Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics)

by Joseph Mitchell

  Dutch’s demeanor fluctuates between servility and arrogance. In the company of some of his members, he is meek. ‘I hate to bother you, pal, but I’m flat,’ he will say, ‘and I wonder could you see your way clear to pay some dues. I wouldn’t ask it, only I know I can count on you.’ Toward others he behaves with the wary impudence of an English sparrow among city pigeons. ‘Either you get yourself in good standing,’ he will say, ‘or I’ll excommunicate you the hell and gone right out of my association. I don’t allow no deadheads, and you know it.’ The majority of his members probably could not explain exactly why they give him money. Some have known him since they were young men together and are genuinely fond of him. Joe Madden, the Assistant Head President, is one of these. ‘I’m acquainted with Dutch almost thirty years,’ he once said, ‘and if he was to croak, I’d miss him. Whatever money he gets out of me, I figure it well spent. He hands me a lot of laughs. I like to listen to him. He keeps his ears open, and he always knows who beat the dice tables last night, and what millionaire from Hollywood lost five thousand bucks and got sick to his stomach, and who’s in hock to who, and what places got thrown in the street by the cops and why. He knows everything. Say a crap game has to float from one little fleabag hotel to another; if you want the new address, Dutch can tell you. A lot of so-called underworld fellows from out of town, as soon as they hit Broadway they look Dutch up, just to hear what’s new. Fellows like Boo Boo Hoff, the big Philadelphia gangster that croaked a few months ago. Use to, every time Boo Boo came to town, he and Dutch would get together and cut up touches. In his time, he gave Dutch plenty of dues.’

  No matter how much his members may like Dutch, practically all of them look upon him as a clown. He does not mind this; he feels that it gives him an advantage over them. ‘I act like a screwball,’ he says, ‘but I know what I’m doing.’ On his nightly rounds he encourages people to ridicule him, and in places like Lindy’s, Madden’s, Attell’s, the 18 Club, the Paddock Bar & Grill, and the Dublin Café, he is treated as an official butt. He cannot be insulted. In situations that would be painful to the average man, he always behaves with a sort of deadpan, Chaplin-like jauntiness. A stock joke is often played on him. Someone invites him to sit down and have a free meal. He promptly accepts, and then his benefactor refuses to let him order anything but a steak. Dutch’s one tooth is useless and he is forced to subsist almost entirely on soups. When a free steak is placed before him, people crowd around and watch his struggle with it. ‘Don’t give up, Dutch, old boy!’ they yell. ‘Keep fighting!’ Dutch puts on a show; trying his best to chew the steak, he grunts, groans, looks cross-eyed, and tosses his head about like a turkey gobbler. ‘I can’t really chew it,’ he says, ‘but I certainly can gum it.’

  At least once a night, wherever he may happen to be, Dutch is asked to sing. ‘Give us a song, Dutch,’ someone will say, ‘and I’ll slip you some dues.’ Dutch is convinced that he has a fine baritone, and between not singing and singing and being laughed at, he greatly prefers the latter. He usually sings ‘My Pearl Was a Bowery Girl,’ ‘The Bowery, the Bowery! I’ll Never Go There Any More,’ or ‘Down in a Coal Mine,’ all of which were popular in his youth. Sometimes, however, if he has an especially appreciative audience, he will put his right foot forward, clasp his hands behind his back, gaze soulfully into the distance, and sing ‘The Last Rose of Summer.’ Almost invariably, while he is singing, someone creeps up from behind and gives him a hotfoot. He has undoubtedly been a hotfoot victim oftener than any other human being. He never appears to mind. ‘A fella that pays his dues, I don’t hold it against him if he gives me a hotfoot,’ Dutch says. ‘Maybe he figures he ought to get something for his money.’

