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The Tiger: The Rise And Fall Of Tammany Hall
The first complete history of America's most bizarre and longest-running political act. Stories of chicanery and finagling and rigged elections abound in this look at a bygone era in American politics.
336 pages, Hardcover
First published November 19, 1993
5 people are currently reading
145 people want to read
About the author
Oliver E. Allen
26 booksObituary (http://tribecatrib.com/content/oliver...)
A former writer and editor for Life magazine and later editor at Time-Life Books, Oliver Ellsworth Allen authored more than a dozen books, including two histories of New York City: “New York, New York” and “The Tiger,” a history of Tammany Hall. But in Tribeca, where he moved to a Hudson Street loft overlooking Duane Park with his wife Deborah in 1982, Allen was best known for his Tribeca Trib column, “Old Tribeca,” and for his volunteer contributions to the community as co-founder of Friends of Duane Park. He also was part of a small group whose work led to the designation of Tribeca’s four historic districts.
In the 1980s, Allen joined a band of local activists that dug into the history of Tribeca’s buildings and published “The Texture of Tribeca,” by architectural historian Andrew Dolkart. The volume, illustrated with photos by Allen, provided the Landmarks Preservation Commission with the research it needed to designate Tribeca’s historic districts in 1991 and 1992.
Approached in 1994 by neighbor Lynn Ellsworth to help with her idea of restoring dilapidated Duane Park, Allen and wife Deborah were her first recruits to what was to become Friends of Duane Park.
“I called him up and he invited me over,” Ellsworth recalled during a Friends fundraising event in 2010 to honor Allen. “I explained the project and Oliver got on board immediately and it started from there.”
Like Ellsworth, Trib editor Carl Glassman was introduced to Allen by longtime Tribeca resident Jean Grillo, who told him, “You must speak to Oliver Allen,” when she heard that he and his wife April Koral were launching a new neighborhood paper.
“He didn’t know us from Adam and he knew we could only pay him a very modest fee,” Glassman recalled, “yet he immediately said he would be happy to write articles about the neighborhood’s history. That was the luckiest moment in the life of the Trib.”
Allen’s first “Old Tribeca” article appeared in the Trib’s first issue in September 1994 and the column turned out to be immensely popular. Many of the pieces were anthologized in two books, “Tales of Old Tribeca” and “Tribeca: A Pictorial History.”
“Oliver’s irrepressible enthusiasm and sense of wonder about our neighborhood and its history was contagious. He conveyed it both in person and in his writing,” said Ellsworth, founder and president of the architectural preservation group, Tribeca Trust. “He was a real defender of its many beauties and insistent on accuracy.” She called Allen “that increasingly rare kind of person” who believed in the “necessity and duty” of volunteering at the most local level.
“For him it was both a civic responsibility and a source of genuine pleasure,” she said. “He inspired those around him to follow in his footsteps. In doing all that, Oliver built, on a daily basis, that most fleeting of things: a sense of community.”
Karie Parker Davidson, a Friends of Duane Park board member, recalled Allen as “funny, curious, insightful and determined to improve his knowledge in any field.”
“On a recent visit,” she recalled, “he was learning about micro-tones, a form of intermediate musical notes as he explained it, and was re-reading classics by Dickens and Dostoyevsky all while keeping up with The New York Times and The New Yorker.”
Working in the Duane Park garden until he was 92, Parker Davidson said, “he also taught youngsters how to pot plants on Earth Day, and slung a 150-foot hose hooked up to the fire hydrant to hand-water the garden in its infancy. For years he trimmed the hedges, met the rodentologists, and kept the Parks Department historians on their toes.” (The full text of Parker Davidson's remembrance is below.)
Jane Freeman, who visited Allen frequently, wrote in an email: “Despite physical confinement in the last years, his scope of intellect and humanity remained unbounded. In the John Adams biog
A former writer and editor for Life magazine and later editor at Time-Life Books, Oliver Ellsworth Allen authored more than a dozen books, including two histories of New York City: “New York, New York” and “The Tiger,” a history of Tammany Hall. But in Tribeca, where he moved to a Hudson Street loft overlooking Duane Park with his wife Deborah in 1982, Allen was best known for his Tribeca Trib column, “Old Tribeca,” and for his volunteer contributions to the community as co-founder of Friends of Duane Park. He also was part of a small group whose work led to the designation of Tribeca’s four historic districts.
