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This delicate little pavilion is one of the few structures left to show for the huge sums “appropriated” by Boss Tweed, the most notoriously corrupt politician in a city famous for political corruption.

The Boss’s first grand theft was for a house of justice. In 1858 – the year construction began on Central Park – Tweed finagled the state legislature into allotting funds for a new city courthouse. Asking for more money became an annual event. By 1871, with the courthouse still unfinished, the cost had skyrocketed to $6.5 million – twenty-five times the original estimate. Much of the money had of course been siphoned off by Tweed and his cronies.

But that was petty larceny compared to what Tweed did next. In 1870, he bullied and bribed passage of an amendment to New York City’s charter. It gave absolute control of the city to Mayor Oakley Hall, Boss Tweed, and two cronies. They collected and disbursed all taxes. They set the salary of every city official. They stuffed ballot boxes and handed out jobs to loyal supporters. They issued tens of millions of dollars’ worth of bonds. In two years, the city’s debt tripled, as Tweed’s net worth and girth ballooned.

Naturally, Tweed and his cronies also seized control of Central Park. Due to the frugal and efficient management of Andrew Haswell Green, the Board of Commissioners supervised not just the Park, but huge projects such as building bridges and laying out streets in northern Manhattan and the Bronx. Their employees ran to thousands, their budgets to millions.

Tweed’s new Commissioners, said the New York Times, “know no more about park management or adornment than three tomcats.” They ordered the Ramble to be tidied up. They ordered trees at the edges of the park be cut back or hacked down, so that park visitors could admire mansions on Fifth Avenue rather than Olmsted and Vaux’s landscape views.

In nineteen months, Tweed’s cronies on the Park’s Board of Commissioners appropriated $2.3 million: about half the original purchase price of the land for the park. What they didn’t steal, they spent on amenities that made the park popular rather than pastoral. A proposed conservatory never got further than its expensive foundations. The Tweed-era carousel burned to the ground in 1924. Architect Jacob Wrey Mould designed a colorful wooden home for some of the denizens of the zoo, which was torn down in the 1930s.

Only two structures designed and built in the Tweed era are still standing in Central Park. One is that brick-and-stone building at West 67th Street, an elegant creation by Mould, albeit impractical for its original residents.

The other survivor is this cast-iron gem, also by Mould, that once sheltered women waiting for the trolley at Columbus Circle.

When the Maine Monument was assigned to that corner, the “ladies pavilion” was banished to an obscure corner of the Lake. In 1971 some hooligans gave it a good shove, and it collapsed. Two years later it was carefully renovated, with new parts cast from old. Now it sits like a prim and proper Victorian lady on the shores of the Lake.

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• Chronology: Tweed’s Board of Commissioners of Central Park came into power in May 1870. In November, they fired Olmsted and Vaux and appointed Mould chief architect. Andrew H. Green remained on the Tweed Board of Commissioners, but was powerless, since his vote was always countered by Tweed’s three cronies. Often the cronies simply didn’t show up to scheduled Board meetings: no quorum, no meeting. Investing his ill-gotten gains in real estate, Tweed became the third-largest landowner in the city, with a mansion on Fifth Avenue and two steam-powered yachts. Tweed was ousted from power in November 1871. By then the New York Times estimated that the Tweed Ring had stolen $250 million – about $5 billion today. Tweed was eventually tried in one of the rooms of the (then still unfinished) “Tweed Courthouse”.
• On Jacob Wrey Mould, see this post.
• For more on Central Park in the 1850s-1870s, see my book Central Park: The Early Years.
• For early images of Central Park, see the pages on this site for through 1860, 1861-1865, and 1866-1870.
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