1 A Shocking Sabbath Carnival of Death Close to midnight on the evening of Sunday, November 8, 1874, as the early edition of the next day''s New York Herald was being born, the gaslit building at the corner of Broadway and Ann Street bustled. The telegraph machines hammered away, the press platens churned, the setting room clinked with the frenetic rearranging of movable metal type, the copy editors clamored for last-minute changes--and outside, in the cool autumn air, the crews of deliverymen pulled up to the freight docks with their dray horses and wagons, waiting to load the hemp-tied bundles and carry them to every precinct of the slumbering city. Following routine, the night editor had the draft edition of the paper brought up to the publisher for his approval. This was no mean feat: The proprietor of the New York Herald could be a tyrannical micromanager, and he wielded his blue pencil like a bowie knife, often scribbling barely legible comments that trailed along the margins and then off the page. After his usual wine-drenched dinner at Delmonico''s, he would return to his office to drink pots of coffee and torment his staff until the paper was finally put to bed. The editors dreaded his tirades and expected him to demand, well into the wee hours, that they rip up the entire layout and start over again. James Gordon Bennett JR. was a tall, thin, regal man of thirty-two years with a trim mustache and fine tapering hands.
His blue-gray eyes seemed cold and imperious, yet they also carried glints of mischief. He wore impeccable French suits and dress shoes of supple Italian leather. To facilitate his long, if erratic, work hours, he kept a bed in his penthouse office, where he liked to snatch an early-morning nap. By most reckonings, Bennett was the third-richest man in New York City, with an assured annual income just behind those of William B. Astor and Cornelius Vanderbilt. Bennett was not only the publisher but also the editor in chief and sole owner of the Herald, probably the largest and most influential newspaper in the world. He had inherited the paper from his father, James Gordon Bennett Sr. The Herald had a reputation for being as entertaining as it was informative, its pages suffused with its owner''s sly sense of humor.
But its pages were also packed with news; Bennett outspent all other papers to get the latest reports via telegraph and the transatlantic cable. For the newspaper''s longer feature stories, Bennett did whatever was necessary to acquire the talents of the biggest names in American letters--writers like Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, and Walt Whitman. Bennett was also one of New York''s more flamboyant bachelors, known for affairs with burlesque stars and drunken sprees in Newport. He was a member of the Union Club and an avid sportsman. Eight years earlier, he had won the first transatlantic yacht race. He would play an instrumental role in bringing the sport of polo to the United States, as well as competitive bicycling and competitive ballooning. In 1871, at the age of twenty-nine, Bennett had become the youngest commodore in the history of the New York Yacht Club--a post he still held. The Commodore, as everyone called Bennett, was known for racing fleet horses as well as sleek boats.
Late at night, sometimes fueled with brandy, he would take out his four-in-hand carriage and careen wild-eyed down the moonlit turnpikes around Manhattan. Alert bystanders tended to be both puzzled and shocked by these nocturnal escapades, for Bennett nearly always raced in the nude. James Gordon Bennett''s most original contribution to modern journalism could be found in his notion that a newspaper should not merely report stories; it should create them. Editors should not only cover the news, he felt; they should orchestrate large-scale public dramas that stir emotions and get people talking. As one historian of American journalism later put it, Bennett had the "ability to seize upon dormant situations and bring them to life." It was Bennett who, in 1870, had sent Henry Stanley to find the missionary-explorer David Livingstone in remote Africa. Never mind that Livingstone had not exactly needed finding. The dispatches Stanley had sent back to the Herald in 1872 had caused an international sensation--one that Bennett was forever seeking to re-create.
