Chapter Seven
IN THE LATE SUMMER OF 1897, BARNUM BROWN STEPPED off a train from Kansas into one of the busiest stations in the world. Men clad in bowler hats and ladies in prim Victorian dresses buzzed about, set for destinations across the country. Never before had the world felt within such easy reach. With the right ticket in his hand, Brown could be on a coast three thousand miles away within less than eighty hours, flung across a continent on the power of steel tracks. A few months earlier, he had been excavating the remains of the prehistoric world; now, as he made his way to a steam ferry docked along the humid New Jersey riverfront and glimpsed the forest of skyscrapers on the other side of the Hudson, he saw for the first time the city that felt like the future.
New York was a place of extremes, filled with a population unencumbered by history and anxious to start anew. A few months after Brown arrived in the city, more than ten thousand people in Union Square braved a bitter New Year’s Eve rain to watch a parade of electric floats celebrating the Festival of Connection, honoring the merger that went into effect at midnight joining Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island into the modern City of New York. The consolidation of power joined the nation’s first- and fourth-largest cities into one super metropolis, a giant with a footprint stretching nearly 303 square miles. The rush toward bigger and stronger things left some worrying that the provincial character of Brooklyn would be corrupted by the rise of corporations, fueled through a bold new era of securitization on Wall Street that created institutions whose power and size was unimaginable just a few decades before. “Brooklyn has repeatedly shown herself to be the most independent urban community in the world,’’ St. Clair McKelway, the editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, told a considerably more somber audience gathered in mourning that New Year’s Eve on the steps of Brooklyn’s City Hall, soon to be known as Borough Hall. “There need be no apology for the poverty of Brooklyn. It is an honorable poverty.”
Everywhere Brown looked were signs of the modern era overtaking the past. Directly ahead in Lower Manhattan loomed the Gothic spire of Trinity Church, which at 281 feet had stood as Manhattan’s tallest structure for the past fifty years and was the traditional site of the city’s New Year’s Eve celebrations. Its reign would soon end, however. A few blocks away workers were clearing Revolutionary War-era stables and squat general stores for the construction of the Park Row Building, whose soaring twin copper-tipped domes would top out at 391 feet and make it the tallest building in the world when it was completed in 1899. Architecture critics were not sure what to make of this new behemoth, one of the first buildings to properly be called a skyscraper. “New York is the only city in which such a monster would be allowed to rear itself,” one paper argued, while another deemed it a “horned monster.” At the lip of New York Harbor, Brown could spy bricklayers working amid the scorched ruins of the immigration station on Ellis Island, which had been destroyed by a fire just a few months earlier and was already in the process of being expanded and rebuilt. Far uptown, within a few minutes’ walk of his destination, Columbia University, stood the newly-built Greek mausoleum holding the tomb of President Ulysses S. Grant, who remained one of the most popular figures in the nation for his role commanding the Union Army in the Civil War. More than sixty thousand soldiers from throughout the country had marched in a parade before Grant’s Tomb earlier that spring, as if intent on burying not only the war hero but the scars of history. “Never before in the history of parades were there fewer accidents or did the police have less trouble in keeping the throng within the lines,” the New York Times reported the following morning.
Brown was one of millions of new arrivals to the city, many of them hailing, like him, from small or rural towns and driven by the chance at a better life. Over 1.5 million immigrants had passed through Ellis Island over the previous ten years, many of them coming from poor provinces in Germany, Ireland and Italy, willing to brave the unknown. Nearly 100,000 African Americans from the South migrated to New York over the same period, finding a foothold of freedom within memory of the abolition of slavery.
