If any apology should be needed for what I am now to write it would be found in a large pile of newspaper-cuttings, preserved for me by a friend, which testify to no little public interest in my removal a year ago from the position which I had for a long time held in the Department of Public Parks of this city; in the great kindness which these evince toward me personally (if there was anything else it has been omitted from the collection); and in the earnest remonstrance against the action of the Park Commissioners which a large and most respectable body of citizens did me the honor to make.

My private life for many years has been one of so much seclusion that few of those who, as I have since learned, took an active interest in the matter are personally known to me, and this fact, while it increases my obligation to them compels me to think of it much less as an obligation to individuals than to the public.

The general interest taken in my removal was obviously in some degree due to the circumstances under which it occurred, and as these may now have a new significance I shall beg briefly to recall them. The principal works of the Department had been suspended for the winter, and leave of absence had been given me for three months upon a physician’s certificate of the immediate and imperative necessity of my release from duty. I was to use the opportunity thus occurring to review the principal works of my profession in Europe, and it was with a knowledge of my motives and intentions that, on the day which had been first appointed for my departure, my removal was resolved upon. No intimation that such action was contemplated had been given me. I was notified of it only as I was going on board the steamer and the final act of removal occurred after I had landed in Liverpool.

The object was said to be to save the amount of my salary; but as my salary was to be stopped during the period of my sick-leave, the motive did not account for the abruptness and apparently unpremeditated character of the action. It might be suspected that, in taking leave, I had given the Commissioners some ground for sudden offence with me which they had taken this method to resent; but they had provided against such an idea by passing a complimentary and grateful resolution, and by a promise that if, after my return, they should find that they had anything to do in my line, they would take pleasure in giving me an occasional day’s work..

It was not a matter for a coroner’s jury, and such interest as had been taken in it soon blew over. For more than five months afterwards I avoided looking at a New York newspaper, and when I returned I could no longer with propriety say some things which it might have been becoming in me to do had I been at home while the public concern with it continued.

[374]

A recent occurrence having revived interest in the doings of the Commission, occasion seems offered me for three duties:

First, to give my thanks, as I heartily do, to the remonstrants against my removal; second, to express my regret that an exaggerated view should have been taken by some of the writers for the press of the responsibilities with which I had for some time previously been entrusted, and credit given me for services to the city which belonged wholly or in part to others; and, lastly, to point out that the circumstance of my removal was in itself of less public interest than that of the adoption of a general policy in the business of the Department of which it was but the first step — a fact which has not, I think, obtained that degree of consideration which it would have received had it been frankly stated at the time.

I shall not explain or characterize this policy, but briefly give a few examples by which it may be better understood.

The duty of laying out that part of the city lying north of the Harlem River had been given, some years before my removal, to Mr. J. J. R. Croes, C.E., and myself jointly. I may be permitted to say that it was a duty which, for several reasons, I had strenuously endeavored to avoid, and which I took up only when not to do so would have compelled me, according to my notions of official propriety, to resign other duties very dear to me. To get adequate command of the conditions of so large, complex, and in many respects original a problem had been necessarily a work of time, and would have been much more so but for the familiarity with them which Mr. Croes had already gained. This, however, had been accomplished, and when my removal occurred the whole of our common design had been studied, its leading lines laid down, its principles and motives determined; about two-thirds of it had been elaborated, half of it laid before the Commissioners, discussed with them, and remitted to the property-holders; their protests, requests, and comments given the most careful consideration; the plans laboriously revised, again submitted for discussion, and finally accepted and adopted. Perhaps a quarter of the whole had been surveyed in, filed, and fixed. So much as had been gained toward what remained of the work by prolonged study, by experience, by debate, by increasing familiarity with and confidence in the general principles adopted, and by practice in their application; whatever had been gained by intimate knowledge of the ground and of all records, precedents, laws, usages, and prejudices to be consulted, rested, after my removal, with Mr. Croes. His removal, however, as a measure of economy, soon succeeded mine.

