result of mass production and wide distribution of agricultural goods, ease of transportation and less dependence on local products, public taste for off-season luxuries, and therefore increased need for better shelflife of food products. It killed Mom and Pop non-agribus small scale farming. Smalled packages became desirable as a result of more people and smaller living quarters in the cities, and therefore less shelf space in kitchens.
Some of us still know of "rushing the growler," that is going to a bar to have a reusable jug filled with beer from a reusable barrel. As a young child, I recall having reusable milk bottles filled from a twenty-gallon open-top milk can by a grocery clerk using a dipper (don't shudder, he closed the can between uses, with ladle and funnel inside). And today you can still order seltzer in reusable siphon bottles from a local soda maker. There are also greenmarkets supplying fresh vegetables and fruit all through the year, by storing the harvest in their local cold storage rooms, then bringing out the requisite amount for the market day. That is the way apples are supplied all year long, and the concept can be extended to some other fruit and locally grown vegetables. No need for most frozen vegetables, canned vegetables and fruit. Juices also can be served into reusable jars from reusable barrels. And the Japanese , for centuries, have brought home takeout food in beautiful stacked lightweight lacquer vessels. Consequently, we have the solutions for reducing the need for packaging and garbage in six major areas - beer, soda, vegetables, fruit, juice and takeout. Remember, nowadays we have the miracle of refrigeration at home. And a can of Coca-Cola could be reduced to a large pill, like Alka-Seltzer, plus water. Of course, they would have to change the refrain of their song to "Plop plop, fizz, fizz." Of course, it would hurt, but I'm willing to be brave. The real pain would be going to the Internet for the New York Times.
Of course, it would cost, more labor in the grocery store and less employment in the packaging industry. But it would also reduce destruction of forests and other natural resources. Again, refrigeration saves the day, the one great saving factor in preserving food which our forebears did not have. Everybody knows that the European discovery of the Far East was prompted by the need for spices that would help the taste of food turning rancid in the winter. Salt helped, and salt pork that kept was a major staple, as was smoked meat. This is no longer our problem.
Increasing the size of packaging of goods that cannot be sold fresh will further reduce garbage production. My cat's food now comes in a 15 oz can. In the drugstore, we can get a quart squeeze bottle of shampoo instead of a pint, and squeeze hair lotion instead of spraying it. Squeeze bottles are also reusable and refillable. Think of going back to reusable sanitary napkins and diapers, which should be not all that difficult, since we now have washing machines.
"Kia ora" (pronounced kiora) is the Maori for "hello," a bit classier than the Aussie "ay mate" (pronounced mite). Hands across the ocean and all that. This may be a local paper, but we are not provincial.
Thursday, July 11, 1996
Have Radio, Will Travel - The Catskills
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
First about the travel. To go to the Catskills, we crossed the mighty Hudson River at Kingston and followed Route 199 into Route 28, the road marked picturesque by the AAA up to Boiceville. This is what I'd call the Middle Road to the Catskills, in Ulster County, a wide easy highway in the valley with mountain views on both sides,leading through the tourist country of the Game Farm, Catskills Railroad and the ubiquitous Esopus River with its rafting attractions. (The Lower is the Borscht Circuit Route 17, in Sullivan County, to Liberty, to the former Grossingers, Concord and the famous Roscoe Diner; the Upper is Route 23B over the Greene mountaintops to Oneonta in Otsego County, where I lost my 1977 Ford Maverick years ago. Oneonta is a college town with brick sidewalks and geranium pots hanging from streetlights on Main Street, just like Oxford. Route 28 becomes narrow, crooked and immensely picturesque in the poverty-struck farming country of Delavare County, above Fleischmans, Margaretville and particularly after the exit to New Kingston. Here the views are truly momentous and cows abound on vertical pastures.
Our Brooklyn Heights friends Tom and Julie, both amateur gourmet chefs, had recently acquired a 37 acre property with a cabin and a stream, cornfields and wildflower meadows, with retirement in mind, for the price of a studio apartment in a Manhattan coop. (You too can have equal pleasures if you don't mind up to four hours on on the road, much of it twisting, each way.) Their forever winding dirt driveway is kept accessible by a local contractor for $500 a year, and a carpenter last Fall jacked up the house and strengthened the supporting cinderblocks and the basement walls, just in time for the floods. That closed the exits for the field mice who seek refuge indoors during the harsh months. Julie fed the rapidly multiplying basement dwellers birdseed every weekend until the spring, when she trapped them in a Have-A-Heart trap, up to seven at a time, and released them behind the stream. That's a true New Yorker Liberal, a much maligned breed. New Yorkers will feed the needy and the homeless, but we do not condone corruption.
As for the radio part: we too are country folk, on this side of the mighty Hudson, in Columbia County. This is the time of the year when our ancient cat Missy, a dignified house cat, will begins to act like a youngster, chasing birds and snakes on the lawn and under the trees that we have planted in the past 16 years. This is also when the purple fruit of the crabapple tree outside the window start swelling, and we start looking for the Tanglewood Music Festival schedule in all seriousness. Lenox is only 40 miles away, and July, the starting month for the concerts, is upon us.
Over the years we have attended many open rehearsals of the Boston Philharmonic on Saturday mornings, and listened live to the Tanglewood concert broadcasts over WAMC, the Northwest corridor FM Public Radio network. (Their station identification takes a minute and two deep breaths of the announcer's lungs to detail. All of the stations invoke visions; WAMC Albany, originally the Albany Medical College station; Kingston, an ex-IBM town, dying; Middletown - Rt 17 to the Catskills, Roscoe Diner; Canajoharie, near Syracuse - the gorge; Ticonderoga - up North history, fort, Lake Champlain; Great Barrington, Mass., the top of our ski mountain where the station is located. Now a deep breath - Oneonta, hanging geranium baskets on Main Street, and 50 c beers; Newburgh and Rensellaer-Troy, sad poverty.)
The live Tanglewood concerts were announced, for years, by the slowest-speaking thoughtful musicologist with the deepest voice in radioland, and a name that's impossible to get right - Robert Gelertzman? Anyway, we knew him as Deep Throat.
Today, Deep Throat has a 7 to 12 AM Morning Pro Musica program on WAMC, Sat/Sun, and, while traveling to the Catskills, we caught a most delightful program centering on J.S. Bach's transpositions. I'm a sucker for the divine Chaconne, a movement in Bach's BWV 1001-5 (the acronym is for the Bach's Werke Verzeichnis by Schmiege, like the Kocher Register of Mozart) series of sonatas and partitas, solo pieces for an unaccompanied violin. Chaconne is a movement of Partita 1004, and we first heard it around 1985, in Carnegie Hall, performed by Millstein, who waddled out like a smiling penguin in a tails suit - and then he played, like an angel with a violin. There was never anything nobler in my musical experience than this. I could have fallen down and adored him. Of all the recordings of the Partita I have acquired since none match Millstein's cool remote passion, if you can imagine it.
Anyway, Deep Throat teased us along by playing the Chaconne's twin, the Fugue from the Sonata 1001 in G-minor, and its transcriptions for organ, Bach's own Prelude and Fugue (539 BWV), and for lute (123 BWV). There was a Nicholas Garousis guitar version too, and we heard it. All this was getting me excited, in anticipation, and Deep Throat worked the audience. Before he played the Chaconne, from Partita 1004 in D-minor, recorded by Arthur Grumio, Deep Throat teased us, explaining that a Chaconne is like a Passacaglia, utilizing harmonic variations, except that it uses needs a continuo and the Passacaglia uses an ostinato. I was dying. But then he played it, followed by the Firrucio Busone piano transcript from 1987, popular but ordinary, and broke out the Brahms' earlier, 1878 Study for piano, left hand only, played by - you guessed right - Leon Fleischer. Fleischer, the musical director of Tanglewood, lost the use of his right hand twenty years ago. Now we know of it as ergo???, Glen Gould had it too, but Fleischer pulled out, an in the 1995 Tanglewood season he was the surprise guest, playing two-handed piano , at the Seiji Ozawa-Yo Yo Ma anniversary performance. The Brahms was the more sensitive transcription, despite Busoni's popularity. I know there is a also a Andres Segovia guitar version, which did not get mentioned.
I'd die listening to J.S. Bach, but not the oeuvre. Pasacaglia and Fugue in , xxx. P.D. Q. Bach, otherwise known a xx, has it down. But this is not a paean of Bach, it is about Public Radio, to which we listen while traveling cross- Northeast. New York to Boston, Boston to Cape Cod, we move from station to station as we travel through the short range of FM transmitters. WGBH in Boston is a key station.
While within the WAMC area, we find out the true range of Prof Allen Chartock of SUNY New Paltz, whom New Yorkers remember of from the weekly dialogue program with Governor Mario Cuomo, who when cornered gave as much as he got, accusing Allen, a Massachusentsian, of having no right to talk New York politics. It was a good act, and the sensible Carl McCall interviews do not replace the fun. Allen ia a WAMC power, seemingly in charge of the Environment and Govenment programming too. Doesn't he ever sleep?
Wally has found out since that Deep Throat is Robert G. Lurtsema of WGBH, Public Radio station in Boston And Chartock is not infallible - during the pre- 4th of July period he chortled that the threat of missed vacations (recess is end June to January, except for committee chairs and an occasional recall by the Gov) would be the only thing that would force the legislators to complete the budget. But he was wrong - the legislators took, the holiday, left the staff memners to dicker on the remaining details, and came back in July to pass the law. School districts are really hurting, they had to borrow money for expenses, and my local school board in Columbia County, in sheer frustration, voted to bill the Gov $8,000, the interest it cost them.
Lulus are bonuses members get based on senior and comm chairmanship.
Member items are based on a complex formula, which involves seniority and delegation decisions. Thus Manh del may decide to put in extra money for an AIDS facility by giving it to the member in whose distr it resides. Not quite parochial. Discret funds. Cheese Museum .Steve fully funded the Citizens United Against Riverwalk. Sm amount may be crucial for a
First about the travel. To go to the Catskills, we crossed the mighty Hudson River at Kingston and followed Route 199 into Route 28, the road marked picturesque by the AAA up to Boiceville. This is what I'd call the Middle Road to the Catskills, in Ulster County, a wide easy highway in the valley with mountain views on both sides,leading through the tourist country of the Game Farm, Catskills Railroad and the ubiquitous Esopus River with its rafting attractions. (The Lower is the Borscht Circuit Route 17, in Sullivan County, to Liberty, to the former Grossingers, Concord and the famous Roscoe Diner; the Upper is Route 23B over the Greene mountaintops to Oneonta in Otsego County, where I lost my 1977 Ford Maverick years ago. Oneonta is a college town with brick sidewalks and geranium pots hanging from streetlights on Main Street, just like Oxford. Route 28 becomes narrow, crooked and immensely picturesque in the poverty-struck farming country of Delavare County, above Fleischmans, Margaretville and particularly after the exit to New Kingston. Here the views are truly momentous and cows abound on vertical pastures.
Our Brooklyn Heights friends Tom and Julie, both amateur gourmet chefs, had recently acquired a 37 acre property with a cabin and a stream, cornfields and wildflower meadows, with retirement in mind, for the price of a studio apartment in a Manhattan coop. (You too can have equal pleasures if you don't mind up to four hours on on the road, much of it twisting, each way.) Their forever winding dirt driveway is kept accessible by a local contractor for $500 a year, and a carpenter last Fall jacked up the house and strengthened the supporting cinderblocks and the basement walls, just in time for the floods. That closed the exits for the field mice who seek refuge indoors during the harsh months. Julie fed the rapidly multiplying basement dwellers birdseed every weekend until the spring, when she trapped them in a Have-A-Heart trap, up to seven at a time, and released them behind the stream. That's a true New Yorker Liberal, a much maligned breed. New Yorkers will feed the needy and the homeless, but we do not condone corruption.
As for the radio part: we too are country folk, on this side of the mighty Hudson, in Columbia County. This is the time of the year when our ancient cat Missy, a dignified house cat, will begins to act like a youngster, chasing birds and snakes on the lawn and under the trees that we have planted in the past 16 years. This is also when the purple fruit of the crabapple tree outside the window start swelling, and we start looking for the Tanglewood Music Festival schedule in all seriousness. Lenox is only 40 miles away, and July, the starting month for the concerts, is upon us.
Over the years we have attended many open rehearsals of the Boston Philharmonic on Saturday mornings, and listened live to the Tanglewood concert broadcasts over WAMC, the Northwest corridor FM Public Radio network. (Their station identification takes a minute and two deep breaths of the announcer's lungs to detail. All of the stations invoke visions; WAMC Albany, originally the Albany Medical College station; Kingston, an ex-IBM town, dying; Middletown - Rt 17 to the Catskills, Roscoe Diner; Canajoharie, near Syracuse - the gorge; Ticonderoga - up North history, fort, Lake Champlain; Great Barrington, Mass., the top of our ski mountain where the station is located. Now a deep breath - Oneonta, hanging geranium baskets on Main Street, and 50 c beers; Newburgh and Rensellaer-Troy, sad poverty.)
