Читать книгу Palisades - Robert O. Binnewies - Страница 13

LONG BEFORE QUARRY operators started blasting away the Palisades, Native Americans had used the cliffs and summit for shelter, observation, and protection. When Verrazano stared at the cliffs from his ship, very likely his gaze was returned by Native American eyes. The Sanhikan, Hackensack, Raritan, and Tappan are said to have referred to the cliffs as “Wee-awaken,” rocks-that-look-like-trees. The Palisades served as a citadel against threats from cross-river enemies, the Manhattans. But the real threat came from Dutch settlement of the lower Hudson River Valley in the 1600s. Dutch policy favored the establishment of large, manorial estates on the east side of the Hudson upriver from New Amsterdam (New York City) and more adventurous settlement probes on the west side in the dangerous territory of the looming Palisades. This caution proved prescient; in 1643, in response to the murder of Indians by Dutch soldiers, the Hackensack and Tappan attacked and destroyed the Vriessendael colony at present-day Edgewater, New Jersey, and an isolated farmhouse on the Hackensack River. Through much of the 1600s, what was eventually to become Bergen County, New Jersey, and Rockland County, New York, was described as a “howling wilderness with scarcely a single settler located within.”

The Dutch gave up their claim of sovereignty in the Hudson River Valley to the British in 1664, and, slowly, with superior firepower, tools, and military protection, control shifted from Native American to Anglo settlers, but not until the early 1800s was the first house erected atop the Palisades. The house was framed in Boston, transported by ship to New York Harbor, floated by barge across the Hudson to the base of the cliffs, and hoisted, piece by piece, to the summit by its “active and enterprising” owner, Nathan T. Johnson. Johnson was followed by other settlers who scorned “anything as useless as aesthetics” and found a ready market for the forest of centuries-old hardwood trees on the summit that, until then, had escaped the axe man. Old-growth hardwood trees were felled, stripped of their branches, and “pitched” from the cliffs to the talus slopes below for shipment across the river. Railroad ties became the dominant market incentive, and, in time, the once heavily forested Palisades was “stripped practically clean.”

Enterprising merchants also made use of the Palisades. The great vertical cliff faces became natural billboards. Letters twenty feet high, large enough to be read a mile away across the river, were painted on the cliff faces to advertise patent medicines and other products of the era. Fishermen settled at the base of the cliffs, where their livelihood depended on enormous catches of shad. They were joined by employees of “bone factories” where animal bones were ground into fertilizer and by others who worked at a steam-powered cereal mill.

The cliffs did not escape the attention of these early settlers. Small quarries began to appear along the cliffs, hinting at industrial-level rock crushing soon to come.

Wealthy men and women who could afford to cross the Hudson in private yachts sought out properties on the flat summit of the Palisades to escape the city’s pungent congestion and to enjoy the spectacular views. They began erecting stately homes where simple cabins once stood. “Ownership” of the Palisades, from river’s edge up and over the summit, was divided into scores of private holdings.

The nation was in a post–Civil War industrial boom. The iron, textile, shipping, mining, railroad, lumber, and oil industries were providing fortunes for adroit and skilled entrepreneurs. Except for a few solitary voices—John Burroughs, George Catlin, John Muir, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Law Olmsted—these business adventurers paid little attention to environmental damage or even outright destruction. In California, three-thousand-year-old Giant Sequoia trees were being cut down to produce fence posts and other low-grade lumber products. On the Great Plains, remnant herds of bison were being shot for sport, sometimes from the windows of moving trains. Land, from the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean, was up for grabs. Buffalo Bill had moved east to regularly present his circus-like Wild West Show in New York City, reminding audiences of the glamour and dangers of a frontier that had been breached almost to the point of disappearance.

But environmental glimmers of hope also were flashing in nineteenth-century America. The Yosemite Land Grant to California was proclaimed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1864, directing that the grant was made “upon the express conditions that the premises shall be held in public use, resort, and recreation and shall be inalienable for all time.” In 1872, the establishment of Yellowstone National Park followed.

