I’d heard of this old-tyme scam before, and also read of George Parker, who (operating in the late 19th and early 20th century) sold, among other things, the Old Madison Square Garden, Grant’s Tomb, the Met, and the aforementioned bridge.
My question is, how and why was he able to find buyers? I can’t imagine such a scam being profitable today. How did people not know that these places weren’t owned by a single individual? Were conceptions of government property somehow different back then? Unheard of?
If you make an at least slightly plausible argument, someone’ll fall for it. For example a similar scam using the Eiffel tower involved the claim it was being scrapped (not unlikely, since it was originally only planned to be kept up for a few months). See also: the pseudoscience they use in facecare ads.
Many bridges in the 19th century were private (or corporate), for-profit entities, making mony by charging tolls for crossing. There is, in fact, a Supreme Court case involving two bridge companies, one challenging the monopoly in the charter of the other.
Well, yes, but to me, there’s a difference between making up money out of thin air and telling someone (believably!) that a public, government-owned piece of property is actually owned wholly by you.
You don’t do so. What you do is pose as a civil servant who represents the government in the transaction. And you don’t literally sell the item, you tell scrap metal dealers that the item will be demolished, and invite them to submit bids for the metal.
When mrAru and I were driving across the country, we decided to stop and sightsee along the way, and one place was Lake Havasoo City. We looked all over for the bridge, driving across it both ways at least once … until we saw this TINY placque…:smack:
Lake Havasu…
There are rumors that in some ways this sale was sort of a scam… The buyers thought they were getting Tower Bridge, which is the famous one.
GIven how expensive a bridge is, I don’t think they were really selling the entire bridge to some farm boy who just arrived on the train.
I could easily believe they were selling fake shares in the Brooklyn Bridge Company, or some such. “They’re $1/share, and I’ll sell you all you want. How much money do you have? Good. I’ll sign you up for that many.”
As noted above, prior to the New Deal, the idea that Government would own infrastructure was very foreign to the US. Private companies built the railways, canals, bridges, and highways.
Not prior to the New Deal – public highways antedate America as a concept. And the Erie and B&O Canals, among others, date back to the earliest days of the 19th century. But there were private-sector bridges and turnpikes for a long time. Public ownership of any significant portion of U.S. railways dates only back to around 1970. My grandfather and uncle retired from a private-sector railroad which they had spent nearly all their adult lives as employees of.
It’s nothing but an urban legend that the buyers of the London Bridge thought that they were getting the Tower Bridge:
And it’s a fairly ridiculous story. They obviously went to London to look at the bridge when they bought it. They did the disassembly work on it. They had to spend some time planning the move and how it would be assembled.
