Island of Vice

by Richard Zacks

  Avery Delano Andrews—rail thin, tall, military bearing, long waxed mustache—followed the crowds on 125th Street and watched some men splinter off to the side entrances of various saloons. He entered with them and observed men with foam on their mustaches and steins of warm beer in their hands. He ordered a glass himself. “I drank it just to see whether it was really beer,” he said later. “It was; it was not Weiss beer.”

  This glass of suds would occasion Town Topics sarcastically to call Andrews a “genius” for discovering what everyone knew. “The first thing we know some of those marvelous Commissioners will be finding out that bad women openly walk Broadway at night for business purposes.”

  Although this blue law against Sunday saloons had been on the books since 1857, it was honored more in the breach than the observance, at least in New York City. Sunday, the workingman’s only day off, also marked the city barkeeps’ most profitable day of the week. Police captains or Tammany Hall raked in a couple of dollars per saloon to look the other way. This pragmatism, though perhaps morally and legally murky, seemed to satisfy the vast majority of New York City residents.

  Outside several of the saloons, Andrews saw policemen twirling their batons and oblivious to the dozens of thirsty men filing inside. After he had spent two hours unobtrusively wandering into joints in his uptown precinct, someone finally recognized the tall quiet chap as a police commissioner. Word spread surprisingly quickly, probably via policemen sending messages, and the joints bolted their side doors.

  But Andrews, fit from his daily bicycling, decided to walk south from 125th Street to 42nd Street, along the poorer sections east of Madison Avenue. He passed the mostly Irish shantytown of makeshift cottages, with pigs and goats, up around 118th Street, heading farther south and farther east among the shoddy tenements that looked out toward Blackwell’s Island, home to the almshouse, lunatic asylum, workhouse, and penitentiary.

  All along the route, he found the side doors of saloons open and policemen staring the other way. “I did not see a patrolman putting forth a spirited effort to do his duty.”

  Andrews came to headquarters on Monday morning and recounted the Sunday beer sales to Roosevelt, who grew quite irritated. He immediately instructed acting chief Conlin to summon the police captains to headquarters. The telephone operator contacted the precincts; the blue-uniformed men traveled free on the various Els and streetcars to reach the Mulberry Street headquarters.

  After more than two dozen captains arrived, Roosevelt lectured them on doing their duty and enforcing all laws. “I want you all to understand that your personal opinions or feelings on the Sunday opening question, or any other phase of the law, have nothing to do with enforcement of the law,” he enunciated. “While the law is on the statute book it must be strictly enforced without question.”

  It is unclear whether Roosevelt realized how utterly utopian and otherworldly his orders sounded. Cops constantly used their judgment to not enforce all laws. Detective Cornelius Willemse wrote of beating up a drunk who was the sole breadwinner of a large family, rather than arresting him and putting the family on the brink of starvation and eviction. A standard guidebook—hardly a book of controversial political theory—Zeisloft’s New Metropolis stated that New York cops were chosen not to act like soldiers but rather to make decisions on their own on the spot.

  Rumors swirled around headquarters of an “earthquake” shake-up, with every single member of the force reassigned to uncomfortably new precincts. Roosevelt denied such a plan. He said the board would attack problems as they discovered them.

  Roosevelt’s turn to act as judge came up again on Thursday, June 13. He had sixty-three cases to race through and had no intention of adjourning without finishing. His staccato questioning kept the line of bluecoats moving. A Mrs. Bennett was testifying that a patrolman had tried to shake her down for a dollar to avoid a “drunk and disorderly” charge when shots suddenly rang out in the courtroom. Mrs. Bennett went scrambling to the corner. More rapid-fire shots rang out. Lawyer Levy, representing the accused policeman, whirled and ducked. Court clerk Peterson pressed himself against a wall between the windows. Meanwhile, Theodore Roosevelt calmly continued writing notes, then touched a blotter to the sheet of paper and moved it aside. “Mr. Peterson, I did not understand that this is Execution Day,” he said, looking up for the first time. “Am I mistaken? If so, we will adjourn the trial.”