  References to Dutch frequently appear in sports and Broadway columns, especially in Damon Runyon’s and Dan Parker’s. Such references are seldom complimentary, but Dutch always considers them so. Recently, commenting on the attitude of civilians toward soldiers in some parts of the country, Runyon wrote, ‘It is said that in certain of these spots the appearance of a guy in uniform in the vicinity of a local festivity would produce about the same coolness that might be created if Commodore Dutch showed up at Mrs Vanderbilt’s party.’ Dutch carried a clipping of this column around until it wore out. ‘Did you see the swell write-up my pal Runyon gave me?’ he would ask, pulling it out. When Dutch is introduced to someone, he usually makes fun of his own face. He shakes hands and says, ‘Pleased to meet you, pal.’ Then, opening his mouth as wide as possible and exhibiting his solitary tooth, he giggles and says, ‘Look, pal! I’m an Elk.’ He seems most pleased with himself when people are making jokes at his expense and laughing at him. It makes no perceptible difference to him whether their laughter is scornful or good-natured. ‘When a fella is laughing at me, I’m sizing him up,’ he once told an intimate. ‘I’m giving him the old psychology. To put the bite on a man, what I call collecting dues, you got to study him. You got to figure out the right moment to nail him. With some of my members, I wait until they are drunk and happy before I bring up the question of dues. With others, I wait until they pick right in a horse race or beat the tiger in a crap game. With others, I wait until they are sitting with some doll that they want to impress with their great generosity. But with each and every one of them, before I ask for dues, I wait until I got them snickering at me.’ Dutch has devoted considerable thought to his peculiar position in society. He is profoundly cynical and has come to the conclusion that people enjoy his company because he makes them feel superior. ‘The fellas on Broadway are so low themselves,’ he says, ‘it makes them feel good to have somebody around that they can look down on, and I guess I fill the bill.’

  Dutch says that he was born on Tompkins Square, a lower East Side neighborhood which was then known as Little Germany. He says that he has been called Dutch for as long as he can remember, but that he doesn’t know whether his parents came from Germany or Holland. ‘I never took no interest in where they came from,’ he says. He makes a mystery of his childhood and will not tell his real name. He explains that his surname is a long one and hard to pronounce. ‘I’m the only person in the world that knows it,’ he says, ‘and I wouldn’t tell it to nobody. I don’t hardly remember it myself. I haven’t used it since I quit school. When I was fifteen, I just wouldn’t go to school no more and had to leave home, so I got a job helping on a Bowery dray wagon. The driver said to me, ‘What’s your name?’ I told him the kids all called me Dutch, and that’s what he called me. Since then I never once used my born name, not even to vote. When I die, I don’t even want it on my tombstone. Some of my pals around Broadway don’t realize Dutch is a nickname, and they figure I ought to have a nickname, so they call me The Tooth.’

  Dutch’s first boss was a drayman who owned his own cart and picked up most of his jobs around the Bowery. In the morning he and Dutch hauled for a second-hand furniture store on Chatham Square and the rest of the day they were on call, working out of a stable on Great Jones Street. At that time, in 1894, the Bowery was just beginning to go to seed; it was declining as a theatrical street, but its saloons, dance halls, dime museums, gambling rooms, and brothels were still thriving. In that year, in fact, according to a police census, there were eighty-nine drinking establishments on the street, and it is only a mile long. On some of the side streets there were brothels in nearly every house; Dutch refers to them as ‘free-and-easies.’

  Dutch is excessively proud of this period of his life. ‘In that day and time,’ he says, ‘a good way to get yourself educated was to work on a dray. I hadn’t been on a dray a year before I could point out the head madams, the head pickpockets, the head crapshooters, and all like that. Quite a few of the free-and-easies were outfitted by the furniture store we hauled for, and we were in and out of them all the time. Also, the girls were always on the move, and we handled their trunks. And we did trunk work for the classy Bowery hotels, places like the Occidental, the Worden House, and Honest John Howard’s Kenmore Hotel. The Occidental was the classie
st. We called it the Ox, and I got a thrill out of it even if I only went in to horse some luggage around. It’s still standing, at the southwest corner of Broome and the Bowery, but it’s just a ghost of bygone days. You can stay there now for three bucks a week. It gives me the awfullest feeling just to walk past it. In my time it had a beautiful barbershop and a beautiful barroom, and the ceiling of this barroom was one enormous painting of some dames giving theirselves a bath. The old Ox was a hangout for politicians, actors, gambling men, fighters, and the like of that, the sporting element. Some of the fighters that put up there to my personal knowledge were Terrible Terry McGovern that Sam Harris managed for years, the original Jack Dempsey that they called the Nonpareil, Charlie Mitchell that throwed himself away fighting in gin mills when he should of been saving his strength for the ring, Jake Kilrain, Joe Bernstein, Tom Sharkey, and Oscar Gardner that they called the Omaha Kid, only he came from Wheeling, West Virginia; names don’t mean a damn thing. I knew them all, to speak to.

