The Boy Mayor of New York

The Bowery Boys podcast is proud to be sponsored by Founded by NYC, celebrating New York City's 400th anniversary in 2025 and the 250th anniversary of the United States in 2026. Read all about the exciting events and world-class institutions commemorating the five boroughs legacy of groundbreaking achievements and find ways to celebrate the city that's always making history at FoundedbyNYC.com. Well it's mayoral election season in New York City once again and a very intriguing slate of candidates will be on our ballot this November, so we thought it was finally time for this very special presentation of a show. We recorded many years ago, but I think you'll agree this is a story more profoundly relevant today. There will be about seven points in this show actually where you stop, look down at your player, however you're listening to this, and ask, "Did they just record this today?" This is the story of John Perroy Mitchell, the boy mayor of New York. Hey, it's the Bowery Boys. Hey. Hi there, welcome to the Bowery Boys. This is Greg Young. And this is Tom Myers. It is election season in New York City. We are choosing a brand new mayor. It's an exciting time, Greg. We've had Bloomberg for years and years and decades and decades, it seems, so we're picking a new person for the job. And now, as we record this, we are less than two months away from the election of New York's next mayor. So we wanted to look at a prior mayor for the show. There's some obvious candidates that we haven't really tackled on the show yet, like Fiorella LaGuardia, Glamorous old Jimmy Walker, or even Ed Koch would be a good choice. But instead, we're going to turn back the clock to exactly 100 years from today. We're going back to the year 1913 to look at the election and the career of the man who was called the boy mayor of New York, his name, John Paroy Mitchell. And it would be really convenient, Greg, at this point of the introduction to say, and it's amazing how many parallels there are to today's situation, today's world. But looking back 100 years, you see how much has changed in the city. You see how political machines have a much different kind of power. And how 100 years ago, the reform movement was really in full swing, and a candidate like John Paroy Mitchell could sweep in and wanted to really clean house. He was a person with new and fresh ideas, and he was also incredibly young, which is why he has the nickname the boy mayor of New York. That would lead me to think that he is the youngest mayor in New York's history. That is a popular urban legend, but in fact, he is the second youngest, which I shall explain once we get into the show here. Ooh, a little civic intrigue, Greg. We'll also tell you a place in New York City, in fact, a place in Central Park that you can visit to honor this oft-forgotten mayor. So we hope that you'll elect to join us for this story of a very enigmatic man, a man named John Paroy Mitchell, the boy mayor of New York. So Greg, before we just launch into the history of John Paroy Mitchell, we're really going to be talking a lot about reform politics. Do we know how to kick off a sexy show? I mean, there's really nothing more exotic than talking about reform politics. At least 19th century. But this had happened before this boy mayor was born. Yeah, I would say it has defined the story of the ebb and flow of New York government. It's essentially these periodic efforts by New Yorkers to write the ship, to create a city that's based on sound, uncorrupted principles that, of course, then get quickly re-corrupted, essentially. And I suppose in an extremely populous city like New York, and one that's experiencing a lot of growth, say, after the Civil War, there's a lot of opportunity for graft and for corruption. Right, population and money. But of course, the core of this element is, of course, the idea of political parties. Where in essence, one political party will gather a great amount of power, then grow corrupt with that power, and then will become ineffective, leading the other party, the old one, or a newly formed party, to rise up. And then the cycle begins again. So in New York, of course, this basically means Tammany Hall versus anti-Tammany Hall forces. Tammany Hall was the powerful democratic machine of the 19th century that existed in some form all the way up to the 1960s. Of course, one of the most famous leaders of Tammany Hall was Boss Tweed, who we did an entire podcast on many years ago. The zenith of Tammany Hall was around the era of Boss Tweed, which was the late 1860s and 1870s. Tammany, as we said in our old podcast, was his former gentleman in society, had very noble and uncontroversial aims, I would think, depending on what your opinion of their Native American costumes were. They would start off to be a political machine where they would use a very specific organizational method throughout the city to sort of curry power with people. Basically, the idea of ward leaders or bosses throughout the city where they could take advantage of, for instance, newly arriving immigrants who might be able to sway their vote in the way of the democratic party. And they could sway them by offering jobs? Offering jobs by patronage, but also less forthright methods, I'd say, bribery and intimidation. This organization that was non-governmental, they controlled who was basically elected by the democratic party? On every level, yes. They weren't just a New York part. Tammany Hall had national presence, but they were probably at their most potent here in the city. So what would end up happening is sort of back and forth cycle to the end of the 19th century of a Republican or an anti-Tammany Democrats, because there