Another followed, doubtless with the same motive — that of the Superintending Gardener of the Department, Mr. W. L. Fischer. Mr. Fischer had been first employed in the Central Park in 1857, and two-thirds of the trees and shrubs planted upon it had been set by his hands. He is the only man now living, except myself, who has a close, intimate, intelligent, and sympathetic understanding of the design of the Park plantations, and who fully knows what is necessary to their due development. A man of admirable qualities, [375] he loved the trees of the Park as his children, and his heart was wholly in his work.

The cases of Mr. Aldrich, the engineer whom I left in charge of the Riverside Avenue (and the only man in the Department to whom I had fully explained the aims and motives of its design), and of the several surveyors, draughtsmen, and inspectors under him, also removed in pursuance of the general policy of the Department, have gained some attention of late, because of the publication of a report upon the subsequent progress of that undertaking, but I must doubt if the full significance of this report has been appreciated. It cannot be unless the circumstances which led to the enquiry and under which it was prepared, are well considered. Briefly stated they are these:

A few months after the removal of Mr. Aldrich the comptroller of the city was advised, by a resident and owner of land fronting upon the Avenue, that the work of the contractors upon it was plainly not proceeding in accordance with the terms of the city’s agreement with them, and that on this ground assessments for it could be successfully resisted — a serious charge for many reasons. The comptroller thereupon suspended payments to the contractors and notified the Park Department. The Commissioners replied by sending him a copy of a report from their engineer, denying the statement, and by presenting certificates calling for further payments to the contractors. At the same time being urged to make a more thorough enquiry into the matter, they refused to do so. In the end, however, they were compelled to assent to a proposition for this purpose.

Payments to the contractors requiring the concurrence of both the mayor and the comptroller, each of these officers, to guard his responsibility against further imposition, if imposition there had been, independently selected an engineer to examine the work, and the two thus chosen were joined by a third, who was specially appointed for the occasion by the Department of Parks.

The report lately published gives conclusions reached unanimously by the three examiners thus enlisted. It is silent not only upon any points left in doubt in the mind of either one of them, but also as to much of the construction which, in the short time allowed for their scrutiny and with the means at their disposal, they could not uncover. They did not ask for the observations of others, made while the covered work had been in progress. The language of the report is technical and guarded, and the restraint of gentlemen meeting a thankless duty, reflecting upon more than one of their own profession, and addressing employers neither one of whom could be held wholly free from responsibility for anything wrong in the affair, is strictly observed.

I repeat that it is only when the unusual circumstances under which the report was made and the restricted range of the enquiry is kept well in mind that even the professional reader of it is likely to recognize how often [376] the conclusion is reiterated that since Mr. Aldrich’s removal the contractors have been allowed to draw large sums from the city treasury for work which has not been done but which they had engaged to do and which it was the particular function of the Department to insist that they should do.

I must go further and say that no engineer even, without some previous knowledge of the ground and of the plan and motives of the work, which are quite distinct from those of ordinary engineering constructions, will be able to infer from the report how great a wrong to the people of New York is told in its cramped recitals.

I have not personally examined the work since my return, and I am not expressing my opinion or giving my evidence about it. I simply want at this point to fix it in the reader’s mind that down to the moment of Mr. Aldrich’s removal there is no evidence that the city had been defrauded, while such evidence as I have indicated has been given to the public that since his removal, the contractors have been allowed to do much as they pleased, and that they have been pleased to do what it would have been much better for the city that they had not done.

Another proof thus occurs of a delusion which, though often exposed, even in such startling instances as those of the successive disasters of the Forty-second Street tunnel, appears yet to have a strong hold. It is commonly supposed, that is to say, and the city’s charter is shaped to the assumption, that by giving public work, under open competition, upon recorded specifications, checked by high officers of the city, an assurance is obtained against waste, misappropriation, and extravagance. The theory fails in practice in ways innumerable.