The live Tanglewood concerts were announced, for years, by the slowest-speaking thoughtful musicologist with the deepest voice in radioland, and a name that's impossible to get right - Robert Gelertzman? Anyway, we knew him as Deep Throat.
Today, Deep Throat has a 7 to 12 AM Morning Pro Musica program on WAMC, Sat/Sun, and, while traveling to the Catskills, we caught a most delightful program centering on J.S. Bach's transpositions. I'm a sucker for the divine Chaconne, a movement in Bach's BWV 1001-5 (the acronym is for the Bach's Werke Verzeichnis by Schmiege, like the Kocher Register of Mozart) series of sonatas and partitas, solo pieces for an unaccompanied violin. Chaconne is a movement of Partita 1004, and we first heard it around 1985, in Carnegie Hall, performed by Millstein, who waddled out like a smiling penguin in a tails suit - and then he played, like an angel with a violin. There was never anything nobler in my musical experience than this. I could have fallen down and adored him. Of all the recordings of the Partita I have acquired since none match Millstein's cool remote passion, if you can imagine it.
Anyway, Deep Throat teased us along by playing the Chaconne's twin, the Fugue from the Sonata 1001 in G-minor, and its transcriptions for organ, Bach's own Prelude and Fugue (539 BWV), and for lute (123 BWV). There was a Nicholas Garousis guitar version too, and we heard it. All this was getting me excited, in anticipation, and Deep Throat worked the audience. Before he played the Chaconne, from Partita 1004 in D-minor, recorded by Arthur Grumio, Deep Throat teased us, explaining that a Chaconne is like a Passacaglia, utilizing harmonic variations, except that it uses needs a continuo and the Passacaglia uses an ostinato. I was dying. But then he played it, followed by the Firrucio Busone piano transcript from 1987, popular but ordinary, and broke out the Brahms' earlier, 1878 Study for piano, left hand only, played by - you guessed right - Leon Fleischer. Fleischer, the musical director of Tanglewood, lost the use of his right hand twenty years ago. Now we know of it as ergo???, Glen Gould had it too, but Fleischer pulled out, an in the 1995 Tanglewood season he was the surprise guest, playing two-handed piano , at the Seiji Ozawa-Yo Yo Ma anniversary performance. The Brahms was the more sensitive transcription, despite Busoni's popularity. I know there is a also a Andres Segovia guitar version, which did not get mentioned.
I'd die listening to J.S. Bach, but not the oeuvre. Pasacaglia and Fugue in , xxx. P.D. Q. Bach, otherwise known a xx, has it down. But this is not a paean of Bach, it is about Public Radio, to which we listen while traveling cross- Northeast. New York to Boston, Boston to Cape Cod, we move from station to station as we travel through the short range of FM transmitters. WGBH in Boston is a key station.
While within the WAMC area, we find out the true range of Prof Allen Chartock of SUNY New Paltz, whom New Yorkers remember of from the weekly dialogue program with Governor Mario Cuomo, who when cornered gave as much as he got, accusing Allen, a Massachusentsian, of having no right to talk New York politics. It was a good act, and the sensible Carl McCall interviews do not replace the fun. Allen ia a WAMC power, seemingly in charge of the Environment and Govenment programming too. Doesn't he ever sleep?
Wally has found out since that Deep Throat is Robert G. Lurtsema of WGBH, Public Radio station in Boston And Chartock is not infallible - during the pre- 4th of July period he chortled that the threat of missed vacations (recess is end June to January, except for committee chairs and an occasional recall by the Gov) would be the only thing that would force the legislators to complete the budget. But he was wrong - the legislators took, the holiday, left the staff memners to dicker on the remaining details, and came back in July to pass the law. School districts are really hurting, they had to borrow money for expenses, and my local school board in Columbia County, in sheer frustration, voted to bill the Gov $8,000, the interest it cost them.
Lulus are bonuses members get based on senior and comm chairmanship.
Member items are based on a complex formula, which involves seniority and delegation decisions. Thus Manh del may decide to put in extra money for an AIDS facility by giving it to the member in whose distr it resides. Not quite parochial. Discret funds. Cheese Museum .Steve fully funded the Citizens United Against Riverwalk. Sm amount may be crucial for a
Tuesday, July 09, 1996
Start Shrinking Your Trash, You Will Soon Have to Pay Disposal Fees, and Some Global Observations
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
For most New Yorkers garbage is a non-subject, apart from complaining about the noise of the sanitation trucks early in the morning. The apartment dweller will do his grudging bit of separating newspapers, cans, bottles and plastic, throw the refuse down the chute and the stuff will disappear, in some dump with the attractive name of Fresh Kills, far away in in Staten Island.
But Staten Island has had it, and their mighty Beep Guy Molinari who delivered the Borough's vote to Mayor Giuliani and Governor Pataki has called in his markers, requesting early closing of the dump, and suing for it, under the Clean Air Act. And as of end of May his political debtors agreed to accelerate the closing of Mount Trash, the 3,000 acre Fresh Kills Landfill, from a projected year 2010 to year-end 2001. This was a highly politically motivated decision. One cannot help but think that certain well-established statesmanlike concepts of the flavor of "when the day comes, we will be elsewhere," and "we'll stick it to a committee to figure out how to get rid of the daily 13,000 tons, and when they make the public pay, it will not be our fault" were involved.
In the absence of a plan from either City or State governments, a clear case of non-feasance, let us, the citizens, examine the alternatives. Stay with me, the good guys win on the last page.
First, I offer the example of what happened in my home-away -from-home, Columbia County, 40 miles South of Albany, admittedly a rural area with 60,000 empoverished souls on 600 square miles of underused agricultural land. It too closed all of its landfills around 1990, and the NIMBY townships have fought off commercial proposals offering both landfill and burn plants, even though the industry offered plenty of jobs. This resulted in exporting garbage to nearby Troy. When that landfill closed two years ago, Columbia County considered sending its trash ("Bail-and-Rail") to Ohio, at a huge expense. Fortunately, a purportedly Mafia-linked landfill in the even poorer next-door Greene County became available. Garbage disposal now costs $2 for a 30 gallon bag, plus a hauler fee, or you deliver it yourself to a transfer station. Dumping a bicycle costs $5, a refrigerator $12. Recycling is rigorous, because sorted recyclables are accepted free. I don't quite see an apartment dweller hauling bags to a transfer station in the South Bronx, but the fee charges for bags of trash will eventually come to us city dwellers. Mark my words, and start shrinking your trash, you too will be rigorously recycling. But what about the poor? In Columbia County some secretly and illegally bury trash in their back yards (I found out, belatedly, that a renegade contractor buried a washer/dryer under my lawn rather than hauling it and paying the $12), and destroy their progeny's heritage. You don't have that advantage.
Well, what about giving the household trash to NYC's commercial haulers who are independent of city dumps? The 12,000 daily tons of commercial waste, which since 1957 has been collected by 600 Mafia-ridden carting companies from the city's 250,000 businesses have long been exported by rail to poor areas in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Indiana (sludge from sewage treatment plants goes to Texas) at an annual cost of $1.5 billion in hauling fees. Mayor Giuliani has had some 23 companies and four associations indicted for corruption. The carters' maximum charge permitted was $47 for a yard of compacted and $14.7 for loose waste (a large grocery pays $15,000, a restaurant $50,000 a year; and you wonder why food costs so much), and even the average charges are a multiple of those of Boston, L.A. and Chicago. The local haulers had succeeded in scaring away national companies such as the Browning Ferris Industries (their manager found a bleeding dog's head on his doorstep, with a "Welcome to New York" card), but some new competition has lowered certain rates as much as 40 percent. Recently BFI, USA Waste and WMX Technologies, the three big national waste removers, have made inroads in the city, but none of them can cope with the potentially doubled load of the added residential waste, even at $60 a ton, as opposed to the Sanitation Department's claimed cost of $14 a ton (known to be a much understated figure). And now the four recipient states are rebelling against an increased volume of garbage from New York, claiming that we don't do enough recycling (14 percent against the legally required 25, which some states have attained). Meanwhile Mayor Giuliani is cutting next year's recycling budget by 40 percent. Also, a law permitting limits on garbage imports has already passed the US Senate, and one is pending in the House. No matter how much we are willing to pay, some doors are slamming shut.
All of the above points to a whole new kind of future ahead of us, New Yorkers and, by extension, all Americans and other inhabitants of Spaceship Earth. In the long run we have to severely cut the production of goods that cannot be decomposed, recycled or reused: metal and wax food containers, rows of nothing but plastic goods on drugstore shelves will have to go, maybe even the thick New York Times will have to become a thing of the past. A new engineering science and industry, a new lifestyle is coming, to cope with garbage. Graduates, forget the dying arts of medicine and law. Let me whisper just one word to you. (Why does the tune of "Mrs Robinson" suddenly come to mind?). And one additional word: overpopulation. There will be a global attack on this root of all evils, population growth. The world is exploding because of such humanitarian activities as curbing infant death, medical research and increasing life span in all countries, doubling the Earth's population every 37 years. Consequently, the planet is dying. Ground water level is receding, arable land is eroding and forests are disappearing in 17 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Think of the internecine fraternal warfare and destruction in Bosnia, Rwanda, Chechnia, Cambodia, Peru, Liberia, Somalia, the terrorism in Middle East and Ireland and the institutionalized crime in Russia, Philippines and other marginal democracies. Much of these are attributable to the underlying causes of the shrinking means of earning a living, by far too many people driven off the land and into the cities, fired up by the surface causes of religion and ethnicity.
I offer a generous gift to the Mayor's committee of 12 professionals charged with pulling the rabbit out of the hat by October 1, an idea that will save this country and potentially the world from suffocating in its own refuse: have New York buy a small West African oceanside country and convert it into the next Fresh Kills. Take a country that has no water, no remaining industry, where the people are killing each other and the government is corrupt, such as Liberia. Henry Kissinger should be able to do a deal. This purchase would be a truly humanitarian act of mercy, stopping the wars and providing employment forever. It will spawn side industries: New York's garbage is rich in discarded blue jeans and Ralph Lauren polo shirts that can be re-exported to Canal Street for a nice profit.
Further, convert dangerous leaking oil tankers into trash haulers, instead of letting them be stripped and rot on Pakistan's shores. Make the New York's garbage barges sea-worthy, reviving Brooklyn's Navy Yard. (I would not give the job to Staten Island, they had their chance at secession and a lifelong holdup of the four boroughs by escalating the Fresh Kills tipping fees so that no Staten Islander, man, woman or child would ever have to have a job and could live off the garbage revenue. But they blew it. Tough.)
This venture will revive our city: brokering landfill deals with other cities, states and countries desperate with garbage will make New York, Inc. a rich business enterprise. The great financial center will boom, providing employment and new tax revenue. New York will not only balance the budget but also pay its Medicaid bills. City patronage jobs will come back.
Of course, you cannot just buy a country any more, only cocaine dealers can do it. You rent it on a hundred year lease with option to renew, net net. But if Africa does not cooperate - though they make short shrift of NIMBYs, think of Nigeria - I have a fallback option: buy one of those immense Air Force or Army bases that is about to close, or a bombing range. New York's garbage must be a lot better neighbor than explosives, atomic or conventional.
I rest my case. Remember you heard of it here first.
More of the Dobelis Plan and other life-and-death garbage matters soon. NIMBY stands for "Not In My Back Yard," a well-established name for protesters against encroachments of various kinds. This is not to be confused with SIMBY, or "Stay In My Back Yard," a name given by the New York Times editorial page writers in 1987 or thereabouts to Wally's Committee to Save the Police Academy (CSPA).
Some facts: The Sanitation Department has a budget of $575 million for the upcoming year; there are 7,200 uniformed members of a total staff of 9,800. Of the 6,000 vehicles 2,000 are for collections, 1,000 are out in the streets daily.
Wally Dobelis thanks Assistant Commissioner Lucian Chalsen for the
2200 vs 3000
No matter how the garbage situation resulting fron the closing of the Fresh Kills Landfill 5 1/2 years from now is resolved, the citizens will pay.
Fresh Kills today processes over 13,000 tons of garbage daily. That is often expressed as 27,000,000 pounds, over three pounds for every man, woman and child in the city. That does not include the New York Times and other recycled material.
The 3,000 acre landfill, the size of 225 Yankee Stadiums, has some mountains of garbage as high as 20 stories, covered with dirt and grass. Fresh dumping is covered fast, cutting down on the gulls population's breakfast. But there is a decomposition process, emitting methane gas (about 1/20 of the national emissions), 5 percent of which is captured and converted to fuel use. Nevertheless, the odor persists. There is also leachage,
since the 48-year ol dump has noliner, and rainwater brings solubles with some toxins into the surrounding waterways.
This is probably not as bad as the smaller Pelham Bay Landfill, active for 15 years and closed in 1978, which brings leachate
There will be less people, because tax based relief payments and school subsidies for large families will go; tax-funded research to increase the life span of the non-producing elderly will go.