Predating these seminal land conservation actions, the Hudson River Valley School of art was begun in 1825 when two landscape paintings by Thomas Cole were spotted in a frame-maker’s shop window. New York City mayor Phillip Home purchased the paintings, giving early market validation to artistic interpretations of “sublime natural beauty.” The Hudson School of art, now renowned for highly valued art pieces, most in museums, attracted the talents of Albert Bierstadt, Asher Durand, William Bartlett, George Inness, Frederick Church, Victor Audubon, Winslow Homer, and Thomas Moran. They found timeless natural splendor in what others had referred to as “useless aesthetics.” Jasper Francis Cropsey, especially, found inspiration in the charm of the Palisades and put his brush to canvas to capture indelible scenes.

But rolling explosions by quarrymen were predominant, causing Rudyard Kipling to grieve:

We hear afar the sounds of war,

as rocks they rend and shiver;

They blast and mine and rudely scar

the pleasant banks of the river.

Palisades Scene (Jasper Francis Cropsey)

Public outrage over destruction of the Palisades began to find voice in newspapers in the 1890s, but at the same time, in an example of dueling interests, the Carpenter brothers and other quarry operators, including Brown & Fleming, the Trevor brothers, and P. Gallagher were increasing production in response to market demand in New York City. The Carpenter brothers owned about one-half mile of cliff face and shoreline and could produce 1,500 cubic yards of crushed stone each day at a market price of $1 per yard. They had enough raw material to stay in business for decades.

New Jersey governor George T. Werts, serving in office from 1893 to 1896, became an early political champion for protection of the Palisades. Searching for an answer to the challenge, Werts turned to his state geologist, John Smock, who suggested passage of a “park condemnation act” that would allow the state to demand and take legal possession of river shoreline beneath the cliffs, thus blocking access to the river by the quarrymen. But the governor had a problem. While demolition of the cliffs could be seen easily from the New York side of the river, the view from New Jersey was of a bucolic summit landscape. Some members of the New Jersey legislature confessed no knowledge of the location of the Palisades cliffs.

To compensate, in 1894 the governor hosted a boat trip on the Hudson River to allow key members of the legislature a firsthand view of the problem. The glaring wounds of quarrying prompted New Jersey state senator H. D. Winton to suggest that the governor appoint a commission at the opening of the next legislative session to identify the speediest means of preventing further destruction. In January 1895, Werts appointed three members of the legislature to the task, but one of the members, J. J. Croes, seems not to have understood the mission. He said of the quarries that they “were capable of adding to the picturesqueness of the river shore.”

In February, the New York Times reported that, on a “light legislative day,” New York governor Levi P. Morton followed Werts’s lead and appointed a three-member commission to work with its counterparts in New Jersey “for the purpose of securing action by the government of the United States of America in acquiring and setting apart the west shore of the Hudson, as designated, for the purpose of fortification and reservation in order that the brink of the precipice may be securely held and defended against attack and hostile occupation.” One might argue that this resolution was a bit tardy, given that the British had stormed and taken the Palisades and its defending fort in 1776, thus forcing General George Washington and the Continental Army to retreat to Valley Forge. A reader of the Times commented that “it would take a pretty bold invader to threaten New York from the direction of northern New Jersey. It has been suggested that an enemy approaching New York from Boston by way of Albany might be checked by forts on the Palisades. It is certain, however, that such an emergency would greatly surprise the Naval War College at Newport, which has been engaged in the study of the defense of the eastern entrance of Long Island Sound under the conviction that an enemy from the east would surely try to get at New York that way.”

From Washington, D.C., Secretary of War Daniel S. Lamont, a New Yorker, tersely reinforced this opinion, commenting that fortification of the Palisades “does not meet with favor.” Officers down in the ranks, who were aware that Yellowstone and Yosemite National Parks were patrolled and protected by the U.S. Cavalry, were among the first to see park potential. One officer said, “I think the best course to pursue would be to secure from Congress authority and an appropriation for the purchase of the land and quarry plants and turn the whole thing over to the Interior Department.” Another agreed: “I favor the idea of making a great public park out of the Palisades.”