That it should work well requires not only that there should be trained, skilled, painstaking, honest, and honorable setting-out, inspection, and accounting by subordinates, but resolute integrity and absolute independence on the part of the directing and auditing officers. Our frequent and sudden changes both of subordinate and superior public servants; the insecurity of any official’s tenure; his dependence on the caprices of others, on tastes, whims, personal, party, and faction interests which are constantly changing, and on judgments formed hastily, rashly, on imperfect information, and from which any form of review or appeal is a deceptive formality, sufficiently account for the dangerously speculative way in which contracts are often taken. It should not be surprising, when the character of the temptation which the public thus offers is considered, that contractors should be found who carry the principle of caveat emptor so far as to be constantly experimenting on the honor and keenness of those who stand for the interest of the public. In the affairs with which I have been connected I do not now recall a single important instance in which the penalties provided for delays in a contract have been finally enforced. When a contractor finds that he is at all exactingly dealt with, the temptation to speculate on changes of superintendence, and take [377] his chance to rush upon new-comers, hoodwink, embarrass, and outrun them, if nothing worse, is obviously great. Give him time enough, and there are many other chances before him. The general result is unfortunately but too well known.

Yet the public is slow to draw the inference that only by sustained method, system, training, and discipline, and by so establishing men’s positions and making clear their responsibilities that they may be in some measure independent of back-door influence, can essential improvement occur. New York is not now, so far as I can see, essentially more secure in this respect than when Mr. Tweed’s great operations began.

The change required is not, as it seems to me — for I would speak with no assurance on such a matter — simply one in respect to methods of appointment and removal and of conditions of holding office, but also one in respect to the classifying and fixing of official responsibilities. In the fifteen years in which I have served the city I do not think that there has been any period of six months in which my official status has not been distinctly modified; in which a material change has not occurred in my official relations with my superiors, colleagues, and subordinates, sufficient in most cases to much disturb if not wholly upset the routine, form, method, and the whole system of checks of my business. This in a department with which the legislature and the Common Council has perhaps less interfered than with any other. That the evil of shifting and uncertain official responsibilities exists under the able single-minded administration of the Department of Public Works was clearly shown by the statements given to the public after the Forty Second Street disasters last summer. Two recent trials in the Police Department have made it ludicrously apparent there. And I have heard gentlemen connected with another branch of our municipal service deplore constant conditions in it obviously growing from the same root, or more directly from the jealousies, apprehensions and intrigues which branch from it.

The design of the Riverside work had engaged my best study during a period of four years, and to bring the cost of realizing it down to a point at which its simplest desiderata could be saved without laying the Department open to the charge of extravagance, the plans for it had been again and again revised with the aid of an engineer of more varied experience in such works than any other I know.

The design had been adopted under the administration of Colonel Stebbins, and, in its earliest form, with the assistance of Mr. Richard M. Blatchford, Mr. Robert C. Dillon, and Mr. F. C. Church, the artist. It had been reviewed and confirmed under the presidency successively of Col. Stebbins, Mr. Wales, and Mr. Martin, and I had twice taken drawings of it to Albany and obtained the approval of legislative committees.

The carrying out of so much of the general design as applies to what is known as the Avenue — an unfortunate misnomer — was to form the largest [378] piece of contract-work of its class ever let by the city; its letting, consequently, attracted much attention. Among the bidders were some of the most respectable contractors in the country, and they had been aided in their calculations by some of the best engineers for the purpose.

The bid at which, under the provision of the charter to which I have referred, the Department was compelled to let the work was lower by more than two hundred thousand dollars than the average of the bids, and there were large portions of the work, chiefly those which would come late in its progress, which no well-informed man supposed could be executed at the prices determined, without heavy loss to the contractor.

If I should have any readers to whom it is supposable that, in long pondering over such duties as I have had the priviledge to be called upon by the city of New York to undertake there may possibly enter some degree of the labor and spirit, love and pride in which great works of the imagination grow, they will, perhaps, understand how the fact last mentioned became at once to me, and has ever since remained, a matter of deep concern.

The possibility that what I had pictured to myself as the ultimate results of the Riverside work would ever be realized, the possibility that its construction would not prove to me a great humiliation, rested wholly on the chance that the superintendence should be such that, while aiding and encouraging the contractors to meet their obligations in good faith, it should persistently resist all attempts to escape them.

The appointment of Mr. Aldrich as the certifying engineer of the work was not made at my solicitation, but was most satisfactory to me, for I not only had had knowledge through other engineers of his successful dealings with contractors on other works, and of his shrewdness, manliness, and fidelity, but some personal experience of his accuracy and conscientiousness.