There will be less people, because tax based relief payments and school subsidies for large families will go; tax-funded research to increase the life span of the non-producing elderly will go.
For most New Yorkers garbage is a non-subject, apart from complaining about the noise of the sanitation trucks early in the morning. The apartment dweller will do his grudging bit of separating newspapers, cans, bottles and plastic, throw the refuse down the chute and the stuff will disappear, in some dump with the attractive name of Fresh Kills, far away in in Staten Island.
But Staten Island has had it, and their mighty Beep Guy Molinari who delivered the Borough's vote to Mayor Giuliani and Governor Pataki has called in his markers, requesting early closing of the dump, and suing for it, under the Clean Air Act. And as of end of May his political debtors agreed to accelerate the closing of Mount Trash, the 3,000 acre Fresh Kills Landfill, from a projected year 2010 to year-end 2001. This was a highly politically motivated decision. One cannot help but think that certain well-established statesmanlike concepts of the flavor of "when the day comes, we will be elsewhere," and "we'll stick it to a committee to figure out how to get rid of the daily 13,000 tons, and when they make the public pay, it will not be our fault" were involved.
In the absence of a plan from either City or State governments, a clear case of non-feasance, let us, the citizens, examine the alternatives. Stay with me, the good guys win on the last page.
First, I offer the example of what happened in my home-away -from-home, Columbia County, 40 miles South of Albany, admittedly a rural area with 60,000 empoverished souls on 600 square miles of underused agricultural land. It too closed all of its landfills around 1990, and the NIMBY townships have fought off commercial proposals offering both landfill and burn plants, even though the industry offered plenty of jobs. This resulted in exporting garbage to nearby Troy. When that landfill closed two years ago, Columbia County considered sending its trash ("Bail-and-Rail") to Ohio, at a huge expense. Fortunately, a purportedly Mafia-linked landfill in the even poorer next-door Greene County became available. Garbage disposal now costs $2 for a 30 gallon bag, plus a hauler fee, or you deliver it yourself to a transfer station. Dumping a bicycle costs $5, a refrigerator $12. Recycling is rigorous, because sorted recyclables are accepted free. I don't quite see an apartment dweller hauling bags to a transfer station in the South Bronx, but the fee charges for bags of trash will eventually come to us city dwellers. Mark my words, and start shrinking your trash, you too will be rigorously recycling. But what about the poor? In Columbia County some secretly and illegally bury trash in their back yards (I found out, belatedly, that a renegade contractor buried a washer/dryer under my lawn rather than hauling it and paying the $12), and destroy their progeny's heritage. You don't have that advantage.
Well, what about giving the household trash to NYC's commercial haulers who are independent of city dumps? The 12,000 daily tons of commercial waste, which since 1957 has been collected by 600 Mafia-ridden carting companies from the city's 250,000 businesses have long been exported by rail to poor areas in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Indiana (sludge from sewage treatment plants goes to Texas) at an annual cost of $1.5 billion in hauling fees. Mayor Giuliani has had some 23 companies and four associations indicted for corruption. The carters' maximum charge permitted was $47 for a yard of compacted and $14.7 for loose waste (a large grocery pays $15,000, a restaurant $50,000 a year; and you wonder why food costs so much), and even the average charges are a multiple of those of Boston, L.A. and Chicago. The local haulers had succeeded in scaring away national companies such as the Browning Ferris Industries (their manager found a bleeding dog's head on his doorstep, with a "Welcome to New York" card), but some new competition has lowered certain rates as much as 40 percent. Recently BFI, USA Waste and WMX Technologies, the three big national waste removers, have made inroads in the city, but none of them can cope with the potentially doubled load of the added residential waste, even at $60 a ton, as opposed to the Sanitation Department's claimed cost of $14 a ton (known to be a much understated figure). And now the four recipient states are rebelling against an increased volume of garbage from New York, claiming that we don't do enough recycling (14 percent against the legally required 25, which some states have attained). Meanwhile Mayor Giuliani is cutting next year's recycling budget by 40 percent. Also, a law permitting limits on garbage imports has already passed the US Senate, and one is pending in the House. No matter how much we are willing to pay, some doors are slamming shut.
All of the above points to a whole new kind of future ahead of us, New Yorkers and, by extension, all Americans and other inhabitants of Spaceship Earth. In the long run we have to severely cut the production of goods that cannot be decomposed, recycled or reused: metal and wax food containers, rows of nothing but plastic goods on drugstore shelves will have to go, maybe even the thick New York Times will have to become a thing of the past. A new engineering science and industry, a new lifestyle is coming, to cope with garbage. Graduates, forget the dying arts of medicine and law. Let me whisper just one word to you. (Why does the tune of "Mrs Robinson" suddenly come to mind?). And one additional word: overpopulation. There will be a global attack on this root of all evils, population growth. The world is exploding because of such humanitarian activities as curbing infant death, medical research and increasing life span in all countries, doubling the Earth's population every 37 years. Consequently, the planet is dying. Ground water level is receding, arable land is eroding and forests are disappearing in 17 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Think of the internecine fraternal warfare and destruction in Bosnia, Rwanda, Chechnia, Cambodia, Peru, Liberia, Somalia, the terrorism in Middle East and Ireland and the institutionalized crime in Russia, Philippines and other marginal democracies. Much of these are attributable to the underlying causes of the shrinking means of earning a living, by far too many people driven off the land and into the cities, fired up by the surface causes of religion and ethnicity.
I offer a generous gift to the Mayor's committee of 12 professionals charged with pulling the rabbit out of the hat by October 1, an idea that will save this country and potentially the world from suffocating in its own refuse: have New York buy a small West African oceanside country and convert it into the next Fresh Kills. Take a country that has no water, no remaining industry, where the people are killing each other and the government is corrupt, such as Liberia. Henry Kissinger should be able to do a deal. This purchase would be a truly humanitarian act of mercy, stopping the wars and providing employment forever. It will spawn side industries: New York's garbage is rich in discarded blue jeans and Ralph Lauren polo shirts that can be re-exported to Canal Street for a nice profit.
Further, convert dangerous leaking oil tankers into trash haulers, instead of letting them be stripped and rot on Pakistan's shores. Make the New York's garbage barges sea-worthy, reviving Brooklyn's Navy Yard. (I would not give the job to Staten Island, they had their chance at secession and a lifelong holdup of the four boroughs by escalating the Fresh Kills tipping fees so that no Staten Islander, man, woman or child would ever have to have a job and could live off the garbage revenue. But they blew it. Tough.)
This venture will revive our city: brokering landfill deals with other cities, states and countries desperate with garbage will make New York, Inc. a rich business enterprise. The great financial center will boom, providing employment and new tax revenue. New York will not only balance the budget but also pay its Medicaid bills. City patronage jobs will come back.
Of course, you cannot just buy a country any more, only cocaine dealers can do it. You rent it on a hundred year lease with option to renew, net net. But if Africa does not cooperate - though they make short shrift of NIMBYs, think of Nigeria - I have a fallback option: buy one of those immense Air Force or Army bases that is about to close, or a bombing range. New York's garbage must be a lot better neighbor than explosives, atomic or conventional.
I rest my case. Remember you heard of it here first.
More of the Dobelis Plan and other life-and-death garbage matters soon. NIMBY stands for "Not In My Back Yard," a well-established name for protesters against encroachments of various kinds. This is not to be confused with SIMBY, or "Stay In My Back Yard," a name given by the New York Times editorial page writers in 1987 or thereabouts to Wally's Committee to Save the Police Academy (CSPA).
Some facts: The Sanitation Department has a budget of $575 million for the upcoming year; there are 7,200 uniformed members of a total staff of 9,800. Of the 6,000 vehicles 2,000 are for collections, 1,000 are out in the streets daily.
Wally Dobelis thanks Assistant Commissioner Lucian Chalsen for the
2200 vs 3000
No matter how the garbage situation resulting fron the closing of the Fresh Kills Landfill 5 1/2 years from now is resolved, the citizens will pay.
Fresh Kills today processes over 13,000 tons of garbage daily. That is often expressed as 27,000,000 pounds, over three pounds for every man, woman and child in the city. That does not include the New York Times and other recycled material.
The 3,000 acre landfill, the size of 225 Yankee Stadiums, has some mountains of garbage as high as 20 stories, covered with dirt and grass. Fresh dumping is covered fast, cutting down on the gulls population's breakfast. But there is a decomposition process, emitting methane gas (about 1/20 of the national emissions), 5 percent of which is captured and converted to fuel use. Nevertheless, the odor persists. There is also leachage,
since the 48-year ol dump has noliner, and rainwater brings solubles with some toxins into the surrounding waterways.
This is probably not as bad as the smaller Pelham Bay Landfill, active for 15 years and closed in 1978, which brings leachate
There will be less people, because tax based relief payments and school subsidies for large families will go; tax-funded research to increase the life span of the non-producing elderly will go.
There will be less people, because tax based relief payments and school subsidies for large families will go; tax-funded research to increase the life span of the non-producing elderly will go.
Start Shrinking Your Trash, You Will Soon Have to Pay Disposal Fees, and Some Global Observations
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis 7/9/1996
For most New Yorkers garbage is a non-subject, apart from complaining about the noise of the sanitation trucks early in the morning. The apartment dweller will do his grudging bit of separating newspapers, cans, bottles and plastic, throw the refuse down the chute and the stuff will disappear, in some dump with the attractive name of Fresh Kills, far away in in Staten Island.
But Staten Island has had it, and their mighty Beep Guy Molinari who delivered the Borough's vote to Mayor Giuliani and Governor Pataki has called in his markers, requesting early closing of the dump, and suing for it, under the Clean Air Act. And as of end of May his political debtors agreed to accelerate the closing of Mount Trash, the 3,000 acre Fresh Kills Landfill, from a projected year 2010 to year-end 2001. This was a highly politically motivated decision. One cannot help but think that certain well-established statesmanlike concepts of the flavor of "when the day comes, we will be elsewhere," and "we'll stick it to a committee to figure out how to get rid of the daily 13,000 tons, and when they make the public pay, it will not be our fault" were involved.
In the absence of a plan from either City or State governments, a clear case of non-feasance, let us, the citizens, examine the alternatives. Stay with me, the good guys win on the last page.
First, I offer the example of what happened in my home-away -from-home, Columbia County, 40 miles South of Albany, admittedly a rural area with 60,000 empoverished souls on 600 square miles of underused agricultural land. It too closed all of its landfills around 1990, and the NIMBY townships have fought off commercial proposals offering both landfill and burn plants, even though the industry offered plenty of jobs. This resulted in exporting garbage to nearby Troy. When that landfill closed two years ago, Columbia County considered sending its trash ("Bail-and-Rail") to Ohio, at a huge expense. Fortunately, a purportedly Mafia-linked landfill in the even poorer next-door Greene County became available. Garbage disposal now costs $2 for a 30 gallon bag, plus a hauler fee, or you deliver it yourself to a transfer station. Dumping a bicycle costs $5, a refrigerator $12. Recycling is rigorous, because sorted recyclables are accepted free. I don't quite see an apartment dweller hauling bags to a transfer station in the South Bronx, but the fee charges for bags of trash will eventually come to us city dwellers. Mark my words, and start shrinking your trash, you too will be rigorously recycling. But what about the poor? In Columbia County some secretly and illegally bury trash in their back yards (I found out, belatedly, that a renegade contractor buried a washer/dryer under my lawn rather than hauling it and paying the $12), and destroy their progeny's heritage. You don't have that advantage.
Well, what about giving the household trash to NYC's commercial haulers who are independent of city dumps? The 12,000 daily tons of commercial waste, which since 1957 has been collected by 600 Mafia-ridden carting companies from the city's 250,000 businesses have long been exported by rail to poor areas in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Indiana (sludge from sewage treatment plants goes to Texas) at an annual cost of $1.5 billion in hauling fees. Mayor Giuliani has had some 23 companies and four associations indicted for corruption. The carters' maximum charge permitted was $47 for a yard of compacted and $14.7 for loose waste (a large grocery pays $15,000, a restaurant $50,000 a year; and you wonder why food costs so much), and even the average charges are a multiple of those of Boston, L.A. and Chicago. The local haulers had succeeded in scaring away national companies such as the Browning Ferris Industries (their manager found a bleeding dog's head on his doorstep, with a "Welcome to New York" card), but some new competition has lowered certain rates as much as 40 percent. Recently BFI, USA Waste and WMX Technologies, the three big national waste removers, have made inroads in the city, but none of them can cope with the potentially doubled load of the added residential waste, even at $60 a ton, as opposed to the Sanitation Department's claimed cost of $14 a ton (known to be a much understated figure). And now the four recipient states are rebelling against an increased volume of garbage from New York, claiming that we don't do enough recycling (14 percent against the legally required 25, which some states have attained). Meanwhile Mayor Giuliani is cutting next year's recycling budget by 40 percent. Also, a law permitting limits on garbage imports has already passed the US Senate, and one is pending in the House. No matter how much we are willing to pay, some doors are slamming shut.