were still a large number of people who had the same similar principles of the democratic party. But they just weren't part of this. Yeah, not all Democrats were crooked. No, exactly. So it would go back and forth, and then, of course, Tammany would eventually retake power when that reform choice ended up not quite being able to do the job or not having enough power or themselves becoming corrupt. One fine example of Tammany coming back into power that I wanted to mention was in 1888, they chose and got elected a man named Hugh Grant, but I wanted to bring him up because he is, in fact, the youngest mayor to ever be elected. Now, the reason that there's some ambiguity here is because- It's because actors always hide their image. Actors and Tammany-chosen mayors who may not want the age of their choice to come to the fore in an era when New York was electing mayors who were in their 50s and 60s. This was someone that they had wanted for this particular period of time. That wasn't a selling point, whereas for Mitchell, later it would be. In 1909, so we're coming to our era that we're about to talk to right now, the man who is mayor of New York in 1909 is named William J. Gaynor. He was a Tammany-selected man. He was a Democrat, Tammany basically chose him for the ticket and he got elected. Who is this Gaynor? Was he qualified at all for the position? Well, I do like Gaynor, actually. I do think he is a qualified mayor and I actually think he did a good job during his duration. He was a judge for the New York Supreme Court. He lived in Park Slope. If you see these pictures, he has a very kind face and a very trim white beard. Oh, how interesting that he's from Park Slope because our current Democratic candidate, Bill de Blasio, is also from Park Slope. I will hold him up to the standard of Gaynor who used to walk to work. In fact, on his very first day on Inauguration Day, there's these great pictures of Gaynor on the Brooklyn Bridge walking from his home on 8th Avenue in Park Slope all the way over the bridge to City Hall. Good heavens. Every day? Many days. I can't vouch for every day, but especially on that first Inauguration Day, it was a very photogenic and powerful moment because the city had only been united for just a dozen years by that time. Although, there was a powerful imagery of people from different boroughs interacting in this way. Still had some meaning. It's really, yeah, glorious Gaynor. Gaynor, however, soon disappointed Tammany Hall because, you know, so what happens is if you are a Tammany Hall elected official, you're required to fill all the job functions with Tammany Hall men. That's how they stay empowered. Gaynor has like more than a thousand appointees that he needs to designate right away. Exactly. So, I mean, that would be very easy to do, but once he got elected, he decided to fill the office with people who could, I don't know, people who could actually do the job and could benefit New York. So of course, Tammany... Was ready to throw him out. Yeah, he became a huge enemy. One more strange thing about Gaynor to set us up here for Mitchell's story. So, he's the mayor in New York in 1910, the following year that he got elected. And he decided to leave town for a few days. He boarded a vessel in Hoboken in August of 1910 to go on a cruise, you know, back then mayors just left for weeks at a time and they left the city in the capable hands of others. He was approached on the deck of the boat by a dock worker named James Gallagher, who then shot him in the throat. Oh. So, an assassination attempt, unbelievable that a New York world photographer was there. He was taking pictures of him because he's a photogenic mayor, captured this very moment and became one of the earliest great examples of journalistic photography. And it's still an incredible picture, not too graphic, so I'll put it on the blog. And Gaynor survived this. I'm taking it. Yeah, so due to the placement of the bullet and the medical opinions of the day, they actually left the bullet in his neck. So for the duration of his term as mayor, he would have the assassin's bullet in his neck. I'll leave us on the grizzly image as you introduce to us a bright new star on the New York firmament. Well, and the reason that you've taken us all the way up to Gaynor is because he would be replaced in the next election by said boy mayor. But in order to understand who Mitchell is and where he came from, let's just fall back a little bit. We can turn the dial back. I mean, this is my favorite part of the show. We go back to the beginning. The sound of harps. John Perroy Mitchell's grandfather was also named John Mitchell. He was an Irish hero who wrote for the Irish nation and later founded the United Irish man, which was a journal which openly challenged the English. This was, of course, a very tense political time between the English and the Irish. In 1848, he really took England to task and even challenged England to expel him, which they did. They banished him to Australia from where he made the journey to America five years later. And once here in the US, he was greeted as a huge celebrity by the Irish population from coast to coast. He arrived in California, then made his way to New York, where the city's Irish population threw a huge reception for him, and he shook so many hands that after his first five days in New York that he had to put his arm in a sling. I just think that it's amazing that he joined this gigantic Irish migration to America, but via Australia. Right. He had three sons, all of whom fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War. Two of them didn't survive it, but one of his sons, James, would survive and went on to work in New York's registrar's