The Courthouse That Cost More Than a Country

On your right, the pale marble courthouse behind the iron fence once consumed more city money than almost any building in American history. Construction began in eighteen sixty one, with the cornerstone laid that December, and by the time the scheme behind it collapsed a decade later, the final bill had climbed to nearly thirteen million dollars, almost twice what the United States had paid Russia for the entire territory of Alaska only a few years earlier. Historians still argue over the exact total, because almost none of the paperwork behind it was honest.

The man running the show was William Tweed, head of the Tammany Hall political machine and chair of the city board that oversaw construction. Tweed and his allies steered contracts to their own men and then let the bills run wild. One carpenter was paid more than three hundred sixty thousand dollars for a single month of work, in a building with almost no woodwork to speak of. A plasterer named Andrew Garvey collected over a hundred thirty three thousand dollars for two days of labor, and nearly three million dollars total over two years, a sum that earned him the nickname the Prince of Plasterers in the press. Four commissioners appointed to watch the spending never once held a meeting, yet each still collected a twenty percent cut of every supply bill.

It was the New York Times, backed by cartoonist Thomas Nast, that finally dragged the numbers into daylight starting in the summer of eighteen seventy one. Tweed was arrested that October, convicted two years later, fled the country in disguise, and was eventually recaptured and brought back in chains. He died in a city jail in eighteen seventy eight, having allegedly stolen tens of millions more than this courthouse alone. The building he left behind still stands, a monument built on padded bills and broken promises, doing the job it was built for, housing the government he robbed.