All of the above points to a whole new kind of future ahead of us, New Yorkers and, by extension, all Americans and other inhabitants of Spaceship Earth. In the long run we have to severely cut the production of goods that cannot be decomposed, recycled or reused: metal and wax food containers, rows of nothing but plastic goods on drugstore shelves will have to go, maybe even the thick New York Times will have to become a thing of the past. A new engineering science and industry, a new lifestyle is coming, to cope with garbage. Graduates, forget the dying arts of medicine and law. Let me whisper just one word to you. (Why does the tune of "Mrs Robinson" suddenly come to mind?). And one additional word: overpopulation. There will be a global attack on this root of all evils, population growth. The world is exploding because of such humanitarian activities as curbing infant death, medical research and increasing life span in all countries, doubling the Earth's population every 37 years. Consequently, the planet is dying. Ground water level is receding, arable land is eroding and forests are disappearing in 17 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Think of the internecine fraternal warfare and destruction in Bosnia, Rwanda, Chechnia, Cambodia, Peru, Liberia, Somalia, the terrorism in Middle East and Ireland and the institutionalized crime in Russia, Philippines and other marginal democracies. Much of these are attributable to the underlying causes of the shrinking means of earning a living, by far too many people driven off the land and into the cities, fired up by the surface causes of religion and ethnicity.
I offer a generous gift to the Mayor's committee of 12 professionals charged with pulling the rabbit out of the hat by October 1, an idea that will save this country and potentially the world from suffocating in its own refuse: have New York buy a small West African oceanside country and convert it into the next Fresh Kills. Take a country that has no water, no remaining industry, where the people are killing each other and the government is corrupt, such as Liberia. Henry Kissinger should be able to do a deal. This purchase would be a truly humanitarian act of mercy, stopping the wars and providing employment forever. It will spawn side industries: New York's garbage is rich in discarded blue jeans and Ralph Lauren polo shirts that can be re-exported to Canal Street for a nice profit.
Further, convert dangerous leaking oil tankers into trash haulers, instead of letting them be stripped and rot on Pakistan's shores. Make the New York's garbage barges sea-worthy, reviving Brooklyn's Navy Yard. (I would not give the job to Staten Island, they had their chance at secession and a lifelong holdup of the four boroughs by escalating the Fresh Kills tipping fees so that no Staten Islander, man, woman or child would ever have to have a job and could live off the garbage revenue. But they blew it. Tough.)
This venture will revive our city: brokering landfill deals with other cities, states and countries desperate with garbage will make New York, Inc. a rich business enterprise. The great financial center will boom, providing employment and new tax revenue. New York will not only balance the budget but also pay its Medicaid bills. City patronage jobs will come back.
Of course, you cannot just buy a country any more, only cocaine dealers can do it. You rent it on a hundred year lease with option to renew, net net. But if Africa does not cooperate - though they make short shrift of NIMBYs, think of Nigeria - I have a fallback option: buy one of those immense Air Force or Army bases that is about to close, or a bombing range. New York's garbage must be a lot better neighbor than explosives, atomic or conventional.
I rest my case. Remember you heard of it here first.
More of the Dobelis Plan and other life-and-death garbage matters soon. NIMBY stands for "Not In My Back Yard," a well-established name for protesters against encroachments of various kinds. This is not to be confused with SIMBY, or "Stay In My Back Yard," a name given by the New York Times editorial page writers in 1987 or thereabouts to Wally's Committee to Save the Police Academy (CSPA).
Some facts: The Sanitation Department has a budget of $575 million for the upcoming year; there are 7,200 uniformed members of a total staff of 9,800. Of the 6,000 vehicles 2,000 are for collections, 1,000 are out in the streets daily.
Wally Dobelis thanks Assistant Commissioner Lucian Chalsen for the information.
DUP?
2200 vs 3000
No matter how the garbage situation resulting fron the closing of the Fresh Kills Landfill 5 1/2 years from now is resolved, the citizens will pay.
Fresh Kills today processes over 13,000 tons of garbage daily. That is often expressed as 27,000,000 pounds, over three pounds for every man, woman and child in the city. That does not include the New York Times and other recycled material.
The 3,000 acre landfill, the size of 225 Yankee Stadiums, has some mountains of garbage as high as 20 stories, covered with dirt and grass. Fresh dumping is covered fast, cutting down on the gulls population's breakfast. But there is a decomposition process, emitting methane gas (about 1/20 of the national emissions), 5 percent of which is captured and converted to fuel use. Nevertheless, the odor persists. There is also leachage,
since the 48-year ol dump has noliner, and rainwater brings solubles with some toxins into the surrounding waterways.
This is probably not as bad as the smaller Pelham Bay Landfill, active for 15 years and closed in 1978, which brings leachate
There will be less people, because tax based relief payments and school subsidies for large families will go; tax-funded research to increase the life span of the non-producing elderly will go.
For most New Yorkers garbage is a non-subject, apart from complaining about the noise of the sanitation trucks early in the morning. The apartment dweller will do his grudging bit of separating newspapers, cans, bottles and plastic, throw the refuse down the chute and the stuff will disappear, in some dump with the attractive name of Fresh Kills, far away in in Staten Island.
But Staten Island has had it, and their mighty Beep Guy Molinari who delivered the Borough's vote to Mayor Giuliani and Governor Pataki has called in his markers, requesting early closing of the dump, and suing for it, under the Clean Air Act. And as of end of May his political debtors agreed to accelerate the closing of Mount Trash, the 3,000 acre Fresh Kills Landfill, from a projected year 2010 to year-end 2001. This was a highly politically motivated decision. One cannot help but think that certain well-established statesmanlike concepts of the flavor of "when the day comes, we will be elsewhere," and "we'll stick it to a committee to figure out how to get rid of the daily 13,000 tons, and when they make the public pay, it will not be our fault" were involved.
In the absence of a plan from either City or State governments, a clear case of non-feasance, let us, the citizens, examine the alternatives. Stay with me, the good guys win on the last page.
First, I offer the example of what happened in my home-away -from-home, Columbia County, 40 miles South of Albany, admittedly a rural area with 60,000 empoverished souls on 600 square miles of underused agricultural land. It too closed all of its landfills around 1990, and the NIMBY townships have fought off commercial proposals offering both landfill and burn plants, even though the industry offered plenty of jobs. This resulted in exporting garbage to nearby Troy. When that landfill closed two years ago, Columbia County considered sending its trash ("Bail-and-Rail") to Ohio, at a huge expense. Fortunately, a purportedly Mafia-linked landfill in the even poorer next-door Greene County became available. Garbage disposal now costs $2 for a 30 gallon bag, plus a hauler fee, or you deliver it yourself to a transfer station. Dumping a bicycle costs $5, a refrigerator $12. Recycling is rigorous, because sorted recyclables are accepted free. I don't quite see an apartment dweller hauling bags to a transfer station in the South Bronx, but the fee charges for bags of trash will eventually come to us city dwellers. Mark my words, and start shrinking your trash, you too will be rigorously recycling. But what about the poor? In Columbia County some secretly and illegally bury trash in their back yards (I found out, belatedly, that a renegade contractor buried a washer/dryer under my lawn rather than hauling it and paying the $12), and destroy their progeny's heritage. You don't have that advantage.
Well, what about giving the household trash to NYC's commercial haulers who are independent of city dumps? The 12,000 daily tons of commercial waste, which since 1957 has been collected by 600 Mafia-ridden carting companies from the city's 250,000 businesses have long been exported by rail to poor areas in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Indiana (sludge from sewage treatment plants goes to Texas) at an annual cost of $1.5 billion in hauling fees. Mayor Giuliani has had some 23 companies and four associations indicted for corruption. The carters' maximum charge permitted was $47 for a yard of compacted and $14.7 for loose waste (a large grocery pays $15,000, a restaurant $50,000 a year; and you wonder why food costs so much), and even the average charges are a multiple of those of Boston, L.A. and Chicago. The local haulers had succeeded in scaring away national companies such as the Browning Ferris Industries (their manager found a bleeding dog's head on his doorstep, with a "Welcome to New York" card), but some new competition has lowered certain rates as much as 40 percent. Recently BFI, USA Waste and WMX Technologies, the three big national waste removers, have made inroads in the city, but none of them can cope with the potentially doubled load of the added residential waste, even at $60 a ton, as opposed to the Sanitation Department's claimed cost of $14 a ton (known to be a much understated figure). And now the four recipient states are rebelling against an increased volume of garbage from New York, claiming that we don't do enough recycling (14 percent against the legally required 25, which some states have attained). Meanwhile Mayor Giuliani is cutting next year's recycling budget by 40 percent. Also, a law permitting limits on garbage imports has already passed the US Senate, and one is pending in the House. No matter how much we are willing to pay, some doors are slamming shut.
All of the above points to a whole new kind of future ahead of us, New Yorkers and, by extension, all Americans and other inhabitants of Spaceship Earth. In the long run we have to severely cut the production of goods that cannot be decomposed, recycled or reused: metal and wax food containers, rows of nothing but plastic goods on drugstore shelves will have to go, maybe even the thick New York Times will have to become a thing of the past. A new engineering science and industry, a new lifestyle is coming, to cope with garbage. Graduates, forget the dying arts of medicine and law. Let me whisper just one word to you. (Why does the tune of "Mrs Robinson" suddenly come to mind?). And one additional word: overpopulation. There will be a global attack on this root of all evils, population growth. The world is exploding because of such humanitarian activities as curbing infant death, medical research and increasing life span in all countries, doubling the Earth's population every 37 years. Consequently, the planet is dying. Ground water level is receding, arable land is eroding and forests are disappearing in 17 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Think of the internecine fraternal warfare and destruction in Bosnia, Rwanda, Chechnia, Cambodia, Peru, Liberia, Somalia, the terrorism in Middle East and Ireland and the institutionalized crime in Russia, Philippines and other marginal democracies. Much of these are attributable to the underlying causes of the shrinking means of earning a living, by far too many people driven off the land and into the cities, fired up by the surface causes of religion and ethnicity.
I offer a generous gift to the Mayor's committee of 12 professionals charged with pulling the rabbit out of the hat by October 1, an idea that will save this country and potentially the world from suffocating in its own refuse: have New York buy a small West African oceanside country and convert it into the next Fresh Kills. Take a country that has no water, no remaining industry, where the people are killing each other and the government is corrupt, such as Liberia. Henry Kissinger should be able to do a deal. This purchase would be a truly humanitarian act of mercy, stopping the wars and providing employment forever. It will spawn side industries: New York's garbage is rich in discarded blue jeans and Ralph Lauren polo shirts that can be re-exported to Canal Street for a nice profit.
Further, convert dangerous leaking oil tankers into trash haulers, instead of letting them be stripped and rot on Pakistan's shores. Make the New York's garbage barges sea-worthy, reviving Brooklyn's Navy Yard. (I would not give the job to Staten Island, they had their chance at secession and a lifelong holdup of the four boroughs by escalating the Fresh Kills tipping fees so that no Staten Islander, man, woman or child would ever have to have a job and could live off the garbage revenue. But they blew it. Tough.)
This venture will revive our city: brokering landfill deals with other cities, states and countries desperate with garbage will make New York, Inc. a rich business enterprise. The great financial center will boom, providing employment and new tax revenue. New York will not only balance the budget but also pay its Medicaid bills. City patronage jobs will come back.
Of course, you cannot just buy a country any more, only cocaine dealers can do it. You rent it on a hundred year lease with option to renew, net net. But if Africa does not cooperate - though they make short shrift of NIMBYs, think of Nigeria - I have a fallback option: buy one of those immense Air Force or Army bases that is about to close, or a bombing range. New York's garbage must be a lot better neighbor than explosives, atomic or conventional.
I rest my case. Remember you heard of it here first.
More of the Dobelis Plan and other life-and-death garbage matters soon. NIMBY stands for "Not In My Back Yard," a well-established name for protesters against encroachments of various kinds. This is not to be confused with SIMBY, or "Stay In My Back Yard," a name given by the New York Times editorial page writers in 1987 or thereabouts to Wally's Committee to Save the Police Academy (CSPA).
Some facts: The Sanitation Department has a budget of $575 million for the upcoming year; there are 7,200 uniformed members of a total staff of 9,800. Of the 6,000 vehicles 2,000 are for collections, 1,000 are out in the streets daily.
Wally Dobelis thanks Assistant Commissioner Lucian Chalsen for the information.
DUP?
2200 vs 3000
No matter how the garbage situation resulting fron the closing of the Fresh Kills Landfill 5 1/2 years from now is resolved, the citizens will pay.
Fresh Kills today processes over 13,000 tons of garbage daily. That is often expressed as 27,000,000 pounds, over three pounds for every man, woman and child in the city. That does not include the New York Times and other recycled material.
