Fingy Conners & The New Century Read online

  The First Ward II

  Fingy Conners & The New Century

  Richard Sullivan

  Books

  by Richard Sullivan:

  The First Ward

  The First Ward II: Fingy Conners & The New Century

  The First Ward III: Murderers, Scoundrels and Ragamuffins

  The First Ward IV: His Lips Forgot The Taste Of Truth

  Driving & Discovering Hawaii: Oahu

  Oahu Spectacular Beaches: Driving & Discovering Hawaii

  Driving & Discovering Hawaii: Maui and Molokai

  Reclaim Your Youth: Growing Younger After 40

  Family Tree Secrets & Genealogy Search Tips

  The First Ward II:

  Fingy Conners & The New Century

  by

  Richard Sullivan

  Copyright © 2012-2018 by Richard Sullivan and

  Montgomery Ewing Publishers

  . . .

  This book is dedicated to my sister Barbara Sullivan

  . . .

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The Sullivan Family Historical Archive

  Fultonhistory.com

  Ancestry.com

  Margaret M. Sullivan

  Dennis C. Sullivan

  Mary Lou Woelfel

  Craig Cooper-Wyble

  Thomas J. Higgins

  Anette Weitzel

  Steven Whelan

  Lenny Kamp

  Sonja Stieglitz, nee Grażyna Dyląg,

  Michelle Bennett Stieglitz

  Advocates of Murder: Death Before Divorce

  by Charles Boswell and Lewis Thompson

  Pediatrics 12:414-419, 1901

  Snap Shots On The Midway by Richard H. Barry

  The Railway Age, Volume 32.

  Marine Review

  Review Of Reviews vol. xii

  The Chief, by David Nasaw

  The National Archives

  The Library of Congress

  The staff of the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library

  The staff of the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society

  The Buffalo Express

  The Buffalo Courier

  The Buffalo Commercial

  The Buffalo Times

  The Buffalo Courier and Republic

  The Buffalo News

  The Buffalo Star

  The Buffalo Evening News

  The Buffalo Advertiser

  The Buffalo Catholic Union and Times

  The New York Times Online

  The Detroit Free Press

  The Amsterdam Democrat

  The Amsterdam Sentinel

  The Fulton County Republican

  The Chicago Tribune

  www.buffalohistoryworks.com

  …..

  Put Me Off At Buffalo

  “Put me on at Buffalo,”

  Said “Fingy” Conners, soft and slow

  And so they did, for “Fingy’s” way

  Is what the bosses need today.

  What! You don’t know who this party is?

  Well, listen to a story

  That circulates in Buffalo

  To add to “Fingy’s” glory.

  He isn’t to the manner born,

  But has the planks aplenty

  And when a ten is all they ask

  He hands them out a twenty.

  He has a mighty yearn to be

  A social luminary,

  But up to date the swagger set

  Is just a wee bit wary.

  To catch the fashionable eye

  And please the social powers,

  He set across his spacious lawn

  His name in gorgeous flowers.

  Such art and beauty, “Fingy” thought,

  would sock ‘em in the plexus

  And make him solid socially

  From Buffalo to Texas.

  A swagger lady, driving by.

  Observed the combination:

  “Poor man,” she sighed “poor man

  he thinks

  He is a railway station.”

  L’Envol

  In politics they put him on

  At Buffalo, and star him;

  But socially they put him off

  At Buffalo and bar him.

  —From the New York World

  The First Ward

  Synopsis: The Story Thus Far

  Brothers James and John (“JP”) Sullivan were placed in the Buffalo Orphanage in 1863 by their destitute mother after their father died in the Civil War. The Union Army had no record indicating Pvt. John Sullivan was ever married or had children, and because of this oversight the family was denied a pension. Out of desperation, Mary McGrady Sullivan took a new husband, an ex-and future convict named Halloran just in order to survive and reclaim her sons. Living in Halloran’s saloon at the edge of the Buffalo River, life for the Sullivan brothers was almost as violent outside the home as in.

