Pick a building, then click an empty lot. Click a building to inspect or clear it.
SolidLeaningContestedReformers
Next Election: Fall 1888— days
Whispers & Opportunities
Word travels before the city puts pen to paper.
The District Ledger
G.W. Plunkitt Library of Congress
You are George Washington Plunkitt
District leader · Fifteenth Assembly District New York City, 1888
"There's an honest graft, and I'm an example of how it works.
I seen my opportunities and I took 'em." — G.W. Plunkitt
This ward is mine. I keep my people housed and working, and they keep me
in office. Here's the whole of it:
Build. Pick a building, click an empty lot.
Votes win elections. Three wins and I'm Boss. Two losses and I'm finished.
Heat is the reformers watching. At 100 they haul me off.
Honest graft. When a Whisper marks land, buy it
before the city announces its plans — then sell high.
The Political Machine
Three ways to run a district. You cannot afford all three — and what pays fastest is what brings the investigators.
About This Game
George W. Plunkitt, ca. early 1900s (Library of Congress)
The Tammany Hall building, East 14th Street
Honest Graft is a satirical city-tycoon game inspired by George Washington Plunkitt, a real Tammany Hall district leader (1842–1924) who ran the Fifteenth Assembly District, and the 1905 book Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, recorded by journalist William L. Riordon.
Plunkitt also sat in the State Assembly (1869–73) and the State Senate (1884–87, 1892–93, 1899–1904). In 1888, when this game is set, he was between Senate terms — but still running his district, which is the job you are doing here.
Every Plunkitt line in the game is quoted from Riordon's text with its chapter given, so you can check it. Nothing is paraphrased and nothing is invented.
Plunkitt famously distinguished "honest graft" — profiting from advance knowledge of city plans, such as buying land before a park was announced — from "dishonest graft," like outright bribery. This game turns that distinction into its central mechanic. It is a work of satire meant to illuminate a real and important chapter of American urban history, not an endorsement of corruption.
The cartoons of Tammany's earlier, more notorious boss William "Boss" Tweed by cartoonist Thomas Nast — who helped popularize the very idea of "graft" as a political scandal — also appear in this game as historical illustrations.
Quotes and chapter references adapted from Plunkitt of Tammany Hall (1905), in the public domain via
Project Gutenberg,
and from the Wikipedia biography of George W. Plunkitt.
"Reform Heat" references the real 1894 Lexow Committee investigation into corruption in New York City.