The Gangs of New York

by Herbert Asbury

  Several minor conflicts over the Abolition movement occurred late in 1833, and the homes of many prominent Abolitionists were bombarded with stones and bricks, but for the most part the anti-slavery agitation was obscured by the excitements of the spring election, for it was the first time that a mayor had been elected by direct vote and there was fierce fighting for three days between Tammany and the Whigs before the former was finally victorious. About the middle of 1834 the feeling against the Abolitionists, which was always very strong in the metropolis, once more flared into open violence, and on July 7 mobs attacked the Chatham street Chapel and the Bowery Theater, where Edwin Forrest was playing in Metamora for the benefit of the manager, an Englishman named Farren. When the police drove the rioters from the playhouse they roared down to Rose street, now a dingy thoroughfare in the gloomy shadow of Brooklyn Bridge, but then an important residential street lined with pretentious mansions. There they launched an assault against the home of Lewis Tappan, a prominent Abolitionist, and smashed the doors and windows with stones. Swarming into the building, they wrecked the interior and pitched the furniture into the street, where it was arranged in huge piles and oil poured over it. In throwing out the pictures which had adorned the walls one of the gangsters came across a portrait of George Washington, and another thug tried to snatch it from his arms. But the discoverer hugged it to his breast and shouted dramatically:

  “It’s Washington! For God’s sake don’t burn Washington!”

  His cry was taken up in the street, and the mob began to shout in unison:

  “For God’s sake don’t burn Washington!”

  A line was formed, and the painting of the first President was passed tenderly down the stairs and into the street, where a group of huge bullies bore it aloft to a neighboring house. There it was installed upon the verandah and carefully guarded until the end of the riot. Sporadic outbreaks occurred during the next few days, and on July 10 a mob did great damage to residences and business houses in Spring, Catherine, Thompson, and Reade streets, while another great throng, composed almost entirely of Five Points gangsters, terrorized the area around Paradise Square. The rioters there appeared to be well organized, for runners were kept passing between the different gangs, and scouts patrolled the streets to give warning of the approach of the police and soldiers. The word spread that the gang chieftains had resolved to burn and loot every house around the Five Points that did not have a candle in a window, and soon the entire Paradise Square district blazed into illumination.

  Nevertheless, a dozen buildings were sacked and set on fire, and by midnight the heavens glowed with the glare of the conflagration, while a dense pall of smoke hung low over that part of the city. Five houses of prostitution were burned, and the inmates, stripped and parcelled out among the gangsters, were shamefully mistreated. St. Philip’s Negro Church in Center street was destroyed, as were three houses on the opposite side of the street, and one adjoining the church. Throughout the night the screams of tortured Negroes could be heard, and an Englishman who was captured by the thugs had both eyes gouged out and his ears torn off by the frenzied rioters. But at one o’clock in the morning, when the blare of bugles told of the coming of the military, the gang chieftains dispersed their thugs, and half an hour later the Five Points was quiet except for the tramping of the troops and the waiUng of the unhappy victims who mourned beside the ruins of their homes. The next night the rioters wrecked a church in Spring street and barricaded the thoroughfare with furniture, but were routed by the Twenty-Seventh Regiment of Infantry, which destroyed the fortifications and chased the mob away without firing a shot.

  The worries of the city authorities were enormously increased by the great fire of December 16-17, 1835, which raged for a day and a half with the thermometer at seventeen degrees below zero, and devastated thirteen acres in the heart of the financial district. The loss was more than $20,000,000. The conflagration started at No. 25 Merchant street and swept into Pearl street and Exchange Place, burned southward almost to Broad street, eastward to the East River, and from Wall street to Coenties Shp.^ Every building on the south side of Wall street from WiUiam street to the East River was destroyed, and the flames were not checked until Marines from the Navy Yard dynamited the Dutch Church, the Merchants’ Exchange and other buildings, and created a gap which the fire could not cross. Several hundred houses were burned, and at least fifty others were wrecked and looted by criminals, who also raided the great heaps of furniture, jewelry and clothing which were piled in the streets without adequate guard. Much valuable property was recovered by the police a week later in the hovels of the Bowery