office and also worked as a fire marshal. John, the subject of today's podcast, was born on July 19th, 1879, and he grew up in the family home in Fordham, in the Fordham section of the Bronx, a very Catholic upbringing. He would later attend Columbia, starting in October of 1899. Interestingly, Greg, he would spend two years in the Midtown Campus of Columbia on Madison Avenue, and then move uptown when Columbia opened up its new campus for his final two years. That's right. When he started school, they had not yet moved up to Morningside. Wow. Right. He was reportedly very shy, had a close group of friends. He was on the debate team, and he was on the fencing team. So you both went to Columbia University. You and John Fry Mitchell, I mean, would they ever get brought up in classes? Well, I would see Mitchell almost on a daily basis, which we will come back to at the end of the show. All right. I'll remind you. After Columbia, he went to New York Law School, where he graduated with honors in 1902, and then worked as a lawyer for a small firm that sent him on a job exploring claims of diamonds in British Guiana. Did you know that I was going to take this treasure island twist? No. But once he got home, he suffered from malaria and fever. So he had caught something while he was there. And this would actually lead Mitchell to have terrible headaches like migraine that would afflict him for the rest of his life and sometimes at very inconvenient moments. The Bowery Boys podcast is proud to be sponsored by Founded by NYC, celebrating New York City's 400th anniversary in 2025 and the 250th anniversary of the United States in 2026. And this fall, we'll be helping to spread the word about some of New York's most fascinating and exciting experiences, events that bring this rich history to life. And this week is an event very close to my heart. It is the New York Film Festival, run by Film at Lincoln Center and held primarily at the Center's campus, though with screenings in all five boroughs. The New York Film Festival has been a fixture on the cultural calendar for more than six decades. Over the years, the festival has featured films from many, many groundbreaking directors. This year's lineup will feature an array of world, North American and New York premieres, avant-garde works and future hits. And of course, there will be a number of talks with directors and stars that take place over these days as well. So mark your calendars. The New York Film Festival takes place from September 26th to October 13th. Read all about the Film Festival and all the other exciting events and world-class institutions commemorating the five boroughs' legacy of groundbreaking achievements, and find ways to celebrate the city that's always making history at foundedbynyc.com. So back from British Guiana, how does he get his first job into New York's civic life here? Well, things really took off for him in 1907 when he would become the commissioner of accounts. And he was charged with investigating somebody at the very height of civic responsibility, the Manhattan Borough President, John A. Hearn. So Mitchell's first government job here, government-associated job, was to actually crack down on the Borough President of Manhattan, wow. And well, and he only got the job because he was unknown. It was such a politically fraught situation for any lawyer to be in. So they went with this completely unknown lawyer. In his mid-twenties. Right. Maybe it was his youthful energy, I don't know, but he embraced this position. He attacked it, and this brings us to one of the characteristics of Peroi Mitchell that really defines him. He was obsessed with tracking down inefficiencies in the government, exposing them. He thought the New York City was the best city in the world, and he wanted it to run the right way. He hated waste, and he was in a position now to look how the Manhattan Borough President was running his job, and figure out if anything shady was going on. So I assume he found something here. Oh, yeah. He found all kinds of crazy things. He found contracts being awarded to people who were completely not qualified, contracts being given to not the lowest bidder, but to friends of... Right. A friend of a friend. Dronism. Uh-huh. There were no ethical guidelines in place here. And so he interviewed people and produced 3,000 pages of testimony against the Manhattan Borough President. I don't know. I didn't read, I don't think, any of the 3,000 pages of my research. I assume. Well, that was 3,000 pages of testimony from which he produced 158 pages in his own report calling the Manhattan Borough President incompetent. And because of this, and because of his finding, Governor Charles Evans Hughes removed Ahern as Manhattan Borough President, although notably he didn't accuse him of doing anything illegal. He made a point of saying that the Borough President is not being convicted of anything or being charged with anything except incompetence. Just doing a bad job. Right. I am really glad that I didn't work for him. Oh, please. I mean, I... You are completely efficient. I'm a model of efficiency. Sounds like he's cracking a whip here. I mean, who else did he take down here? Well, from Manhattan, he went to the Bronx and he tackled Borough President Lewis Hoffin. And it was the same thing. This time around, actually, it got a lot more ink in the press because this was a big deal that the Manhattan Borough President lost his job. And now the same guy was going with the same zeal after the Bronx President. And he's from the Bronx. Right. And again, he accused him of incompetence and again, Hoffin was removed from his office. So he's just going borough by borough methodically. It sounds