I knew nothing to the discredit of the contractors, but it was too much in the natural way of things, under all the circumstances, for me to be much surprised when, soon after the work opened, I began to hear that the appointment of Mr. Aldrich was a good deal talked of as a strange one; that it was asked whose man he was; that it was doubted if he was an engineer; that it was confidently asserted that he could have had nothing to do before with public works; that he did not seem to understand the specifications; that he was not accurate in measuring up work; and that he was a thoroughly unpractical sort of man. And after this I was less surprised to learn that he had persistently refused to give the contractors certificates for work which they were quite sure that they had done, and that he had even insisted that some of the work for which they had asked certificates should be taken down, because, as he said, it did not come up to the specifications.

Nor yet was I surprised when frequently-recurring appeals were made from his decisions to the Park Commissioners; nor yet, again, when counsel and advocates (not all free of the bar) were brought in to reinforce these appeals.

[379]

On one of these hearings, having said that the contractors must be expected to govern themselves by the requirements of the contract as defined in the specifications, one of them, standing before the Commissioners, laughed at the suggestion, and declared that no contractor who attempted to work up to his specifications could get his living, and that no one with any practical knowledge of public works would think of expecting him to do so.

I shall not recite all the long and sickening history, but move on at once to the point of time when, according to the terms of the contract, the work should have been completed. I believe that at this period not one-third of the necessary outlay to complete it in accordance with the terms of the contract had been made, and its slow, halting, irregular progress could be rationally accounted for only on the surmise that a change of superintendence was expected. This was Mr Aldrich’s opinion. When I was about leaving last winter, not yet knowing of my own intended discharge, he said: “You will not find me here when you return. How it will be managed I can’t guess, but I shall have to go.”

How it was managed, by whom it was managed, or that there was any management required I do not know, but some time before my return it had so happened that Mr. Aldrich and his corps, now thoroughly organized, instructed, and trained, familiar with the ground and their several duties upon it, and working to an admirable system, had been got away.

It may be an unworthy suspicion which suggests some connection between the circumstances before stated and this event, and that it was, like the other removals of last winter, “a measure of economy”; but it is to be observed that the city saved not one dollar in salaries or wages by the operation, and, since the report of the examining engineers, it is unnecessary to say to whose interests the economy was applicable.

This chapter of my story having been written, it is time again to take up a thread which I dropped with the cases of Mr. Croes and Mr. Fischer.

Mr. Croes had several times during the appealing period been taken from his proper duties north of the Harlem River to resurvey and reinspect the Riverside work, with a view to advising the Board how far the complaints made by the contractors against Mr. Aldrich could be justified, the result being in every case a disappointment to the contractors.

Mr. Fischer’s duty on the Riverside work had been of the slightest, but he had been over it with me in conference about the plantations, and under my instructions had marked some of the old trees to be felled, and others on the Park beyond the limits of the Avenue, in order that the engineer might see that particular care was taken to prevent them from being injured by the contractors. These are the trees the grubbing out of which is shown by the report of the examining engineers to have followed quickly upon that of Mr. Fischer.

Though there are no more like instances of economy to be referred to, I shall have occasion before I close to pick up the thread once again by [380] which the interests of the contractors are associated with the general economical policy of the Commissioners.

I could not consider the report of the examining engineers without pointing to the demonstration which it offers, that the fancied security against extravagance of the provisions of the city charter in respect to contracts is but a stimulant to the worst kind of waste, so long as present methods in the appointment and removal of the professional servants of the city are sustained.

If any ask what I would have, I answer that, after a silence, demanded by official propriety, of twenty years, I am speaking of certain evils of which, as a servant of the city, I have had experience. It has not been my business to look for a remedy for them, and upon that question I have nothing to say. The great body of those whose business it has been plainly believe that under our form of government no permanent remedy is practicable and that the conceded evils of our present methods should be accepted as a part of the price that we pay for the advantages we gain by it. But if so, should not the consequences be more frankly accepted and the state be spared the yearly agitation for changes of the charter of the city and other temporizing, superficial and futile expedients, of which with whatever good purpose they may be urged by some the preponderating motive and the more conspicuous result nearly always is the gratification of personal or political spite or friendship?