The 3,000 acre landfill, the size of 225 Yankee Stadiums, has some mountains of garbage as high as 20 stories, covered with dirt and grass. Fresh dumping is covered fast, cutting down on the gulls population's breakfast. But there is a decomposition process, emitting methane gas (about 1/20 of the national emissions), 5 percent of which is captured and converted to fuel use. Nevertheless, the odor persists. There is also leachage,
since the 48-year ol dump has noliner, and rainwater brings solubles with some toxins into the surrounding waterways.
This is probably not as bad as the smaller Pelham Bay Landfill, active for 15 years and closed in 1978, which brings leachate
There will be less people, because tax based relief payments and school subsidies for large families will go; tax-funded research to increase the life span of the non-producing elderly will go.
Monday, July 01, 1996
John Bigelow -A History and a Memorial
John Bigelow
A history and a Memorial
By Wally Dobelis
Introduction
Ars longa, vita brevis, John Bigelow would have said. In his 95 years he squeezed in enough history to last many lives, and yet the remembrance of his accomplishments is scant. If you walk the mezzanine balcony of the New York Public Library, after having entered though the Lions Gate and ascended to the balcony directly above the entrance, you will find the uninspiring portrait of the founder and first president of the institution, familiarly known as Old John. If you look into the various encyclopedias of the history of our country, you will find a paragraph of John Bigelow, the Democrat and anti-slavery writer of the New York Post, the pro-Union propagandist in Paris and the library founder. All dry stuff, nowhere reflecting the incredible energy and spirits of the founder of what turns out to be a dynasty of Americans, with some ferocious reinforcements from the Caucasus.
Old John's history is in the pages below. this rundown is to tell you of his progeny. Of his two surviving sons, Young John, Col. John Bigelow of the Uniter States Army ( 18xx-19xx), fought many a frontier engagemen, and wrote books about them. He wrote the story of the Chancellorville Battle (May 2-4, 1863), where Stonewall Jackson was mortally wounded (!*xx, publ), and the Battle of Santiago de Cuba in the Spanish-American War of 1898 (19XX, PUBL BY XX)
Poultney Bigelow (1855-1954), who grew up and went to school in Europe, was a classmate of the Kaiser Wilhelm, and clashed with him in xxxx. They reconciled after the Kaiser's abdication and Pultney wrotexx He also wrote books of his travels, and resided in between at the old family farm in Malden, N.y., currently being rehabilitated by the Jenny branch.
Jenny Bigelow (-) married John Tracy, a partner of J. P. Morgan, another highland Falls summer resident, and her daughter XX married the dashing Georgian (that's Tiflis, not Atlanta) Prince, the Col. Simon Sidamon-Aristoff, refugee of the Georgian wars of Independence (1917) during the Communist Revolution. His progeny, Constantine, New York Mayor John V. Lindsay's transportation Tzar, and Andrew, City Councilman of the 2nd District, occupy the xx and the "Squirrels," the family residence, while sister Anne lives in the Tracy residence, " ."
Grace Bigelow ( --) never married and is pictured with Old John in carriages on festive occasions (quote Steve Garmey's book on GP).
Flora Bigelow ---?
Jane Bigelow ---?
The above information is filtered through the recollections of the Jenny branch of the Bigelow family, a bunch of ancestor worshippers devout in their memory of Old John, if not in their genealogical acumen. Serious work is needed.
The author extends his thanks to Andrew Eristoff, his father Constantine Sidamon-Eristoff, aunt Anne Eristoff, and Margaret Clapp, author of the fascinating 1947 Pulitzer-Prize winning history, Forgotten First Citizen: John Bigelow, that started me on the research for further facts and stories about the most fascinating character of an era so rich in history-makers. John Bigelow, though long forgotten, will live again, as long as this Democracy survives.
John Bigelow Comes to New York.
The Gramercy Park area has been the home to many famous names in American history, arts and literature. You can read of Samuel Tilden, Peter Cooper and Edith Wharton, but often left out is a man who for many of his 95 years lived on East 14th Street, at 69 East 23rd Street and at 21 Gramercy Park, a lawyer, newspaper publisher, Union propagandist in Europe during the Civil War and founder of the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations -John Bigelow, the Forgotten First Citizen, in the words of his biographer, Margaret Clapp (Little Brown, 1947). His life is no mere dry history - it provides parallels to problems that current-day politicians wrestle with, without the benefit of a background of classics and political philosophy that John Bigelow drew upon when evaluating events and consequences. Little was new to him, he could hark back to thinkers and wits from Lucian to Jefferson who had faced similar circumstances.
John, son of Asa Bigelow, a farmer and trader in Bristol on the Hudson (now Malden), 40 miles South of Albany, was born in 1817. A bright boy, his mother took him to the Walnut Grove Academy in Troy. He distinguished himself, and was accepted at thirteen by Washington (later Trinity) College in Hartford. He worked through their 880-book library, and moved over to Union College, in Schenectady, which had a library of 13,000 books. Graduating at 17, he started reading law at Hudson, then a major center, and moved to New York, when his employers' firm dissolved. He read law until admitted to the bar at 21, taught at a girls' school, made good friends and, along with some of them - Charles Eames, Samuel Jones Tilden, Parke Goodwin - wrote articles for William Cullen Bryant's anti-slavery newspaper, the New York Evening Post, and for John O'Sullivan's Democratic Review. Law business was slow and he edited books, B.M.Norman's Rambles Through Yucatan, and Josiah Gregg's Commerce of the Prairies, and suffered when Van Buren lost his reelection bid to the Whig Harrison -Tyler ticket in 1840. An editor on the Morning News, with Tilden, he also worked on the unpopular prison reform and wrote articles advocating political reform. The poet Bryant, looking for time off, offered Bigelow the editorship of his Evening Post, and in 1848 he bought a 1/3 interest in the paper and also in the associated commercial press, with borrowed money. He ran the distinguished paper, founded by the Federalist Alexander Hamilton in 1801 (still in existence as the New York Post, subsequently associated with the names of Carl Schurz, Thomas Lamont, Dorothy Schiff and now Rupert Murdoch), on Bryant's Democratic/Barnburner principles.
To summarize XIX Century party politics, Washington's first cabinet was split, with Hamilton's Federalists advocating centralized government, encouraging industry and protecting the merchant and landowner interests. The opposing Jeffersonian Democratic Republicans (later Democrats) took over in 1800 and grew more radical under Jackson in 1828, but divided over the issue of slavery. The 1820 Missouri Compromise Act admitted Maine as free and Missouri as a slave state, and limited slavery to below 36th Parallel. Southern Democrats blocked the admission of new anti-slavery states in the West, causing a split in the party. The opposition party, anti-Jacksonite Whigs (formerly National Republicans), led by Daniel Webster and Henry Clay, also split during the 1848 slaveowner Zachary Taylor's campaign and many joined the Democrat anti-Slavery Barnburner and Free-Soiler faction. Barnburners were Democrat radicals, and took the name from a Dutch farmer who burned his barn to get rid of rats.
Bigelow opposed a third party, and broke away from the Democrats only when Senator Stephen A. Douglas introduced legislation (subsequently the Kansas-Nebraska Act, 1854) to solve the slavery issue in the territories by local decision (dubbed "squatter sovereignty" by the opponents). In "bleeding Kansas" this resulted in armed warfare, culminating in the 1856 massacre of five pro-slavers by the abolitionist John Brown. In the East anti-slavers of both parties immediately formed a Republican party, and after much dispute between the supporters of the Whig New York Sen. William H. Seward and the Free-Soiler Gov. Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, chose a political novice, a military man and the explorer of the West, California Sen. John C. Fremont, as their Presidential candidate for 1856. To help the cause, Bigelow wrote his campaign biography. But the people elected a conservative Democrat, James Buchanan. Tilden, by then a successful corporate lawyer, had stayed away, continuing to build his power in the Democratic organization of New York (an Assemblyman, he became the Democratic State Chairman, fought the Tammany's Tweed Ring in 1866 and went to Governorship in 1874).
Bigelow continued to build his paper. Having married Jane Poultney in 1850, the parents of three children (eventually there were eight, six surviving early childhood) decided to move out of their 14th Street quarters and in 1857 bought a house in Highland Falls, below West Point, with John commuting by ferry to the City. The country was prosperous, and the stock market was flush. But John was cautious, and when Erie Railroad (much plagued by the fraudulent speculators Daniel Drew, Jay Gould and James Fisk maneuvering around Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt for control) elected a new president at the unheard of salary of $25,000 a year, he editorially cautioned industry to pay good men well for their services, but not to let them play the stock market for their own profit and for the company's loss. (An interesting observation 140 years before America found out that linking corporate CEO's bonuses to the quarterly market performance of the companies' stocks can result in destructive downsizing, trimming of payrolls and selling off of low-profit subsidiaries that wreak havoc with lives for the sake of a short-term profit. What would he have thought of major stockholders like CALPERS pressuring CEOs for quick gains, and of travelling gunslinger CEOs like "Chainsaw" Albert J. Dunlap moving through paper companies with his axe, then selling off his most recent employer?). On the heels of his observations came the market crash of 1857, initiated by the collapse of the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company, which had lent bankers' deposits to the unsound railroads (an early example of bankers abusing insureds' monies that eventually led to the Glass-Steagall Banking Act of 1933, keeping the bankers away from widows' and orphans' funds. This is now under attack by the deregulators in the Congress.Imagine how many more Third World bonds Walter Wriston could have floated if he had insurance assets under his control!). Banks and railroads fell apart, and the jobless marched on Wall Street, demanding a "right to a living." The corrupt populist Mayor Fernando Wood bought 50,000 barrels of flour, to be sold to the poor at cost, much to Bigelow's distress, who worried about creating a pauper class that would never grow smaller (FDR had the same fears), and objected to government "buying up our criminals, hiring them to respect the laws, or they will rob you." With Gramercy's Samuel B. Ruggles and Peter Cooper he sponsored a series of lectures on poverty, advocating private donations to help the poor (think of Lamar Alexander). When Horace Greeley advised young men to go West and return to farming, our visionary foresaw farm overproduction, and a capitalist invasion of large scale mechanized agriculture, all overwhelming the family farmer (think of FDR's Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 and subsequent laws which have not prevented the decline of the family farm). His recommendation for the West-bound was to engage in "prosecution of the useful and ornamental arts" in the best industrially developing towns.
With the Post running smoothly, the Bigelows spent 18 months in Britain and the Continent, meeting the literati and the powerful, returning mid-1860. Six months later John sold his profitable share in the paper to Bryant's unworldly son-in-law Parke Goodwin. The sale made sense only to Bigelow, who wanted to retire (he had accumulated enough to continue to live on a modest scale), and to write a major work on the relations of Church and State through a biography of the Catholic Archbishop Fenelon. He bought a house at 69 East 23rd Street and dug into history.
But it was not to last. When Pres. Abraham Lincoln was elected in 1860, seven Southern states seceded (with four more joining later), forming the Confederate States of America (1861-65), and on April 12, 1861 the Confederacy attacked and destroyed Fort Sumter, S.C. A week later 100,000 New Yorkers met on Union Square, to express their outrage. Bigelow was one of the leaders. The war was on, the Union was in danger, and his country wanted him to serve where his talents were needed - in Europe, where agents of the Confederacy were stirring French and British public opinion towards a war against the Union.
Winning the Civil War
John Bigelow and family left 69 East 23rd Street for Paris in August 1861, to do his duty in the Civil War, at the request of Secretary of State William H. Seward, a former political enemy and a subsequent friend and confidante. Even though his lowly title was that of a Consul of the U.S., John's direct instructions were to work on the French and British public opinion, counteracting Confederate propaganda in a hostile environment. He was to be the Union's spin doctor, putting the proper interpretation on sometimes contradictory Government declarations and Congressional resolutions. European cotton manufacturing industry was in a depression because of the Union blockade of Southern ports, unemployment was rampant, and Confederate agents were managing to place clandestine orders for ships with builders, while the governments closed their eyes and maintained outward neutrality. The ambassadors, Charles Francis Adams, son of President John Quincy Adams, in London, and ex-Vice Presidential candidate William L. Dayton in Paris, both ex-Whig tariff advocates, were no opinion molders, and the Confederacy was advocating free trade, much to the liking of English and French manufacturers. Dayton was not even willing to learn French. Bigelow, who had sharpened his language skills during a recent 19 month trip through Europe, knew the literati and politicians personally and through their publications during his 12-year editorship of his scholarly newspaper, the Evening Post.
Bigelow was the right man for the job. Pictures of his middle years show a handsome tall man (over 6 ft.), with a watchful expression. (He acquired the largest mutton-chop whiskers ever seen, even among the beard-proud Victorians, in later life. The copy of the 1900 Emke portrait hung in a position of honor on the 2nd Floor balcony of the New York Public Library on 42nd Street shows the same alertness.)
Bigelow had to be active and alert. Unlike his eminent propagandist predecessors during the American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, a mere consul had no entry to high government quarters. A meager staff of two worked on passports, wills, estates and problems of destitute Americans while the Consul pursued the politicos and opinion-molders. Undaunted by a skimpy $4,000 salary, he spent personal funds for office expenses while working on the main task - Union propaganda.
