Robert Fulton Cutting (1852-1934), known as “the first citizen of New York,” was born into a prominent New York family.

His grandfather, Robert Cutting, was Robert Fulton’s partner in the ferry from Brooklyn to New York, and Robert Fulton Cutting  and his elder brother, William, started the sugar beet industry in the U.S. in 1888. Another illustrious ancestor was Leonard Cutting, a former president of King’s College, later Columbia University, who took over when his predecessor fled the city during a smallpox outbreak and, according to an authoritative history of the college, delivered a “masterly” valedictory oration in Latin at the college’s first graduation, in 1758.

After himself graduating Columbia, R. Fulton Cutting became involved in various municipal campaigns in the city, often speaking from a box in Union Square. One of the main organizers of the Citizens Committee, Cutting was offered the support to run for mayor of New York. Instead, he threw his support behind Seth Lowe, president of Columbia, who promised to tackle the corruption of Tammany Hall.

Cutting was also an early advocate of public baths for the poor, a cause he shared with Dr. Simon Baruch, father of Bernard, the philanthropist, FDR adviser and benefactor of City College and the City University.

Realizing early on that a reform mayor was not enough, Cutting thought that good citizens could not act intelligently about their government’s decision without knowing all the facts. For the facts to be reliable and valid, they would need to be presented by an impartial and detached organization. His first attempt came in 1897 with the formation of the Citizens Union of which Cutting became president. Its goal was to study political issues, develop policies, and then aggressively present its findings to the public in support of a cause, especially at election time. A division of the Citizen’s Union was the Bureau of City Betterment whose work in support of the main group was becoming increasingly important; so much so that in 1906 the division became an independent entity and was given the name of the Bureau of Municipal Research.

Cutting and his friends became the largest contributors to the new organization for the next decade, ensuring that it would survive and thrive during its infancy, and attracting other eminent deep-pocketed donors.

He also became president of Cooper Union and chairman of the board of the Metropolitan Opera. He owned fabulous mansions.

http://daytoninmanhattan.blogspot.com/2012/03/lost-1899-r-fulton-cutting-mansion-no.html

Cutting died at 82 in 1934 and was mourned by all New York. Eulogists sang his praises: “He did work for the people’s pocketbook, as it was often remarked, but it was not a selfish, negative economy that he was ever urging, concerned as he was in abolishing public waste and official graft.”

The Institute of Public Administration honored Cutting with a large framed portrait (above) that hung in the Institute’s library and greeted researchers who came to mine its treasures.

Where would archivists be without supplies? Especially document boxes, manilla folders, and inter-leaving paper (to separate documents) by the ream, all certifiably non-acidic, to be sure. Processing the 700-plus cartons of Baruch’s collection of the New York Bureau of Municipal Research and the Institute of Public Administration requires literally tons of supplies, a new installment of which was delivered this week to the archives in the William and Anita Newman Library at 151 East 25th Street. There were 20 humongous boxes and five smaller ones, shrink-wrapped on wooden pallets and delivered by hand truck. That’s Project Archivist  Aleksandr Gelfand checking out the delivery and Mike Lasko doing the heavy lifting.

Thanks again to Carnegie Corporation of New York for its generous grant to kick off the processing, uh, process.

After all the contents were laboriously offloaded and stored away, there was the problem of the empty boxes.  Anyone remember moving day?

In the second half of the 19th century, New Yorkers certainly horsed around. Indeed, one of the biggest problems faced by municipal planners of a rapidly growing metropolis was the staggering number of horses needed to keep the city running. The problem of cleaning up after the herds presented a logistical nightmare.

Growing mechanization at the turn of the 20th century eventually solved this problem but horses did not disappear overnight. In the first two decades of the 20th century horses were still to be found employed throughout the city. In fact, the company that styled itself “the largest horse supplier in the world” at the start of the last century was located on the spot where Baruch College’s William and Anita Newman Vertical Campus now stands. (Before that it was a livestock market.)

In 1913 the New York Bureau of Municipal Research decided to investigate how many horses were still being used by various city agencies, sending out a brief questionnaire with the following questions:

1 – What is the location of all stables owned or leased by the department, with their capacity of horses and the number of horses at present stables in each?

2- How many horses does the department own, and to what use are they put?

3 -How many horse-drawn vehicles are owned by the department – where are they housed and to what use are they put?

4 – What is the average number of horses, drivers and vehicles hired per day – the average time each is worked – and the rate of hire? Are they hired regularly all the year or only at special times?