  ^ A few blocks north of the Battery. One story of the origin of the name is: In colonial times a Dutchman, named Coen, had a sweetheart, Antye. The slip was their trysting place, and the townspeople called it Coen’s and Antye’s Slip. From this came Coenties and Five Points. Many houses and stores were set on fire by the thugs, and one man who was caught applying the torch to a building at Broad and Stone streets was seized by a group of irate citizens and hanged to a tree. His body, frozen stiff, dangled for three days before the police found time to cut it down.

  The fire was one of the direct causes of the panic of 1837, for the losses were so great that many banks suspended, and the insurance companies could not pay their policies in full. Consequently owners of business houses and factories were unable to obtain money with which to rebuild, and thousands who had been thrown out of employment by the disaster remained without work throughout the following summer. Early in September, 1836, flour was seven dollars a barrel, and within another month it had advanced to twelve, and commission merchants predicted that it would go to twenty before the end of the winter. Bread soon became a scarce article of diet among the poor, and in the slums of the Bowery and Five Points thousands were on the verge of actual starvation. In February, 1837, a report was circulated that there were only 4,000 barrels in the great depot at Troy, New York, instead of the customary 30,000, and the newspapers published the news with the largest headlines of the period, and in editorial articles denounced certain merchants who were said to be hoarding great quantities of flour and grain, waiting for the advance in price.

  Great unrest prevailed, and many mass meetings were held, but there was no direct action until February 10, 1837, when a mob which had listened to inflammatory harangues in City Hall Park attacked the wheat and flour store of Eli Hart & Company, in Washington street between Dey and Cortlandt. Hart’s watchmen retreated into the building, but neglected to bar the door, which soon gave way to the battering assault of the rioters. The mob rushed into the building and began throwing barrels of flour and sacks of wheat from the windows. Most of the casks were staved in when they struck the pavement, and the others were quickly smashed by the rioters, who had set up a sing-song shout of “here goes flour at eight dollars a barrel!” Five hundred barrels of flour and a thousand bushels of wheat in sacks had been destroyed when a large body of police appeared, supported by two companies of the National Guard. Fleeing before the muskets and nightsticks, the rioters streamed across the city and launched themselves against the store of S. H. Herrick & Company, near Coenties’ Slip. There they destroyed thirty barrels of flour and a hundred bushels of wheat before they were driven away.

  The next day the price of flour increased $1 a barrel.

  ONE of the first of the political leaders to discover that the gangsters could be employed to great advantage was Captain Isaiah Rynders, Tammany boss of the Sixth Ward, king of the Five Points gangsters and head of the notorious Empire Club at No. 25 Park Row, and owner of half a dozen Paradise Square greengroceries. Captain Rynders first appeared in New York in the middle thirties, after a brief career as a gambler and pistol-and-knife fighter along the Mississippi River. He was one of the most astute politicians who ever operated in the metropolis, although he sometimes permitted his love for the Irish and his hatred of the English to upset his judgment. Eventually he became United States Marshal, and for more
than twenty-five years exercised considerable power in Tammany Hall, save for several years in the fifties when he became a renegade and espoused the cause of the Native Americans. For many years Captain Rynders made his headquarters at Sweeney’s House of Refreshment at No. 11 Ann street, a thoroughfare much frequented by volunteer firemen, but about 1843 he organized the Empire Club, which became the political center of the Sixth Ward and the clearing house of all gangster activities which had to do with politics. From it Rynders issued the commands and pulled the wires which kept his henchmen out of jail. With the aid of the gang chieftains and such gifted lieutenants as Dirty Face Jack, Country McCleester and Edward Z. C. Judson, better known as Ned Buntline, Captain Rynders kept the Sixth Ward under his political thumb and waxed rich and powerful. His control of the Five Points gangs was absolute, and he was frequently appealed to by the police to quell riots which the watchmen themselves could not stop.

