The Village

by John Strausbaugh

  Another by-product of that wartime boom would have a significant effect on lifestyles in the Village, artificially extending its life as a place of cheap rents and a magnet for bohemians and artists. To stem the rising tide of inflation caused by the bustling economy, the federal government instituted wartime price controls, including a freeze on rents. And when federal rent control ended after the war, New York State enacted its own programs, maintaining rents well below market rates in qualifying buildings. In New York, a city of renters, rent control and rent stabilization were godsends to tenants lucky enough to be in the right units, but a curse to their landlords. As real estate prices rose in Manhattan through the rest of the twentieth century, lower-income tenants, including artists, were able to stay in apartments they never could have afforded otherwise.

  For Italians in the South Village, as for all Italian Americans, the war exacerbated rifts between the older, immigrant generation and their American-born kids. The older ones, conservative by nature and often illiterate, tended to view Mussolini and the Fascists in terms of Italian national pride. The federal government deepened their unhappiness over the war against him by classifying many of them as “alien enemies,” placing restrictions on their rights to travel and own property. For their American-born children, on the other hand, the war represented escape from the strictures of old-world family life. Young men went off to war and to see the world; young women went off to jobs in factories and offices. They now had independent incomes they could spend on entertainment and clothes. Some became war brides, hastily marrying boys in uniform who maybe weren’t Italian and whom their parents might not even have met, much less approved of. At Greenwich House, a group called the Italian Mothers’ Club met to fret about how to keep their daughters down on Sullivan Street after they’d seen Times Square.

  With their moms on the factory floor and their dads in uniform or killed in action, the war also created a generation of latchkey kids and war orphans. Worries about these unsupervised children growing up into drug-taking, switchblade-flicking juvenile delinquents started during the war and amped up to levels of moral panic in the postwar years and through the 1950s. “No community, rich or poor, rural or congested, is free from the plague of juvenile delinquency,” Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer warned. “Like a heathen religion, it is all tied up with tom-toms and hot jive and ritualistic orgies of erotic dancing, weed-smoking and mass mania, with African jungle background.”

  In the Italian Village, these fears had some basis in fact. By the mid-1950s young dope addicts and hoodlums were a major concern to the neighborhood’s social workers and church leaders. When Howard Moody, an ex-marine veteran of Guadalcanal, took over as pastor of Judson Memorial in 1956, he told the new Village Voice that programs for young heroin users were his first priority. He was still trying to get local and federal governments to take the problem seriously a decade later. Reverend Moody would be at the Judson until 1992, transforming it into possibly the most progressive church in the country. Under his stewardship, with his assistant the Reverend Al Carmines in the 1960s and ’70s, Judson resembled less and less a church and more an all-faiths community arts center leaning distinctly toward the bohemian, hippie, and avant-garde.

  Though a contentious time for most Italian Villagers, the war was good to the mob. The servicemen flooding the city kept mobsters’ clubs, gambling dens, and whorehouses busy while the city, state, and feds virtually suspended their racket-busting operations for the duration. Even the former mob-chasing prosecutor Dewey, now governor, was too busy prepping for his presidential campaign to think much about the syndicates. That same blind eye would be turned toward the racketeering on the Village’s Irish waterfront for the duration of the war.

  The Village in 2011 was much less Irish than it was during wartime, but some guys who grew up there in the 1940s and ’50s were still around. A handful of them, now gray-haired men in their late sixties and up, met for lunch every week at the White Horse Tavern on Hudson Street. They had names like Kelly, Mullens, O’Connell, McGee. They all grew up within a few blocks of the bar and had been pals since childhood. Virtually all of them were vets. They had worked as moving men, bartenders, security guards, and at the big Nabisco factory in Chelsea that now housed the Chelsea Market (and where the Oreo was invented). People said they were wild and tough boys in their younger days—drinkers, gamblers, brawlers. Now in retirement, they mostly drank juice or club soda, although one cracked the others up by ordering a nonalcoholic beer with a double tequila chaser. They scraped the butter off the rolls that came with the soup, speaking with fatalistic tough-guy shrugs about their last heart attack or their next trip to the cardiologist. And with almost no prompting they told stories about the Village and the West Side waterfront of their youth.

