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Astoria Park was promptly named in his honor, but Tammany aldermen later rescinded the designation.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.
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).
Comments are no longer being accepted.