By all accounts, the bulk of the suckers were greenhorns, fresh off the boat. Swindlers used to approach the stewards of international vessels docked at Ellis Island and pay them for information about passengers who might have money and be interested in buying property. “They didn’t understand the country,” Mr. Nash said of this population. “They didn’t understand the law. But they understood that this was supposed to be the land of opportunity.”
The Brooklyn Bridge had several attributes that made it particularly well suited for this sort of endeavor. Its proximity to the port made it highly visible to newcomers who might be likely marks, and its size provided opportunities to show it off while avoiding the law. But perhaps most critical was its considerable fame. “In the 19th century,” said Kathleen Hulser, the public historian at the New-York Historical Society, “the bridge was one of the two best-known symbols of America,” the other being the Statue of Liberty.
Vendors of the bridge not only counted on the gullibility or greed of their targets; they also appealed to their vanity. Buyers could believe, as Mr. Sifakis put it, that “they had become real men of substance, great capitalists.”
“All great monuments will have swindles built around them,” he added. “The appeal is to own a piece of the rock.”
Even as the nature of the immigrant population shifted, the scam endured. “Up to the 1920’s people were still trying,” Mr. Nash said. “But it was a hard sale. Immigrants had become much more sophisticated and knowledgeable, and by that time the processors at Ellis Island were handing out cards or booklets saying, ‘You can’t buy public buildings or streets.’” These shifts explain why the Brooklyn Bridge is the span associated with swindles; the city’s other bridges were built after the high tide of gullibility had already begun slipping away.
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