Havemeyer first won office in 1845 on the Tammany ticket, then proceeded to endear himself to his backers by proposing a new city charter that would give him veto power and severely rein in the Tammanycontrolled Common Council.
The Council, having none of that, declared open season on the mayor, turning his first term into a verbal sparring match. Surprisingly, amid the infighting, Havemeyer scored one major accomplishment: establishing the New York Police Department, largely in its current incarnation.
Battle-scarred, Havemeyer refused re-nomination in 1846. Two years later, however, apparently for lack of a better idea, Tammany re-nominated him at their 1848 convention, a gathering that featured a number of fistfights (as all good nominating conventions should).
Havemeyer’s second term looked a lot like his first, with the mayor’s calls for reform falling on deaf ears at the Common Council. But again Havemeyer managed to achieve some tangible results, namely in education, garbage collection and street lighting. Nonetheless, his indecisiveness about the job apparently remained high. In 1849, Havemeyer refused re-nomination again.
The decision marked the start of a quarter-century absence from City Hall for Havemeyer, but it did not mark an end to his war with Tammany Hall. In 1871, he led the “Committee of Seventy,” a group that was pushing to expose the rampant corruption of the Tweed Ring. They succeeded in getting a look at the city’s books, as well as the personal bank accounts of Tweed and others. That just about spelled the end for the Boss and crew.
It also spelled the end for his connections to the Democratic Party, which meant that when Havemeyer jumped into the 1873 race, he went with the Republicans. He won, but had he known what kind of term lay ahead, he probably would not have come out of retirement.
First, he fought so much with the Republican-controlled Council that his own party tried to get him removed from office. Though he survived, he was attacked by Republicans for working with Democrats and by Democrats who hated him for what he had done to Boss Tweed. Havemeyer became the mayor everyone loved to hate.
He did not take it well. While a libel lawsuit against him brought by Tammany Boss “Honest” John Kelly was working its way through the courts, Havemeyer had a massive heart attack. True to form, given his unwillingness to let go of the mayoralty, he dropped dead in his office at City Hall in November 1874.
—James Caldwell
