Eat the City(93)

38 “Bones is hard business now”: “Walks Among the New York Poor: The Rag and Bone Pickers,” New York Times, January 22, 1853.

39 you could get burned and bruised: “Incidents and Accidents,” New York Daily Times, January 3, 1853; “Williamsburgh,” New York Times, August 10, 1865; “A Laborer’s Horrible Death; Caught in an Elevator Shaft and Frightfully Crushed,” Brooklyn Eagle, November 17, 1884; “The Hottest Place in Town; If You Don’t Like the Weather of the Last Few Days, Try a Sugar Refinery,” New-York Tribune, August 7, 1896.

40 You could stab yourself: “Scalded by Boiling Sugar,” Brooklyn Eagle, January 18, 1899; “Foot Crushed,” Brooklyn Eagle, April 26, 1875; “Bags of Sugar Fell on Him; Frederick Senft Probably Fatally Hurt at the Havemeyer Refinery,” Brooklyn Eagle, December 31, 1900.

41 the intense, 110-degree heat: “Incidents and Accidents”; “Sugar Workers Stricken,” New-York Tribune, July 30, 1892.

42 burn an unlucky worker “to a crisp”: “A Victim Found and Identified,” New York Times, June 18, 1887.

43 “I cannot grant your request, boys”: “Havemeyers and Elder Lose Their Firemen and Boilermen,” New York Times, June 15, 1893.

44 “Get it down as a fact”: Draft manuscript of Harry W. Havemeyer, Henry O. Havemeyer: The Most Independent Mind (New York: privately printed, 2011), 44.

45 “He considered him a brute”: John E. Parsons, the trust’s lawyer, in testimony to the Hardwick Committee. Quoted in Richard Zerbe, “The American Sugar Refinery Company, 1887–1914: The Story of a Monopoly,” Journal of Law and Economics 12, no. 2 (October 1969).

46 called their job “hell”: “Death in the Refineries: How the Slaves of the Sugar Trust Work, Suffer and Die,” New York Tribune, July 22, 1894.

47 “a conscienceless octopus”: “Mr. Havemeyer Not Guilty,” New York Times, May 28, 1897.

48 “I think it is fair to get out”: Cesar J. Ayala, American Sugar Kingdom (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 31.

49 “with all the enthusiasm of a schoolboy”: “H. O. Havemeyer Dies at L.I. Home,” New York Times, December 5, 1907.

50 “So far as the coffee end of the war is concerned”: “End of Sugar War Not Near; President Havemeyer Aware of No Arrangement Looking to That End; Few Developments To-day,” Brooklyn Eagle, April 3, 1900.

51 “Do you see any possible way”: “War of the Sugar Kings,” Washington Post, March 30, 1900.

52 a near total monopoly that controlled 98 percent: Jack Simpson Mullins, “The Sugar Trust: Henry O. Havemeyer and the American Sugar Refining Company” (PhD dissertation, University of South Carolina, 1964), 157; Harry W. Havemeyer, Merchants of Williamsburgh: Frederick C. Havemeyer, Jr., William Dick, John Mollenhauer, Henry O. Havemeyer (New York: privately printed, 1989).

53 U.S. Navy gunships quietly floated: Julian Go, American Empire and the Politics of Meaning: Elite Political Cultures in the Philippines and Puerto Rico During U.S. Colonialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).

54 “Every man, woman, and child”: “Trade of Porto Rico,” speech on the bill H.R. 8245, Hon. Jacob Ruppert, Jr., in the House of Representatives, Wednesday, April 11, 1900, Washington, D.C.

55 Puerto Rico’s annual production of sugar jumped tenfold: José Solá, “ ‘The Funnel System in Which His Is the Little End’: The Technological Transformation of the Sugar Industry and American Protectionism in the Emergence of the Colonos in Caguas, Puerto Rico, 1898–1928” (PhD dissertation, University of Connecticut, 2004), 89.

56 that single crop provided: Nydia R. Suarez, “The Rise and Decline of Puerto Rico’s Sugar Economy,” in Sugar and Sweetener, S&O/SSS-224/December 1998. Economic Research Service/USDA, 22.

57 little Puerto Rico became the second largest: Luis A. Figueroa, Sugar, Slavery, and Freedom in Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 49.

58 “These traders almost never see”: John Mitchell, “Price,” Feeding the City, WPA, The Municipal Archives, New York.

59 a group of men including Frederick Havemeyer: Harold van B. Cleveland and Thomas F. Huertas, Citibank, 1812–1970 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 42.

60 They raised funds to build their own, independent central: Solá, “The Funnel System.”

61 “four cents more than the food expense”: Cesar J. Ayala, American Sugar Kingdom (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 182.

62 Political agitators against Spain established: Virginia E. Sánchez Korrol, From Colonia to Community: The History of Puerto Ricans in New York City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 13.

63 They bought winter coats on credit: The first stop for many migrants, especially those who came in winter, was Old Man Markofsky at 106th and Second Avenue, a “clothier on the long, long installment plan,” wrote one of his customers. Gráfico, March 27, 1927, p. 2. Quoted in Korrol, Ibid., 64.

64 Salaries in Puerto Rico stayed roughly level: Clarence Senior and Donald O. Watkins, “Toward a Balance Sheet of Puerto Rican Migration,” United States-Puerto Rican Status Commission Report, 1966, Washington, D.C., p. 749. Quoted in Korrol, Ibid., 38.

65 “Job and Home in New York”: Alfredo López, Do?a Licha’s Island: Modern Colonialism in Puerto Rico, (Boston: South End Press, Boston: 1987), 96.