In 1895, a bill was introduced in the Fifty-Fourth Congress by New York congressman Benjamin Lewis Fairchild that would cede the Palisades to the federal government to become a national park/military reservation, but this legislative attempt never was brought to a vote. Three years later, with Spanish-American War paranoia gripping the nation, a second legislative attempt was made to transfer the Palisades to the War Department. This effort also failed.

As nascent attempts to save the Palisades sputtered along, voices in opposition by local citizens began to rise. A New Jersey property owner said, “If Bergen County prefers swamps and rattlesnakes and a dozen denizens on top of her miles of cliffs, and a half dozen dynamite fields along their face, she ought not be disturbed, and her rights infringed upon.” The Carpenter brothers and other quarry operators wasted no time in seeking out politicians who would defend their rights to do as they pleased with their properties.

This was a man’s world; men decided things, so little attention was paid in 1896 when seventeen women gathered at the home of Mrs. John A. Wells to form the Englewood Women’s Club, a new chapter of the statewide New Jersey Federation of Women’s Clubs. Led by Adaline Sterling, Elizabeth Vermilye, and Mrs. Chester Loomis, the club was formed “for the purpose of bringing together women interested in intellectual and cultural advancement, to stimulate inquiry concerning questions of public significance, to be a potent factor in the development of the community, and to promote its well-being through a program of philanthropy.” Their “inquiry concerning questions of public significance” became sharply focused on the Palisades.

The women intended to find a way to stop the quarry operators. They had no voting rights and were expected to stay out of politics, but just before the first automobile rolled off the Ford assembly line and while the Klondike gold rush was underway in Alaska and Canada, the Englewood women formed a subcommittee on the Palisades, chaired by Vermilye. A retrospective, published years later in the Rockland Journal News, captured Vermilye’s love for her task:

In the 1860s, when she was a child, she would hike up Englewood’s steep Palisades Avenue to the edge of the cliffs and roam the trails skirting the brink and the shoreline. She would clamber over the Indian Head and peer into the old tavern at Alpine where Cornwallis holed up as his British and Hessian troops scaled the cliffs to chase the Americans from Fort Lee. She marveled at the spectacular drops of Forest View, Bombay Hook, and the Giant Stairs. She watched the trains work their way up and down the opposite shoreline through Riverdale, Yonkers, and Hastings, silent as ships and barges at a distance.

Vermilye and her colleague Cecelia Gaines set out to enlist women from throughout New Jersey to the cause of the Palisades. They started writing letters to every newspaper in the state, accepted any invitation to speak before interested groups, and started lobbying legislators. In 1897, the Englewood women won the privilege of hosting the third annual gathering of the New Jersey Federation of Women’s Clubs. Fifty women attended and were invited aboard the yacht Marietta made available by its owner, Harrison B. Morse.

Accompanying the women were several members of the newly formed American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society, chaired by Andrew H. Green. Green strongly shared the belief that quarrying of the Palisades must be stopped, and, as comptroller of Central Park and president of the New York City Board of Education, he brought strong credentials to the challenge. On board the yacht, Englewood club member Mrs. K. J. Sauzade stated that the practical duty of women was to “conserve the beauties of nature.” She found no disagreement from Green, whose Preservation Society mission included the need to “promote public parks by private gift or the appropriation of public funds for the health, comfort, and pleasure of the people.”

When the women debarked from the yacht, having seen the brutal evidence of quarrying, they arrived unannounced at the Carpenter brothers’ operation just when midday blasting was scheduled. The scene only can be imagined: tough, gritty quarrymen who likely held strong opinions about the place in society of the weaker sex confronted by a group of determined, genteel ladies. The place for women was not at a quarry interfering with honest, purposeful work. Church sewing societies were fine places for disenfranchised women to chatter; politics and commerce should be left to men, who understood these complicated matters.