  Their “friend” and neighbor, an arsonist and bully named Jimmy Conners, left school at age 13 to escape the clutches of the police and sail on the Great Lakes aboard passenger steamers as a cabin boy. In the ship’s galley one day on a dare his friend Kennedy chopped off Jimmy’s left thumb with a meat cleaver. Jimmy Conners raced all over the ship screaming, “Me fingy! He chopped me fingy!” providing him the nickname that would follow him throughout the rest of his life.

  Fingy Conners returned to his Buffalo home as a young adult and due to the convenient sequence of deaths of four family members, who all died within less than two year’s time, he inherited all of their estates, which included a saloon.

  Dock-walloper Fingy had witnessed the desperation and disorganization among his fellow longshoremen and conceived the idea of contracting with a shipper to exclusively handle their freight, promising lower costs and an end to labor unrest. He accomplished this by hiring and paying his workers from his saloon, arranging for those who spent the most of their meager pay in his tavern on drinks to be the first hired on again to work the following week. The desperate competition fostered by this ploy plunged First Ward families further into poverty and desolation, not to mention alcoholism. Soon other shippers took notice of the cessation of labor unrest on the docks, lower costs, and higher profits. Ultimately Fingy Conners cornered the market on contracting workers, expanding his saloon-boss schemes to the point of becoming a millionaire. Thousands of First Ward families soon found themselves trapped under Conners’ heel in indentured servitude.

  In addition to owning half the ward’s residents, Fingy also came to control its politicians, as well as the Buffalo Police Dept., who guarded the polling places on election day while hired thugs assaulted anyone trying to vote for any candidate other than Conners’ choice.

  Laborers James and JP Sullivan were determined to escape the First Ward’s downward spiral. James founded the Mutual Rowing Club in 1881, which became the social hub of the ward, and joined the Buffalo police department in 1883. His younger brother JP unscrupulously won the office of Alderman of the First Ward in 1890, acting recklessly for his first few years, beholden as he was to his sponsor Fingy Conners and various other political demons. In 1899 there a great labor strike was called against Fingy Conners in which the Alderman finally turned his back on Fingy, standing instead with the strikers and thus forever altering his historically-precarious alliance with Conners.

  The humiliating loss of the Great Scoopers Strike, as it was called, polarized Fingy Conners, who swore revenge on all his enemies. Now a multi-millionaire and the single largest employer of labor in the United States, he drafted a scheme to rain economic devastation down upon the entire city and bring to ruin the upcoming mammoth Pan American Exposition of 1901.

  . . .
<
br />   January 1, 1900

  00:04

  “My God, man!” Annie Sullivan screamed. “Watch out!”

  She held tight to her agonized husband.

  As rockets raced skyward on their futile conspiracy to become one with the stars, and firecrackers ignited and exploded and bounced wildly about on the frozen pavement in celebration of the brand-new century, the speeding Fitch ambulance carrying the stricken Alderman and his wife began to slide sideways on the icy cobbles.

  The horses, spooked by the aerial explosions and pulled off balance by the momentum of the careening wagon, its wheels failing to adequately grip the street, stumbled. One fell. The other, dragged down by the weight and momentum of his partner could not help but follow, screaming. The ambulance turned over ejecting the driver who landed sickeningly on his head with a resounding crack as loud as any accompanying pyrotechnic, killing him instantly.

  John P. Sullivan and his wife Annie collided painfully with each other inside the wagon as the ambulance tobogganed, but they remained contained within it.

  The dead man’s partner, ambulance attendant Malcom Weber, found himself badly bruised, but no bones had been broken in the crash.

  The Alderman’s brother, following the ambulance at a three-minute distance in his sleigh, soon came upon the horrific scene. The Detective had some twenty years’ police experience dealing with the unexpected and the gruesome, but when catastrophe involves one’s own family, emotions have a tendency to override a man’s professional detachment, his practiced calm and cool flying out into the ether. Jim Sullivan was gobsmacked by the scene.

