Charles Yerkes
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Charles Tyson Yerkes (June 25, 1837 – December 29, 1905) was an American financier, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He played a major part in developing mass-transit systems in Chicago and London.
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[edit] Philadelphia
Yerkes began his career at the age of 17 as a clerk in a Philadelphia grain brokers where he demonstrated his business talent early. In 1859, aged 22, he opened his own brokerage firm and joined the Philadelphia stock exchange. By 1862 Yerkes had moved into banking and specialised in selling municipal, state and government bonds; however, the collapse of the American bond market after the Great Chicago Fire in 1871 left him insolvent, unable to make a payment to City. Yerkes was convicted of embezzlement and served seven months of a thirty-three month prison sentence. On his release, Yerkes began to rebuild his fortune and began to invest in transport stocks.
[edit] Chicago
In 1881 he moved to Chicago with plans to open a bank there but soon became involved with the public transportation system instead. In 1886, Yerkes and his business partners used a complex financial deal to take-over the North Chicago City Railway and then proceeded to follow this with a string of further take-overs until he controlled a majority of the city's street railway systems on the north and west sides. When necessary to achieve his plans, Yerkes was not averse to using bribery and blackmail to ensure that a deal was completed.
A partially reformed City Council under Mayor Carter Harrison, Jr. fought against Yerkes, with the swing votes coming from aldermen "Hinky Dink" Kenna and "Bathhouse" John Coughlin. In an attempt to improve his image, Yerkes renovated a couple of tunnels under the Chicago River and built two bridges over the river. In the 1890s, Yerkes was involved in a number of Chicago's elevated railways and used a series of proxy companies to obtain permissions to construct the elevated loop of tracks around the downtown area.
In 1899, Yerkes over-reached himself. Despite allegedly having paid bribes of over one million dollars, he failed to persuade Chicago city council to grant him a one hundred-year franchise for a new street railway line which he was planning to build. Following a campaign against his "rapacity," Yerkes sold the majority of his Chicago transport stocks and moved to New York.
[edit] London
About the same time as he left Chicago, he became involved in the developing London Underground railway system, taking control of the Metropolitan District Railway and the unbuilt Baker Street & Waterloo Railway, Charing Cross, Euston & Hampstead Railway and Great Northern, Piccadilly & Brompton Railway. Yerkes employed the same complex financial arrangements that he had used in America to raise the funds necessary to construct the new lines and electrify the District railway.
He died in New York aged 68 in 1905, before any of the works on the London railways were completed but with the construction well underway. He left a fortune of four million dollars.
[edit] Trivia
- The events of Yerkes's life formed the bases for the Theodore Dreiser novels, The Financier, The Titan and The Stoic, in which Yerkes was fictionalized as Frank Cowperwood.
- Yerkes contributed nearly $300,000 to the University of Chicago to establish Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin.
- Yerkes crater on the moon is named in his honor.