The resolute women obviously had a different opinion. They made no headway at the quarry trying to deliver a message to protect scenic beauty, but before the annual meeting of the Women’s Clubs adjourned, a resolution was approved: “This famous Hudson River scenery which the citizens of New Jersey hold in trust for all the world will eventually become a thing of the past to their lasting shame and disgrace. As it is, the glorious heritage of the people of the state is being trampled under the foot of man and beasts in the streets of Gotham. Will the State Federation realize its power for good in this matter?”

In partial answer to that question, New Jersey governor Foster M. Voorhees, successor to Governor Werts, felt enough pressure from public opinion and the media to agree to meet with Elizabeth Vermilye and the Englewood women. His message was anything but encouraging: “Ladies, this is a hopeless task. I have tried for ten years to save the Palisades; it cannot be done.” Voorhees said that the state had no money to buy the Palisades and that no support or interest in protecting the cliffs existed in “south Jersey.”

But Voorhees had not counted on the 1899 arrival in the New York governor’s chair of Theodore Roosevelt, the celebrated commander of the Rough Riders of Spanish-American War fame. No government leader would bring more energy and sense of mission to the cause of national conservation than this legendary man. Among his early public-service accomplishments, Roosevelt had served as police commissioner for New York City. Drawn, as always, to the outdoors, he had become an active member of the Englewood, New Jersey, rod and gun club and had roamed the summit of the Palisades in search of small game, gaining a detailed knowledge of the area and appreciation for its bold, natural beauty.

Soon after being elected governor, he met and conferred with Voorhees. The two governors agreed that preserving the Palisades would be to the benefit of both states. By then, the first study commission had gone by the wayside, having found no viable solution to the explosive problem. Roosevelt and Voorhees appointed a second commission, five members representing New York and five New Jersey. In a female bounce against the glass ceiling, Vermilye and Gaines were among the New Jersey appointees. Meeting every week, this commission rushed to report back to the governors even as the Carpenter brothers accelerated their blasting schedule. By the end of the year, the study commission revisited a discarded idea, proposing to take a 737-acre strip of land along a fourteen-mile stretch of the Palisades between the cliffs and the low-tide mark of the river, thereby denying use of the shoreline for crushed rock commerce. The commission estimated the cost at $350 per acre; total price, $260,000.

Unknown to them, a resident across the Hudson was about to join their cause and would become crucial to the task. From his Glyndor estate on the eastern shoreline of the Hudson, George Walbridge Perkins was keenly aware of the Palisades. The cliffs were boldly within his view. He could hear the blasting, see the smoke and dust, and feel the tremors. The reverberating explosions would awaken Perkins’s napping two-year-old child. These experiences would draw Perkins along a path of civic duty that would span two decades and involve his family for a century. He would establish precedent-setting momentum for the creation of parks and historic sites, actions that would bring energy and skill to the nation’s fledgling conservation movement and place him squarely between two giant achievers whose opposing philosophies were legend: John Pierpont Morgan and Theodore Roosevelt.

According to biographer John Garraty, “George Perkins is a man little known today but was one of the most successful, controversial, and interesting Americans of the early twentieth century. The story of his rise from obscure beginnings to wealth and power would have strained the credulity of Horatio Alger’s most devoted readers. Son of the warden of a boy’s reformatory, he never went to high school but was invited to lecture at Columbia University. His father thought him slow in the head, but he revolutionized the insurance business, mastered the most complicated problems of corporate finance, developed the Palisades Interstate Park, guided creation of the International Harvester Corporation, made millions of dollars—and helped to organize and run Theodore Roosevelt’s ‘Bull Moose’ Progressive Party.”

So compelling was his personality that J. P. Morgan offered him a partnership, plus $125,000 for any worthy cause close to Perkins’s heart, the first time they met. Jealous leaders of the hotly competitive farm-machinery industry, unable to agree about the value of their enterprises, asked Perkins to make an assessment and promised, in advance, to accept his decision. The shrewd Russian finance minister Sergei Witte was so captivated that he refused to license American competitors of Perkins’s life insurance company. Wall Streeters called him a socialist, and Western reformers considered him to be a tool of Wall Street.