  The ambulance had crashed just a few yards from a firebox. Responding automatically to the emergency, Jim ran to it and pulled the alarm. The driver’s head was cracked apart, he observed as he stepped over the man’s splayed lifeless form on the street, his brains eerily exposed in the ugly yellow arc light. Soon a steamer and a ladder wagon came shrieking from the hose company on Chicago Street, tearing toward the Elk Street site of the accident.

  The Alderman was in severe pain. Annie was bruised but uninjured she assured Jim through tears, though doubtless she was quite shaken.

  The Fitch Hospital was alerted and a second ambulance was quickly dispatched.

  Jim helped the firemen carefully remove the Alderman from the overturned conveyance. He did his best to comfort his brother. The vehicle’s windows, reinforced with chicken wire, were fractured in a spider webbed pattern, but resisted shattering as designed.

  Both horses were bruised but not gravely so. The entangled team was unattached from the overturned vehicle so that the firemen could right the ambulance. The equines were becalmed, then treated, then reengaged. The smarting attendant examined the Alderman but could not determine if he’d suffered any serious injuries as he had already been riddled with pain when they first arrived to fetch him. Annie was now wailing and crying, discombobulated, as fully worried for her husband as she was for her secret passenger.

  The couple were transferred into the second ambulance and continued on their ill-fated race for the hospital. Jim followed. The dead conductor was loaded onto his original ambulance, this time riding in the back, his gaping head tightly wrapped to contain his brain matter within. He had lived but four short minutes into the new century.

  The telephone sounded at the Mutual Rowing Club boathouse a little past one o’clock. Because of the noise of the continuing New Year celebrations, it went unheeded for ten rings until Junior perceived its jangle over the music, horns and revelry and finally unhooked the earpiece.

  His sister Nellie happened to be watching him from across the way as his face transformed, stricken with the news.

  He bolted across the room and hooked Nellie’s arm, steering her through the crowd, past the Christmas tree, beneath the mistletoe, down the stairs and out the door.

  “That was Ma! Uncle’s ambulance crashed,” he gasped. “You go stay with Ma, Nellie. I’m going to the Fitch to be with Pa.”

  Nellie felt as though she’d been shot. She lingered as Junior ran to fetch the Alderman’s sleigh, minding each step carefully as she rounded the corner of South and Hamburg Streets so as not to slip on the icy walk. She waited in front of the house until her brother had hitched up the horse and disappeared down the street before she opened the door to step inside. Zeke, the black Labrador retriever invisible in the dimness, was only evident by his excitedly wagging tail colliding with her knees. She let him out and waited until he finished peeing on the front gate, too distracted to scold him. As the dog ran back inside past her she firmly shut the door. There she would await further news while comforting her mother.

  ...

  Annie sat on a gurney at the hospital having her bruises attended to. Suddenly she began to cramp badly, almost doubling over from the pain. She looked down, then felt with her hand, quickly withdrawing it in horror. Blood seeped from her vagina. She jumped up and screamed.

  “Tell me, are you pregnant, ma’am?” asked the alarmed doctor.

  ...

  Where am I?” abruptly shouted Alderman Sullivan awaking from a terrible nightmare. He tried to sit up, but weakness prevented the effort.

  His head pounded with migraine.

  In his disturbing phantasm he had found himself in the company of his father, a man he had no actual recollection of. Pvt. John Sullivan of the 49th NY Vols. had died in the Civil War when the Alderman was just a baby cradled in his forsaken mother’s arms.

  In his dream he and his father were conversing together atop Louis Sullivan’s masterwork, the terracotta-faced Guaranty Building, fourteen stories up on the roof. He had been frozen with a fear that his father might fall from there, and tried to dissuade him from getting too close to the edge. He even felt a vague suspicion that his father might purposely try and jump. He was anxious and apprehensive, clinging to the surface, terrified of the height, dizzy at being so high up, the adventure being such an unnatural one. He had no idea how they had arrived there, but felt that as long as he kept his father talking that nothing bad would happen. As they spoke about nothing much of consequence, his father walked over to the steel skeleton of the two-story weather tower bolted to the corner of the roof. There, clinging to its brace work, he leaned out and over to have himself a long look down at the smoky city below. The war veteran marveled aloud that from that vantage point he could actually look down squarely upon the highest pinnacle of the spire of St. Paul’s.

