When the Astors Owned New York by Justin Kaplan

pedigreed sheep and other prized livestock. He cited his bear-dog as proof of a long-standing belief of his that animals of different genera could together produce a creature that was neither one nor the other but at least theoretically more valuable and useful than either.
    According to Dr. William Hornaday, director of the Bronx Zoological Garden, Astor’s bear-dog was probably just a dwarf St. Bernard that the Gypsies had put over on this rich innocent. He suggested that Astor apply his mind to genetic engineering and animal husbandry. He might make a second Astor fortune, Hornaday said, “if he could invent an animal to eat dirt, for dirt is very cheap.”
    SCIENTISTS SCOFF AT ASTOR’S BEAR-DOG, the Times headlined its two-column story. BRONX ZOO DIRECTOR THINKS [ASTOR] OUGHT TO OFFER A PRIZE FOR A REAL LIVE MASTODON. In his article in the American, Astor cited laboratory experiments with frogs’ eggs conducted by a Professor Albert Oppel of the University of Halle, in Germany. Professor Oppel had apparently succeeded in breeding a frog two feet high. Astor saw no reason other creatures could not be similarly enlarged by selective breeding. It might even be possible to bring back extinct giant creatures of the Carboniferous period; use them both as farm animals, like oxen and draft horses, and as a meat source for humans; and, meanwhile, feed them cheaply. His nutritional logic appeared to be impeccable. “While our coal was being formed,” he explained, “vegetation as we know it probably did not exist. Since the mammoths and their contemporaries must have eaten the plants that became coal, why may not their descendants eat some preparation of peat, coal, crude oil, or even limestone when the progress of the world requires that they should?” Astor was “so deeply interested,” the Times reported, “that he has offered a prize of $5000 for the best bear-dog to be entered at next year’s dog show at Madison Square Garden.”
    In 1894 Jack had followed cousin Willy’s ventures into novel writing with a work of science fiction, A Journey in Other Worlds: A Romance of the Future, published by D. Appleton and Company. The illustrations were by Dan Beard, who had done the pictures for Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court . His work for Jack’s novel showed, among other wonders, an ascent by flying machine from Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx; a race with a comet; space travel to Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn; and encounters there with mastodonic animals and the souls of the righteous dead. Jack’s tale, inspired by Jules Verne, was set in the year 2000, by which time Manhattan dwellers, presumably kept in check by the Republican Party, the Episcopal Church, and a terror of socialism and anarchism, enjoyed many blessings of science and technology: the “kintograph”—“a visual telegraph”—that put scientists in New York in visual contact with engineers and workmen on the shores of Baffin Bay; fast electric automobiles; a convenient subway system; and an existence made want free through the harnessing of a force Jack called “Apergy.” Apergy combined “negative and positive electricity with electricity of the third element or state.” Elijah, Jesus, and other ancients had at least suspected the existence of this miraculous force.
    In Jack’s world of the future, scientists employed by the Terrestrial Axis Straightening Company harnessed apergy to nullify gravity, melt the polar ice cap, and blow up the Aleutian Islands. All this had been done in order “to straighten the axis of the earth, to combine the extreme heat of summer with the intense cold of winter and produce a uniform temperature for each degree of latitude the year round.” By the year 2000, according to Jack’s prediction, the United States would have absorbed not only Canada but Mexico, Central America, and parts of