Born in Chicago in 1862, Perkins died at age fifty-eight in Stamford, Connecticut. During his lifetime, and almost by accident, he became one of the nation’s great environmental champions. A glimpse of Perkins’s style occurred in 1911 when he appeared as a witness before a congressional committee investigating Morgan’s alleged manipulation of the stock market. “What do you say to the statement that the panic was started to get rid of certain undesirable bankers, and that you gentlemen later were unable to manage it?” Congressman Charles L. Bartlett asked of Perkins. Perkins was reported to have stood up in “high theatrical dudgeon,” slammed his fist on the table, and shouted, “I say that there never was a more infamous lie started than that! There is not a scintilla of truth in it! You might just as well say that a certain group of gentlemen made a contract with Mrs. O’Leary’s cow to kick over the lamp that set Chicago afire!”

Perkins had wanted to be a missionary, but thin family finances prevented him from gaining the necessary training. Instead, he joined the New York Life Insurance Company as a clerk at age seventeen. In his mid-twenties, he was selling insurance from Wichita to Denver. By age thirty, Perkins placed his net worth at $51,000 and had arrived as third vice president at the company headquarters in New York City. He and his wife, Evelina, searched for a home in the metropolitan area and found a pleasant property in Riverdale-on-the-Hudson with a commanding view of the Palisades.

In 1900, when the second Palisades study commission was reporting to governors Roosevelt and Voorhees, Perkins had other issues on his mind. For him, the decades of the 1890s “had been one long triumph,” according to biographer Garraty. Perkins reached an annual salary of $30,000 and, rising to second in command of the world’s largest insurance company, enjoyed the allegiance of New York Life agents across the country. He instituted a pension plan for the agents, favored steady sales over high-pressure tactics, and believed in profit sharing. Reasoning that local agents could best serve their clients if they were given better financial incentives and less red tape, Perkins took steps to eliminate forty-four regional offices in favor of local shops. Old-guard middle managers were eliminated, and their traditional cut of profits went instead to local agents, all of whom reported directly to Perkins.

In the 1890s, when the massacre of Lakota Sioux Indians at Wounded Knee was juxtaposed against the founding of the Wall Street Journal, the construction of Carnegie Hall, and the opening of an immigration center on Ellis Island, the nation was still struggling to come of age and find its way in the international arena. American insurance companies were turning toward Europe and had established footholds in England, France, and Russia, but the lucrative German market, which held Swiss, Austrian, and Polish customers in its sway, was closed to American insurance companies. The financially conservative Germans were suspicious of upstart vendors from the United States. Competition among the American insurers was intense, and a breakthrough into Germany would be an impressive feat. Perkins took it upon himself to meet the challenge. On several transatlantic trips, he negotiated with German insurance regulators and invited them to visit New York Life and examine the books. The tough sell was to convince his own corporate colleagues to forsake more risky stock market investments in favor of the safe financial harbor of bonds. With these assurances, New York Life won the sole privilege of selling American insurance in Germany.

It was this success that brought Perkins face-to-face with Theodore Roosevelt. Competing insurance companies were seeking passage of a “Limitation Bill” that, if approved by the New York legislature and signed by the governor, would place a cap of $1.25 billion on the amount of insurance that any company could carry. Ostensibly, this legislation was said to encourage competition and reduce costs for working men and women, but the real purpose was to box in New York Life so that smaller insurance companies could gain more market share. Perkins said the Limitation Bill was “enough to make a man’s hair turn white.”