He had unexpected help from the Confederacy, which declared an embargo of cotton exports, in the hope that it would force England and France to recognize their independence, threaten war and demand peace. When French and British public opinion was roused by the Trent affair - a Union warship had searched a neutral British ship and removed two commissioners of the Confederacy, James M. Mason and John Slidell, Bigelow wrote a masterful letter in the name of the most respected American then visiting Paris, Gen. Winfield Scott. It explained that the Americans had performed a legal act often exercised by the English, that of searching a neutral ship suspected of carrying contraband of war, and becried the absence of adequate international laws protecting neutrals. The letter was widely published and well received.
He had other successes - paying a Fr. 600 monthly subsidy to a French journal, L'Opinion Nationale, to keep it afloat and to insure a steady stream of favorable articles that could be reprinted; supporting a British ministers' conference condemning slavery, and having Fanny Kemble's Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation 1838-1839 published. Fortunately some funds were available from the shadowy Union paymaster Henry S. Sanford, Minister to Belgium. Old friends and accessible journalists were supplied with stories; government officials and informants were cultivated, and eventually Bigelow compiled Les Etats Unis d'Amerique en 1863, a noncontroversial encyclopedia to give factual pro-Union material for writers. It made profits, was translated and reprinted in Germany and pirated in Italy and Spain.
Bigelow needed some successes. The Confederate propagandist Henry de Hotze in London was unceasingly writing articles and supplying news story specifications for a newspaper that he published, The Index, ostensibly written by Englishmen for Englishmen. Its part-time writers, key contributors to popular London press, were free to rehash the material, and thus articles sympathetic to the South found their way into British, Continental and even North American periodicals. Emperor Napoleon III, who had favored a joint recognition of the Confederacy by Britain and France, in Fall 1862 formally asked Britain and Russia to join him in urging a six-month truce. And Slidell had in his corner two Members of Parliament, James A. Lindsay, Britain's largest shipbuilder, and John Roebuck of Laird Bros, who made a sham sale to M. Brave, a French Deputy and head of Brave et Cie., of a Confederacy-bound ship ostensibly built for the Pasha of Egypt. But Bigelow and the ambassadors managed to have the warships Florida, Alexandra and other Confederate purchases tied up in British and French ports by legal proceedings, thus delaying deliveries. Meanwhile, bloody Gettysburg and the fall of Vicksburg in July 1863 showed the Europeans that the fortunes of war favored the Union, and circulars distributed by Bigelow offering land to European immigrants under the Homestead Act were bringing European recruits into the States and the Union army. Nevertheless, half a dozen ships were still in the construction docks of French shipyards, under contract for the Confederacy.
In Spring 1864 Bigelow's office was elevated to Consulate General, after he had written a report to Seward about professionalization of civil servants, which in a roundabout way led to the 1883 Pendleton Civil Service Act, passed after a dissatisfied office seeker shot President James A. Garfield. When Ambassador Dayton died in late 1864, Bigelow was appointed charge d' affaires and eventually, in April 1865, Minister, three weeks before the assassination of President Lincoln. The war was over, but Napoleon's ambitions were still a problem. In 1863 he had given the crown of Mexico to Emperor Maximilian, brother of Franz Joseph of Austria. This came about because in 1861 France, Britain and Spain had invaded Mexico (the latter two soon withdrawing), to collect unpaid war bonds' interest from Benito Juarez' War of the Reform (1857-61). US Congress, otherwise occupied, did not express its opposition until April 1864 (the Dawes Resolution). Bigelow was incurring French anger for pre
ssing for troop withdrawal, and Congressional ire for being too slow. The French finally withdrew their forces from Mexico, in 1867, and Maximilian was captured and shot. Bigelow, who stubbornly clung to his beliefs that "we do not want any territory faster than it will come to us by the voluntary actions of its population; we do not mean to fight for the Monroe Doctrine, because it is illogical and absurd for a nation to attempt to propagate democracy by arms," resigned his office in December 1866, after he had obtained a withdrawal date from the French.
Creating the New York Public Library
Ex-Ambassador John Bigelow left Paris and came back to New York in early 1867, and promptly went to work on his annotated edition of Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. He had located and bought the lost manuscript in Paris for a then exorbitant price of Fr 25,000, and the three-volume publication, correcting over 1200 errors in the standard Jared Sparks' edition, appeared in Spring of 1868. (The manuscript eventually ended up in San Marino, Cal., by way of the bicarbonate of soda manufacturer E(lihu) Dwight Church's book collection in Brooklyn, bought in its entirety by Henry Edward Huntington via the George Watson Cole collection in February 1911 for $1.3 million for his Museum and Library, where Ben now resides, alongside Gainsborough's Blue Boy.The library builder was the nephew of Collis P. Huntington, of Central Pacific and Southern Pacific Railroad fame.)
The reviews were favorable, but Bigelow craved action, and became managing editor of The New-York Times in 1869. It was not to be a happy tenure - he had clashes with management and journalists, and an article planted by the crooked speculator Jay Gould contributed to the gold crisis on Wall Street. The deeply hurt editor resigned within three months and moved the family to Germany, to write a history, France and Hereditary Monarchy, published in 1871.
Still on the loose, Bigelow returned to New York in 1873. He had voted for U.S.Grant in 1868 and 1872, but the corruption in the administration disgusted him, and though offered a Republican seat in the Congress, he went to work in old friend Samuel J. Tilden's 1874 Democratic campaign for Governor. Bigelow himself was elected N.Y. Secretary of State next year, and immediately started on Tilden's 1876 Presidential campaign, writing a biography and dissipating charges about the wealthy lawyer's business problems and falsified tax returns. The campaign, managed by Gramercy's Abram Hewitt, son-in-law of Peter Cooper, seemed a success, but there were two sets of electoral votes from Florida, South Carolina and Louisiana, a disputed original and a Democratic recount. Who had the authority to determine which set to open? The Constitution was not clear, and it took months of Congressional discussions to agree that a commission of 10 politically evenly divided Senators and Representatives, plus five Supreme Court judges chosen by lot would decide. Republican Judge Joseph Bradley substituted at the last minute for Democratic Judge David Davis, who had been elected Senator and refused to serve on the Commission. The vote was divided on party lines, and Rutherford B. Hayes was elected President of the United States. Bigelow blamed Tilden's sickliness and inability to present a commanding stature for the unfavorable turn of events, and may have swayed Tilden not to run in 1884 (1880 was destined to go to Republican James A. Garfield, but he was assassinated, and his successor Chester Arthur was much disliked), and to endorse the young N.Y. Governor, Grover Cleveland, for Presidency. He won, and Bigelow, originally slated to be Secretary of State, or Treasury, was offered only a boring Assistant Secretaryship, which he refused and went back to writing his biographies of Tilden and William Cullen Bryant (who had died in 1878).
Tilden, who dubbed Bigelow "the worst used man in the U.S." had bought a house for his friend at 21 Gramercy Park in 1881, while the Bigelows were on one of their European trips, and deeded it to Bigelow's eldest daughter, Grace, to forestall objections. That became the family home, with the venerable statesman and author residing there until his death at 95, in 1911. There he completed editing his multi-volume The Complete Works of Benjamin Franklin (1887-88), The Writings and Speeches (1885), Life (1895) and Letters...of Samuel J. Tilden (1908), his own Retrospections of an Active Life (1909-13), along with numerous feisty introductions, as well as philosophical and Swedenborgian treatises.
In 1884 Bigelow helped Tilden revise his will, leaving $5 million to establish a public library, an old dream of Bigelow's, "the noblest memorial a wealthy man could raise unto himself." There were two major public libraries in New York. The Astor Library, on Lafayette Street, now Joe Papp's Public Theater, was built in 1854 by William B. Astor (1792-1875) with $400,000 left by his father, landowner John J. Astor (1763-1848), then the richest man in America. It was created by Joseph Green Cogswell (Harvard, Goettingen), whom Washington Irving wanted as his first secretary at the Madrid embassy, but Astor prevailed by promising the huge funds for book purchase.
Lenox Library (1870) on 5th Avenue and 70th Street, was built to house the eclectic collection of rare books assembled by the eccentric James Lenox. In 1847, for an exorbitant L500, he bought the first Gutenberg Bible to come to the U.S. His first superintendent was George H. Moore; his first librarian was Samuel Austin Allibone the biographer and bibliographer. Lenox received the Drexel and Stuart bequests and T.A. Emmett and C. H. Hildeburn newspaper purchases and Dr. W. E. Prime Cervantes collection. Wilberforce Eames, the librarian since 1892, moved to the New York Public Library and retired in 1937. The library was torn down to make room for the Henry Clay Frick Mansion (now Collection).
Soon after Tilden's death and burial in a little hillside cemetery in New Lebanon, N.Y. the will was read and his relatives immediately sought its invalidation. Nevertheless, a Tilden Trust was authorized by the legislature, and the trustees (Bigelow as President, Andrew H. Green, Tilden's law partner, George W. Smith, his assistant and two elected members) went about their business, waiting for the law suit to settle. It took until 1891. Most of the money went to relatives; the trustees ended up with $2 million. In expectation, Bigelow had drawn plans for a building at the city-owned site of the abandoned Reservoir, 42nd Street between 5th and 6th Avenues. The old agit-prop expert swung into action with a Scribners Magazine article to sell his proposal. But the trustees had internal disagreements regarding the site (the Old City Hall on Wall Street was a possibility) and the mergers needed to build up the library holdings. Offers to merge with Columbia University, N.Y. Historical Society and the National Academy were discarded, and final agreements for the Free Public Library to merge with the Astor and Lenox libraries were made in 1895, with legislative and the Governor's and City Aldermen's approvals obtained in 1896. By the time Park Commissioners' approval and appropriations of funds from the Board of Estimate were in place, Bigelow was 79 years old. A military surgeon and library builder, Dr. John S. Billings, was chosen as director, and started operating in the Astor and Lenox buildings, the collections swelled by purchases and gifts, such as the Emmet autographs, Ford, Gould and Bigelow collections. The latter consisted of Congressional documents and treaties; the famous Benjamin Franklin manuscript went to the Elihu Dwight Church collection and eventually to Henry E. Huntington's museum in California.
Building plans took longer, the cornerstone was laid in November 1902, and the building was opened on May 23, 1911 by President William Howard Taft, with the 95 year old President of the Board of Trustees of the New York Public Library, John Bigelow, at his side. The 2,500,000 New Yorkers (grown tenfold since John Bigelow's arrival 75 years earlier) had acquired a new major resource, not a little due to one man's persistence. The 64 public library branches (many designed by McKim Mead and White), built with the $5.2 Millon donation from Andrew Carnegie after he sold his steel compaany to J. P. Morgan in 1901, were administered by the Library.
The last major task of this life safely put to rest, John Bigelow died, in December 1911. But another of his projects was not completed until 1914 - a canal.
Bigelow's steadfastness helped build the Panama Canal, an interest that overlapped his Public Library efforts almost completely. He first visited Baron de Lesseps' Colombia site in 1886. When de Lesseps failed and his chief engineer, Phillipe Bunau-Varilla came to Bigelow in despair, the old propaganda expert advised writing a book. Americans were apathetic, an a alternative route, through
Nicaragua, was gaining strength. Colombia also resisted, and it took the Spanish-American War and a revolution partitioning Columbia to finally complete the Canal. The first flag of the revolutionary republic of Panama was sown in the library of Bigelow's upstate house, "The Squirrels," in Highland Falls, by daughter Grace and Mme Bunau-Varilla, in 1903.
.
Wally Dobelis, President of the Park Towers co-op, co-President of the Stuyvesant Park Neighborhood Association and coordinator of a volunteer homeless shelter project on Gramercy Park, also writes a local history column for Town and Village, a newspaper servicing the Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village area of New York City. He is a former adjunct lecturer at New York University and makes his living auditing computer systems for a major insurance company.
4B Franklin's autobiography manuscript, 1771-1790, begun at 65 and kept to his death at 84, was acq by Henry Edwards Huntington (1850-1927,nephew and heir of Collis P. Huntington the railroad builder) for his rich San Marino, CA, museum and library in 1911. (Eliz Pomeroy, The Huntington Museum, London1983)
First to Elihu Dwight Church Bklyn, Geo watson Cole catalogs
Lenox; presented to public 1870; 1st suptd Geo H. Moore, 1st lib Samuel austin Allibone the biographer and bibliographer, received the Drexel &Stuart bequests TAEmmett and CHHildeburn newspap purch. Dr WE Prime Cervantes coll.Wilberforce Eames lib 1892, to NYPL died 1937i
Beverly Chew later Harry M. Lydenberg 600 pg hist
Astor: Joseph Green Cogswell (Harvard, Goettingen) was treasurer and prime minister 1848 WIrving wanted him as embassy secty in Madrid, JJA kept him by promise of 400k for lib, bought80-90k abroad by 1894 when opend
Carnegie: 1901 sold steel co to JPMorgan, gave $5.2m for 64 branches thru city, many by McKim Mead White (murd 1906); city to maintain. Fell under NYPL
Tilden 20k books?