Critics scoffed that these exclusives were merely "stunts," and perhaps they were. But Bennett had a conviction that a first-rate reporter, if turned loose on the world to pursue some human mystery or solve some geographical puzzle, would invariably come back with interesting stories that would sell papers and extend knowledge at the same time. Bennett was willing to spend profligately to get these kinds of articles into his paper on a routine basis. His paper was many things, but it was rarely dull. Now, on this early November morning, the Herald''s night editor must have been cringing as he had the still-warm draft of the first edition sent to his mercurial boss. The Herald contained a lead story that, if executed properly, was guaranteed to cause the kind of stir Gordon Bennett delighted in. It was one of the most incredible and tragic news exclusives that had ever run in the Herald''s pages. The story was headlined "A Shocking Sabbath Carnival of Death.
" The Commodore scanned the paper and began to take in the horrifying details: Late that Sunday afternoon, right around closing time at the zoo in the middle of Central Park, a rhinoceros had managed to escape from its cage. It had then rampaged through the grounds, killing one of its keepers--goring him almost beyond recognition. Other zookeepers, who had been in the midst of feeding the animals, had rushed to the scene, and somehow in the confusion, a succession of carnivorous beasts--including a polar bear, a panther, a Numidian lion, several hyenas, and a Bengal tiger--had slipped from their pens. What happened next made for difficult reading. The animals, some of which had first attacked each other, had then turned on nearby pedestrians who happened to be strolling through Central Park. People had been trampled, mauled, dismembered--and worse. The Herald reporters had diligently captured every detail: How the panther was seen crouching over a man''s body, "gnawing horribly at his head." How the African lioness, after "saturating herself in the blood" of several victims, had been shot by a party of Swedish immigrants.
How the rhino had killed a seamstress named Annie Thomas and had then run north, only to stumble to its death in the bowels of a deep sewer excavation. How the polar bear had maimed and killed two men before tramping off toward Central Park''s upper reservoir. How, at Bellevue Hospital, the doctors were "kept busy dressing the fearful wounds" and found it "necessary to perform a number of amputations . One young girl is said to have died under the knife." At press time, many of the escaped animals were still at large, prompting Mayor William Havemeyer to issue a proclamation that called for a rigid curfew until "the peril" had subsided. "The hospitals are full of the wounded," the Herald reported. "The park, from end to end, is marked with injury, and in its artificial forests the wild beasts lurk, to pounce at any moment on the unwary pedestrians." Bennett did not break out his blue pencil.
For once, he had no changes to suggest. He is said to have leaned back among his pillows and "groaned" at this remarkable story. The HERALD report was written in an even tone. Its authors had peppered it with intimate details and filled the roster of victims with the names of real, in some cases quite prominent, New Yorkers. But the story was entirely a hoax. With Bennett''s enthusiastic encouragement, the editors had concocted the tale to demonstrate that the city had no evacuation plan in the event of a large-scale emergency--and also to point out that many of the cages at the Central Park Zoo were flimsy and in bad need of repair. The outmoded Central Park menagerie, the editors later noted, was a far cry from the state-of-the-art zoo at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. It was time for New York City to rise to the level of a world-class city, and for the nation, whose one hundredth birthday was approaching in just over a year and a half, to have at least one world-class park to display the planet''s wildest creatures.
Lest anyone say that the Herald had deceived its readers, the editors had covered their bases. Anyone who''d read "A Shocking Sabbath Carnival of Death" to its end (buried discreetly in the back pages) would have found the following disclaimer: "Of course, the entire story given above is a pure fabrication. Not one word of it is true." Still, the paper contended, the city fathers had devoted no thought to what might happen in an authentic emergency. "How is New York prepared to meet such a catastrophe?" the Herald asked. "From causes quite as insignificant the greatest calamities of history have sprung." Bennett knew from experience that very few New Yorkers would bother to read the article all the way to its conclusion, and he was right. That morning, as the usual clouds of anthracite coal fumes began to rise over the stirring city, people turned to their morning papers--and were plunged in chaos and confusion.
Alarmed citizens made for the city''s piers in hopes of escaping by small boat or ferry. Many thousands of people, heeding the mayor''s "proclamation," stayed inside all day, awaiting word that the crisis had passed. Still others loaded their rifles and marched into the park to hunt for rogue animals. It should have been immediately apparent to even the most naïve reader that the pi.