  The clerk nervously peered out the window and said that the sounds apparently came from a pack of firecrackers, now lying spent in the street. The New York World reported: “All felt ashamed, and took care not to meet the eye of President Roosevelt … but after a while they consoled themselves with the recollection that the President was a sportsman, and his experiences in the far West raised him above common mortals.”

  Roosevelt resumed his role as trial judge; he was sitting in snap judgment of officers mostly caught by roundsmen lounging or sleeping on the job. Burly men mumbled lame excuses about sitting down to tie a shoe or being compelled to use the saloon’s urinal.

  He found most of the patrolmen guilty of small derelictions but one case of accused brutality drew his sympathy and leniency. A bunch of Irish boys were shooting dice in the tough Irish tenements in the East Forties. An Irish plainclothes detective, John McMullin, decided to break up the game. When he grabbed a boy, a crowd gathered; a day laborer named Tom Hogan leaped off a beer barrel outside a saloon and tried to spring the boy. As the two men wrestled in the street, the kid escaped, to the bystanders’ cheers. The officer drew his revolver—maybe he pulled the trigger or maybe Hogan kicked at the gun. In any case, a bullet wound up grazing Hogan’s thigh. The mob tightened its circle around the officer, pummeling him, when another policeman, happening by, came to the rescue. The two officers yanked Hogan out of the crowd and then McMullin beat the already bleeding Hogan so badly with his club that Hogan spent the next four days in Bellevue Hospital. Now the brawler Hogan was bringing brutality charges against Officer McMullin. Roosevelt asked Hogan if he had been drinking. Had he ever been arrested? For what crimes? The surly answers in the affirmative led Roosevelt to decide that a brave police officer had used justified force to subdue and teach a lesson to a drunken thug.

  At midnight that same night, TR once again exited the Union League Club, this time with a handsome young man at his side, thirty-one-year-old Richard Harding Davis. The pair, both elegantly dressed after eating supper at the club, strolled over to 42nd Street and Third Avenue, mounted the steps, and took the El train down to 14th Street. TR was taking a new partner on a midnight ramble.

  Davis—born wealthy, educated at Johns Hopkins, managing editor of Harper’s Weekly—already ranked, though young, among the literary lions of the city. He had kick-started his career by delivering accurate, empathetic coverage of the catastrophic Johnstown Flood; he had already written two successful books. His impeccable manners, elegant clothes, and the high fees he received from newspapers created a lot of envy among rivals.

  Somewhere on 14th Street, TR and Davis met Commissioner Andrews and walked east toward the river and then downtown into one of the city’s worst slum tenement districts. They tramped up and down Avenues A, B, and C, amid the bleak five-story buildings, every so often leaving the avenues and “venturing into narrow unlighted apologies for streets.” The poor overcrowded 13th Precinct, east of Tompkins Square Park, used to be thriving “Kleindeutschland”—a thoroughly German neighborhood of Protestants and Catholics, of lager beer halls, oyster saloons, and Beethoven Hall, with signs everywhere in Gothic German script. Now the area, especially in the poorer districts toward the river, was being flooded with impoverished Jews from Eastern Europe.

  For the next two hours, the three explorers were shocked to find policemen dutifully walking their beats, trying doors, peering into stores and alleyways.

  “No bluecoat was lounging against a lamp-post receiving a complaint from a blonde young woman,” wrote the New York Press. “Nor did a member of the force emer
ge from a saloon, wiping his lips and saying he was called in to quell a riot.” The New York Recorder decided that these events, if true, “suggested a veritable departmental millennium.”

  TR and crew entered the precinct’s Union Market station house at 1:55 a.m. and Roosevelt introduced himself to desk sergeant Joseph Saul. “Your precinct is in very good order, sergeant, and your men are doing their duty,” he told the astonished officer. He added that hardworking policemen had a true friend in the new commissioners.

  While wandering in the building, TR discovered a clue as to how this precinct had performed so well on his unannounced midnight inspection. On the wall of the men’s washup room, someone had penciled an accurate drawing of TR; apparently, the first bluecoat who spotted him had warned the others. In this round of police cat-and-mouse, score one for the mouse.

