Way Back Machine | The Mayor Is Shot

Mayor William Jay Gaynor, center, moments after being shot on Aug. 9, 1910. William H. Warnecke/The New York World Mayor William Jay Gaynor, center, moments after being shot on Aug. 9, 1910.

Most New York City mayors are typically booed at ballgames, but fortunately only one, William J. Gaynor, was wounded in an attempted assassination. It happened a century ago on Monday.

The bullet, fired by a disgruntled former municipal employee, remained lodged in Gaynor’s neck. Three years later, suffering from the lingering effects of the wound, he succumbed to a heart attack — the only mayor of modern New York to die in office.

Although nominated by the Tammany machine in 1909, Gaynor emerged as a fiercely independent reformer. He fought police use of excessive force and corruption (though Police Lieut. Charles Becker would be convicted during Gaynor’s tenure of ordering the murder of the gambler Herman Rosenthal). He championed mass transit. He abolished East River bridge tolls.

Few tangible signs of his legacy endure, though.

Astoria Park was promptly named in his honor, but Tammany aldermen later rescinded the designation. A Brooklyn intermediate school that bore his name was closed last year. With City Hall being renovated, his official portrait, which usually hangs on the third floor, is in storage.

A memorial to the former mayor still stands in Brooklyn’s Cadman Plaza. And a plaque that he presented to St. Mary Hospital in Hoboken, N.J., where he was treated after the shooting, was found a few years ago by Michael Miscione, the Manhattan borough historian, in the basement of a Brooklyn building belonging to the Franciscan Sisters of the Poor. It’s on loan to the Museum of the City of New York, where it is on display.

Mayor Gaynor’s funeral in 1913.Courtesy Museum of the City of New York Mayor Gaynor’s funeral in 1913.

Born upstate in 1851, Gaynor became a reporter for The Brooklyn Argus. As a lawyer who lived in Park Slope (as mayor, he would typically walk to City Hall) and as a candidate for the State Supreme Court, he challenged John Y. McKane, the omnipotent Coney Island party boss, who was later convicted of criminally thwarting democracy. Gaynor was considered incorruptible. He literally kicked out of his office politicians who tried to buy his support.

Still, in a rare miscalculation, Tammany nominated him in 1909 against a field that included the publisher William Randolph Hearst. Gaynor won. His inauguration as New York’s 97th mayor was his first visit to City Hall.

Seven months later, on Tuesday, Aug. 9, 1910, he boarded the liner Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse for a month-long European vacation. He was posing for photographers and chatting on the deck with well-wishers from his official family and with a fellow passenger, the president of Chile, when he was accosted by John J. Gallagher, who had been fired by the city’s docks department a few weeks before as a 25-cents-an-hour night watchman on the East River piers.

Gallagher, a 58-year-old Irish immigrant who lived alone in a boarding house on Third Avenue, had been accused of dereliction of duty. He claimed he was the victim of a conspiracy. He wrote the mayor seeking redress. He also tried to meet with him a few days earlier at City Hall, but was rebuffed with a note that said the mayor “can do nothing in the matter of which you write.”

“You took the bread and meat out of my mouth,” Gallagher cried and fired several shots from a .38 revolver, striking the mayor and hitting his sanitation commissioner, William H. Edwards, a 300-pound former Princeton football player, in the arm.

“Tell the people goodbye for me,” Gaynor gasped, believing that he was mortally wounded.

He was taken to St. Mary, where he recuperated for several weeks. He returned to City Hall on Oct. 3.

The shooting prompted such an outpouring of sympathy that short-lived boomlets of support projected Gaynor for the governorship and even the presidency. But the mayor spurned higher office.

“When a man has gone down into the Valley of the Shadow and looked the specter Death in the face, and said to it, ‘I am ready,’ nothing in this world looks very large to him,” Gaynor wrote.

Shortly before the shooting, a constituent had warned him against going around the city unescorted. “I do no think anyone would do me any harm unless he was a lunatic, and it is hard to guard against lunatics,” Gaynor replied.

Just after the shooting, Gaynor blamed “journalistic scoundrels” for stoking public sentiment against him and creating a climate for violence. (Apparently because Gaynor was ailing, Mr. Gallagher was never tried for shooting the mayor. He was sentenced to 12 years imprisonment for shooting Mr. Edwards and died in 1913 in a state hospital for the insane.)

A former lay member of the lay brotherhood of the Christian Order (he later renounced Catholicism), Gaynor could be secretive, scrappy, ill-tempered and blunt. He did not suffer fools. When he was introduced to a fanatical supporter of Sunday blue laws, a man who affected the title canon, Gaynor refused to shake hands and barked: “Canon? You’re no canon. You’re only a popgun.”

Yet a friend also described him as melding “the methodical persistence of Grant and the tactical genius of Lee.”

Just before sailing for Europe again on Sept. 4, 1913, he delivered a vituperative parting salvo at Tammany and planned an independent re-election campaign. In the meantime, he said, “I am going to spend two weeks on the ocean where nobody can get at me.” He died aboard the steamship Baltic on Sept. 10.

