Photo of the Day: Mayor Gaynor Memorial, Brooklyn, NY

Okay, I cheated a bit with this headline. Technically, this is called the William Jay Gaynor Memorial. But the men (and so far, it’s been all men) who have held what John Lindsay once called “the second-toughest job in America" have, more often than not, ended up nonentities to most New Yorkers several decades after their deaths.

So, I figured that giving his title in the headline might bring at least more recognition to William Jay Gaynor than he’s had in a while. I myself knew next to nothing about him when I saw this monument to him in Cadman Plaza Park, near the Brooklyn Bridge, and decided to photograph it back in October. I decided, at some point, that I would research his life and career. So much for good intentions.

Then, in November, I came across a New York Times article about Presidential aspirants who found their final resting place in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, and became interested in a hurry. Gaynor not only belonged to this group, but among an even smaller, more fortunate one: a politician who’d been shot—and survived. For a while, anyway.

The bust of Gaynor, little noticed these days, was created by Adolph Alexander Weinman. The German-born sculptor added, to each side, allegorical bas-reliefs representing law and strength on one side and knowledge and ease on the other. One side sounds like the attributes of someone dedicated to the life of the law; the other, a politician. If it sounds a bit incongruous, it wasn’t more so than the thought that Tammany Hall would nominate this reforming state supreme court justice, for Mayor.

According to H.L. Mencken, reviewing a biography of Gaynor in the February 1932 issue of his magazine, The American Mercury: “When he sat on the bench in Brooklyn he [Gaynor] tried to enforce it to the letter, to the natural scandal of his brethren of the ermine. Scarcely a day went by that he did not denounce the police for their tyrannies. He turned loose hundreds of prisoners, raged and roared from the bench, and wrote thousands of letters on the subject, many of them magnificent expositions of Jeffersonian doctrine. Unfortunately, his strange ideas alarmed the general run of respectable New Yorkers quite as much as they alarmed his fellow judges, and so he was always in hot water.”

A former Christian Brother, Gaynor would not interfere with citizens enjoying Sundays as they wished, whether going to saloons or playing baseball. But, to Tammany Hall’s post-election horror, he had a short way with patronage seekers, and a marvelous asperity that would surely come in handy nowadays in dealing with fake news. ("Dear Sir," he wrote one correspondent while in City Hall, “I care nothing for common rumor, and I guess you made up the rumor in this case yourself.")

In August 1910, just as he was about to depart for Europe on a vacation, Gaynor was shot by James Gallagher, who was angry over being fired from the Docks Department a few weeks earlier. The bullet, lodged in Gaynor's throat, was too dangerous to be removed, his doctors decided. Though the mayor recovered and returned to work, the stuck bullet left him subject to frequent, exhausting coughing spasms.

At the 1912 Democratic Convention, Gaynor was mentioned as a potential Presidential candidate, and actually received one vote on each of six ballots until the delegates finally turned to New Jersey Governor Woodrow Wilson, the winner that fall.

The following year, with Tammany firmly rejecting him and a Republican-Fusion ticket supporting John Purroy Mitchell, Gaynor attempted to assemble his own coalition for a re-election bid. That September, exhausted from his efforts, he was on another vacation to Europe when he died. Thousands paid their final respects to him as his body lay in state on a bier in City Hall.

Only 19 years later, Mencken was already noting that Gaynor was “almost if not quite forgotten.” The memorial in Cadman Plaza ensures that the mayor never will be completely lost to curious visitors.

Photo of the Day: Horace Greeley Bust, Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn

When I visited Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn a year and a half ago, I had no plan for how to maximize my time. I didn’t know, for instance, that shuttle tours operate only at certain times and days. As this is a megalopolis of the dead, with more than half a million “permanent residents” in their final resting place, I would have to get around on foot, and though a map I got near the center’s entrance helped me some, it seemed to collapse distances. Finding a grave would be a matter of serendipity.

The one you see here was among the most dramatically situated, on a hill in Section 35, Lot 2344—one of the highest points in the whole sprawling cemetery. How appropriate: the man in this 12-ft.-high green bust that I photographed, newspaper editor Horace Greeley, possessed not only a lofty vision for his readers, but also for himself in the life of the country. He was more successful in achieving the former view than the latter.