Those riding the swelling fortunes of Wall Street made their homes in grand new apartment buildings that stood as shrines to the new era of money. At the recently-opened Dakota Building on Central Park West, residents enjoyed the marvels of central heating and an in-house electric power plant. The building proved so popular that it led to a boom in luxury housing, filling what had been considered a remote part of Manhattan with opulence. While the rich moved higher into the sky, more than 2.3 million people—two-thirds of the city’s population—crammed into squalid tenements downtown, barely able to survive. Rooms overflowed with people; children went hungry; whatever dollars were on hand never seemed to be enough. “Once a nurse navigated the hallways and reached her destination,” a medical student named Lillian Wald wrote in an essay describing her experience in the tenements of the Lower East Side, “it was not uncommon to go in the daytime into the closet-room with candle or lamp to be able to see the patient at all; not uncommon to go into the house and see ten or eleven people occupying two small rooms—people who have been working all day, for the night’s rest stretched on the floor, one next to the other, dividing the pillows, different sexes not always of the same family, for here are ‘boarders,’ who pay a small sum for shelter among their own, the family glad of this help to the rent.”
The poverty of the growing city, especially among its youngest residents, pushed social reformers to call for playgrounds, parks, schools—anything that would offer a citizen of the slums a glimmer of life beyond their narrow horizons. “With no steady hand to guide him, [a boy from the tenements] takes naturally to idle ways . . . the result is the rough young savage, familiar from the street,” wrote Jacob Riis, a Danish immigrant whose work reporting on New York’s slums led to his landmark book How the Other Half Lives. “Rough as he is, if anyone doubt that this child of common clay has in him the instinct of beauty, of love for the ideal of which his life has no embodiment, let him put the matter to the test. Let him take into a tenement block a handful of flowers from the fields and watch the brightened faces, the sudden abandonment of play and fight that go ever hand in hand where there is no elbow-room, the wild entreaty for ‘posies,’ the eager love with which the little messengers of peace are shielded, once possessed; then let him change his mind.”
The museum into which Brown would soon walk for the first time was one of the few places in a position to unite the far reaches of the city’s rich and poor, binding the population together through a shared fascination with the range and beauty of the natural world. It had yet to make much of its opportunity, however. Its grand experiment that science could be a common ground for the sprawling metropolis remained unproven, its halls more likely to hold academics or wealthy students than those who would have the most to gain from even a brief exposure to a place devoted to learning. In its annual report that year, the museum revealed that it required a steep drawdown from its endowment and several charitable gifts to meet its operating deficit. Unless it could find a way to bring in more visitors to make up for its small amount of public funding, the report warned, the institution might never be profitable, leaving it forever at the whim of Wall Street and unreliable donors. “It will be seen that the amount received from the city is not sufficient to maintain the Museum,” the annual report cautioned.
Nothing was working. The Barbary lion diorama led to no noticeable uptick in visitors; the mammoth exhibit and giant elk were not talked about in the city’s poorer neighborhoods in the same tones of awe that had once accompanied the latest exhibit at P. T. Barnum’s famous and now lost museum. Despite all of its efforts, the museum staff had accomplished the impossible: making a collection of some of the rarest and most fascinating items ever collected seem boring and unworthy of a person’s time.
Its newest attractions that year were castoffs and giveaways, a collection of curios unloaded from the closets of its wealthy benefactors and amateur collectors. The annual list of additions seemed more like the inventory of an estate sale than anything designed to get the public clamoring to get into the building. James A. Bailey, who founded what became the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, donated the skeletons of two camels, two kangaroos and an Indian elephant. An insect enthusiast by the name of Henry C. Pratt presented a gift of thousands of dead termites and ants collected in Haiti. And a Miss Annie Peniston sent a shipment of shells she had gathered in Bermuda. In a move of desperation, the museum obtained the bodies of animals and fish that died in the city’s zoos and aquarium and stuffed them for display, as if the public would be more interested in seeing taxidermied corpses than they would have been watching those same creatures swimming and breathing just a few months before.
Though the museum had the skeletons of the Diplodocus and the Apatosaurus unearthed in Wyoming sitting in storage, it would take months if not years to prepare them for display. Everything about paleontology—the trial and error involved in finding a fossil, the work to pull it out of the ground, the long lag between the discovery of a specimen and the time it took to clean the fossils and mount them on a frame—was slow at a time when the museum needed a hit right away, leaving it to improvise and make do until it could reveal its treasure. With no dinosaur fossils ready to show, Osborn filled the halls of the Vertebrate Paleontology wing with large charts showing the succession of animals found in rock layers in North America and watercolor paintings of untouched landscapes. His main attraction was the skeleton of a three-toed rhinoceros, mounted so that only an astute viewer would notice the two beams keeping the specimen upright. He knew that it was not enough, though he maintained an outward face of optimism. “In the Department of Vertebrate Paleontology we have continued to devote the greatest care and study toward arousing the interest of the public in our exhibits,” he wrote.