In the 1980s, Allen joined a band of local activists that dug into the history of Tribeca’s buildings and published “The Texture of Tribeca,” by architectural historian Andrew Dolkart. The volume, illustrated with photos by Allen, provided the Landmarks Preservation Commission with the research it needed to designate Tribeca’s historic districts in 1991 and 1992.
Approached in 1994 by neighbor Lynn Ellsworth to help with her idea of restoring dilapidated Duane Park, Allen and wife Deborah were her first recruits to what was to become Friends of Duane Park.
“I called him up and he invited me over,” Ellsworth recalled during a Friends fundraising event in 2010 to honor Allen. “I explained the project and Oliver got on board immediately and it started from there.”
Like Ellsworth, Trib editor Carl Glassman was introduced to Allen by longtime Tribeca resident Jean Grillo, who told him, “You must speak to Oliver Allen,” when she heard that he and his wife April Koral were launching a new neighborhood paper.
“He didn’t know us from Adam and he knew we could only pay him a very modest fee,” Glassman recalled, “yet he immediately said he would be happy to write articles about the neighborhood’s history. That was the luckiest moment in the life of the Trib.”
Allen’s first “Old Tribeca” article appeared in the Trib’s first issue in September 1994 and the column turned out to be immensely popular. Many of the pieces were anthologized in two books, “Tales of Old Tribeca” and “Tribeca: A Pictorial History.”
“Oliver’s irrepressible enthusiasm and sense of wonder about our neighborhood and its history was contagious. He conveyed it both in person and in his writing,” said Ellsworth, founder and president of the architectural preservation group, Tribeca Trust. “He was a real defender of its many beauties and insistent on accuracy.” She called Allen “that increasingly rare kind of person” who believed in the “necessity and duty” of volunteering at the most local level.
“For him it was both a civic responsibility and a source of genuine pleasure,” she said. “He inspired those around him to follow in his footsteps. In doing all that, Oliver built, on a daily basis, that most fleeting of things: a sense of community.”
Karie Parker Davidson, a Friends of Duane Park board member, recalled Allen as “funny, curious, insightful and determined to improve his knowledge in any field.”
“On a recent visit,” she recalled, “he was learning about micro-tones, a form of intermediate musical notes as he explained it, and was re-reading classics by Dickens and Dostoyevsky all while keeping up with The New York Times and The New Yorker.”
Working in the Duane Park garden until he was 92, Parker Davidson said, “he also taught youngsters how to pot plants on Earth Day, and slung a 150-foot hose hooked up to the fire hydrant to hand-water the garden in its infancy. For years he trimmed the hedges, met the rodentologists, and kept the Parks Department historians on their toes.” (The full text of Parker Davidson's remembrance is below.)
Jane Freeman, who visited Allen frequently, wrote in an email: “Despite physical confinement in the last years, his scope of intellect and humanity remained unbounded. In the John Adams biog
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
April 10, 2014
One cannot but laugh at times at the utter boldness behind the men of Tammany Hall. Before baseball, politics was the local sport, and the Tammany Hall menagerie provided plenty of stars. If you think politicians speak before thinking, meet Mayor "Elegant" Oakey Hall, an Anglo was an anti nativist, never at a loss for an insulting quip, or Boss Croker who first rose to fame after knocking out several teeth of a prize fighter after a heated arguement to the master, Boss Tweed, who stole anywhere from 20mm to 200 million dollars.
Yet, under Charles Francis Murphy, Tammany stopped making money off of vice, elected progressive politicians, and supported the legislation that flowed from these politicos - in effect, signing their own death warrant as the government began to assume many of the responsibilities that Tammany provided.
A great yarn, filled with some of the most colorful characters set to paper.
Yet, under Charles Francis Murphy, Tammany stopped making money off of vice, elected progressive politicians, and supported the legislation that flowed from these politicos - in effect, signing their own death warrant as the government began to assume many of the responsibilities that Tammany provided.
A great yarn, filled with some of the most colorful characters set to paper.