amazing. By the time he turned his gaze to Queens, the Borough President got so nervous, he just resigned. And then he went after the Brooklyn Borough President, tackled him again and once again produced another report. But the governor refused to remove him from office because the guy only had a month left in his term. So the Borough President from Staten Island must have been breathing a huge sigh of relief. Seriously, though, this did certainly raise his own profile. And by this point, everybody knew who John Peroi Mitchell was and he was, again, still pretty young. Peroi Mitchell, I mean, a rising star in his, by this time around 30 years old, around 1909. Right. And just in time for the election of 1909, when the anti-Tamini leaders started looking around for a good new candidate to put on the ticket, not yet for mayor because he was too young and inexperienced, but for the second biggest slot on the ticket, that of the President of the Board of Aldermen, which is basically like the head of city council. So Peroi Mitchell, who is an anti-Tamini Democrat, was elected in the same election as William J. Gainer, who was pro-Tamini, who was part of the Tamini Circle. Right. That election was almost an anti-Tamini sweep with the exception of the mayor. And I think that's because the vote got split by a number of other candidates. Most notably, the newspaper editor William Randolph Hearst, who ran for mayor and lost splitting the vote and allowing Tamini to take the mayor's seat. Now we won't spend too much time with the Board of Aldermen because we've got places to go with this story, but let's just say that he attacked his work with the same keen eye for efficiency. And he notably produced the city's first comprehensive budget because he wanted to take a full and public accounting of all of the city's expenses, which had never been done before. Well, he sounds like he's going to become Mr. Austerity here. But really, how did he take that next step and become the mayor? Well, part of it was the stature that he would get while being on the Board of Aldermen, but also a series of somewhat unfortunate events, well, unfortunate for many people, not for him. A lot of strange things would happen in the election year of 1913 that would get him to the mayor's seat at only age 34. Now throughout the tenure here of Mayor Gainer, where Mitchell is head of the Board of Aldermen, he's being groomed for great things politically. A lot of the older politicos of the region see him as a rising star, of course. In May of 1913, President Woodrow Wilson decides to hire him for a very powerful position in the federal government, but he doesn't have to go anywhere. It's because it's based in New York. The job is the collector of the port of New York. This job function is basically to collect and set import duties, since New York is one of the main ports, it's natural that the job would be situated here. It's a really good job to have if you're going to eventually run for mayor. In your file of fact, you've got a lot of rich names in your... A lot of furs and diamonds. Yes. So did he end up taking this job? He did take the job and only held it for a short period of time, because of course his name comes up again when the anti-Taminy forces are pulling their efforts together to come up with a candidate for election for mayor. So you had reform-minded Democrats, including William Randolph Hearst. You had Republicans, and they would run under the fusion party, because it's essentially a fusion of everyone who's not Taminy, with the exception of socialists. They have their own candidate, but everyone else is pretty much running under this header. They don't have a lot in common. Their only thing in common is they want to take power from Taminy Hall. So we had Republicans and others who were calling themselves fusion. It means temporary alliance, essentially. So people didn't call themselves fusionists. No, no, no. There were no fusionists walking about in New York, I don't believe. The two names rose during these committee meetings, Mitchell, of course, from the board of Alderman and collector of the port. And you had New York's district attorney, Charles Whitman. Whitman is a showstopper of a politician. My favorite Whitman story around this time, as his name is being bandied about for mayor, is around this time, the police are cracking down on nightclubs because they're too late and it's immoral. So they're cracking down on this one particular restaurant and nightclub in Columbus Circle called Healy's, which is staying open past its curfew of like 1 a.m. And so what would happen is that 102, if there's still diners inside because they're not supposed to sell liquor, the police would literally rush in and take people and throw them out into the street, like open the windows and doors and throw them out in the street. So this, of course, got a lot of press because it's completely spectacular. It's very dramatic. And also because it's coming from Mayor Gaynor's office. So Whitman, who is not a fan of Gaynor, one day shows up at Healy, thousands of people and photographers are all around and say, "I'm going to dine here at Healy's. Throw me out." But he's the New York district attorney. So because of this, the police backed down and he was able to call their bluff, in essence. Now, he's such a great politician. Here's the things. He was not chosen by the Fusion Party to be the mayoral candidate. The following year, he would be elected the governor of New York. So for the election of 1913, Tammany has turned against Gaynor. Right. So where does that put him? I guess it puts him out on the street. Well, no, but Gaynor wants to stay in office. He has every intention of staying in office. I