But there is another lesson for the people of New York even less likely, I fear, to be attentively considered than that which I have been aiming to emphasize, and it may be believed that I shall indicate it with reluctance, and only because of the obligation which the action of so many good citizens last winter places upon me.

Perhaps I should admit, however, that I am unwilling that the public should wholly overlook a matter of some moment to my craft.

I will not claim that my craft has as yet a perfectly firm and well-defined place among the callings by which the mark and measure of every people’s civilization is so largely determined; but that there is a field of public as well as of private work which engineers as such cannot be expected to fully occupy, and in which thorough devotion of life is to be desired, I feel sure that no intelligent man will be disposed to question; and possibly the very conditions which make such a vocation as yet a comparatively inconspicuous one among the professions should rather commend a great city to be cautious of treating it with contempt than be regarded as a justification for its doing so.

The opportunity of permanently endowing itself at small cost with a noble work — a work not simply of engineering or of architecture or of gardening; a work which would be in more than one respect without a parallel — which is owned by New York in the site of Riverside Park and Avenue, though it is as yet so little appreciated by its citizens, is really an important item of their corporate property. The difference between well-studied and ill-studied [381] dealings with it, that is to say, may easily be in the future a matter of several millions of dollars.

The question how far the dealings of the Department of Parks with this property during the last summer were, in respect to design, well-studied or ill-studied, refined or brutal, did not come before the examining engineers. It is touched in their report only incidentally to the proper purpose of it; but, incidentally, facts are stated which unquestionably show a reckless disregard of the interests of the city. And this is a matter responsibility for which can in no degree be shifted from the Commissioners to their engineer. It was not the business of an engineer to be able to properly determine a class of questions such as their engineer was allowed, consulting with no one, to determine finally — such as, after giving my life to them, I have never thought of determining without reporting to, and obtaining the approval of, my official superiors.

The waste which the contractors were permitted, and even aided, to make, through the destruction of opportunity and the accumulation of obstacles and conditions of costliness to valuable results previously intended — waste against which due guardianship had been provided for in the contract — is a matter much more to be regretted, and which will yet be much more regretted, than that which the examining engineers more distinctly report.

If the changes of design — but they cannot be designated by so mild a term — if the botchings of the design of the Avenue and the Park which are indicated in the report of the examining engineers — I have not examined the work, and I speak only of testimony which I find published — if these botchings and mutilations were also a measure of economy, need I point out again that it is not the taxpayers of New York who are to benefit by it?

If the circumstances which I have stated suggest, as they seem to me to do, that a good-natured disposition toward the contractors rather than toward the general body of taxpayers of the city may by some indirect process, hardly understood, perhaps, by the Commissioners themselves, have been combined with some peculiar theories of economy in the removal of Mr. Croes, Mr. Fischer, Mr. Aldrich and his company, I must mention a circumstance having a possible bearing on my own case.

Something more than a month before I was so suddenly shot out of the Department, with resolutions expressive of gratitude, respect, and confidence toward me, and with an intention to take me in again, but in another form, when I should be thought to be needed, some persons had confidently supposed that my removal might be accomplished in a manner which would have occasioned no public curiosity as to its motives, and which certainly would have been attended by no kindly resolutions or promises.

I was to have been discharged on the ground of delinquency and unfaithfulness to my duties. The specifications of a charge of this character were such as could have been honestly framed only by information from one who [382] had made it a part of his daily business to furtively inform himself of my every movement beyond the doors of my house.

I would not, if I could well avoid it, provoke a comparison between this incident of my life and the celebrated case of Mr. Eugene Wrayburn, but frankness compels me here to say that I had, in fact, observed, and had stated for the amusement of my friends, that I certainly was being mysteriously “worked up,” and that I had allowed myself a slight indulgence in those peculiar “pleasures of the chase” to which that unfortunate gentleman was addicted. I should still, perhaps, refrain from mentioning so ridiculous a thing, if I did not possess evidence of another piece of meanness even more contemptible, tracing very distinctly from the same direction.

