On the brisk Manhattan morning of his inauguration, New Year’s Day 1926, Jimmy Walker arrived at City Hall exactly on time, shocking nearly everyone who had gathered to greet him. As he stepped out of his sleek gray town car, he waved to the crowd, “a noisy, joyous gathering,” many of the celebrators old friends from his Greenwich Village neighborhood. Some of his loyalists had just finished bringing in the New Year, the women’s evening gowns showing beneath their winter wraps. When the mayor-elect came into view, they blew whistles and party horns, and some of them held up hip flasks to salute their trim debonair hero as he swept past them and up the marble steps, acknowledging a few old friends with a nod and a quick pull on the brim of his silk hat. Shoulders hunched forward, eyes staring straight ahead, he spoke to no one in the crowd. “Let me in. I want to work,” he said to the policemen who opened a wedge for him through a solid wall of reporters and photographers.展开