  “I can still recall when St. Paul’s was the tallest structure in the entire Niagara region. Now we’re high above it. Can ye believe it, son…I…” As his father spoke, mid-sentence the Union soldier nonchalantly stepped off into empty space and disappeared.

  JP was horrified. He wanted to flee, to find the stairs and get himself down from there as fast as he could, but was more urgently compelled to investigate in order to verify his worst fear. He crawled haltingly toward the edge on his hands and knees, too vertiginous to stand upright. Loose scree painfully embedded in his palms and knees. He peered uneasily over the edge into the abyss to witness a crumpled human figure in orange lying far, far below on Church Street. A street-cleaner’s cart lay shattered into pieces all around him, brooms broken, a blizzard of paper litter fluttering slowly down like giant snowflakes to cover the lifeless musketeer. The Alderman wondered why his father was dressed so oddly, in a Union Army uniform of bright orange wool.

  “There, there. You’re still at the hospital, Alderman. Just lie back and relax. You are in good hands. Dr. Park will be in to see you shortly.”

  “But...what’s happening to me?” he asked.

  Nurse Margaret Mary O’Neill just smiled.

  “Dr. Park will be in to see you shortly.”

  “Where’s Annie? Where’s my wife?”

  “Remain calm, sir. Dr. Park will be in to see you shortly.”

  She pulled the drape around his bed not quite fully closed, then exited the room.

  A minute later there came a sudden commotion.


  “Papa!” the voice loudly whispered as the Alderman saw a young girl’s figure run past though the gap in the drape.

  “My little Margaret!” barked a gruff voice from a few feet away.

  The Alderman was not in a private room.

  He worried suddenly that he might be in a public ward, recalling the noisy, confusing stressful experience of being hospitalized after his leg had been crushed on the docks when he was a young man. He didn’t sleep for weeks back then, what with all the noise, the midnight interruptions by staff, and the occasional screams of someone or other in terrible distress.

  “Hurry!” whispered the girl, as the Alderman saw three more children quietly rush past the narrow gap in the curtain.

  “Be quiet, you kids, or they’ll know we’re here and kick us all out!” young Margaret scolded.

  It was the first time they had seen their father since the accident.

  Ed Moylan was a yard detective for the Lehigh Valley Railroad. He’d encountered more than his share of roughs in the course of his job, that of policing the Tifft Farm railyard. His task was to remain alert for those who might be emboldened to break into cars to loot the contents or for vagrants secreted away in the darkest corners attempting to evade detection. He’d had guns, knives, swords, bayonets, clubs, daggers, and even an old musket aimed straight at him, mere seconds away from reuniting him with his maker, but had blessedly remained unscathed except for a few knocks and bruises here and there.

  But on December 26th, right at the tail end of the century, something occurred while moonlighting across the border over in Ridgeway, at the Crystal Beach amusement park. There he supervised construction of the much-ballyhooed Scenic Railway attraction at the famous Canadian resort. With its promise of wicked turns and thrilling sheer drops, the Scenic Railway was the number one topic of talk in any conversation addressing the upcoming summer season of 1900. Workmen were rushing to complete it.

  As Ed Moylan stood atop the steepest drop’s apex during his inspection, a gale-force gust of arctic wind blasted off Lake Erie and invaded the volume of his heavy woolen overcoat transforming it into a sail of sorts and toppling him from the towering height. He instinctively reached out to grab a handhold as he fell, but his wrist became lodged tightly in a crook where a number of support beams all joined together. Gravity, velocity, and the weight of the man’s stout frame, along with the unfortunate torque of his arm at that exact moment all conspired to tear the limb right off his body.