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The Bowery Boys: New York City History

#156 The Boy Mayor of New York

The Bowery Boys: New York City History

Tom Meyers

Places & Travel, History, Documentary, Society & Culture

4.7 • 3.9K Ratings

🗓️ 20 September 2013

⏱️ 45 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

As New York City enters the final stages of this year's mayoral election, let's look back on a decidedly more unusual contest 100 years ago, pitting Tammany Hall and their estranged ally (Mayor William Jay Gaynor) up against a baby-faced newcomer, the (second) youngest man to eventually become the mayor of New York City. John Purroy Mitchel, the Bronx-born grandson of an Irish revolutionary, was a rising star in New York, aggressively sweeping away incompetence and snipping away at government excess.  Under his watch, two of New York's borough presidents were fired, just for being ineffectual!  Mitchel made an ideal candidate for mayor in an era where Tammany Hall cronyism still dominated the nature of the five boroughs. Nobody could predict the strange events which befell the city during the election of 1913, unfortunate and even bizarre incidents which catapulted this young man to City Hall and gave him the nickname the Boy Mayor of New York. But things did not turn out as planned.  He won his election with the greatest victory margin in New York City history.  He left office four years later with an equally large margin of defeat.  Tune in to our tale of this oft-ignored figure in New York City history, an example of good intentions gone wrong and -- due to his tragic end -- the only mayor honored with a memorial in Central Park. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/boweryboys

Transcript

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0:00.0

Episode 156 of The Bowery Boys, the boy mayor of New York.

0:05.3

Hey, it's The Bowery Boys.

0:06.8

Hey.

0:07.8

So The Bowery Boys is brought to you by EuroChipo.com.

0:13.1

EuroChipo's editors inspect and recommend the best budget hotels in Europe on the web at EuroChipo.com.

0:21.9

Hi there, welcome to The Bowery Boys. This is Greg Young.

0:24.4

And this is Tom Myers.

0:25.8

It is election season in New York City.

0:28.1

We are choosing a brand new mayor.

0:30.3

It's an exciting time, Greg.

0:31.6

We've had Bloomberg for years and years and decades and decades, it seems.

0:36.0

So we're picking a new person for the job.

0:38.6

And now as we record this on the 18th of September, we are less than two months away from the election of New York's next mayor.

0:47.2

So we wanted to look at a prior mayor for the show.

0:49.9

And there's some obvious candidates that we haven't really tackled in the show yet, like Ferella LaGuardia,

0:55.6

glamorous old Jimmy Walker, or even Ed Koch would be a good choice.

0:59.5

But instead, we're going to turn back the clock to exactly 100 years from today.

1:05.1

We're going back to the year 1913 to look at the election and the career of the man who was called the boy mayor of New York.

1:13.2

His name, John Paroy Mitchell.

1:15.4

And it would be really convenient, Greg, at this point of the introduction to say,

1:19.1

and it's amazing how many parallels there are to today's situation, today's world.

1:24.7

But looking back 100 years, you see how much has changed in the city.

...

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