5 – Do you do your own shoeing?

The result showed that almost every single city department and agency either still owned or regularly hired horses for various jobs. The largest horse owner was the Department of Street Cleaning (the future Department of Sanitation) which had 2,823 horses in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. (Queens and Staten Island often came under a different administrative structure.)

The Fire Department was  second, employing 1,400 horses for fire engines and transportation, in addition to hiring around 60 horses from outside vendors.

The Police Department was a distant third with 620 horses engaged in various services. Interestingly, the Police Department indicated it had recently lowered the amount paid to have its horses shod, going from $39,933.5 in 1911 (around $959,000 today) to $26,917.66 by 1913 (around $646,000 today).

The majority of the departments, however, owned far fewer horses. For instance, the Board of Education had only two stables – one in Queens and one in Brooklyn, with a total of six horses. The horses were used for such tasks as delivering laundry and bread (and sometimes truant students) to the Brooklyn Truants’  Home, as well as carting manure, plowing and harrowing on one of the school farms.

One of the Home’s more notorious denizens was Salvatore Lucania, better known as the mob boss Lucky Luciano, who did a stint there in 1911.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucky_Luciano

Bellevue Hospital had 14 horses in its main location of which one was used for a hearse, one for the transfer wagon, one for laundry truck, one for store truck, 8 for ambulances, and 2 for the pathological laboratory. At least one horse at its Fordham location was used for transportation between the subway and hospital for visiting physicians and other individuals.

Some departments owned almost no horses and contracted out. For instance, the Department of Public Works owned a single horse which was used by the inspector in charge of roads and viaducts. It would however hire horses on a daily basis if needed.

Similarly, the Bureau of Weights and Measures had no stables or horses but employed two horses and wagons at a rate of $5 a day (around $120 today). Because the average daily rate was around $3.50, the department felt that it needed to justify the steep price tag in its answer to the Bureau of Municipal Research, noting that only a single inspector was present in each wagon but was required to carry between 1,000 and 2,000 pounds of test weight. Lifting the weights required a great deal of effort and the driver of the cart was paid extra to assist the inspector. If not for this expedient, noted the Bureau, a second inspector in the cart would entail an additional annual salary expenditure of $1,200.

Interestingly, the only city agency that did not indicate the employment of any horses was the New York Public Library. It  used two electric delivery wagons to transact its business. How green was my Library!

Diligent readers will recall our post of Oct. 6 (A Mysterious Package) that recounted the finding, in one of the 700-odd boxes of files and books of the New York Bureau of Municipal Research and the Institute of Public Administration and their longtime czar Luther Gulick, of an ominous white powder.

Oh No! we thought. Will we have to blow the whistle on our late friend, innovator of scientific government and confidant of Presidents? 

Before jumping to any conclusion, we knew we had to have the powder tested. We did, and here’s the intriguing solution to the mystery:

But first, to recap: the substance was found in an envelope in a chaotic box of miscellaneous material of the late 1920s and early 30s that offered no clues to any context. The envelope, apparently unsealed and torn, bore the embossed return address of the Mount Vernon Heights Congregational Church on South Columbus Avenue in Westchester County. No connection could be found between the church and the Gulicks. It had been sent to Leeds Gulick, Luther’s younger brother, at 14 Sussex Avenue, Bronxville, a posh suburb not far away, but for some reason the name was misspelled “Guilick.” Unlikely  that a family member would make that error, although Luther was prone to typos and their father, Sidney, then 80, might also have had a slip of the finger on the keys, if indeed he typed at all. No letter or other information was found inside.  A postmark showed the envelope had been stamped at the Mount Vernon post office on Dec. 20, 1940, at precisely 8:30 p.m. The postage: 3 cents.

We arranged to have the powder tested at  an organic chemistry lab at Baruch College, courtesy of Chemistry Professor Keith Ramig and Biology Assistant Professor Pablo Peixoto. It looked like a serious place with complicated diagrams scrawled on a whiteboard. If this mystery could be solved anywhere, we felt, this was the place.

First Dr. Ramig eyeballed our substance. It looked brownish, probably from bits of paper from the envelope that migrated in over the many years. That could affect the result.

“The quickest test would be a taste test,” Dr. Ramig said. “But none of us are brave enough.”

The next best was a flame test, he decided. Because it resembled salt, Dr. Ramig set up a control experiment. He put a small measure of common sodium chloride (table salt) in a watch glass, added a few drops of methyl alcohol and touched a match to it. After a moment, the flame burned orange.