May 6, 2022
This book should have been entitled, The One Hundred Year Fleecing Of NYC.
An in depth, fascinating account of machine politics in NYC.
A strangle hold on an entire city. The mayors, city council members, the courts and extending all the way to Albany. How this much power concentrated in the hands of so few is jaw drop reading.
The Irish, the Germans, The Italians all had their snoots in the trough.
Its base for most of its reign was the tsunami of immigrants who entered the city.
America has never been welcoming to immigrants. Tammany Hall was, and it paid off in spades at the ballot box. Was this altruism? Probably not.
An in depth, fascinating account of machine politics in NYC.
A strangle hold on an entire city. The mayors, city council members, the courts and extending all the way to Albany. How this much power concentrated in the hands of so few is jaw drop reading.
The Irish, the Germans, The Italians all had their snoots in the trough.
Its base for most of its reign was the tsunami of immigrants who entered the city.
America has never been welcoming to immigrants. Tammany Hall was, and it paid off in spades at the ballot box. Was this altruism? Probably not.
June 6, 2023
excellent book and well researched. Eye-opening on Gotham's political history. How one group gained so much power in 150 years. Its illicit operation was the catalyst for 20th Century progressive reform.
July 8, 2025
An entertaining detailed history of Tammany--the organization that controlled New York City (and sometimes State) politics for over a century. From its beginning--Aaron Burr--through Tweed and its end, it is a fascinating story. Like all history, it needs to be retold, lest it happen again!
January 30, 2025
It's an interesting and disturbing look at the birth of politics in America. Seeing many of the reforms that ended this era being rolled back is a bit disturbing as we enter 2025.
May 29, 2015
2.5 stars. This was an ok popular history of Tammany Hall, but it covers such a broad scope of political activity — not only the obvious local dimensions but also state and national politics, as the Tammany machine played an outsize role in shaping nominations within the Democratic Party as a whole — that it was hard to give each era (from post-Revolutionary War on up through the 1960s) its full due.
Given its extended period of coverage and the important role Tammany played through so many city (and state/national) administrations, the book does touch upon many interesting political trends, and describes how Tammany transformed to use immigrant voter outreach, street muscle, control over city patronage, and (through the police) control over other illicit markets to perpetuate its lock on the city. That lock was actually interrupted fairly frequently throughout the Hall's history, though, and the book is full of broken coalitions, candidates who later split from the Hall once they reached office, and periodic reform movements to throw out Tammany regimes.
The book is largely structured around the succession of Tammany Hall bosses, though, and the particulars of their personalities, endorsements, wins and losses (with plenty of doses of scandal, payoffs, and graft) tends to drive the book's contents. This is fine as a high-level introduction to the Hall's overall history (which it was for me) but I would've like to have seen more focus on the lower organizational level, and more examination of the deeper dynamics that powered the Hall (and particularly its reform opponents). 'Machine Made' by Terry Golway is another history of the organization on my reading list and I'm hoping it might offer a somewhat fuller treatment - will see when I get to it.
Given its extended period of coverage and the important role Tammany played through so many city (and state/national) administrations, the book does touch upon many interesting political trends, and describes how Tammany transformed to use immigrant voter outreach, street muscle, control over city patronage, and (through the police) control over other illicit markets to perpetuate its lock on the city. That lock was actually interrupted fairly frequently throughout the Hall's history, though, and the book is full of broken coalitions, candidates who later split from the Hall once they reached office, and periodic reform movements to throw out Tammany regimes.
The book is largely structured around the succession of Tammany Hall bosses, though, and the particulars of their personalities, endorsements, wins and losses (with plenty of doses of scandal, payoffs, and graft) tends to drive the book's contents. This is fine as a high-level introduction to the Hall's overall history (which it was for me) but I would've like to have seen more focus on the lower organizational level, and more examination of the deeper dynamics that powered the Hall (and particularly its reform opponents). 'Machine Made' by Terry Golway is another history of the organization on my reading list and I'm hoping it might offer a somewhat fuller treatment - will see when I get to it.
August 11, 2014
A very good social and political history of New York city, which reveals a lot about the development of the city through the rise and decline of the country's most notorious political machine.
January 5, 2019
Interesting history
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews