We are all familiar with the phrase “there’s a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you”. Typically it is uttered to a person perceived as extremely gullible.
Was this a real scam? It seems perfectly feasible that someone once used this con to make some megabucks. But who? And does history record the name of the mark?
I doubt if anyone actually bought the bridge. The sense of the phrase is that the mark is so gullible he’d buy the bridge.
Actually, somewhere in one of my Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader books is an article about several notable scams involving selling various landmarks. There was the guy who posed as a French government official and sold the Eiffel Tower to a demolition yard for the price of a few hundred tons of scrap iron. There were the brothers who were conned into buying the information booth at Grand Central Station; they actually showed up a few days later with saws :eek: - they were going to tear it down and build a fruit stand. My book says that for several years afterwords these two brothers would go into the station and harass the information booth workers. And, yes, the Brooklyn Bridge was sold to a guy who got pretty pissed at the cops when they tried to put an end to his building of a tollbooth a few days after he bought the bridge.
Now I’m not saying that UJBR isn’t an unimpeachable source, but whoever wrote that article obviously got it from somewhere.
There were at least a couple of people who pulled scams like this. According to a book I have called Strange Stories, Amazing Facts, a Scotsman named Arthur Furguson sold a statue of a famous English hero to a rich American by convincing him that Britain’s debts were soaring, and the statue had to go. He used the same tactic to trick people into buying Big Ben for 1000 pounds, a 2000 pound down payment on Buckingham Palace. He then leased the White House to a cattle rancher for 99 years for $100,000 a year. Then, he sold the Statue of Liberty, because, he told the buyer, that the New York harbor has to be widened.
Rastahomie refers to Count Victor Lustig, who posed as a French official in the ministry responsible for public buildings. He explained to his prospective buyers that the enormous maintenance cost of the Eiffel Tower made its preservation impractical. Because of the sentimentality the Parisians had for the tower, the whole deal, of course, had to be kept secret. The buyer of the tower was too embarrased to report the hoax, so the guy sold the tower again. The second buyer went to the police, though, and Lustig was caught.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention the time frame of these scams. Most of these scams took place in the early 1900’s, specifically, the 1920’s for most of these events.
George Parker regularly sold the Brooklyn Bridge, “Twice a week for years after the day it opened in 1883.” He was sent to prison in 1928 after selling the bridge to 3 Texans and (having had 3 previous convictions) spent the remaining nine years of his life in prison.
George also sold Grant’s Tomb, Central Park and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Source: The Big Book of Hoaxes, 1996 Paradox Press