guess the Democratic candidate. Yeah. I mean, he's had a good run. Just that Tammany now doesn't like him. In fact, they drop him as the Tammany Hall appointed Democratic candidate and they choose this nondescript Edward Everett McCall, who is also a judge from the New York Supreme Court. So it's almost like another dig at Gaynor. It's like, "See how replaceable you are? We're taking another person from the New York Supreme Court." So Gaynor, he's like, "I'm going to run anyway. I'm going to run as an independent candidate." So on September 3rd, from the steps of City Hall, with thousands of supporters in front of City Hall where City Hall Park is, he notifies, it's called the Gaynor notification of his independent candidacy. But I find it really fascinating about all of this. People are announcing their intention of running for office two months before the election. Right. I mean, I can't even imagine that in today's politics where people are running for office that, you know, almost- They're independent candidacy two months before. Wow. So his emblem for his new campaign was a shovel, which he would hold aloft and it would symbolize not only the digging of new subway tunnels, but also to bury further corruption in the city and to bury Tammany Hall. Wow. So he really turned against Tammany Hall. Absolutely. He didn't, at the time, there were no microphones, of course, and he has got voice problem. So he didn't deliver any of his speech because of the bullet. Because of the bullet in his neck. Right. I forgot about that. So his secretary did most of the talking for him. So Gaynor decides the following day, after announcing his candidacy for mayor, he decides that he's going to take an ocean cruise for two or three more weeks. I don't know. I don't like it. Anytime he takes a cruise, I'm getting nervous. I know. Don't get on a boat. So they board the RMS Baltic on a trip to Europe and he's just going to get back. He's going to be back in New York by October for the final month of campaigning. But a couple days later, his son finds Mayor Gaynor dead in a deck chair on the deck of the Baltic here, succumbing to these long gestating wounds. His body was transported back to New York on the RMS Lusitania and taken back to the Pier of New York. And they had a lavish funeral for him on September 20th. So you get this dramatic period of time, it's like two and a half weeks. The mayor of New York City, in a battle for his political life here, announces an independent candidacy and then dies when he's not in the city. Very odd. To add to that, one of the most powerful bosses of Tammany Hall this period was a man named Big Tim Sullivan, classic example of a New York Tammany Hall man with one foot in legit politics, the other in criminal and gangland activity. The previous year in 1912, his star had faded a little bit due to a little corruption and he had a bout of syphilis which deteriorated his mind and he eventually was locked up in a sanatorium. But he's still considered one of the most popular faces of Tammany Hall here. Come to August of 1913, so a few months before the election, Sullivan escapes the asylum and then is promptly hit and killed by a train in the Bronx. His body is taken to the morgue and is not identified for a couple weeks when a police officer walks in and recognizes Big Tim Sullivan. So just a few days before the funeral of the mayor, there is a massive funeral in New York for Big Tim Sullivan, one of the leaders of Tammany Hall. All of this happens September, 1913, a few weeks before the election. So what you have explained strikes me as a huge soap opera happening right before this election. So the mayor of New York has died. This powerful symbol of Tammany glory has died. It's six weeks before the election. Tickets to the Bowery Boys Ghost Stories of New York City, our live show will once again be coming to Joe's Pub and tickets are now on sale. There are two shows a night, 7 and 9 30 p.m. on October 29th, 30th and 31st. That's Halloween and yes, it's on a Friday this year. You can get the best seats by buying your tickets right now at joespob.org. That's the Bowery Boys Ghost Stories of New York City, a live tradition at Joe's Pub since 2018. Mitchell takes the stage of Madison Square Garden in Madison Square. On October 30th, 1913, a week before the election, Rails against Tammany Hall and gives a emphatic and amazing speech with his special guest, New York District Attorney Charles Whitman. Combined, they seem like this new force of energy that's finally going to change things in politics in the city. I've heard the city of this blight of Tammany and they're a Democrat and a Republican. So there's something really powerful in this uniting of these two. So on election day, John Perroy Mitchell wins the seat of mayor, the largest percentage in New York mayoral history. He wins with 57% of the vote or 358,000 votes. We might even call this a mandate. I've seen some photos of him, I wouldn't mind mandating him myself. But seriously? But seriously, he did come in with a mandate. Just to review, he would be mayor of New York from 1914 to 1917. He attacked his job with an earnest quality, he was a hardworking man. He had his opponents, of course, but one thing that he was never accused of was being crooked. Everybody saw that he was a man of integrity. He was a straight shooter. He wasn't, however, ever accused of being a colorful character. Regardless of what we've said with his zeal to find inefficiencies, he had a certain disdain for politics as usual, which I think could work against him because he refused to play politics. It won him friends and admiration, sort of in the abstract. But it also made him seem kind of out of touch with