Greeley is often credited with a famous saying that epitomized Americans’ movement across the continent: "Go west, young man, go west." His actual advice, though essentially the same, was not as pithy: "If any young man is about to commence in the world with little in his circumstances to prepossess him in favor of one section above another, we say to him publicly and privately, Go to the West; there your capacities are sure to be appreciated and your industry and energy rewarded." It goes to show, I guess, that even an editor may need editing.

I have been looking to write about Greeley and his final resting place for a while, and now I have a ready excuse: this month marks the 175^th anniversary of his newspaper, the New York Tribune. Hiring top talent (including leading literary figures of the time such as Margaret Fuller, George Ripley, and Richard Hildreth), and adding editorials and commentaries, Greeley created a “penny paper” affordable for the working class. That enabled the Tribune to reach a circulation of more than a quarter of a million, fulfilling the ambition he had proclaimed to the wife of a clergyman friend of his: that it would be “a power in the land.”

One cause after another absorbed Greeley’s interest: workers’ rights, women’s rights, scientific farming, free distribution of government lands, and Irish nationalism. But, coming to feel that journalism wasn’t enough to shape the nation’s debates, he longed to be part of the political arena. A three-month stint in Congress as a Whig in the 1848-49 term only whetted his interest. Over the next 24 years, he ran three times for Congress, twice for the U.S. Senate, and once for the Presidency. He lost every race.

What bedeviled him was the same issue that vexed the nation: slavery. He was simultaneously an abolitionist and a pacifist who believed that the South had a right to secede; then a supporter of war and immediate emancipation; then, as Northern forces temporarily stalled in 1863 and 1864, a backer of peace negotiations with the Confederates. Abraham Lincoln bore patiently with his constant offers of unsolicited advice and hot-and-cold attitudes. “I do not suppose I have any right to complain," the President remarked wryly. "Uncle Horace agrees with me pretty often after all; I reckon he is with us at least four days out of seven."

In 1872, Greeley came as close as he ever could to real power by being nominated for President by both the Democratic and Liberal Republican parties. His campaign brought catastrophe on him in multiple forms. Backers of President Ulysses S. Grant pointed to Greeley’s vacillating support of the war as evidence of his unsteadiness of purpose, and cited multiple aspects of his appearance and personality (e.g., oversized boots, rumpled trousers, a battered hat, and a white overcoat jammed with papers) as proof of his extreme eccentricity. In the election that November, Greeley was soundly trounced in the Electoral College.

Just before the election, Greeley’s wife died. Within a few weeks of his crushing defeat at the polls, he also lost control of the Tribune to Whitelaw Reid. The cumulative effect of all of this was so devastating that Greeley first suffered a complete breakdown, then died a month after the election. 

Such was Greeley’s eminence that after his death, his opponents felt obliged to honor him. President Ulysses Grant, who had defeated him in the election of 1872, attended his funeral, and the committee formed to create his memorial was headed by Thurlow Weed, a onetime ally who had fallen out with Greeley when this New York state Whig political boss did not secure for him the party nomination for U.S. Senate in 1854.

The Greeley sculpture, unveiled in December 1876, was created by Charles Calverley, who also fashioned busts in Green-Wood Cemetery of sewing-machine inventor Elias Howe and “Precious Georgie,” a four-year old boy who died of scarlet fever. The Greeley bust anchors the family plot in Green-Wood. You have to hope that Greeley finds more serenity here than those closest to him would have provided the editor during his life: only two of his seven children lived to adulthood, and his wife experienced so many nervous ailments and neglected the household so much that he was obliged to sleep closer to his city office.

Photo of the Day: Metropolis of the Dead: Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn

A friend’s recent photos of a recent trip to Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery prompted me to go back to my own vast cache of pictures taken in this National Historic Landmark over a year and a half ago. While my images are not as lovely as my friend’s, they do record the great variety in this place.

Even so, what I photographed conveys only a fraction of this 478-acre pastoral setting. The than 560,000 “permanent residents” here would make this a good-sized city in its own right, and a necropolis of enormous size. 

I was only able to get to a mere handful of the more famous "residents" in the two hours I spent at the site. This photograph illustrates the only real way to see more of that, if you don’t have a car (as I did not when I went there): Take the Wednesday bus tour. But be sure to sign up in advance. I checked the cemetery's Website the other night, and that trolley tour was already full.