  They remembered a neighborhood that was largely Irish, with pockets of Spanish, Lithuanian, Polish, Jewish, German, a few black families, later Puerto Ricans. “The prejudice was against the Italians,” Tom Kelly said. “Not the blacks or Puerto Ricans. They were sort of accepted as long as they fought the Italians.”

  When they were kids the buildings were all still heated with coal. Coal ash and cinders from chimneys coated every outdoor surface in the winter. When they went up after playing in the street, their clothes were filthy with it and their moms gave them hell. In the summers they’d swim in the Hudson, jumping or diving off the piers. Just getting to the water took some doing. The waterfront was very different from the way it is now. From the Battery straight up the West Side it was crowded with working piers for cargo operations, transatlantic cruise ship companies, and Hudson ferries. Very few of them were open. Most had buildings on them called “sheds,” a name that didn’t do them justice. They were warehouses, loading docks, railroad barns, and passenger terminals—imposing brick and steel structures with footprints big as football fields and standing three or four stories tall. “You walked along West Street, you didn’t see the river,” Kelly recalled. Only a very few piers, like the one at Gansevoort Street, were open. “That’s where we went swimming. Right next to the Department of Sanitation dump.” There was so much trash and garbage in the water “you learned how to do the breaststroke,” pushing it out of your way.

  In the hot weather “there was one fan in your mother and father’s room—if they were still together and your father wasn’t upstate. So you slept on the fire escape.” Most of them grew up in tenement buildings, in railroad flats, with windows facing the street in the front room and windows on narrow air shafts in the back rooms. Kids got the back rooms. Kelly’s bedroom window was directly above Tim Mullens’s in a tenement on West Eleventh Street, just down the block from the White Horse. They hung a tin can and string communication system down the air shaft between them and later graduated to actual walkie-talkies. “We could’ve just talked out the window, but that was no fun.”

  Parents always took the front room, so all the moms could lean out the windows and keep an eye on the street. One lady was known as Elbows Smith because she was always leaning out, with a pillow under her elbows. “You couldn’t get away with anything within eight blocks of your house without your mother hearing about it,” Kelly said. Mullens recalled that when he played hooky he would run alongside the Hudson Street buses as they passed Eleventh Street, “so the neighbors—Mrs. Sherman, Mrs. Donovan—couldn’t see me out the windows.”

  They were all working-class poor, their dads struggling to keep their large Irish Catholic families in food and clothes. Eight kids, twelve kids, thirteen kids was the norm. Supplementing the family income by illegal means was common practice, and trips to Sing Sing or Dannemora for Dad or his sons were regular occurrences. Kelly recalled a friend who was one of thirteen kids once telling him, “ ‘You know why there are only thirteen of us? There’s two years between this one and that one, three years between those two. That’s when my father was up the river.’ Every family had somebody in trouble . . . It wasn’t a stigma.”

  When these guys were growing up, th
e West Side waterfront, with its gangsters, crooked union bosses, and Tammany pols, was enjoying its last hurrah—the On the Waterfront years. (Budd Schulberg based his screenplay on Malcolm Johnson’s eye-opening series of twenty-six articles for the New York Sun, “Crime on the Waterfront,” for which he won a Pulitzer in 1949.) Much of the criminal activity in the neighborhood spilled out from the docks. “The waterfront was rough. It was bad,” Kelly said. A lot of Irish men in the neighborhood worked on the docks. Longshoremen were what is euphemistically known as “casual labor,” meaning they worked and got paid only when a ship was in. “You worked for that pier and that company. The Grace Line, the Holland American, whichever.” When you had work, there was a whole system waiting to take your paycheck away. West Street, in the shadows of the elevated West Side Highway, was lined with “cheap lunchrooms, tawdry saloons and waterfront haberdasheries,” according to the 1939 WPA Guide to New York City, which catered to the dockworkers, truck drivers, and thousands of sailors from around the world who came in on the cargo ships and ocean liners. “On every block you had at least one bar, some blocks two,” Kelly said. “And every single bar had a bookmaker.” On payday the moms in the neighborhood sent their oldest boys to look for Dad in the bars and try to bring at least some of his pay home before he drank and gambled it away. If he did, there was also a loan shark in every dive to help him out, at a crushing interest rate.