JBigelow por, with some of the longest muttonchop whiskers ever seen even in thre beard-proud Victorian era. On the Balcony 2nd floor directly above the main entrance, he and Billings brace the opening overlooking the main entrance and Astor Hall.
A history and a Memorial
By Wally Dobelis
Introduction
Ars longa, vita brevis, John Bigelow would have said. In his 95 years he squeezed in enough history to last many lives, and yet the remembrance of his accomplishments is scant. If you walk the mezzanine balcony of the New York Public Library, after having entered though the Lions Gate and ascended to the balcony directly above the entrance, you will find the uninspiring portrait of the founder and first president of the institution, familiarly known as Old John. If you look into the various encyclopedias of the history of our country, you will find a paragraph of John Bigelow, the Democrat and anti-slavery writer of the New York Post, the pro-Union propagandist in Paris and the library founder. All dry stuff, nowhere reflecting the incredible energy and spirits of the founder of what turns out to be a dynasty of Americans, with some ferocious reinforcements from the Caucasus.
Old John's history is in the pages below. this rundown is to tell you of his progeny. Of his two surviving sons, Young John, Col. John Bigelow of the Uniter States Army ( 18xx-19xx), fought many a frontier engagemen, and wrote books about them. He wrote the story of the Chancellorville Battle (May 2-4, 1863), where Stonewall Jackson was mortally wounded (!*xx, publ), and the Battle of Santiago de Cuba in the Spanish-American War of 1898 (19XX, PUBL BY XX)
Poultney Bigelow (1855-1954), who grew up and went to school in Europe, was a classmate of the Kaiser Wilhelm, and clashed with him in xxxx. They reconciled after the Kaiser's abdication and Pultney wrotexx He also wrote books of his travels, and resided in between at the old family farm in Malden, N.y., currently being rehabilitated by the Jenny branch.
Jenny Bigelow (-) married John Tracy, a partner of J. P. Morgan, another highland Falls summer resident, and her daughter XX married the dashing Georgian (that's Tiflis, not Atlanta) Prince, the Col. Simon Sidamon-Aristoff, refugee of the Georgian wars of Independence (1917) during the Communist Revolution. His progeny, Constantine, New York Mayor John V. Lindsay's transportation Tzar, and Andrew, City Councilman of the 2nd District, occupy the xx and the "Squirrels," the family residence, while sister Anne lives in the Tracy residence, " ."
Grace Bigelow ( --) never married and is pictured with Old John in carriages on festive occasions (quote Steve Garmey's book on GP).
Flora Bigelow ---?
Jane Bigelow ---?
The above information is filtered through the recollections of the Jenny branch of the Bigelow family, a bunch of ancestor worshippers devout in their memory of Old John, if not in their genealogical acumen. Serious work is needed.
The author extends his thanks to Andrew Eristoff, his father Constantine Sidamon-Eristoff, aunt Anne Eristoff, and Margaret Clapp, author of the fascinating 1947 Pulitzer-Prize winning history, Forgotten First Citizen: John Bigelow, that started me on the research for further facts and stories about the most fascinating character of an era so rich in history-makers. John Bigelow, though long forgotten, will live again, as long as this Democracy survives.
John Bigelow Comes to New York.
The Gramercy Park area has been the home to many famous names in American history, arts and literature. You can read of Samuel Tilden, Peter Cooper and Edith Wharton, but often left out is a man who for many of his 95 years lived on East 14th Street, at 69 East 23rd Street and at 21 Gramercy Park, a lawyer, newspaper publisher, Union propagandist in Europe during the Civil War and founder of the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations -John Bigelow, the Forgotten First Citizen, in the words of his biographer, Margaret Clapp (Little Brown, 1947). His life is no mere dry history - it provides parallels to problems that current-day politicians wrestle with, without the benefit of a background of classics and political philosophy that John Bigelow drew upon when evaluating events and consequences. Little was new to him, he could hark back to thinkers and wits from Lucian to Jefferson who had faced similar circumstances.
John, son of Asa Bigelow, a farmer and trader in Bristol on the Hudson (now Malden), 40 miles South of Albany, was born in 1817. A bright boy, his mother took him to the Walnut Grove Academy in Troy. He distinguished himself, and was accepted at thirteen by Washington (later Trinity) College in Hartford. He worked through their 880-book library, and moved over to Union College, in Schenectady, which had a library of 13,000 books. Graduating at 17, he started reading law at Hudson, then a major center, and moved to New York, when his employers' firm dissolved. He read law until admitted to the bar at 21, taught at a girls' school, made good friends and, along with some of them - Charles Eames, Samuel Jones Tilden, Parke Goodwin - wrote articles for William Cullen Bryant's anti-slavery newspaper, the New York Evening Post, and for John O'Sullivan's Democratic Review. Law business was slow and he edited books, B.M.Norman's Rambles Through Yucatan, and Josiah Gregg's Commerce of the Prairies, and suffered when Van Buren lost his reelection bid to the Whig Harrison -Tyler ticket in 1840. An editor on the Morning News, with Tilden, he also worked on the unpopular prison reform and wrote articles advocating political reform. The poet Bryant, looking for time off, offered Bigelow the editorship of his Evening Post, and in 1848 he bought a 1/3 interest in the paper and also in the associated commercial press, with borrowed money. He ran the distinguished paper, founded by the Federalist Alexander Hamilton in 1801 (still in existence as the New York Post, subsequently associated with the names of Carl Schurz, Thomas Lamont, Dorothy Schiff and now Rupert Murdoch), on Bryant's Democratic/Barnburner principles.
To summarize XIX Century party politics, Washington's first cabinet was split, with Hamilton's Federalists advocating centralized government, encouraging industry and protecting the merchant and landowner interests. The opposing Jeffersonian Democratic Republicans (later Democrats) took over in 1800 and grew more radical under Jackson in 1828, but divided over the issue of slavery. The 1820 Missouri Compromise Act admitted Maine as free and Missouri as a slave state, and limited slavery to below 36th Parallel. Southern Democrats blocked the admission of new anti-slavery states in the West, causing a split in the party. The opposition party, anti-Jacksonite Whigs (formerly National Republicans), led by Daniel Webster and Henry Clay, also split during the 1848 slaveowner Zachary Taylor's campaign and many joined the Democrat anti-Slavery Barnburner and Free-Soiler faction. Barnburners were Democrat radicals, and took the name from a Dutch farmer who burned his barn to get rid of rats.
Bigelow opposed a third party, and broke away from the Democrats only when Senator Stephen A. Douglas introduced legislation (subsequently the Kansas-Nebraska Act, 1854) to solve the slavery issue in the territories by local decision (dubbed "squatter sovereignty" by the opponents). In "bleeding Kansas" this resulted in armed warfare, culminating in the 1856 massacre of five pro-slavers by the abolitionist John Brown. In the East anti-slavers of both parties immediately formed a Republican party, and after much dispute between the supporters of the Whig New York Sen. William H. Seward and the Free-Soiler Gov. Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, chose a political novice, a military man and the explorer of the West, California Sen. John C. Fremont, as their Presidential candidate for 1856. To help the cause, Bigelow wrote his campaign biography. But the people elected a conservative Democrat, James Buchanan. Tilden, by then a successful corporate lawyer, had stayed away, continuing to build his power in the Democratic organization of New York (an Assemblyman, he became the Democratic State Chairman, fought the Tammany's Tweed Ring in 1866 and went to Governorship in 1874).
Bigelow continued to build his paper. Having married Jane Poultney in 1850, the parents of three children (eventually there were eight, six surviving early childhood) decided to move out of their 14th Street quarters and in 1857 bought a house in Highland Falls, below West Point, with John commuting by ferry to the City. The country was prosperous, and the stock market was flush. But John was cautious, and when Erie Railroad (much plagued by the fraudulent speculators Daniel Drew, Jay Gould and James Fisk maneuvering around Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt for control) elected a new president at the unheard of salary of $25,000 a year, he editorially cautioned industry to pay good men well for their services, but not to let them play the stock market for their own profit and for the company's loss. (An interesting observation 140 years before America found out that linking corporate CEO's bonuses to the quarterly market performance of the companies' stocks can result in destructive downsizing, trimming of payrolls and selling off of low-profit subsidiaries that wreak havoc with lives for the sake of a short-term profit. What would he have thought of major stockholders like CALPERS pressuring CEOs for quick gains, and of travelling gunslinger CEOs like "Chainsaw" Albert J. Dunlap moving through paper companies with his axe, then selling off his most recent employer?). On the heels of his observations came the market crash of 1857, initiated by the collapse of the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company, which had lent bankers' deposits to the unsound railroads (an early example of bankers abusing insureds' monies that eventually led to the Glass-Steagall Banking Act of 1933, keeping the bankers away from widows' and orphans' funds. This is now under attack by the deregulators in the Congress.Imagine how many more Third World bonds Walter Wriston could have floated if he had insurance assets under his control!). Banks and railroads fell apart, and the jobless marched on Wall Street, demanding a "right to a living." The corrupt populist Mayor Fernando Wood bought 50,000 barrels of flour, to be sold to the poor at cost, much to Bigelow's distress, who worried about creating a pauper class that would never grow smaller (FDR had the same fears), and objected to government "buying up our criminals, hiring them to respect the laws, or they will rob you." With Gramercy's Samuel B. Ruggles and Peter Cooper he sponsored a series of lectures on poverty, advocating private donations to help the poor (think of Lamar Alexander). When Horace Greeley advised young men to go West and return to farming, our visionary foresaw farm overproduction, and a capitalist invasion of large scale mechanized agriculture, all overwhelming the family farmer (think of FDR's Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 and subsequent laws which have not prevented the decline of the family farm). His recommendation for the West-bound was to engage in "prosecution of the useful and ornamental arts" in the best industrially developing towns.
With the Post running smoothly, the Bigelows spent 18 months in Britain and the Continent, meeting the literati and the powerful, returning mid-1860. Six months later John sold his profitable share in the paper to Bryant's unworldly son-in-law Parke Goodwin. The sale made sense only to Bigelow, who wanted to retire (he had accumulated enough to continue to live on a modest scale), and to write a major work on the relations of Church and State through a biography of the Catholic Archbishop Fenelon. He bought a house at 69 East 23rd Street and dug into history.
But it was not to last. When Pres. Abraham Lincoln was elected in 1860, seven Southern states seceded (with four more joining later), forming the Confederate States of America (1861-65), and on April 12, 1861 the Confederacy attacked and destroyed Fort Sumter, S.C. A week later 100,000 New Yorkers met on Union Square, to express their outrage. Bigelow was one of the leaders. The war was on, the Union was in danger, and his country wanted him to serve where his talents were needed - in Europe, where agents of the Confederacy were stirring French and British public opinion towards a war against the Union.
Winning the Civil War
John Bigelow and family left 69 East 23rd Street for Paris in August 1861, to do his duty in the Civil War, at the request of Secretary of State William H. Seward, a former political enemy and a subsequent friend and confidante. Even though his lowly title was that of a Consul of the U.S., John's direct instructions were to work on the French and British public opinion, counteracting Confederate propaganda in a hostile environment. He was to be the Union's spin doctor, putting the proper interpretation on sometimes contradictory Government declarations and Congressional resolutions. European cotton manufacturing industry was in a depression because of the Union blockade of Southern ports, unemployment was rampant, and Confederate agents were managing to place clandestine orders for ships with builders, while the governments closed their eyes and maintained outward neutrality. The ambassadors, Charles Francis Adams, son of President John Quincy Adams, in London, and ex-Vice Presidential candidate William L. Dayton in Paris, both ex-Whig tariff advocates, were no opinion molders, and the Confederacy was advocating free trade, much to the liking of English and French manufacturers. Dayton was not even willing to learn French. Bigelow, who had sharpened his language skills during a recent 19 month trip through Europe, knew the literati and politicians personally and through their publications during his 12-year editorship of his scholarly newspaper, the Evening Post.
Bigelow was the right man for the job. Pictures of his middle years show a handsome tall man (over 6 ft.), with a watchful expression. (He acquired the largest mutton-chop whiskers ever seen, even among the beard-proud Victorians, in later life. The copy of the 1900 Emke portrait hung in a position of honor on the 2nd Floor balcony of the New York Public Library on 42nd Street shows the same alertness.)
Bigelow had to be active and alert. Unlike his eminent propagandist predecessors during the American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, a mere consul had no entry to high government quarters. A meager staff of two worked on passports, wills, estates and problems of destitute Americans while the Consul pursued the politicos and opinion-molders. Undaunted by a skimpy $4,000 salary, he spent personal funds for office expenses while working on the main task - Union propaganda.
