Puck's Political Weather Forecast for Fourteenth Street and Vicinity

Louis Dalrymple's full-page chromolithograph stages a flood destroying Tammany Hall, the Democratic Party machine that dominated New York City politics. Father Knickerbocker glowers from storm clouds while a lightning bolt labeled "Popular Condemnation" strikes the wreckage. The Tammany Tiger clings to a crumbling staircase labeled "Tammany" as party bosses—Richard Croker, Roswell Flower, William Bourke Cockran, Hugh Grant, and others—flounder in the water. Dalrymple caricatures these men as Native Americans in war paint and feathers, a stock Puck device equating Tammany's name with "savage" corruption—imagery that deployed the era's racist visual shorthand to mock Irish-American machine politicians. The caption beneath reads: "Terrible Atmospheric Disturbances, Earthquakes and Bosquakes, Floods and Washouts." The cartoon reflects the reform coalition's confidence ahead of the 1894 elections, which did, in fact, sweep Tammany from City Hall.