  When there was no work at your pier, you tried to pick up some day work on a pier that was busy. This required showing up in the morning for the “shape-up,” when union hiring bosses, either at the pier or at the union hall, picked extra hands as needed that day. “All the guys on your pier aren’t working either, so you’ve got fifty to a hundred guys all looking to get in,” Kelly explained. Maybe one in three would be picked; the rest returned to hanging out in the bars, hoping there’d be another shape-up that afternoon. It was a system obviously built for exploitation, graft, and bias. Irish workers got picked over men of other ethnicities. If black men got any work at all it was the lowest brute labor, jobs the white workers shunned. This is why, when waterfront unions called strikes, black workers were happy to act as scabs—they felt they owed nothing to the white union men. The longshoreman who got work was expected to kick back some of his pay to the hiring boss. The loan sharks had their own arrangement. For instance, if a man fell behind in his payments, he was told to wear a toothpick behind his ear at the shape-up. The hiring boss would spot this signal and hire the man, who then had to kick some of his pay to the boss and some to his loan shark. Everyone came out ahead except the longshoreman. Waterfront gangsters and hoodlums, meanwhile, extorted the bosses for their own kickbacks or leaned on them to hire their men, who quite often never showed up at the dock except to collect their paychecks. The gangsters also made money by charging the shipping and trucking companies steep fees to move the cargo that came in.

  The whole system was enforced with violence. Anyone who didn’t play ball—longshoreman, hiring boss, truck driver—was beaten or killed. The threat of violence also ensured that everyone on the waterfront observed a strict code of silence, or “D and D” (deaf and dumb), that for decades stymied the law. The assistant district attorney William Keating, who prosecuted waterfront murders in the 1940s, called them “the most hopeless of cases . . . On the waterfront, to talk was to rat, and to rat was to stand exposed and unprotected.” One man shot by his rivals and lying in the hospital snapped at detectives, “I don’t know who shot me, and if I did I wouldn’t tell you.”

  In 1947, Andy Hintz (rhymes with pints) stepped out of the door of apartment 3A at 61 Grove Street, next door to the spot where Tom Paine died, and headed down the stairs to the street. On the second-floor landing he came up against three men: the waterfront racketeer “Cockeye” Johnny Dunn, the gunsel “Squinty” Sheridan, and Dunn’s gofer Danny Gentile. Dunn had an interest in the hiring and loading on all the piers south of Fourteenth Street—except on Pier 51, at the foot of Jane Street. As the boss stevedore there, Hintz refused to hire the men Dunn told him to or pay Dunn the kickbacks he demanded. This rare show of defiance could have only one end. Dunn put five bullets into the stout longshoreman before escaping across the rooftops. As he lay dying in St. Vincent’s, Hintz refused for three days to rat to the law. Then, asked one last time who shot him, he is said to have uttered the immortal line, “Dunn. He done well too,” and died. The Hintz case cracked the long-standing code of silence. Cockeye and Squint were convicted and died in Sing Sing’s electric chair in 1949. Keating later cooperated with filmmakers on the 1957 dramatization of the story, Slaughter on Tenth Avenue.