  Roosevelt was trying to pierce one of the odder, more secretive, closed societies on the planet, one with its own rituals, and loyalties. The 3,800-member police force was heavily dominated by Irish-born or first-generation Irish Americans, mostly Tammany Catholics.

  New York policemen in the 1890s slept together. At night, the dozens of men “on reserve” bunked together in foul-smelling overcrowded barracks rooms in the precinct houses. They hung their dirty, often wet, uniforms on pegs along the walls, and plunked their overripe socks and shoes below. Small sinks provided the only washup. The beds often stood only eighteen inches apart, close enough to hear a “chorus of snores” and other nocturnal noises. The “shouting or singing of drunks” echoed up from the cells below. Every morning with military precision citywide, a doorkeeper came to wake the “reserve” men at 5:40 a.m. for the “dog watch” from 6 a.m. to 8 a.m. At one precinct, the fellow belted out daily: “Get up, you big bums! He who sits on a hot stove shall rise to shine again.”

  About 1,000 officers, or one-quarter of the police, remained “on reserve” sleeping at the station house every night, ready to quell any sudden riots or upheavals in this great “melting pot” city of foreigners, underpaid laborers, beggars, bomb-threatening anarchists, labor-rallying Socialists. That forced policemen to work 110 hours a week, to zigzag through a dizzying schedule of shifts—including midnight tour and six a.m. dog watch—with fifty hours on the streets and sixty hours spent on reserve. “It was a dog’s life,” said Max Fischel, crime reporter for the Evening Sun. The starting salary of $1,000 a year put them just past the upper end of poverty.

  A patrolman in Manhattan in the mid-1890s walked his beat alone, without a partner, for eight hours during daytime. Sore feet and bronchitis topped the complaint list. He knew every store owner from the butcher to the iceman; he often ate free. He had a “coop” where he sneaked to get warm in the winter; he was supposed to check all doors and coal chutes every evening; he looked for unlit streetlamps, for unemptied ash cans, for stray dogs, for thieves. He arbitrated marital disputes and saloon brawls. He nabbed truants, sham lunatics, reckless carriage drivers, abortionists, milk-waterers, fornicators, but mostly he collared “drunk” or “disorderly” persons, who accounted for more than half of 113,000 arrests made in New York City in 1895.

  Whenever he needed backup, the cop blew hard on his small cylindrical metal whistle or he rapped his billy club three times on the pavement or a lamppost. If still unaided, he often drafted a bystander as messenger to run to the precinct house.

  The policemen of a given precinct became especially close-knit, like an army platoon on a mission in a foreign country. They saw much more of their brother officers than they did of their wives—110 hours versus 58 hours per week less commute time.

  They played pranks; they had hazing rituals. A veteran detective recalled his rookie hazing. At midnight a bunch of burly men in hooded black raincoats had stripped him naked, forced him to kneel on a stone, and painted him “shamrock green, their favorite color.” Then they mummified him in adhesive tape. At Thanksgiving, he in turn had joined in when they grabbed a sleeping recruit, stripped him, and covered him in carrot tops and greens, then mercilessly pinched to see if the “turkey” was tender.

  He also recalled that nobody could sit on the toilet and read a newspaper unless he folded it into a small square; otherwise someone would set it on fire.

  All these hours sequestered together, filled with pranks and camaraderie, bonded the men together; the New York police evolved into a kind of paid, mostly Irish fraternity, with a deep streak of “us” versus “them,” often not only “us” against the officers but “us” against the citizens as well.

  The structure of police discipline reinforced this “us vs. them” attitude. Ambitious roundsmen—officers who literally made rounds—skulked around the beats of patrolmen looking for rules violations. Patrolmen might be caught chatting too long, drinking a “can of coffee,” lingering in a warm shop, smoking a cigar, carrying an umbrella.

  Cops perfected silent semaphore signals to alert each other—arms stretched out, for instance, meant roundsman approaching. With so many hours to kill “on reserve,” they shared their prize escapes like epic lore.

  Once, a patrolman on a frigid cold night was “cooped” up talking to a friend, an undertaker, when a small boy raced into the funeral home with a warning from a fellow cop that the roundsman was heading down the block.