As Brown walked through the museum’s halls for the first time, weaving among the construction zones of the five interlocked buildings that when finished would make up the facade along Seventy-Seventh Street, he passed through empty rooms earmarked to hold bones that he had not yet found. He knew, more than anyone, how an exposure to science at a young age could change the course of a life, and he felt the weight of finding attractions that could hold the interest of children whose parents had, like him, traded a rural life for one that held greater promise. He had already traveled farther from Carbondale and its routines of selling coal and chasing chickens than he had dared to imagine, yet it only made him realize that the world was bigger than his childhood dreams. Like countless other young men and women enchanted by their first exposure to New York, the daily toil of life in the city only increased his ambition.
He began a new routine, living in a room of a house on East Sixty-Seventh Street owned by a doctor who had his medical practice on the first floor, working at the museum as an assistant curator of vertebrate paleontology and taking graduate courses at Columbia, though he had not yet completed the coursework to earn his bachelor’s from the University of Kansas. He was one of the few students at the university who did not come from money; he was there for the education and the increase in rank it would signal rather than for the connections he might make. The stiff, slow world of formal education did not excite him and he soon fell behind, daydreaming about another dig rather than committing to the slog of completing another paper.
In the field, he would have outshone every other student, able to put into practice what they could only discuss in theory. Yet the world he was attempting to step into was not the frontier, and the skills that helped so much there—a willingness to try anything, to bend the rules and to rely on physical strength and endurance to outlast any competitors—were of no use in a lecture hall. He could barely tolerate going through the motions of academia when he longed for the adventure of discovering the fossils that would form the basis of ideas his fellow classmates were now discussing. He belonged to the paleontology of dirt and rocks and dust, and instead was asked to make do in a world of paper and books and pencils.
The classroom could also not compete with the appeal of a beautiful blond woman who lived on another floor of his boarding house. Courting women came naturally to him, leaving fellow members of his field expeditions to joke that he could find a lover even in the most barren places on Earth. Those affairs were often short-lived, done in as much by the ephemeral nature of a dig as by Brown’s need to pursue something else that caught his attention. But in New York, the city that offered a young, attractive man more options for pleasure than any other, he for the first time encountered a person who appealed to his brain as well as his body.
Like Brown, Marion Raymond was a part-time graduate student at Columbia, finishing her master’s degree while teaching high school biology. But that was about as far as the similarities went. She was the daughter of a distinguished lawyer and educator from the tidy hamlet of Oxford, New York, a woman more comfortable with a book or in a laboratory than in one of Brown’s all-night poker games; he was a farmer’s son who despite his brilliance and long career would author but two scientific papers and could never abide the idea of staying in one place for long. Yet something about the two clicked, each finding in the other what they had been missing in themselves. As Barnum and Marion began spending long hours in each other’s worlds, he experienced the novel sensation of slowing down and conversing with a woman whose mind equaled his own, while she grew comfortable with the pleasant chaos that was Barnum’s drive to experience all that the world had to offer.
For the first time in his life, Barnum began to feel the restlessness which had been a part of him since childhood seep away. Before Marion, before New York, before the museum, he had always felt the need to chase something down; now, he felt the novelty of contentment, sprouting up from soil that he did not know he had within him. It was all so early, and so quick. He had been in New York a little over a year, and in that time had braved a classroom filled with men whose privilege far outshone his own, and held down a job that was his childhood fantasy while living in a city as different from the farm back home as he could imagine. And now he felt himself falling in love for the first time. For a man who could never feel peace, his world was finally settling into place.
And that was when Osborn came into his office one morning and told him to pack his bags for Patagonia.