In March 1900, he gained a meeting with Roosevelt. The directness and clarity of Perkins’s presentation convinced the governor that the Limitation Bill was a bad idea, prompting Roosevelt to signal to legislative leaders that it would not win his signature. The bill was withdrawn. Whether Perkins touched on the punishment being visited on the Palisades during this meeting is unrecorded, but the second study commission had completed its work. Two weeks after the Roosevelt-Perkins meeting, on March 22, 1900, legislation reached the governor’s desk that would “establish the Commissioners of the Palisades Interstate Park.” As authorized, the commissioners could “provide for the selection, location, appropriation, and management of certain lands along the Palisades of the Hudson River for an interstate park, and thereby preserve the scenery of the Palisades.” The legislation allowed the governor of New York to appoint five commissioners from New York and approve five from New Jersey. The legislation included $10,000 in operating funds.

Similar legislation was making its way through the New Jersey government, but Roosevelt’s signature was the first on record, marking an initial step in what, for him, would become a national conservation legacy of immense proportion. Perkins was on vacation when the bill was signed. Roosevelt telephoned him to say that he wanted Perkins to serve on the newly established interstate park commission. When Perkins asked for time to “think about it,” the governor responded, “I did not call you up, Mr. Perkins, to ask you to consider this thing; I called you up to tell you that you are President of the Commissioners of the Palisades Interstate Park.”

In New Jersey, Governor Voorhees was contending with opposition to the Palisades initiative from landowners on the summit and by quarry operators who warned of government restrictions on business freedom and tax and job losses. In response, the New Jersey Federation of Women’s Clubs swamped the legislature with letters, news articles, and personal visits. In various attempts to head off the women, the Palisades legislation was rewritten several times. A sticking point was the word appropriation, which had been included in the New York version of the legislation. This word meant that commissioners of the interstate park would have the authority to purchase privately owned land over the objections of landowners. This option to “condemn” land was considered essential if the commission were to have any real power. In an astonishing victory for Elizabeth Vermilye and her women’s club partners, opposition to the New York legislative version was overcome, and Voorhees signed the legislation. New Jersey appropriated $5,000 for expenses.

The identical legislative acts cooperatively approved by the two states focused almost entirely on the New Jersey Palisades. The northern boundary of commission authority was set at Piermont Creek, a small tributary of the Hudson River barely across the state line in New York. Although membership on the commission was balanced, five and five, almost 100 percent of commission actions would be in New Jersey.

Vermilye and Cecelia Gaines hoped that their leadership and persistence, their service on the second study commission, and the hard-won legislative victory in New Jersey would result in appointments to the newly authorized interstate park commission. The response was that “some male members would be less free in their deliberations if women also served.” Appointed to the commission were New Yorkers George H. Perkins, Nathan Barrett, D. McNeely Stauffer, Ralph Trautman, and J. DuPratt White. The New Jersey contingent included W. A. Linn, Abram S. Hewitt, Col. Edwin A. Stevens, Franklin H. Hopkins, and Abram De Ronde.

Despite the wishes of Roosevelt, Col. Stevens was chosen as the first president of the commission, but soon deferred to Perkins. Technically, there were two ten-member commissions, but the membership was identical. The commissioners would meet on New Jersey matters, adjourn, and immediately be called back to order to work on New York issues. The agenda was self-evident. By the time the commission was authorized and began its work, quarry dynamite was booming daily, and the 3,000-acre summit of the Palisades had been cut into 127 separate privately owned parcels. Land prices were rising. Land on the summit was generally valued at $3,000 per acre; down along the shoreline, somewhat less. Perkins and his fellow commissioners had a total appropriation of $15,000. This meager sum was encased within the commission’s broad authority to receive, control, and invest money, purchase land and property, construct facilities, maintain and operate parks, and take legal action as deemed necessary. The commissioners had no staff, no office, and no clear understanding of park stewardship. They knew only that they were expected somehow to conserve open space and natural beauty in the nation’s most densely populated metropolitan region.

