Nobody had thought of it before. Now, all at once, when it was accomplished, it amazed the people of New York to learn how easy it was to control the city’s whole life, civic and commercial.
A battalion of infantry occupied the Grand Central Terminal. Another battalion took the great Pennsylvania terminal with its under-river tunnels to New Jersey and Long Island. Detachments appeared at the Twenty-third Street and Forty-second Street ferries over the Hudson River and by that one seizure controlled all railroad connections with the West from uptown. The occupation of half a dozen other Hudson River railroad ferries down-town, and of the Hudson Terminal Tube System, completed the entire control of all the city’s railroad traffic in every direction.
Equally simple was the control of its communications. Men appeared at the two great telegraph buildings and at the telephone building. Within half an hour they had every trunk line of wires in their hands and could strike the city dumb at will.
Thus less than three thousand men had their fingers on the big town’s spinal nerves, and could paralyze it with a slight pressure.
Still Easier to Guard
It was still easier to control the city from a military point of view. The citizens who had expected to see their streets commanded by cannon on limbers, did not at first comprehend why there were hardly any of these to be seen, while machine gun detachments scattered and disappeared as soon as they got well into the town. Only gradually did the citizens discover that their big, sprawling metropolis was being held subject by a very simple utilization of the city’s characteristic feature.
This feature was the sky-scraper. To the eye of the soldier, these high buildings were nothing so much as inviting and magnificent eminences for controlling the street-valleys and their population below.
Four men with a machine gun and abundance of ammunition in one of these stone and steel summits could control more area than half a dozen heavy field gun batteries posted in the streets could command.
These sentinel watchers were as aloof and as sure as fate. They could neither be rushed by a mob nor sniped from concealment. At a word from the telephone in their eyries, they could start death dancing among the pygmy hordes far under them.
From the top of the Woolworth Building two of the little guns pointed down into Broadway. Turned southward, they could sweep the town as far as the Battery. Eastward, they could rain their steel-jacketed bullets into the river front streets and over the two lower bridges that cross the East River. Northward, they had Broadway as far up as Canal Street under their fire.