One Set of Hands: Part I
One Set of Hands: Part I
The beginning of the end of the American constitutional order
“First, this great and glorious country was built up by political parties; second, parties can’t hold together if their workers don’t get the offices when they win; third, if the parties go to pieces, the government they built up must go to pieces, too; fourth, then there’ll be hell to pay.”
—George Washington Plunkitt
One Set of Hands
Ruff’s Barker Shop
Last year New York City’s iconic Tammany Hall Building, once a “temple of corruption” and monument to Democratic power, was leased to Petco and transformed into a 30,000 square-foot pet care center. Designed to capitalize on the “humanization trend in animals,” Petco’s Manhattan flagship now offers pets a full suite of services and experiences, including a dog park, grooming salon, and gourmet kitchen. With children in US households declining and pet ownership on the rise, Petco’s New York experiment will likely be a success and inspire imitations all over the country.
But the landmark’s dramatic makeover did not please everyone. Petco’s grand opening brought complaints from locals. Union workers protested, outraged that Tammany’s owner, Reading International—a Los Angeles real estate conglomerate—used non-union labor for the renovation. Other residents were miffed by the renovation itself, which was just the latest scandal of many, including the destruction of an old auditorium frequented by Franklin Roosevelt and the installation of a hideous $50 million glass dome.
But such complaints went unheeded, and now the shrine to Tammany tiger is home “Ruff’s Barker Shop,” a classic barbershop for dogs, and the stylish Reddy Soho, which offers a lounge area, fitting station, and treatery for both dogs and their “pet parents.”
If Tammany Hall was a symbol of Democratic power in ages past, surely it remains a symbol of something today, even if it’s hard to say exactly what that is.
New Deals and Old-Fashioned Politics
For all the grumbling at ground level, Petco’s Tammany renovation is an appropriate bookend to an era when machine politics dominated.
For better or worse, the Tammany Hall Building now housing Ruff’s Barker Shop is not the same Tammany Hall “wigwam” used by the infamous grand sachems Tweed, Croker, and “Silent” Charlie Murphy. Rather, the Tammany Hall Building located at 44 Union Square was erected in 1929, in the organization’s twilight years, with then-Governor Franklin Roosevelt giving the dedicatory address. By the beginning of the Great Depression Tammany Hall was slowly losing its grip on the Democratic Party. By the 1950s, a string of crippling prosecutions brought Tammany to its knees, with the final death blow coming after its last boss, Italian Carmine DeSapio, had effectively ended Irish-American dominance of the institution. By 1967, Tammany was gone.
Most people will tell you that Tammany’s involvement with organized crime put it on the road to ruin. And this is more or less correct. But crime, organized and otherwise, had always been a part of the Tammany story. It does not explain why the institution continued to crumble despite extensive patronage, a bought-and-paid-for judicial system, and one-party rule in New York and Washington.
The truth is that Tammany eventually succumbed to the same powerful forces that overwhelmed the rest of the country in the 1960s and ‘70s; forces unleashed years earlier by its old friend-turned-enemy, Franklin Roosevelt.
Just as so many of the nation’s oldest institutions were uprooted by the New Deal revolution, only to wither away some time between the invention of the lava lamp and the Watergate scandal, Tammany Hall was mortally wounded in the tumult of the 1930s. This was the beginning of the end of the American constitutional order. For better or worse, Tammany, which which had mastered old-fashioned politics since the earliest days of the Republic, could not survive under the same administrative authority that turned its grand old nemesis, the Republican Party, into a quivering shadow of its former self. This was the end of politics, and politics was Tammany’s lifeblood.
The United House of Tammany
Founded in New York City in 1786, the Society of Tammany was a fraternal benefit society committed to the principles of “true republicanism,” with political backing from the likes of Aaron Burr and the mighty Clinton family.
These were the rough-and-tumble days of the early American Republic, when New York was a critical battleground in the fight between Hamilton’s Federalists and Jefferson’s Republicans. Months of bitter infighting during Washington’s second term had left both Hamilton and Jefferson ready to resign, and as Washington tried in vain to restore order to his cabinet, the conflict spilled out into the rest of the country.