Ownership of the Palisades was constantly changing. Ulysses S. Grant had once owned a summit parcel, and Susan B. Anthony still did. In 1858, Joseph Lamb built Falcon Lodge, the first of many summer homes on the summit that eventually would be dubbed “millionaires’ row.” To reach his lodge on summer weekends, Lamb would ride up the east side of the Hudson River on the New York Central Railroad until opposite his property. At his request, the train would stop, allowing him, family members, and guests to be met as prearranged by the necessary contingent of shad fishermen. After being rowed across the river, Lamb and party would climb a rugged trail to his lodge.

At the northern end of the Palisades, near Piermont, New York, a terminus of the Civil War underground railroad, former slaves had established Skunk Hollow. At one time, seventy-five black farmers wrenched a marginal living from the rocky soil but had sold out and moved on. At the base of the cliffs, a few elderly widows lived in small shacks to which they had no legal claim. They were the last survivors of more than eight hundred fishermen, boat builders, and bone merchants, who, beginning in 1825, had settled along the Hudson River shoreline in the loosely defined community of Undercliff.

Palisades Mountain House, circa 1860 (PIPC Archives)

A three-hundred-room hotel, the Palisades Mountain House, had been constructed in 1860 at a choice summit location, offering expansive views, landscaped grounds, bowling, billiards, fine dining, and music. The Mountain House was a favorite of city dwellers, who found respite there from crowded, pungent metropolitan environs.

William Dana, publisher and editor of the New York World, built the baronial Greycliff mansion in 1861. Cuban sugar baron Manuel Riondo arrived on the Palisades in 1904, four years after the interstate park commission was formed, and built an estate on his 200-acre Rio Vista property, complete with a one-hundred-foot-high water tower. Charles Nordhoff, editor of the New York Herald, who had sent Henry M. Stanley to Africa in search of Dr. David Livingston, had a home on millionaires’ row, as did John Ringling of Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey Circus. A much later arrival was Anthony Fokker, the Dutch engineer who had designed the tri-wing airplane flown with lethal skill in World War I by Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron.

George Perkins and his newly appointed colleagues on the Palisades Interstate Park Commission (PIPC) faced the daunting task of trying to decipher the ownership conundrum and decide how to proceed. They agreed to use $3,000 of their scanty financial war chest to retain the services of C. C. Vermeule, a reputable engineer from Englewood, N.J., who was charged with surveying the Palisades to untangle the question of ownership and property lines. But Perkins’s primary target was the Carpenter brothers. He was determined to end the battering of the cliffs and the resulting assault on the sensibilities of residents in the lower Hudson River Valley, including his own.

In October 1900, he contacted the brothers George and Aaron Carpenter, beginning a negotiation that would span several weeks. Many successful, socially privileged, patrician businessmen of the day might not have been willing to sit down with hard-scrabble, blue collar, tough-minded quarrymen to try to hammer out a purchase deal, deferring instead to their lawyers. Not so Perkins: he sat across the table from the brothers.

The asking price started at $200,000 and then was “shaded” to $190,000. Perkins offered $100,000. In response, the brothers boosted the price back up to $200,000, offering to donate $25,000 to the park commission if the deal was struck. After several sessions, the Carpenters were flirting with a sales price of $145,000, and Perkins had come up to $125,000. In the meantime, the brothers were racing to produce as much crushed stone as possible. A compromise option-to-purchase finally was reached at $132,500. Perkins used the $10,000 appropriated to the commission by the state of New York for the down payment. No one bothered to ask whether spending New York money to buy land in New Jersey was legal. That detail aside, Perkins had to find $122,500 to close the deal, and quickly.

While the Carpenter negotiations were underway, James Stillman, president of the National City Bank of New York, had tapped Perkins to join the bank’s board of directors. In a letter to Stillman years later, Perkins said, “You were the first man from the financial district to invite me to be connected with any of the important financial interests downtown, and I have always felt that this led to openings that have given me exceptional opportunities to broaden my education and better equip me for the work of the world.” How right he was. One of the “financial interests downtown” was J. P. Morgan, who had started investing in New York Life Insurance bonds as a result of Perkins’s agreement with Germany.

