The Montgomery advertiser., 1907-05-12

Axe-Fifty-One Years service Falls To Save old SJohnny" Dunn-Wali Street Messenger squeezes Million aires In Real Corner--passing Of Am cient City Markets--Free Education For MilIions-woyk of "People's Uni-
 versity'--Has Tammany Annexed
 Mayor MeCleIians
 New York, May l1.--These are sor- rowful days for New 1orks police force, for since the passage Of his Dill Commissioner Bing ham has been busl- iy engaged in attempting to secure de- tectlyes who can detect and patrolmen Who patrol. Political power and graft 1t is hoped will at last be succeeded by efficiency. Of all the sniits and changes which have marked the recent shake- up in the Police Department, but one may be said to have caused general ana disinterested regret. That was the transfer of Lieutenant John J. Dunn from the head of the Wall Street branch of the Detective Bureau to desk duty in the little nshing village of Canarsie. Dunn IS seventy-nVe years old, t1ty years of which he has spent on the police force. Thirty years and more in Wall street, ana before that a sleuth connected with the main Detective Bureau at oU0 Mui- berry street, he is one of New Iork $ most famous personalities Great se- crets of Wall street are hidden in the brain of "old Johnny Dunn." as he is familiarity called. lie knew Jay Cooke. w. II. Vanderbilt, Jay Gould and Jim Fiske intimately in their day. and among the present generation of Wall Street financiers whom he counts as friends, are J. Pierpont Morgan, Ed ward II. Hartman, II. H. Rogers, Thomas +. Ryan, James K. keene, John w. Gates, and many others. For years his office has been in the old and new buildings of the stock ex- change, whence he has directed the &C., tivities of the Wall Street squad against the hordes of crooks and cranks who venture to cross the dead line" to prey upon the financial dis trict either by force or cunning. Once before, when McAdoo was Commission CT of Police, there was a plan on foot to force Dunn to resign; but the big men in Wall Street whom he knew intimately organized a parade and threatened to march upon headquarters in a body and demand his retention, if less spectacular means were not eff fective. This time, however, Commis- sioner Bingham has firmly decided that the time has come for him to retire. But old Johnny Dunn, equally deter mined to die in the harness which he has worn since 1859, has borrowed q uniform and accepted the transfer without a murmur.
 In one Eddie Lewis, hitherto un- known to fame, Wall Street has a bud
 hYYuT np may one day fill the breach which will be left by the retirement of John w. Gates At present Eddie" is only a telegraph messenger whose frequent trips to the vicinity of Wall Street and Exchange Place have given him unlim- ited opportunities to observe things while "ragging" the humble vendors of lunch commodities who cater to the modest appetites of the curb broker and their messengers. For a long time Eddie's own daily sandwich and glass of milk were purchased at a cer- tain popular stand until he noticed that the taste of the brokers ran particu- larly~ to sardine sandwiches, and that the stock was never sufficient to meet the insistent demands. The next day was pulled off the only successful cor ner Wall Street has seen since the famous Northern Pacific coup. Before the lunch hour arrived Eddie made his appearance with five of his comrades in uniform, and together they purchased 110 sardines sandwiches-the entire stock of the place. When the brokers appeared, hungry for sardine sand wiches, Eddie and his confederate stood on the sidewalk and offered to dispose of their holdings at double the usual price. In exactly fifteen minutes they hal cleaned up their corner" at a tidy profit snatched from under the very noses of the wise gentlemen who spend their waking hours in dreaming g of what they would do with a corner if they could get one.
 Among the picturesque but unprofit- able possessions of Father Knicker- booker which are passing away before the march of progress, are the various public markets owned by the city, Five years ago there were ten of these expensive relics of an earlier day, nine in Manhattan ~and one in Brooklyn Within that time, however, three of them have been forced to give place to other and greater needs of the city. the old Centre Market becoming the site of the new Police Headouarters Building and the Clinton Market a storage ground for the Street Clean ing Department. The old Catherine Market was abandoned. Five of the
 
 structures in which stalls are rented out to hundreds of individual dealers in produce of every sort and the sixth, Gansevoort Market, is simply A vacant space occupying an entire block in one of the city's busiest districts. where the small truck farmers who cross the ferry from New Jersey in the early hours of the morning with wagons piled high with vegetables pay q fee of twenty-five cents a day for each wagon. The ten acres of land now occupied by these markets are valued at something like 5000. 900. They provide positions and salaries for a small army of politicians, but the revenue which they produce in the way of rentals and fees dwindles to an insignificant sum after the ex- pcnses have been deducted Now a movement is under way, backed by a number of West Side business men in the vicinity of Vesey and Washington streets where the largest and most objectionable of these markets Is located, for their complete abolition make them a credit instead of a dis grace to the city.
 That a university is not a series of buildings, but collection of teachers and scholars, has been demonstrated in the remarkable work of the free public system of the New York City Board of Education. Nineteen years ago, in it's first season, the Peoples University" as 1t has been called, gave