Gaynor’s body was returned to New York on the liner Lusitania. He was buried in Green-Wood Cemetery.

The following April, a 71-year-old unemployed blacksmith fired at Gaynor’s successor, John Purroy Mitchel, in City Hall Plaza, but missed, striking the city’s corporation counsel in the cheek instead. In defense, Mr. Mitchel drew his own revolver, which he had become accustomed to carrying (and with which, Mr. Miscione, the historian said, Mitchel once shot a friend in the leg by accident).

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Gaynor was a scoundrel for abolishing the bridge tolls.

You left out the most interesting tidbit about that photo!

The guy in the background wearing the white hat and beard is Robert Todd Lincoln, the son of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln.

In addition to being on-hand during the Gaynor shooting, Robert Lincoln was present or nearby when three presidential assassinations occurred.

– Robert Todd was invited to accompany his parents to the Ford’s Theatre the night his father was shot by John Wilkes Booth on April 14, 1865. Citing fatigue from riding in a covered wagon for an extended period of time, he declined, and remained behind at the White House.

– At President James A. Garfield’s invitation, Lincoln was at the Sixth Street Train Station in Washington, D.C., where the President was shot by Charles J. Guiteau on July 2, 1881, and was an eyewitness to the event.

– At President William McKinley’s invitation, Lincoln was at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, where the President was shot by Leon F. Czolgosz on September 6, 1901, though he was not an eyewitness to the event.

Freaky, right?

After three years with the assassions bullet still lodged in his neck did the Mayor finally succumb to a heart attack…only then did the shooter finally execute a Full Gaynor!

very interesting story, lets hope that any disgruntled employees are far and few between, wonder if the economy had anything to do with this 1910 assassination attempt. I will have to check. thanks for the education and history. stay safe everyone.derelction of duty sounds pretty bad.

I hope this will be an ongoing series.

I’ve always wondered about the history of this photo. Thanks. Any information about William H. Warnecke, the photographer?

This article is terrific. I love writers capable of uncovering New York’s forgotten memories. These peeks into the past, with the details and the photos knock me out. It doubles the pleasure of every walk I take to know what has been before. The more obscure the fact, the higher the reward.

A very nice account of a fascinating event (not to mention a classic photograph) that few today are aware of. One question: what is your source for Gaynor believing he was mortally wounded? According to this article //query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9F01EEDA1239E433A25753C1A96E9C946196D6CF he was quite composed after the shooting, and simply wanted to have the wound dressed and then begin his vacation.

Another tribute to Gaynor still exists: the Mayor’s Lamps in front of his former residence on Eighth Avenue in Park Slope, across from the Montauk Club.

Aaron Naparstek, your post (#2) is not freaky at all — because it is not true. Edward J. Litchfield is the man in the white hat, not Robert Todd Lincoln.

An interesting and informative article…more of the same, please.

Without sounding too much like a “conspiracy theorist,” I wonder if it really was a disgruntled former municipal worker…or, perhaps, a disgruntled municipal political machine working through a disgruntled former municipal worker…

The link in John Price’s post (#8) will take you to the Times’ lead story of the shooting published on August 10, 1910, the day after the assassination attempt, .

Here are links to the coverage from two other papers, the Tribune and Sun. These links will open an interactive window that shows the entire newspaper page. The window has handy links to “Previous Page,” “Next Page,” “Previous Edition” and “Next Edition” that make it very easy to read the coverage over several days.

New York Tribune front page, August 10, 1910:
//chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030214/1910-08-10/ed-1/seq-1/

New York Sun front page, August 10, 1910:
//chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030272/1910-08-10/ed-1/seq-1/

@1 — your opinion is a matter of perspective.

Gaynor noted that the tolls thus far collected had paid for the bridges. The original “contract” with residents of the City was that tolls would be collected for that purpose and then abolished.

This was mainly due to the fact that the bridges were seen as simply extensions of city streets and no one should have to pay individually for an amenity such as public thoroughfares.

What Gaynor and other proponents of free public access overlooked was the yawing fiscal gap this created in how to pay for maintaining the bridges. One reason why they have gone through periods of perilous neglect — only to then cost hundreds of millions to repair and renovate.

Gaynor was, and remains, a hero for abolishing the East River bridge tolls. A son of Brooklyn who knew that it was the least thing required to lessen the abominable elitest arrogance of Manhattan and make at least some sense out of Manhattan’s then recent and still much lamented political conquest of Brooklyn and the three other “outer” boroughs into the empire of “New York City”. As always, Manhattan wants the bodies and taxes, but not the residents and now not the cars. Hey, how about building some better mass transit and parking garages!

To #14:

Hear! Hear!

I can only imagine what the toll would be on the Queensboro Bridge if they were still being collected.

Too bad we can’t abolish the tolls on the Queens-Midtown tunnel!