Morgan logically was on Perkins’s list of potential donors, but there was a problem: Perkins did not know the legendary railroad, shipping, and steel tycoon. He asked Robert Bacon, a fellow member of the National City Bank board and a Morgan partner, to arrange for an introduction. Reputed to be brusque, hardheaded, demanding, and distrustful, Morgan also was known, in contrast, to be a generous philanthropist. On his personal list of charitable projects were the American Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Madison Square Garden, the Cathedral of Saint John the Devine, the American Academy of Rome, Harvard Medical School, and Morgan libraries scattered across America.

Bacon succeeded and introduced Perkins to Morgan at the tycoon’s office, 23 Wall Street, then left the two men to private conversation. Biographer John Garraty reported, “Perkins launched at once into the story of the Palisades, but after a moment or two Morgan interrupted. I know all about that. You are Chairman of the Commission. What do you want?”

“I want to raise $125,000.”

“All right put me down for $25,000. It is a good thing. Is that all?”

Perkins, delighted but probably off balance by the rapid exchange, asked Morgan who else might be approached for a contribution. Morgan suggested John D. Rockefeller. Expressing gratitude for the fundraising pledge and advice, Perkins rose to leave.

Morgan: I will give you the whole $125,000 if you will do something for me.

Perkins: Do something for you, what?

Morgan: Take that desk over there.

Perkins: I have a pretty good desk up at New York Life.

Morgan: No, I mean come into the firm.

With lightning speed, and on first meeting J. P. Morgan, Perkins was being offered a breathless leap to the very pinnacle of the financial world.

Perkins: I’ll have to think about it.

Morgan: Certainly. Let me know tomorrow if you can.

The decision was not easy for Perkins. Morgan was known as a notorious taskmaster. Family, friends, and professional colleagues gave Perkins mixed advice. New York Life responded by raising Perkins’s annual salary from $30,000 to $75,000. Incredible as the conversation had been with Morgan, Perkins made an equally improbable decision—he turned down the Morgan offer.

Two months later, Perkins found himself again in the presence of the persistent Morgan, having breakfast at Morgan’s Park Avenue mansion. Morgan appealed to the younger man by saying that Perkins’s management skills were needed to respond to complex social and economic problems, that relationships between corporations, their employees, and the public must be improved, and that Perkins was the man for the job. On agreement that he could continue part-time at New York Life, Perkins acquiesced and joined the Morgan partnership.

Morgan wrote the check for $125,000 that would put the PIPC in position to close the deal with the Carpenter brothers, but the gift proved to be conditional. Morgan wanted to leverage the money. Years of looking for maximum benefit in any financial transaction had honed his instinct to find opportunity where others might not look. His gift would be anonymous, he told Perkins, but, if there ever were to be more, New York and New Jersey must first provide “sufficient funds,” estimated at $450,000, to acquire various other properties on which the commissioners had obtained willing-seller options.

This demand by Morgan proved to come at an awkward moment. Perkins had momentarily lost his insider contact with the governor of New York. Only two years in office, Theodore Roosevelt had been chosen at the Republican National Convention to run as vice president, and the McKinley-Roosevelt ticket won a landslide victory in November 1900. Succeeding Roosevelt as governor was Benjamin Odell, a pragmatic politician who knew that the defacement of the Palisades had jangled the nerves of many voters in his state, but to him, the fact remained that the cliffs were in New Jersey. Governor Voorhees, approaching his last year in office, would have to take the lead in response to the Morgan financial challenge.

Carpenter Brothers Quarry (PIPC Archives)

Still, with check in hand, Perkins completed the purchase of the Carpenter brothers’ quarry.

On Christmas Eve, 1900, the dynamiting ceased. Silence was a wonderful holiday gift for thousands. Boss Blaster Hugh Reilly, indicative of all that caused the interstate commission to be formed, was not witness to the transaction. Earlier in the year, while walking at night along a narrow trail at the edge of the Palisades precipice, he had slipped and fallen. His body was found the next morning at the base of the cliff.