  Captain Rynders was an important figure in many of the Abolition disturbances, but his most notable exploit was performed in 1849, when he took advantage of the bitter professional jealousy between Edwin Forrest and William C. Macready, the eminent British actor, and became the principal instigator of the famous riots in Astor Place. Macready was driven from the stage of the Astor Place Opera House on May 7, 1849, by a mob which had gathered in response to fiery tirades of Captain Rynders and other agitators against the Briton, and their crafty manipulation of the racial prejudices of New York’s large Irish population. Three days later, on May 10, Washington Irving, John Jacob Astor and other prominent citizens induced Macready to attempt another performance, and Captain Rynders immediately flooded the city with inflammatory handbills denouncing the English and calling upon the Americans to defend their country against foreign insult and oppression. That night a great mob of between 10,000 and 15,000 massed in Astor Place, and Macready again fled when the theater was bombarded with bricks and cobblestones and set on fire by gangsters who had been captured by the police and flung into the basement. The flames were extinguishd before much damage was done.

  The police were unable to control the mob even after Macready had left the theater and escaped to New Rochelle in disguise, and the Seventh Regiment was finally called into action. The soldiers were also attacked, and after they had been forced to fall back upon the sidewalk on the east side of the Opera House, and some of their muskets snatched from their hands, they fired several volleys into the mob, killing twenty-three persons and wounding twenty-two. More than a hundred policemen and Guardsmen were injured by stones and bricks, and half a dozen of the latter were shot. Another attempt to wreck and burn the Opera House was made on the night of May 11, but the mob was cowed by additional troops and by artillery which had been planted to sweep Broadway and the Bowery. The excitement was intense for almost a week, and for several days a great crowd stood in front of the New York Hotel, where Macready had stopped, urging him to come forth and be hanged. But the actor boarded a train at New Rochelle within two hours after the rioting of May 10, and went to Boston. From there he sailed to England, and never again returned to this country.

  SIN ALONG THE WATER FRONT

  BEFORE THE Revolution, and for almost thirty years thereafter, the finest residential section of New York was the old Fourth Ward, lying east and south of the Five Points and including within its boundaries such famous streets as Cherry, Oliver, James, Roosevelt, Catherine, Pike, Water, and Dover. In this district, and especially in Cherry Hill, the high ground in the northeastern part of the Ward, the old families and the great merchants had their homes, and the streets were lined with fragrant cherry trees and splendid mansions. Cherry street was the heart of the fashionable district; it was on this thoroughfare, at the corner of Franklin Square, that George Washington resided when he was inaugurated President of the United States. John Hancock’s home was at No. 5 Cherry street, and at No. 27 lived Captain Samuel Chester Reid, who conceived the present plan of the American flag. The house at No. 7 Cherry street, next door to the Hancock mansion, was the first in the city to be supplied with illuminating gas. At No. 23 was a restaurant and bar-room known as The Well, a favorite resort of army and navy officers and of the captains of American privateers during the War of 1812. It was there that the beefsteak party, so popular with modern stag parties, originated.

  But the wave of immigration which flowed to America soon after the Revolution forced the aristocrats northward, and by 1840 their mansions had given way to long rows of ramshackle tenements housing a miserable population steeped in vice and poverty. When the Old Brewery at the Five Points was demolished its reputation as the most squalid tenement in New York was assumed by Gotham Court, sometimes known as Sweeney’s Shambles, at Nos. 36 and 38 Cherry street, although the claims of this fearsome pile were disputed by the Arch Block, which ran from Thompson to Sullivan streets between Broome and Grand. Among others the Block contained the famous dive kept by a giant Negro woman known variously as Big Sue and the Turtle. She weighed more than 350 pounds and was described by a contemporary journalist as resembling a huge black turtle standing on its hind legs.