  ‘Every single night, after I knocked off work, I would wash up and walk the Bowery. I wasn’t a teetotaler then by no means, and I would hit four or five gin mills and listen to the personalities, what they call celebrities nowadays, only a personality was somebody, but a celebrity, who the hell is he? Like I would listen to old Silver Dollar Solomon. He was high up in a combination of white slavers, the Max Hochstim Association, that bossed over the free-and-easies, and he ran a saloon that had one thousand silver dollars stuck in the concrete floor. And drunks would bring cold chisels in and they would kneel down when they thought nobody was looking and try to pry themselves up some silver dollars, but they would just get throwed out. And I would listen to Steve Brodie that took a leap off Brooklyn Bridge, only he didn’t, and a brewery set him up in a saloon because he got so much attention for himself they figured he would draw trade, and he would wear your ears out discussing Steve Brodie; that’s all he knew. I never thought he was so much. All the write-ups about the Bowery I ever read, they made Brodie a hero. People that really knew him, like me, we considered him ninety-nine per cent jaw. But a personality I liked was George Washington Connors that they called Chuck. He had three girl friends and claimed all of them was his wife – one named The Truck, one named The Rummager, and one named Chinatown Nellie, only she was Irish. Chuck was a guide for slummers, and he had Nellie and an old Chinee fella lying in bunks in a fake opium den on Mott Street, and Nellie sometimes couldn’t keep a straight face when Chuck brought some slummers in. She would bust out laughing, and the slummers would think it was the opium taking effect. Chuck was the squarest of all the personalities. Some nights there were more slummers around than one man could handle, and Chuck would let me guide a party. Him and I were pals. The first cigar I ever smoked, he give it to me. The first drink of champagne I ever had, it was out of a bottle he bought.’

  Dutch says that he quit the dray wagon in 1898, when he was nineteen, and began living by his wits. For a while he had a job steering sailors to a saloon at 295 Bowery called John McGurk’s Suicide Hall, where in one year five back-room girls killed themselves by swallowing carbolic acid. He says he got the title of Commodore while working for McGurk’s. ‘I wore a sailor cap and a pea jacket,’ he says, ‘and I knocked around South Street and gave out cards to the sailors describing the attractions at McGurk’s. Sometimes I would collect a mob and take them up. One night I came in with about two dozen sailors and a fella says to McGurk, ‘Who the hell,’ he says, ‘is that little squirt that brings all the sailor trade into here?’ ‘Why, that’s my Commodore,’ old McGurk says to him. ‘That’s Commodore Dutch, the Commodore of the Bowery Navy.’ And that’s how I got my title. I was proud of it. Back in those days all the personalities had a nickname or a title. If you was known by your real name you didn’t have no standing.’

  Dutch’s period of greatest affluence began in the spring of 1899, when Timothy D. Sullivan, the Tammany boss of the Bowery district, gave him a job. Big Tim was the most powerful and the most open-handed politician in the city. He was a member of a syndicate which controlled all the gambling houses in Manhattan, he owned saloons, race horses, and prizefighters, and he had a partnership in a chain of vaudeville and burlesque theatres. His clubrooms were at 207 Bowery, but he also kept a suite on the second floor of the Occidental, where he and other politicians played poker and he received reports from the managers of his various enterprises. One evening he summoned Dutch to the Occidental. ‘I had run errands for Big Tim and he knew I was O.K., and he asked me did I want a job of a confidential nature,’ Dutch says. ‘He was the silent partner in eight saloons and he was anxious to know what went on in them. He trusted his managers, still and all he didn’t, and he wanted somebody neutral to circulate around in an unbeknownst way and watch conditions and listen to the talk that went on. That was right up my alley. I would wander in and out of Big Tim’s various gin mills every night and enjoy myself to the full, and every afternoon I would go to the Ox and report to him what I seen and heard. Some days he wouldn’t have time to hardly listen, other days he’d keep me talking two, three hours. He paid me irregular. One Saturday night it would be a hundred bucks and the next Saturday it would be a ten spot, all according to the humor he was in. Anyway, he seen to it I had plenty of coconuts.’