I was informed that the charge against me had been made in writing by several hands. I did not see this writing. I did not ask who the writers were. I was not told. It looked to me as if the whole device had been the work of a very clumsy workman, or that its object had been expected to be accomplished quietly, without examination of witnesses, at least without cross-examination. I was not called to make any formal answer to the charge by the Commissioners. I did not think that I was called to do so by self-respect. The story is worth the telling because it shows how a certain class of the community may suppose that it is practicable to deal with public servants who stand in their way, and because it exemplifies again the demoralizing influence of the present methods of appointment and discharge of public servants, especially professional public servants, in whom a certain degree of personal dignity is of decided economic value.

Will it be believed that, upon evidence of such a character as I have indicated, my name was actually struck from the pay-rolls of the Department, that my salary was stopped, that the accusation was given in its full absurdity to the public press, and that my casting out in disgrace was publicly announced? All this actually occurred.

Someone even took the trouble to send me, from the office of publication apparently, a weekly newspaper in which I was set out in prominent capitals as The Great Leech who had for twenty years been gorging himself on the life-blood of the taxpayers of New York. This pleasing bit of condensed biography was followed up by a column of details not to be found in the “American Encyclopædia,” and which must have required a good deal of research, in which the various plants were described by which I had outwitted, one after another, all the old political leaders of both parties in the city and State, from my participation with the Red-handed Vaux in stealing the plan of the Central Park down to my leadership of the Gravel Ring and the snooping of the Capitol with my pals, the Artful Archer and Dickson the Deft. That my gory taking-off should have been accomplished after all by a shepherd banker and a shepherd broker, with little stones from the brook of financial purity, was almost too good to be true, and pointed plainly to the class of men [383] from which, if the city is ever to know a genuine reform, it would have to look for its mayor.

The full folly of the effort to accomplish the end in view of this movement, with whomsoever it originated, was only too soon arrested by a plain recital, by the then President of the Department, of facts within his knowledge, and by reference to the Commissioners’ minutes; and I must not neglect to say that, while giving long, frequent, and patient hearings to the Riverside contractors, and showing much anxiety that the work should go on, and that they should not be annoyed by mere red-tape exactions or in any way unnecessarily hampered, he in the end always acknowledged that Mr. Aldrich had been substantially right, and backed him in insisting upon what was due the city.

As to the other Commissioners I trust that in suggesting a possible relation of cause and effect between the condition of the Riverside work and the dissatisfaction of the contractors in 1877; the discharge of the several professional servants of the city whom I have named, and the condition of the same work as reported by the examining engineers less than a year afterwards, I shall not be thought in the least to imply that my late official superiors are not all honorable men.

To explain the dubious position in which they seem to have been placed I would, without wishing the analogy to be very closely drawn, recur to a common experience which teaches us that when a man who has expended his vigor in toiling up the ladder of pecuniary self-satisfaction takes a fancy to divert his well-earned leisure in agricultural pursuits, or in any others, for which he has no natural aptitude or acquired proficiency, and toward a sound understanding in which all his established tastes and habits sternly interpose, it would nearly always be as well for the public that his virgin essays should be made at his own rather than at their expense.

It is a matter of ordinary observation that amateurs of this class fall into habits of excessive credulity and over-ready good fellowship on the one hand and of morbid distrustfulness on the other. By taking advantage of their weakness in the first respect, cow doctors, tree-peddlers, dealers in patent fertilizers and other practical men, make them very useful in their respective branches of business. Their distrustfulness applies more particularly to men to whom the matters of their amusement have long been the subject of deep and absorbing interest and who are disposed to apply to them a degree of method which would be suitable to affairs of business. If I should add that anything looking like professional pride in such matters, or, worse still, anything looking like a delicate conscience such as would be shown by pottering and worrying over what they regard as trivial and pedantic details, is extremely offensive to them, I should do so only to report more distinctly, that no analogy of this kind should be thought to apply more closely than would be consistent with all due respect to the Commissioners. But that there are those among [384] them who have suffered under an infirmity more or less of the nature thus suggested, I have had reason, in personal experience, to imagine, and I doubt if any explanation of their dealings with the Riverside work can be made which will more redound to their credit.