At the time of Mayor Gaynor’s election, most New Yorkers didn’t drive cars, and the Brooklyn Bridge still accommodated mostly horse and foot traffic along with several trolley companies. The last railroad traveled the bridge in 1908.

Gaynor walked daily from his home in Brooklyn across the Brooklyn Bridge to City Hall from the time he was elected Mayor in 1910.

Thanks Sam for bringing this great character and one of our better Mayor’s back into the public’s consciousness.

The reason a statue (bust really) of Mayor Gaynor exists at Cadman Plaza is because that is at the base of the Brooklyn Bridge where on the Mayor’s regular route. He would exchange pleasantries, and more than occasionally his tart barbs, with anyone who cared to greet or talk to him on his way.

The ‘uncharacteristic miscalculation’ Mr. Roberts refers to in Tammany’s nomination of Gaynor to run for Mayor is that from the time he began to run he made it clear he did not work for bosses, and he carried that pledge out in his appointments, which were possibly more free of patronage inspired motive than any NY mayor, before, or since.

The quote on the Cadman Plaza plaque reflects Gaynor’s most personally held philosophy as a jurist, “Ours is a government of laws not man.” He was a man of his times with many of the prides and prejudices commonly shared, for example he was anti-suffrage while the pragmatic Tammany’s Big Tim Sullivan was pro women’s rights. He was also a bibliophile and an enthusiastic literary spirit who included classic quotations in his opinions with typical Victorian flourish.

What bears exploring is whether the attempted assassination of Gaynor had great similarities with the earlier assassination of Garfield. Both were over refuting patronage and both crimes were committed by discharged workers who wound up being considered insane.

There’s a story about that photograph. It was taken by a photographer for the Evening World, edited by Charles Chapin.

“When a reporter brought in the famous photograph taken the instant a would-be assassin’s bullet struck Mayor Gaynor, Chapin was truly ecstatic. “Blood all over him!” be beamed. “And exclusive, too!””
CHARLES CHAPIN, by Richard F. Snow. American Heritage Magazine, December 1979, Volume 31, Issue 1

GAT

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of “The African Theatre”, Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.

@15 — Stephanie, your LI self-serving persona is coming out.

As to those tolls on the Queens Midtown Tunnel — most of the revenues go to support mass transit — including the LIRR!

Take the train from LI to Manhattan. Your stress level will decrease, the air will be cleaner and you won’t have to worry about where to park and how much it is going to cost.

The era of free rides is ending. With technology such as EZ Pass — putting tolls on the East River bridges becomes easier and less of a traffic clogger.

Something will be done to cut traffic in Manhattan — even if it’s not a system of congestion pricing. Besides, we’re only one fiscal crisis away from tolling the ER bridges — count on it.

The Dual Contract subway lines (most of the IRT and BMT stand as a tribute to Gaynor’s efforts in supportof public transit. For his short time in office, he and his successor, Mitchel stand as two of New York City’s greatest Mayors. Unfortunately, they were succeeded by two of the worst, Hylan and Walker.

Stephanie and Sam Levine August 9, 2010 · 1:34 pm

Thanks to Sam Roberts for this fine article. As transplanted New Yorkers with a lifelong interest in our city’s history, we were enthralled by the details of Gaynor’s life and the event which led to his death. The mention of his successor, John Purroy Mitchel, brings to mind his equally intriguing story, perhaps a fruitful subject for a future article in Roberts’ series.
Boca Raton, FL

the photo of the mayor is renowned in photojournalism circles… Susan Songtag wrote about it in her book ‘On Photography’

Dear Mr. Roberts,
Interesting story; thanks for recounting the event! You state that Lt. Charles Becker was convicted for the Rosenthal murder, which is, of course, correct. However, Ms. Andy Logan’s book, “Against the Evidence,” published about 25 years (?) ago, strongly refutes Becker’s guilt.
So, I wouldn’t say that “although” Gaynor was incorruptible, a New York police officer was sufficiently embroiled in corruption to order a murder.

The comments about name of the gentleman in the rear of the picture with the white hat and beard are incorrect. In fact, the gentleman’s name was William Strauss, a New York businessman who was also my great-grandfather. Mr. Strauss went to the ship to see off a friend who was traveling to Europe.

Mayor Gaynor was one of the best letter writers that our country has ever known. His published letters and speeches are extremely interesting and entertaining to read.

Mr. Meltzer’s post (#23) claims that the man in the white hat was his great-grandfather, one William Strauss. The case for Mr. Strauss has been made by his family members before, in the October 1967 issue of American Heritage Magazine. However, according to the researchers at American Heritage the caption that appeared under the photo when it ran in the New York World identified the man as “Edward J. Litchfield, a Brooklyn neighbor of the Mayor.”

In my various historical research projects I have come across a number of incorrect illustration captions, so I certainly will not swear on a stack of bibles that it is Litchfield and not Strauss — or another plausable candidate.

HOWEVER, given that the primary evidence says it was Litchfield, the onus is on the Strauss camp to prove it otherwise.

Here is a link to the American Heritage article:
//www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1967/6/1967_6_50.shtml