“There’s the sodium ions being excited,” Dr. Ramig said.

OK, the salt was salt. But what about our mystery substance?

He then repeated the experiment with our material, lifting out  a small sample with a thin spatula. “It sure feels like salt,” he said. “But sugar feels like salt.”

For comparison’s sake, Dr. Peixoto first examined some grains of table salt under a microscope of 40X magnification.

The salt crystals were cubical, like tiny dice, with rounded edges.

Then he looked at our sample. It had similar cubical crystals, but with sharp edges.

They looked similar, Dr. Ramig said. Perhaps our crystals had lain unused for so long they were still unworn.

Sugar crystals had a different shape entirely, more elongated and hexagonal, Dr. Peixoto said. So we had evidently not brought in an envelope of sugar. But just to make sure, Dr. Ramig repeated the flame test with our substance.  If it had been sugar, it would have caramelized and turned black.

But — aha! — an orange flame!

Salt?

Maybe.

“We do know it’s not explosive,” Dr. Peixoto said.

“So, a positive test for sodium,” Dr. Ramig said. But sodium came in many compounds, although he added reassuringly, “I’m not aware of any drug with a sodium base.”

But was it necessarily sodium chloride — or a variant?

So, another test.

A negative test by Dr. Peixoto to rule out sugar using Benedict’s reagent and hydrochloric acid was inconclusive so we moved on.

Lastly, Dr. Ramig did a test for chloride. A control test tube was prepared with distilled water, nitric acid and “honest to goodness” sodium chloride. Then another test tube, marked with a star — the same distilled water and nitric acid, and our mystery substance. Both turned cloudy upon addition of silver nitrate solution, denoting chloride.

.

Then Dr. Ramig called for a few drops of ammonium hydroxide. If the mystery substance was sodium chloride, he said, “all the white will dissolve.”

“Drum roll,” intoned Dr. Ramig. He could have said (but didn’t), “May I have the envelope, please?”

Salt!

Call off the D.E.A.

“99.9% it’s sodium chloride,” Dr. Ramig announced. “It can’t really be anything else.”

Of course, that left intact the mystery of why anyone would send salt to Leeds Gulick or anyone else in 1940. Salt was rationed in World War II but not until after Pearl Harbor.

http://www.ameshistory.org/exhibits/events/rationing.htm

But what if the salt hadn’t been sent in that envelope? What if it was put there later, perhaps after rationing? Or maybe a salt shaker tumbled over with the spill scooped into the nearest receptacle, a stray envelope to Leeds “Guilick” from the Mount Vernon Heights Congregational Church?

Some mysteries will remain forever mysteries.

The appearance of the New York  Bureau of Municipal Research in the first decade of the 20th century transformed the way government operated in the United States. By the 1910s there were various other bureaus around the country attempting to duplicate the original model. But what made them a success? We will attempt to answer that in what follows.

When it was formed in 1906, the Bureau was composed of reformers and idealists who wanted to reform the government and the group quickly attracted others of the same mindset. The core of the group was soon made up of a small ensemble  of experts in their respective fields – from educational institutions to police affairs – and a larger group of staff whose task was to assist the experts.

Preaching what they practiced, the Bureau introduced the same type of policies within its institution that it wanted to propagate throughout government departments and made sure that the policies were strictly adhered to.

A project would usually begin with assemblage of all available information on the topic which would be done in a number of ways. If the project involved a single department or was based in New York, a staffer would be sent to that particular entity to observe the way it functioned, collecting as much material as possible before reporting back to the Bureau. In one extant assignment sheet the employee was cautioned:

“Please exercise care in approaching the department officials, arrange to submit constructive and other criticisms to them for their comment, cooperate in every way with the work which they are doing, interfere as little as possible in the regular routine – but bring back information.”

If the department in question would not cooperate, the Bureau would compile its information based on observation, but most were more than ready to assist, resulting in stacks of documentation detailing everything from the way pets were taxed to how residents connected their houses to city sewers.

For larger, multi-city or multi-department projects, the Bureau pioneered the use of questionnaires which would become one of the most common methods of studies even in our day.

After information was collected by questionnaires or other means, it was analyzed and the Bureau would create a thorough report describing the issue in a neutral manner, frequently but not always stating its own unbiased opinion. Frequently charts would be included in the reports. These charts detailed, sometimes for the first time, the complicated relationships within departments and city agencies, allowing for greater efficiency and laying plain the hierarchies of power.

The more popular or important reports would be published for a wider circulation, spreading the Bureau’s message around the country.