people. He lacked a certain charisma, human charisma that people wanted in their political leaders. He wasn't quite effective on a day-to-day level. He didn't have one of these great personalities when we think back on the big mayors of New York. They have larger-than-life personalities. But Guardia or Lindsay or Koch? Even Bloomberg has a big personality. As mayor, he found himself bombarded with people. He was meeting and greeting people all day. And inauguration day was its own nightmare for him because after being sworn in and going through the pomp and ceremony, he went into a reception hall where there were 1,500 people waiting to greet him. And he went diligently from one person to another. And after greeting personally, a third of the crowd, about 500 people, he just maxed out, thought he was going to collapse and retired to a room where his old friends from Columbia were waiting for him. Well, it sounds like he needs his grandfather's sling for his arm. His old grandfather's sling from the old country. Yes. But what he really needed, I think, was some aspirin because he admitted later that his headaches had come on during the inauguration itself, which was a terrible time to be paralyzed by migraines. So how did he get anything done outside of the relief of aspirin here? And a leave. Yes. Well, according to the New York Sun in 1914, "Mayor Mitchell had decided that there is no use trying to do real work in the mayor's office in City Hall. So he has decided to take a room on the top of City Hall to do his thinking there." So his thinking room. "He had his own room that was off limits to everybody else where he would go up and just lock the door and be by himself so he could think. He received scores of letters every day from people asking for favors, asking for jobs, for him to help them out in their daily lives. And actually, people wrote in asking for relationship advice and sending photos saying, "Look, I'm available." That led to some of the papers accusing him of actually running a dating service out of City Hall. Well, and more ominously, I mean, he's taking an office that has been vacated by a man who died because of an assassin's bullet from a disgruntled worker. Well. I'm sure he was getting some of those letters. Well, in fact, he was the object of an assassination attempt in April of 1914. He was leaving City Hall with his police commissioner and the corporation counsel and the tax commissioner, a fun group in an open car, when a small man rushed out of a car, hopped up on the side of the car and shot him point blank aiming for his face. That's horrible, but I mean, I assume he was okay. Well, the police commissioner, who was with him, grappled with the man and he ended up missing the mayor when he shot, but a bullet did hit the corporate counsel and struck him in the mouth. But I mean, what a different era and what a troubled time this was. Well, I feel like I painted a picture of a kind of troubled manna up in his room by himself at City Hall. I do want to point out some of his wins. Most notably, I would say his biggest win was the passing of zoning laws and zoning reform in New York actually started during the previous Gainer administration, but it was left to Mitchell to really draft the laws and push it through Albany to make it law. So zoning laws, you mean buildings from what I know about the Woolworth building is not a zoned building, meaning that it's not, they could have built it as tall as they wanted and no one would have stopped them. Right. And in a way, the Woolworth building is kind of fun and nice because it's right there. It's looking at City Hall Park, but imagine at this time, all of the development that was happening all over the city that was really kind of out of control. There were taller and taller buildings going up. They were casting these huge shadows down on the streets, making the streets really not pleasant places to be, making the entire neighborhoods not pleasant places. In fact, leading to the devaluation of real estate, something needed to be done. So of course, Mitchell attacked this problem with his usual eye for detail, pushed through a plan. In this plan, the city would be divided into zoning districts. There was residential district, commercial district, and then unregulated districts. And the heights to which the buildings would be allowed to be built would be determined by, you know, which district they were in. And also I find this interesting, one of the components was how wide the streets were. Because the buildings could only be as tall as the width of the streets, or a multiple of that, two or three times the width. And otherwise, if they wanted to go higher and they were allowed because of that district, they could build higher, but they needed to have setbacks. And so that's why then buildings... The wedding cake style. Right. Very New York. It would go back, back, back. The taller it got, the further back it had to go. The Board of Estimates adopted this on July 25th, 1916, and New York became the first city in the U.S. to adopt comprehensive zoning plans. Under the Admitral Administration, what's interesting is he actually had a very hard time governing. He did help clean up the police department. He tried to do things in education, but a lot of his experiments that he did didn't necessarily work. And even came off looking like he was a classist, or he was an elitist. So yeah, that was one of the biggest charges against him. The New Republic, which was a publication in 1917, snarked that year, quote, "The humbler people of New York revolted against the consequences to themselves of government by capable and disinterested experts." But one interesting thing that you could say about