Monday, December 14, 2020 – A MAN WHOSE DREAM WAS NOT FULFILLED….BY HIM
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Monday, December 14, 2020
Our 235th Edition
THOMAS RAINEY: A MAN AND A BRIDGE
STEPHEN BLANK
Thomas Rainey: A Man and a Bridge
This is about a guy who spent a lot of time and a pile of money on a bridge that wasn’t built, though it was built later.
We’re talking about the Rainey Bridge or the Blackwell’s Island Bridge (not the purple Roosevelt Island Bridge that’s there now, but the one that wasn’t built). And ultimately the Queensboro Bridge – I mean the Ed Koch Bridge. A lot of bridges to cross.
So, meet Thomas Rainey, who worked long and hard to build a bridge from Manhattan to Queens.
Rainey was born in Yanceyville, Caswell County, North Carolina in 1824, oldest of 15 children. His New York Times obit (New York Times, March 30, 1910) is marvelous: “…because of thrashing, he ran away and wandered out West. With only a moderate education he had picked up in local schools and with a pistol and $3.50 in his pocket, he continued his journeyings by working his way until he had crossed West Virginia, Ohio and Missouri.” He studied “phonography, arithmetic by cancelation and medicine” (not a mistake – “arithmetic by cancelation” does exist), “lectured throughout Missouri and Iowa and in 1847 published ‘Rainey’s Improved Abacus’ a treatise on arithmetic and geometry by cancelation.”
Schooled at some point in engineering, he studied steam navigation in Europe and eventually earned the honorific title, Doctor – and he continued to lead a colorful life. Rainey became involved in politics, and at the request of the National Whig Committee, established The Cincinnati Daily Republican as their official organ. In Washington, he became acquainted with Daniel Webster, then Secretary of State. In 1853, Rainey was appointed Consul to Bolivia. He did not take up that position but did find himself in Brazil where, at one time, owned a fleet of sixteen steam ferry boats.
His fortune was made in Brazil, but it was a bridge that became his life’s passion. Rainey lived in Ravenswood, Queens (long before the current Ravenswood power plant, when Ravenswood was a riverside community of fine mansions) and spent 25 years of his life and most of his fortune advancing the construction of a bridge across the East River between Manhattan and Long Island City. What is now Rainey Park was to be the Queens anchor for a bridge which would extend over Blackwell’s Island, a project backed by leading citizens of Long Island City after the American Civil War.
As New York expanded, the need for bridges across the East River, especially between Manhattan and Brooklyn became clear. John A. Roebling, the architect of the Brooklyn Bridge, had talked about a Brooklyn span as early as 1852. In his diaries, William Steinway (yes, the piano guy, who was much involved in all Queens-Manhattan bridge building) says that Roebling himself determined that the East River between Manhattan and Queens could be bridged using Blackwell’s Island as an ideal intermediate point. Steinway writes that in the mid-1850s Roebling was invited by businessmen and financiers to provide such a design and in 1856 he provided a proposal with a cost estimate of $1.2 million. The project, however, did not move forward, and Roebling soon became an advocate for connecting Manhattan and Long Island by constructing a bridge to Brooklyn – rather than Queens
Why Blackwell’s Island? Easy. Using Blackwell’s Island meant that the bridge would have two spans – one span over the west channel of the river between Manhattan Island and Blackwell’s and another over the east channel between Blackwell’s and Queens. This would simplify the engineering by eliminating the need for one long suspension bridge that would need to cross the width of the entire river, requiring cables at both ends to support the roadway. It also meant that the mid-bridge towers could be built on dry land rather than in deep water.
In fact, this wasn’t the first time the idea for a Queens-Manhattan bridge had been bruited about. In 1838, a plan was developed to build a suspension bridge across the East River from somewhere between 65th and 75th Streets in Manhattan, across the northern end of Blackwell’s Island to Queens. Known as the “Graves” Plan for an iron hanging bridge, but it was doomed to disappointment.
In February 1867, the New York State Senate passed a bill that allowed the construction of a suspension bridge from Brooklyn to Manhattan. In the same year, 1867, the New York State Legislature granted a charter to the New York & Long Island Bridge Company. This project was led by a group of business leaders who were concerned that the proposed Brooklyn Bridge would not open up Long Island for development. They formed the New York and Queens County Bridge Company in 1871, chaired by Steinway. The Company was permitted to acquire land, but no provision was made for public funding. The initial stock capitalization was set at $2 million with each share valued at $100. Once built, the owners were authorized to collect tolls to produce a net profit not to exceed 15 percent.
The Panic of 1873 disrupted planning but the process restarted in 1876. Plans resumed and a caisson was sunk into the river on the Queens side, off the outpost of Ravenswood. A newspaper report from the time notes that the bridge is “under contract, and the contractors are now busy on the ironwork of the pier foundations.” Construction cost was estimated at $5 million, with a timeline of three years.