  The cop was trapped; the place had no back exits. He was broke and couldn’t afford another fine or suspension. Five minutes later he was seen strolling along, and he casually tapped the shoulder of the roundsman still peering through the undertaker’s glass. He wished his superior officer a pleasant evening and kept on walking down the block. But how had he done it? He had convinced the undertaker to load him in a coffin, wheel him out to a hearse, and trot the horses around the corner.

  The New York police force back then had far more duties than today. They investigated housing violations such as out-of-repair “water closets” or the keeping of goats without a permit. They inspected boilers, did background checks for permits for liquor licenses, for carrying guns, for hosting masked balls (a great opportunity for lewdness), for all-night restaurants.

  They shot “more or less mad dogs” and carried dead animals to Barren Island in the harbor; they chased smugglers near the piers; they reported fires and water leaks; they visited homes to view dead infants to check for abortion or infanticide.

  The foreign-born nationality they arrested most in 1895 was Irish (21,628), followed by German (11,443), then Russian (7,172). “Black” Americans accounted for 2,843 arrests.

  So, often Irish cops, avoiding Irish roundsmen, were arresting Irish citizens.

  The vaudeville stage cop was portrayed as a portly Irishman with a faint brogue, leaning forward with his hand out behind him, palm upward. “Of course there are cops who have never taken a dollar, at least I’ve heard about them but I never saw one,” wrote Detective Willemse. “However if they exist, I give them credit for being so good or for being on bum posts.”

  Roosevelt and his fellow investigators decided they had earned a break, and at 2:45 a.m. they headed over to Mike Lyons’s all-night/all-day restaurant, a joint open continuously for almost a quarter century. (Management proudly announced they didn’t own a front-door key.) Cops and criminals, pickpockets and politicians all enjoyed eating the corned beef at this Bowery joint. Located smack in the middle of dozens of sleazy concert saloons and variety theaters, the restaurant drew those who refused to call it a night.

  “The Mayor of the Bowery, Johnny Matthews, used to swap yarns with Broken-Nose Burke,” the owner once reminisced in a newspaper article, “while California George sat by and snorted and said he could tell a better [tale] with his feet.” Inspector Byrnes rubbed elbows with out-of-town hoodlums there. “In those days to gamble was no sin,” explained Mike Lyons, “and to take a fool’s money was no crime, for the fool was buying the experience that made a man of him.” Lyons had often locked up bankrolls of thousands of dollars for his clientele, no questions asked; he served 400 quarts of wine in one night; morni
ngs, he gave out leftover food to the women of the Bowery.

  The press—to this point—was having good-natured fun covering Roosevelt. “Three young men walked into ‘Mike’ Lyons restaurant on the Bowery just before 3 a.m. yesterday. One wore spectacles and had a short bristling brownish mustache. He looked like a trombone player in some east-side brass band, who after a hard night’s work, had dropped in for a good-night chop and a bottle of beer,” wrote an unidentified writer at Pulitzer’s New York World.

  “The second man had bright dark eyes and a pink boyish face. When he pushed back his coat, he disclosed a round silver badge on his waistcoat. Square-jawed, broad-shouldered, tanned featured and wide-mouthed was the third man and a leather belt held up his trousers. A farmer dressed up would have been a man-about-town’s comment on him.” (Gentlemen then wore suspenders.)

  The three men ordered steaks and beer, and the Lyons cook was starstruck enough to come out of the kitchen to glimpse Roosevelt. Word of their tour now spread fast among the bluecoats but some officers were apparently too fast asleep to get the message.

  After enjoying their meal and tipping a quarter, the trio wandered for a few hours till 6 a.m., heading west and then north, through dozens of posts. They found seven policemen either sitting down, missing, or too deep in conversation; three of the derelicts were caught in Captain Eakins’s 15th Precinct near Washington Square Park.

  Roosevelt and Andrews took the Broadway cable car back downtown and arrived at 300 Mulberry. TR wrote his sister that these rambles forced him to go forty hours without sleep. He announced that the first inspection tour’s mercy would not be repeated and that he would stand as complainant against the seven delinquent officers.