  Whitey Munson, grandfather of White Horse owner James Munson, “was a boss down at the docks,” Kelly said. “Tough man. You didn’t mess with him. He was well liked by some people because Thanksgiving and Christmas no family was ever without a turkey. If your husband was up in Sing Sing or Dannemora, you got taken care of.” Like a lot of men in the city at the time, Whitey kept pigeons in a coop on the roof of his apartment building. In the Irish Village, “a big thing was stealing somebody’s pigeons and then selling them to somebody else,” Mullens said. Whitey once caught a friend of theirs up on the roof trying to steal some of his birds. “He says, ‘I know your parents. I know your grandparents. You might as well go kiss them good-bye if you ever come up on this roof again.’ ”

  “When we were younger the White Horse was considered a Communist bar,” Kelly recalled. “A lot of the people that hung out here were merchant marine and dockworkers, but they were the radical left of the dockworkers. Old guys who’d been in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade were there too.” Starting in the late 1930s and continuing in the 1940s, leftist unions such as the International Seamen’s Union and the National Maritime Union, which were affiliated with the CPUSA and the upstart CIO, sought to break the stranglehold the corrupt International Longshoremen’s Union and AFL had on the waterfront. Their organizing and strikes led to pitched battles in the streets, local against local, brother against brother. “Right out here,” Mullens said, nodding at the tavern’s wide windows. One guy they knew, “big guy, tough guy,” kept his pockets full of marbles to throw under the hooves of the mounted cops’ horses when they came to break up the fights. Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker House of Hospitality over on Mott Street housed and fed striking leftist union men. The loyalty oaths employers and unions started requiring during the postwar Red Scare put a lot of the leftist seamen out of work, so they had plenty of time to sit in the bars and sing “The Internationale.” The writer and social activist Michael Harrington, who came to the Village from the Midwest in 1949, writes in his memoir that he was a nightly regular at the Horse from 1951 to 1961. He recalls that “on a number of occasions during the McCarthy years Irish working-class kids from the neighborhood made fist-swinging, chair-throwing raids on the Horse. They used to scream that we were Communists and faggots.” One night he and some of the waterfront radicals left the Horse and went down the street to the Paddock, another Irish longshoremen bar. When they got to singing some of their old workers’ songs the manager had to call the cops to protect them from the other, solidly anticommie union men in the place.

  The National Maritime Union survived the battles and by the 1960s was such an established presence that it hired an architect to design three of the oddest modern buildings on the West Side. The two seamen’s dormitories up in Chelsea have round portholes for windows, making them look like giant wedges of Swiss cheese. The union headquarters and hiring hall in the Village, at Seventh Avenue and West Twelfth Street, is an upside-down ziggurat with the porthole shapes broken into wavelike overhangs, the exterior coated in small white tiles. The union built these flamboyant oddities just as the waterfront was dying; the Chelsea dormitories are now a hotel and St. Vincent’s Hospital bought the hiring hall.

  When Kelly and Mullens were young, some percentage of every cargo that came into the docks—fresh bananas, canned goods, clothes, shoes, cigars, appliances, whateve
r—was siphoned off by the gangs. The shipping lines treated it as a kind of unofficial added tariff, just another cost of doing business in New York. Kelly and Mullens said that pretty much everybody in the Irish Village accepted these stolen goods, aka swag. “When there was a couple of ships in, you could walk down Eleventh Street to West Street, and the people who had cars were parked all along there with the trunks opened up,” Kelly said.

  “Swag was our welfare,” Mullens explained. “My mother paid thirty-two dollars and twenty cents for rent. When it went up to fifty she hit the ceiling. But swag was plentiful.” He remembered once going down into a basement on Christopher Street where some guys were selling televisions stolen off a pier. “All of a sudden there’s two cops standing behind me. They’re waiting in line too.”

  Once, when Kelly was a kid, a shipment of Del Monte canned string beans pilfered off a dock made its way into all the tenements. He remembered cartons stacked in the hall outside his family’s apartment. His mother cooked string beans with every meal until they were gone. “To this day I cannot stand the smell of string beans,” he said.

  It all began to die out when the shipping companies switched to containerized cargo in the 1950s and ’60s and transatlantic air travel began to replace cruise ships. The gangs and unions who ran the West Side docks resisted every effort by the Port Authority to modernize for the new container age. As a result, the shipping companies started using the upgraded Newark and Elizabeth, New Jersey, docks, throwing a lot of guys in the Irish Village out of work. By the mid-1960s the Irish were leaving the neighborhood in a steady stream, the once-bustling Village waterfront having crumbled into disrepair, abandoned and unused.