Mitchell that, you know, no one could sully him about this, I don't think, but he was exceptionally patriotic. During Mitchell's term here as mayor, America was on the sidelines for the duration of what would become World War I, but Wood Enter War in April of 1917, which was his final year. He actually literally signed up to prepare for war himself. In America at that time, in 1915, the U.S. Army General Leonard Wood would set up these civilian training camps, and there was one up in Plattsburgh, New York, up by Lake Champlain. Mitchell, in fact, was one of the first important men of New York society to train at Plattsburgh. And he was training as mayor of New York. Yeah, he was mayor. He was an example citizen, and many men of well-connected families joined him, which also sort of underscored his connection to the upper class and wealthy. In 1916, there was a citizen's preparedness parade. It marched through New York City for 11 hours with 200 marching bands. At the same time, though, it's a city of many nationalities and people on different sides of the conflict here, of course, in World War I, so he banned flags and parades of an ethnic nature. Mitchell says, "Public demonstrations of sympathy by people of a particular race, while natural, from their point of view, are calculated to breed ill feelings upon the part of their fellow citizens of other blood and sympathies, and should not take place in this cosmopolitan and entirely neutral city." Those are from his lips. That definitely did not make him popular. And here we are at the election year of 1917. Tammany up to this time has regrouped to re-tackle the seat and has found an ideal candidate by the name of John Highland, a Brooklynite, and a former locomotive engineer for the Brooklyn Elevated Railroad. And New York at this time, of course, was having this big push to expand the subway service and to expand into the other boroughs. Which of course was popular with voters because they wanted more service and they wanted those jobs. And Highland was a true symbol of this because he had literally worked for them, and he in fact hated, it was embittered by the Brooklyn Rapid Transit and these private companies. He wanted to expand it and have government take a bigger role in mass transit. So Mitchell, at age 38 by this time, with his whole life ahead of him, he was again chosen for the fusion candidate, but just barely. People were less confident in his abilities at this time, of course. And finally, there was another candidate that jumped into the pool here that had a lot of momentum behind him and it was the socialist candidate who rallied a lot of the anti-war sentiment, a man named Morris Hilquist. So between John Highland, the subway man, Mitchell, and the socialist party, they were all on the ballot in 1917. Well, it sounds like a wildly interesting election. Again, the dynamics were so strange here, but Mitchell himself, he didn't campaign that much. He didn't seem to be that enthusiastic. And so this man who had been swept in by a gust of great enthusiasm, with so much promise that had been attached to him, lost the election of 1917, he only got 23% of the vote. Less than a quarter of the city came out for him. He almost lost the socialist candidate who got 21% of the vote. So the man who came in with the greatest margin of victory went out the biggest loser. As a result, Tamini's man is back in office. But without his need to report to city hall, he happily moved forward with his plan to join the war effort. So he joined the air service. He trained at Rockwell Field in San Diego, where he became a major in the signal corps and went for advanced training in single seat flying in Lake Charles, Louisiana. And we have to stress the obvious here, flying is a very new skill in the 1910s. Engines have only been around for less than 20 years. And we should also remember that we're still dealing with John Peroi Mitchell. And so he couldn't help but investigate a little bit the situation with the pilots. He even, I read a report in the times archives last night about, he wasn't sure. He noticed that the goggles were made by a company with German names. And so again, he started an investigation. He claimed that the goggles were influencing poorly the way that the pilots could see. And he thought that a sabotage, it seems like he became a little insecure about things. But these were difficult and insecure times. So tragically, 13 days shy of his 39th birthday on July 6, 1918, Mitchell suffered a plane accident where he fell out of his plane from 500 feet, striking the ground and dying instantly. Another investigation would reveal that he hadn't been wearing his seat belt, which is, I suppose, ironic for somebody who was so into process and the right way to do things, that he hadn't taken that precaution. Although I have to say, after reading so many short accounts of Mitchell's life, because when you look around, you'll find many, many short accounts of his life is very few. It's true. You won't find any longer pieces. There aren't enough where they should be, I agree. And I feel that his death is often treated almost as a punchline, which I find distasteful. You know, it's always like the single sentence at the end and he wasn't wearing his seat belt, period. Right. It is tragic. For a mayor who wasn't beloved when he left office, you wouldn't have known it by the response in New York, because it was overwhelming. The outpouring of love and admiration for this ex-mayor. So just a few years after Mayor Gaynor lay in state at City Hall, here to lay the mayor John Paroy Mitchell. His funeral was at St. Patrick's Cathedral. You know, he lay in state here in City Hall and there was a huge funeral procession