He had unexpected help from the Confederacy, which declared an embargo of cotton exports, in the hope that it would force England and France to recognize their independence, threaten war and demand peace. When French and British public opinion was roused by the Trent affair - a Union warship had searched a neutral British ship and removed two commissioners of the Confederacy, James M. Mason and John Slidell, Bigelow wrote a masterful letter in the name of the most respected American then visiting Paris, Gen. Winfield Scott. It explained that the Americans had performed a legal act often exercised by the English, that of searching a neutral ship suspected of carrying contraband of war, and becried the absence of adequate international laws protecting neutrals. The letter was widely published and well received.
He had other successes - paying a Fr. 600 monthly subsidy to a French journal, L'Opinion Nationale, to keep it afloat and to insure a steady stream of favorable articles that could be reprinted; supporting a British ministers' conference condemning slavery, and having Fanny Kemble's Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation 1838-1839 published. Fortunately some funds were available from the shadowy Union paymaster Henry S. Sanford, Minister to Belgium. Old friends and accessible journalists were supplied with stories; government officials and informants were cultivated, and eventually Bigelow compiled Les Etats Unis d'Amerique en 1863, a noncontroversial encyclopedia to give factual pro-Union material for writers. It made profits, was translated and reprinted in Germany and pirated in Italy and Spain.
Bigelow needed some successes. The Confederate propagandist Henry de Hotze in London was unceasingly writing articles and supplying news story specifications for a newspaper that he published, The Index, ostensibly written by Englishmen for Englishmen. Its part-time writers, key contributors to popular London press, were free to rehash the material, and thus articles sympathetic to the South found their way into British, Continental and even North American periodicals. Emperor Napoleon III, who had favored a joint recognition of the Confederacy by Britain and France, in Fall 1862 formally asked Britain and Russia to join him in urging a six-month truce. And Slidell had in his corner two Members of Parliament, James A. Lindsay, Britain's largest shipbuilder, and John Roebuck of Laird Bros, who made a sham sale to M. Brave, a French Deputy and head of Brave et Cie., of a Confederacy-bound ship ostensibly built for the Pasha of Egypt. But Bigelow and the ambassadors managed to have the warships Florida, Alexandra and other Confederate purchases tied up in British and French ports by legal proceedings, thus delaying deliveries. Meanwhile, bloody Gettysburg and the fall of Vicksburg in July 1863 showed the Europeans that the fortunes of war favored the Union, and circulars distributed by Bigelow offering land to European immigrants under the Homestead Act were bringing European recruits into the States and the Union army. Nevertheless, half a dozen ships were still in the construction docks of French shipyards, under contract for the Confederacy.
In Spring 1864 Bigelow's office was elevated to Consulate General, after he had written a report to Seward about professionalization of civil servants, which in a roundabout way led to the 1883 Pendleton Civil Service Act, passed after a dissatisfied office seeker shot President James A. Garfield. When Ambassador Dayton died in late 1864, Bigelow was appointed charge d' affaires and eventually, in April 1865, Minister, three weeks before the assassination of President Lincoln. The war was over, but Napoleon's ambitions were still a problem. In 1863 he had given the crown of Mexico to Emperor Maximilian, brother of Franz Joseph of Austria. This came about because in 1861 France, Britain and Spain had invaded Mexico (the latter two soon withdrawing), to collect unpaid war bonds' interest from Benito Juarez' War of the Reform (1857-61). US Congress, otherwise occupied, did not express its opposition until April 1864 (the Dawes Resolution). Bigelow was incurring French anger for pre
ssing for troop withdrawal, and Congressional ire for being too slow. The French finally withdrew their forces from Mexico, in 1867, and Maximilian was captured and shot. Bigelow, who stubbornly clung to his beliefs that "we do not want any territory faster than it will come to us by the voluntary actions of its population; we do not mean to fight for the Monroe Doctrine, because it is illogical and absurd for a nation to attempt to propagate democracy by arms," resigned his office in December 1866, after he had obtained a withdrawal date from the French.
Creating the New York Public Library
Ex-Ambassador John Bigelow left Paris and came back to New York in early 1867, and promptly went to work on his annotated edition of Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. He had located and bought the lost manuscript in Paris for a then exorbitant price of Fr 25,000, and the three-volume publication, correcting over 1200 errors in the standard Jared Sparks' edition, appeared in Spring of 1868. (The manuscript eventually ended up in San Marino, Cal., by way of the bicarbonate of soda manufacturer E(lihu) Dwight Church's book collection in Brooklyn, bought in its entirety by Henry Edward Huntington via the George Watson Cole collection in February 1911 for $1.3 million for his Museum and Library, where Ben now resides, alongside Gainsborough's Blue Boy.The library builder was the nephew of Collis P. Huntington, of Central Pacific and Southern Pacific Railroad fame.)
The reviews were favorable, but Bigelow craved action, and became managing editor of The New-York Times in 1869. It was not to be a happy tenure - he had clashes with management and journalists, and an article planted by the crooked speculator Jay Gould contributed to the gold crisis on Wall Street. The deeply hurt editor resigned within three months and moved the family to Germany, to write a history, France and Hereditary Monarchy, published in 1871.
Still on the loose, Bigelow returned to New York in 1873. He had voted for U.S.Grant in 1868 and 1872, but the corruption in the administration disgusted him, and though offered a Republican seat in the Congress, he went to work in old friend Samuel J. Tilden's 1874 Democratic campaign for Governor. Bigelow himself was elected N.Y. Secretary of State next year, and immediately started on Tilden's 1876 Presidential campaign, writing a biography and dissipating charges about the wealthy lawyer's business problems and falsified tax returns. The campaign, managed by Gramercy's Abram Hewitt, son-in-law of Peter Cooper, seemed a success, but there were two sets of electoral votes from Florida, South Carolina and Louisiana, a disputed original and a Democratic recount. Who had the authority to determine which set to open? The Constitution was not clear, and it took months of Congressional discussions to agree that a commission of 10 politically evenly divided Senators and Representatives, plus five Supreme Court judges chosen by lot would decide. Republican Judge Joseph Bradley substituted at the last minute for Democratic Judge David Davis, who had been elected Senator and refused to serve on the Commission. The vote was divided on party lines, and Rutherford B. Hayes was elected President of the United States. Bigelow blamed Tilden's sickliness and inability to present a commanding stature for the unfavorable turn of events, and may have swayed Tilden not to run in 1884 (1880 was destined to go to Republican James A. Garfield, but he was assassinated, and his successor Chester Arthur was much disliked), and to endorse the young N.Y. Governor, Grover Cleveland, for Presidency. He won, and Bigelow, originally slated to be Secretary of State, or Treasury, was offered only a boring Assistant Secretaryship, which he refused and went back to writing his biographies of Tilden and William Cullen Bryant (who had died in 1878).
Tilden, who dubbed Bigelow "the worst used man in the U.S." had bought a house for his friend at 21 Gramercy Park in 1881, while the Bigelows were on one of their European trips, and deeded it to Bigelow's eldest daughter, Grace, to forestall objections. That became the family home, with the venerable statesman and author residing there until his death at 95, in 1911. There he completed editing his multi-volume The Complete Works of Benjamin Franklin (1887-88), The Writings and Speeches (1885), Life (1895) and Letters...of Samuel J. Tilden (1908), his own Retrospections of an Active Life (1909-13), along with numerous feisty introductions, as well as philosophical and Swedenborgian treatises.
In 1884 Bigelow helped Tilden revise his will, leaving $5 million to establish a public library, an old dream of Bigelow's, "the noblest memorial a wealthy man could raise unto himself." There were two major public libraries in New York. The Astor Library, on Lafayette Street, now Joe Papp's Public Theater, was built in 1854 by William B. Astor (1792-1875) with $400,000 left by his father, landowner John J. Astor (1763-1848), then the richest man in America. It was created by Joseph Green Cogswell (Harvard, Goettingen), whom Washington Irving wanted as his first secretary at the Madrid embassy, but Astor prevailed by promising the huge funds for book purchase.
Lenox Library (1870) on 5th Avenue and 70th Street, was built to house the eclectic collection of rare books assembled by the eccentric James Lenox. In 1847, for an exorbitant L500, he bought the first Gutenberg Bible to come to the U.S. His first superintendent was George H. Moore; his first librarian was Samuel Austin Allibone the biographer and bibliographer. Lenox received the Drexel and Stuart bequests and T.A. Emmett and C. H. Hildeburn newspaper purchases and Dr. W. E. Prime Cervantes collection. Wilberforce Eames, the librarian since 1892, moved to the New York Public Library and retired in 1937. The library was torn down to make room for the Henry Clay Frick Mansion (now Collection).
Soon after Tilden's death and burial in a little hillside cemetery in New Lebanon, N.Y. the will was read and his relatives immediately sought its invalidation. Nevertheless, a Tilden Trust was authorized by the legislature, and the trustees (Bigelow as President, Andrew H. Green, Tilden's law partner, George W. Smith, his assistant and two elected members) went about their business, waiting for the law suit to settle. It took until 1891. Most of the money went to relatives; the trustees ended up with $2 million. In expectation, Bigelow had drawn plans for a building at the city-owned site of the abandoned Reservoir, 42nd Street between 5th and 6th Avenues. The old agit-prop expert swung into action with a Scribners Magazine article to sell his proposal. But the trustees had internal disagreements regarding the site (the Old City Hall on Wall Street was a possibility) and the mergers needed to build up the library holdings. Offers to merge with Columbia University, N.Y. Historical Society and the National Academy were discarded, and final agreements for the Free Public Library to merge with the Astor and Lenox libraries were made in 1895, with legislative and the Governor's and City Aldermen's approvals obtained in 1896. By the time Park Commissioners' approval and appropriations of funds from the Board of Estimate were in place, Bigelow was 79 years old. A military surgeon and library builder, Dr. John S. Billings, was chosen as director, and started operating in the Astor and Lenox buildings, the collections swelled by purchases and gifts, such as the Emmet autographs, Ford, Gould and Bigelow collections. The latter consisted of Congressional documents and treaties; the famous Benjamin Franklin manuscript went to the Elihu Dwight Church collection and eventually to Henry E. Huntington's museum in California.
Building plans took longer, the cornerstone was laid in November 1902, and the building was opened on May 23, 1911 by President William Howard Taft, with the 95 year old President of the Board of Trustees of the New York Public Library, John Bigelow, at his side. The 2,500,000 New Yorkers (grown tenfold since John Bigelow's arrival 75 years earlier) had acquired a new major resource, not a little due to one man's persistence. The 64 public library branches (many designed by McKim Mead and White), built with the $5.2 Millon donation from Andrew Carnegie after he sold his steel compaany to J. P. Morgan in 1901, were administered by the Library.
The last major task of this life safely put to rest, John Bigelow died, in December 1911. But another of his projects was not completed until 1914 - a canal.
Bigelow's steadfastness helped build the Panama Canal, an interest that overlapped his Public Library efforts almost completely. He first visited Baron de Lesseps' Colombia site in 1886. When de Lesseps failed and his chief engineer, Phillipe Bunau-Varilla came to Bigelow in despair, the old propaganda expert advised writing a book. Americans were apathetic, an a alternative route, through
Nicaragua, was gaining strength. Colombia also resisted, and it took the Spanish-American War and a revolution partitioning Columbia to finally complete the Canal. The first flag of the revolutionary republic of Panama was sown in the library of Bigelow's upstate house, "The Squirrels," in Highland Falls, by daughter Grace and Mme Bunau-Varilla, in 1903.
.
Wally Dobelis, President of the Park Towers co-op, co-President of the Stuyvesant Park Neighborhood Association and coordinator of a volunteer homeless shelter project on Gramercy Park, also writes a local history column for Town and Village, a newspaper servicing the Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village area of New York City. He is a former adjunct lecturer at New York University and makes his living auditing computer systems for a major insurance company.
4B Franklin's autobiography manuscript, 1771-1790, begun at 65 and kept to his death at 84, was acq by Henry Edwards Huntington (1850-1927,nephew and heir of Collis P. Huntington the railroad builder) for his rich San Marino, CA, museum and library in 1911. (Eliz Pomeroy, The Huntington Museum, London1983)
First to Elihu Dwight Church Bklyn, Geo watson Cole catalogs
Lenox; presented to public 1870; 1st suptd Geo H. Moore, 1st lib Samuel austin Allibone the biographer and bibliographer, received the Drexel &Stuart bequests TAEmmett and CHHildeburn newspap purch. Dr WE Prime Cervantes coll.Wilberforce Eames lib 1892, to NYPL died 1937i
Beverly Chew later Harry M. Lydenberg 600 pg hist
Astor: Joseph Green Cogswell (Harvard, Goettingen) was treasurer and prime minister 1848 WIrving wanted him as embassy secty in Madrid, JJA kept him by promise of 400k for lib, bought80-90k abroad by 1894 when opend
Carnegie: 1901 sold steel co to JPMorgan, gave $5.2m for 64 branches thru city, many by McKim Mead White (murd 1906); city to maintain. Fell under NYPL
Tilden 20k books?
JBigelow por, with some of the longest muttonchop whiskers ever seen even in thre beard-proud Victorian era. On the Balcony 2nd floor directly above the main entrance, he and Billings brace the opening overlooking the main entrance and Astor Hall.