  Gotham Court comprised two rows of connected tenements, set back to back and extending for 130 feet along Cherry street in the direction of Oak street. The buildings housed more than 1,000 persons, principally Irish but with a sprinkling of Negroes and Italians. Entrance to both rows was by two alleys on the east and west sides, called Single Alley and Double Alley. The former was six feet wide and the latter nine. Double Alley was also known as Paradise Alley, and was the boyhood haunt of Edward Harrigan and William J. Scanlon, the celebrated vaudeville and music hall performers. It was this alley, also, which provided the inspiration for the famous street song, “The Sunshine of Paradise Alley”:

  There’s a little side street such as often you meet,

  Where the boys of a Sunday night rally;

  Though it’s not very wide, and it’s dismal beside,

  Yet they call the place Paradise Alley.

  But a maiden so sweet lives in that little street.

  She’s the daughter of Widow McNally;

  She has bright golden hair, and the boys all declare,

  She’s the sunshine of Paradise Alley.

  She’s had offers to wed by the dozen, ’tis said.

  Still she’s always refused them politely;

  But of late she’s been seen with young Tommy Killeen,

  Going out for a promenade nightly.

  We can all guess the rest, for the boy she loves best,

  Will soon change her name from McNally;

  Tho’ he may change her name, she’ll be known just the same,

  As the sunshine of Paradise Alley.

  One of the principal sewers of that part of the city ran in a direct line beneath Gotham Court, with manholes in both Single and Double Alleys. Gangsters and other criminals who sought refuge from the police in the dismal chambers of the Court cut other openings from the cellars of the tenements, and hid themselves and their plunder on the side ledges of the sewer or in niches cut in the walls. The fearful odors and vapors which seeped into the Court made it one of the unhealthiest spots in the city. The death rate was always high, and during the cholera epidemic it reached 195 in a thousand. Of 183 children born in the Court over a period of three years sixty-one died after a few weeks of life. Infants were also frequently killed by the huge rats, some of them as large as cats, which infested the sewer and often invaded the tenements. The Board of Health condemned Gotham Court in 1871, but it was not until the middle nineties that the tenants were evicted and the buildings demolished.

  Conditions such as these soon prevailed throughout the Fourth Ward, and by 1845 the whole area had become a hotbed of crime; streets over whose cobble-stones had rolled the carriages of the aristocrats were filled with dives which sheltered the members of such celebrated river gangs as the Daybreak Boys, Buckoos, Hookers, Swamp Angels, Slaughter Housers, Short Tails, Patsy Conroys, and the Border Gang. No human life was safe, and a
well-dressed man venturing into the district was commonly set upon and murdered or robbed, or both, before he had gone a block. If the gangsters could not lure a prospective victim into a dive, they followed him until he passed beneath an appointed window, from which a woman dumped a bucket of ashes upon his head. As he gasped and choked, the thugs rushed him into a cellar, where they killed him and stripped the clothing from his back, afterward casting his naked body upon the sidewalk. The police would not march against the denizens of the Fourth Ward except in parties of half a dozen or more, and when their quarry sought refuge in a dive they frequently besieged the place for a week or longer until the thug was driven forth by restlessness or hunger. The principal resorts were always well garrisoned, and fully supplied with muskets, knives and pistols.

  On Water street, running parallel with the East River, practically every house contained one or more dives, and some of the tenements had a saloon, dance hall, or house of prostitution on every floor. For at least twenty-five years this thoroughfare was probably the scene of more violent crime than any other street on the continent. John Allen operated his famous dance cellar and house of prostitution at No. 304 Water street, and north and south of his establishment, within a half-mile limit, were forty similar places, as well as a hundred other resorts. Kit Burns’ place. Sportsmen’s Hall, occupied the whole of a three-story frame house at No. 273 Water street, the lower half of which was painted a vivid and bilious green, while before the door swung a huge gilt sign. The principal room of the first floor was arranged as an amphitheater, with rough wooden benches for seats. In the center was a ring enclosed by a wooden fence about three feet high. This was the famous pit in which the huge gray rats from the wharfs were sent against terriers and sometimes, after they had been starved for several days, against each other. One of the noted gangsters who haunted Burns’ place was George Leese, otherwise