from City Hall under the Washington Arch in Washington Square Park and up Fifth Avenue to St. Patrick's Cathedral. There's actually film of one of the pallbearers, Theodore Roosevelt, leaving the church after the funeral. What I find very unusual is that as the procession headed up to St. Patrick's, twenty airplanes flew back and forth over the crowd and dispersed flowers over the crowd, which, I mean, sounds like a nice thing, but having the airplanes considering how he died seems like a poor choice. And the city also responded by erecting monuments in his honor. Mitchell Field, the Mitchell Air Force base on Long Island, was named after him in 1918. In 1928, a granite and bronze monument in Central Park was dedicated on the eastern side of the reservoir and bankman around 90th Street. So it's still there, obviously, today. So you can check it out if you're over there, kind of behind the Met, walk up a little bit. It's one of my favorite and unusual monuments. So it's on Fifth Avenue and 90th Street, so right by the reservoir. It's almost gaudy because it's gilded. It's golden and the lettering on it is also kind of golden. So on a certain light, it seems otherworldly when you approach it. I mean, it's just a bust of Mr. Mitchell with the inscription in memory of John Poroi Mitchell, mayor of the city of New York, born July 19th, 1879, died in the service of the United States, July 6th, 1918. And if you're up at Columbia, as I mentioned before, you can still see Mitchell on campus. There is a bronze plaque that was placed on Hamilton Hall on the western side of Hamilton, where first and second year students take most of their liberal arts classes. You can see Mitchell sort of sitting there in his army uniform and a very nice plaque. So yes, many students pass that every day. And even the library, the main branch of the New York Public Library, has John Poroi Mitchell memorial flagstaff. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, check them out. You can see a little plaque at their base. So he might be one of the most honored mayors in New York City, although I have to say that his legacy has been a little forgotten, although Mayor Fiorella LaGuardia credits Mitchell for some of the initiatives that LaGuardia would then do much more successfully. So thank you for joining us as we pay tribute to perhaps an underappreciated mayor of New York from a hundred years ago. Visit our website, BowrieBoysHistory.com, where there's a lot of really great photographs from the events depicted in the show. This was an era of great black and white photography. So there's lots of images there. In addition, you can also follow us on social media at Instagram, Threads, Facebook, and Blue Sky. Now we are proud to be sponsored by Founded by NYC, celebrating New York City's 400th anniversary in 2025 and the 225th anniversary of the United States next year in 2026. So as we roll into the fall here, there's a lot of great things to do. We want to help you experience the best things that the city has to offer. And, might I say, as a mega film buff, I must celebrate today the New York Film Festival, which takes place from September 26th to October 13th. Now, some of you know I'm a big film fan. I might have a stack of Criterion Collection DVDs in my house, but what I love about the New York Film Festival is that, yes, there are some splashy appearances by movie stars and all that, but it's really a feast for cinema lovers. I've been a couple of times, and for me, it's a little bit of glamour and a little bit or maybe a lot of film geekiness, okay? Just park me in the front row for the two weeks and I'm happy. The New York Film Festival is operated by film at Lincoln Center and held primarily at the Center's campus at Lincoln Center, although there are screenings in all the boroughs. The New York Film Festival has been a fixture on the cultural calendar for more than six decades. Over the years, the festival has featured films from such groundbreaking directors such as surrealist Louise Bungwell, whose film The Exterminating Angel opened the very first film festival back in 1963. Of course, you've got Romer, Tarantino, The Trailblazing, Ava DuVernay, and of course, one of my favorites, the downtown indie film icon, Jim Jarmusch, whose latest film, Father, Mother, Sister, Brother, will be in this fall's installment. And on top of that, this year's lineup features a whole array of world North America and New York film premieres, avant-garde works, and future hits, including the latest thriller from Catherine Bigelow, A House of Dynamite, Iranian director Jafar Panahi's grand prize winner from Cannes, it was just an accident, and the world premiere documentary, Mr. Scorsese, all about New York's filmmaking giant, Martin Scorsese. To get yourself a ticket, be there to see it all take place. The festival runs from September 26th to October 13th. Find out about the film festival and all the other exciting events and world-class institutions commemorating the five boroughs legacy of groundbreaking achievements, and find ways to celebrate the city that's always making history at foundedbynyc.com. Please consider supporting The Bowery Boys podcast at patreon.com, where we also produce a separate show, just for those on Patreon, called Side Streets, and as we enter into the fall and around spooky season, we'll be doing a couple extra shows, sort of talking about our ghost story show, things that we have prepared for the fall, so tune into that. You can get that show by supporting us at patreon.com/boweryboys. This production, from 2013, was newly produced in 2025, by Kieran Gannon. So thank you very much for listening. Have a great New York week, whether you live here or not.