  Big Tim had a number of retainers and hangers-on whose duties were similarly vague and confidential. He rewarded some by permitting them to run balls, or ‘rackets,’ for which all the saloonkeepers and divekeepers in the Bowery district were obliged to buy so many tickets. Among them were Larry Mulligan, Big Tim’s half-brother, who operated a profitable St Patrick’s Eve ball in Terrace Garden Hall, and Harry Oxford, a fixer, who ran one on Washington’s Birthday Eve in Webster Hall. Chuck Connors, whose fanciful conversation amused Big Tim, was allowed to run an annual ball in Tammany Hall; it was sponsored by the Chuck Connors Association, of which Chuck was the sole member. Biff Ellison, a gunman who shepherded gangs of repeaters to the polls every Election Day, imitated Connors and formed a Biff Ellison Association, which ran three rackets a year.

  On New Year’s Eve of 1900, Dutch and a girl friend went on a champagne spree; he woke up owing two saloons a total of $285. He asked Big Tim for a loan. ‘He wouldn’t give me no loan,’ Dutch says. ‘He told me that wasn’t no way to do business. He says to me, “Dutch, you have certainly behaved like a fool, but I tell you what I’ll do. I’ll give you a franchise to run a racket. Hire yourself a date in a hall and get some tickets printed, and I’ll pass the word around.” So I told him it might look nicer to the public if I had an association behind me, like Chuck and Biff. It would look more businesslike. So he says, “Go right ahead. If those hoodlums can be a one-man association, so the hell can you.” I had two thousand tickets printed, a buck a head, ladies free. Everybody on the Bowery knew I was professionally associated with Big Tim in some way or other – why ask too many questions? – so naturally I didn’t have no trouble unloading my tickets.’

  Dutch’s racket, the first Gala Naval Ball of the Commodore Dutch Association, was held on the night of April 30, 1901, in Everett Hall, on East Fourth Street, just off the Bowery. Big Tim, of course, was the guest of honor. With him, in a box, sat Photo Dave Altman, his bodyguard; Sarsaparilla Reilly, his valet; and Flatnose Dinny Sullivan, one of his brothers, who later became boss of Coney Island. The music was furnished by Professor Pretzel Wolf’s East Side Society Orchestra. Dutch led the grand march with a red-haired Irish girl whose name he has forgotten. He wore an admiral’s outfit he had purchased from a theatrical costumer; it consisted of a cocked hat, a pair of swords, and a uniform with gold-starred epaulets and a red, white, and blue belly sash. In the grand march was Connors, who had The Truck on one arm and Chinatown Nellie on the other. The Rummager was escorted by Eat-’Em-Up Jack McManus, a fighter who sometimes worked as night bouncer at McGurk’s. Dutch says there were at least fifteen couples in the march, all personalities, but he has forgotten the names of the others.

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�After we sashayed two times around the ballroom, bowing to the right and then to the left,’ he says, ‘I blowed on a police whistle and the fun began. I had got a cut rate on two dozen kegs of beer from a brewery that was indebted to Big Tim for a favor, and I had them resting in washtubs full of ice. The instant I let loose with my whistle, whoosh, most of the mob descended on the beer, and the way they helped theirselves it was a disgrace to the human race. I was nuts about waltzing – never got enough – and I waltzed around an hour or more, not paying much attention to anything but the music. Then I stopped to get my breath and I took a look around, and I never see so many drunks. The place was swarming with drunks. Each fella was singing at the top of his voice, or slugging somebody smaller than him, or trying to steal some other fella’s girl. One fella was flat on his back and he had his mouth right under a spigot on a beer keg, and the spigot was wide open and the beer was pouring into him; it was coming out of his ears. And the girls were wrestling with the fellas and squealing. I took one look and I felt like fleeing out of there. “Ladies and gentlemen,” I said, “Jesus Christ!” I thought to myself, “No good can come of this. People will die before morning, people by the dozens.” But to tell the truth, it was a most successful swaree. Nobody was killed and everybody got all the beer they could hold, and I cleared damned near fifteen hundred bucks. When I told Big Tim how much I drew, he took me off his steady payroll. He says to me, “Let the racket be your meal ticket. Go ahead and run yourself one every year. All the joints in the district know I’m in back of you, and if any one of them refuses to take their quota of tickets, you just let me know.”