The NY Bridge Co (Brooklyn Bridge) statute was similar to the one for the bridge to Queens with one very significant difference: funding. Unlike the Queens effort — which would have to rely on private investment — the language creating the NY Bridge Co. authorized the “… cities of New York and Brooklyn … to subscribe to the capital stock of said company … and to issue bonds in payment of such subscriptions, payable in not less than thirty years, or may guarantee the payment of the principal and interest of the bonds of the company….” This provision, along with Brooklyn’s vastly greater population and the financial spoils the project provided to Boss Tweed and his cronies who dominated New York politics, were critical differences in the ultimate fates of the two competing bridge projects.
Rainey had been one of the earliest and staunchest supporters of the project, and the burden of organizing and refinancing the Company fell on him, first as treasurer in 1874, then as president in 1877. Ultimately, Rainey resigned from the Company leadership to allow him to spend more time raising funds for the bridge. Money was short, however, and the Company was never financially set.
In any case, the Brooklyn Bridge opened two years later, in 1883. It was a spectacle that caught the attention of New Yorkers and took away any hype surrounding a second bridge to Queens. With less money invested and a waning interest in the project, the Company that was chartered to build Rainey Bridge ended construction. The Company eventually went bankrupt in the 1890s.
Still another effort was made to build that bridge, this time pushed by the LIRR seeking access into Manhattan. After plans for a tunnel came unglued, plans were made for a bridge across the East River from 64th St in Manhattan to Harswell Avenue in Queens. Work seems to have begun on the Manhattan side but the project was abandoned in 1895.
Now here’s a Roosevelt Island mystery. Eleanor’s Pier, roughly opposite the Subway Station, rests on the foundation for a bridge that would link Manhattan and Queens. However, it is opposite 64th St in Manhattan, not 77th. When was it built, and for what purpose isn’t clear.
The project still wasn’t dead. A group called the Committee of Forty kept the effort alive and Rainey continued to search for funding. Finances, legal challenges from landowners, legislative “fixes,” and concerns about the navigability of the East River if the bridge was built, were the major themes for the 1880s and 1890s. In March 1881 the first contract was awarded for construction and work did at last begin on a pier on the Queens side of the river. It was not completed, however, due to lack of money.
Time, once again, was running out on Rainey and the bridge advocates; and, again, the New York State Legislature stepped in. On May 29, 1885 – just three days before the completion deadline set in 1879 — an amendment was passed to require that construction start by May 30, 1888. This time there was no completion deadline, but there were requirements that certain amounts of money be spent each year of construction, beginning with $100,000 in 1889. The legislature apparently was looking for financial commitment from the bridge promoters to support their scheme.
While the statutory and legal aspects of the process were a tangle, the backers were able to engineer legislative fixes and juggle legal challenges. But the fundamental issue was never resolved: funding. Municipal financial support was never authorized. The bridge seemed to be viewed as a project for the benefit of developers and wealthy commercial interests.
In the end, despite three decades of activity, the Blackwell’s Island Bridge was not built as a private project. Rainey failed to interest capital in the project and, in the words of the Times obit, “retired a broken, weary man, to live the last ten years of his life at the home of his youngest sister.”
Ultimately, it was pressure by the Committee of Forty, the emergence of the consolidated City of New York in 1898, and, now, public funding that led to the construction of a bridge spanning the East River at Blackwell’s Island. This time, the City took responsibility and construction began the bridge in 1901. It was completed in March 1909 and celebrated with eight days of events. Considered “a work of art” the bridge has been designated a national monument, and is, according to the Greater Astoria Historical Society, “an exuberant piece of the urban fabric.”
On opening day in 1909, Dr. Rainey realized his dream as he crossed the new bridge with Governor Charles Evans Hughes. Rainey had remained the lone public voice for the bridge. Although a broken and bankrupt man, he never gave up hope and, in the celebration, he received a gold medal inscribed: “Father of the Bridge.” That day Rainey told the New York Times:
“This is my bridge. At least it is the child of my thought, of my long years of arduous toil and sacrifice. Just over there, are the old towers of my bridge, which I began to build many years ago. I spent all I owned on the project . . . It is a grand bridge, much greater than the one I had in mind. It will be in service to thousands in the years to come, when Dr. Rainey and his bridge projects will long have been gathered into the archives of the past.”
The new structure was named the Queensboro Bridge, but Rainey’s contribution was not forgotten. On April 18, 1904, the City of New York acquired several acres of waterfront property through condemnation procedures. The concrete sea wall, built where the park meets the East River, was completed in 1912, by which time Rainey had passed away. To honor his public spirit, the city named the property Rainey Park. This park is the largest in Ravenswood, once an exclusive neighborhood.
Why this bridge?
Build it and they will come.
A bridge held out the promise of commercial transformation of sparsely populated Queens, home to only 45,000 inhabitants in 1870 compared to 942,000 in Manhattan. Before the bridge opened in 1909, although Newtown creek was fully industrialized and factories were found along the river, Queens was mostly woods and farmland, with small clusters of villages and small towns scattered about this bucolic landscape. Not surprisingly, the prospect of moving people and freight more easily over a bridge, rather than exclusively by ferry and barge, was appealing to business leaders in Queens who had land to develop and products to manufacture and sell. Within 10 years of the bridge’s completion, the population of Queens had nearly doubled, from 275,000 to half a million people. Built it and people came.
Stephen Blank
RIHS
December 12, 2020
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Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky
for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac
Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website
Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff
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