Photo of the Day: Sylvan Waters, Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn

Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn was, justifiably, considered a sensation when it  was founded in 1838, epitomizing a new style in pastoral landscapes for the final resting places of Americans. One of the sights on its 478 acres was Sylvan Waters, captured in this image that I took when I visited this National Historic Landmark last October.

Photo of the Day: Brothers Divided by War, United in Death

It’s often been said that the Civil War was fought between brother and brother. I had regarded that statement as more metaphor than fact until last fall, when I came across and photographed the two headstones here at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery.

This landmark is the final resting place for some of New York’s most illustrious citizens, but, with 4,800 veterans of the Civil War identified on its grounds, it is especially rich in the history of that transformative conflict.

The best place to start this post—and the reason why I’m talking about this ground now—is with the date on the headstone of Clifton Kennedy Prentiss: April 2, 1865, when he was mortally wounded at Petersburg, VA. It also happened to be the date that, after a summer and fall of slugging it out with Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant finally succeeded in smashing the Confederate lines, moving unimpeded toward Richmond, and bringing to an end a four-year war that, at its start, nobody dreamed could last so long.

But the death of Clifton Prentiss assumed even more tragic interest for me when I saw the name on the stone near him: William Scollay Prentiss. The surname and the year of birth on the headstone indicated that he was a younger brother. But three initials on the stone—CSA, or Confederate States of America—strongly implied a far more complicated relationship between the two.

A female guide at the cemetery, after I pressed her for details, related the following:

Though refusing a commission he could easily have gotten early on, 25-year-old Clifton had joined the Union army as a private among the New York volunteers. After it mustered out, he was able, as a Maryland native, to join  an infantry unit in the state early in 1862.

In a war that offered remarkable opportunities for promotion, few had risen as high as Clifton from so low a start by the end of the war: brevet colonel. His rise owed in no small part to his conspicuous gallantry, evidenced by the six horses shot from under him.

Maryland, a slave border state, had barely stayed in the Union and was rife with secessionist sentiment, so it was no surprise that William chose an opposite course from his brother, joining the Second Maryland regiment of the Confederacy, where he rose to become a lieutenant. He was among the defenders when Grant, sensing victory finally in his hands, ordered an all-out assault on the rebel entrenchments at Petersburg.

Clifton's Maryland regiment was instrumental in breaking the months-long siege at Petersburg, but, as one of the first officers in the charge, his luck ran out when he was shot in the lung. While he was taken to the side, he was told that some subordinates had just received word that his brother had also been wounded, in the knee, and that he desired to see him.

At first, Clifton refused any contact with his brother with a curt, “I want to see no man who fired on my country’s flag.” Another colonel pleaded with him, but, even after William’s cot was laid beside his, Clifton initially just glared at him.

Williams’ smile finally battered down Clifton’s defenses. Before long, the brothers had reached out their hands to each other and were crying. For about a month, they were kept in the same field medical unit, a tent associated with the Fiftieth New York Engineer’s camp, and it appeared that they would both be on the road to recovery. But their condition began to deteriorate after a transfer a month later to Armory Square Hospital in Washington, D.C.

Besides the camp where the brothers struggled for life, there was another New York connection involving the brothers: their male nurse, Walt Whitman. Specimen Days, the poet’s fragmentary, quasi-autobiography, includes a late May 1865 diary entry describing William, “very intelligent and well bred—very affectionate—held on to my hand, and put it by his face, not willing to let me leave.” Even copious amounts of morphine could not really ease the pain of the “young Baltimorean” (Whitman underestimated his age by five years). An amputation of William’s right leg had left him debilitated so that he “can’t sleep hardly at all.”

William died a little less than a month after Whitman’s diary entry and was buried at Green-Wood Cemetery. By summer’s end, Clifton joined him in death.

The Prentiss brothers ended their lives in poignant reconciliation. Not all American families were so fortunate. After the war, the Confederate sisters of the underrated, enormously brave Union general, the Virginian George H. Thomas, turned his portrait to the wall to indicate he was dead to them. The painful divisions extended all the way to the White House, where First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln faced constant embarrassment from the press over her relationship with her Confederate half-sisters.