by Neil Hanson
Before New York’s breakneck expansion, its brick or brownstone tenements had been pleasant dwellings, often occupied by a single family, with a garden at the rear sometimes ending in a small stream. Those days were long past. As pressure on Manhattan’s scarce space increased—and New York’s population all but quintupled, from 850,000 to 4 million, in the half century following the Civil War—property owners and speculators were not slow to realize that large profits could be made by dividing and subdividing those once fine houses, thus accommodating ten, twenty, thirty, or forty families in the space that had once held only one. Extra stories were also added, often with scant attention to what the original foundations and walls would bear, and many buildings were torn down and rebuilt by speculators as seven- to ten-story tenements, often with a further one or two stories belowground.
At the same time, “in a triumph of efficiency over humanity,” rear tenements were erected in what had once been the gardens, reached either by an alley between buildings or by a passageway like a low tunnel, head-high and as little as two or three feet wide, running through the front house and opening into a yard lined with garbage barrels and privies.17 Construction costs were pared to the bone; when a tenement collapsed in 1885, it was discovered that, to save money, the builder had used the soil excavated from the cellar instead of sand in the mortar.
The long-established common-law doctrine of “ancient lights”—the right to unobstructed windows and access to air and light—was usually ignored. Rear tenements routinely had no windows in the rear or side walls, and were overshadowed on every side by taller, close-packed buildings. The windows and doors of one five-story tenement off Roosevelt Street were one short stride away from the featureless, blank brick wall of the neighboring building. No trace of sunlight ever penetrated the alley. Halfway up Roosevelt Street was a dark, narrow alley, ending in a blank wall—“Slaughter Alley,” though no map of New York ever carried that name.18 It was dark even in daylight, and the stones underfoot were slimy and strewn with refuse. At the far end a low doorway opened onto a black, stinking hallway—Stephen Crane’s description of a hallway “blacker than a wolf’s throat” could have been coined with this place in mind. It led to unlit stairs that had rotted through in places. There were gaps in the handrails, and the walls and ceilings were black with filth. Some rooms had a little natural light; others were in permanent, stygian darkness.
Such tenements crawled with humanity, as many as four hundred people, sometimes even more, crowded into a single building. Rents were fixed high enough to cover dilapidation and damage by tenants, and to help pay the rent, almost every family found room for two to ten boarders who often slept in rotation in beds that never went cold. One room, twelve feet square with only two beds and no partitions, screens, or even a table, was found to be home to five families—twenty people of both sexes and all ages.
All the occupants of a tenement might have to share a single foul and overflowing earth closet, and children and adults alike often defecated in dark corners, alleyways, and cellars. In some tenements the only source of water was the hydrant in the yard, and the always fickle water supply often gave out altogether. Even when the water was flowing, two million New Yorkers were at risk of cholera because the supply was contaminated by sewage.
In winter the tenement roofs leaked water, and drafts whistled through walls that were little more barrier to the cold than were the thin clothes and rags their inhabitants wore. In bitter weather, when icicles dangled from every fire escape and tenement roof, and the horse cars and the trains of the elevated railway froze to the rails, some tenement dwellers simply froze to death.
In summer, the tenements sweltered. Whole buildings seemed to sweat as condensation formed on every wall, and the stench—always terrible, even in the depths of winter frosts—reached new heights of toxicity, flowing up from the sewers, privies, and yards and filling the halls, stairwells, and airshafts like a rising tide. The tenements were so baking hot that thousands of people slept out on roofs, fire escapes, sidewalks, or any level space they could find, until it was “almost impossible to pass along without stepping on a human body.”19 People turning over in their sleep sometimes rolled off the roofs or window ledges on which they were lying and plunged to their deaths.
Winter or summer, the noise of the tenements was unending and inescapable: the wailing of hungry babies; the tramping of feet over uneven, uncarpeted wooden boards; the slamming of flimsy doors; and always the voices, often raised in rancor, drunken, pugnacious, words punctuated by the sounds of punches, kicks, and screams. In the rare moments of relative quiet, the creak of timbers could be heard, as if the tenement itself was groaning under the weight of human misery it had to bear. There was “no waste in these tenements.20 Lives, like clothes, are worn through and out before put aside.”
These anthills of humanity were more densely populated than anywhere on Earth, with 290,000 people to the square mile; the comparable figure for the worst of the London slums was 175,000. Even these figures masked still worse overcrowding; a single block on Houston Street contained 3,500 people, equivalent to 1 million to the square mile, making it “the most crowded block, in the most crowded neighborhood in the world.”21
While their tenants struggled to survive, slum landlords like the Astors made fortunes. Witnesses before a Senate committee declared 40 percent to be a fair average annual return on a tenement, and instances were cited of more than 100 percent being achieved.22 It was one of the blacker ironies of New York life that rents per square foot were from a quarter to a third higher on the Lower East Side than in the most fashionable uptown districts.
Those without the means to rent a room of their own hired lodgings that descended in stages from the relative respectability of the twenty-eight cents that secured a bed for a night in a moderately clean room shared by no more than a handful of others, and perhaps with a curtain or flimsy screen to give a little privacy. At the lower end of the range, the seven-cent lodging gave the right to sleep “packed in like herrings” in a filthy cellar on bare wooden benches or strips of dirty canvas strung between wooden rails arranged in two or three tiers.23 If seven cents was too much, “one may sleep on the floor for five cents a spot, or squat in a sheltered hallway for three.” Those unable to pay even that amount could seek shelter in police “lodging rooms”: basements where the bed was “the soft side of a plank.” In the bitter winter of 1896, sixty thousand homeless people—known as “revolvers” because they were forbidden to sleep more than one or two nights a month in any one police station and had to keep moving on night after night—used these police basements.
Even worse, at the very bottom of the abyss were the two-cents-a-night “stale beer dives”: roach-infested, dank, stinking cellars with a floor of hardened mud. Sometimes a single gas jet gave a flickering light, casting black, malevolent shadows into the corners where sleeping bodies were littered. A faint, leathery rustle in the rare moments of silence showed that the walls and ceilings were alive with cockroaches. In other cellars there was no light at all, and no air, just a reek so foul that it had an almost physical presence. When they crept into the light of day, the denizens of such dwellings were as white and noisome as maggots emerging from a carcass.
The proprietors of these foul establishments sold beer slops drained from the bottoms of barrels left out on the sidewalk for the brewers’ drays. The stolen slops were then “touched up with drugs to put a froth on it” and “needled”—adulterated—with barely palatable and often poisonous ingredients like grain alcohol, camphor, benzene, or metal polish, to give them an extra “kick.”24 Some dives were known as “block and fall joints” because those who drank their rotgut booze wouldn’t get more than a block before falling in the gutter, and on Bayard Street there was a notorious “tumbler” dive where stale beer was sold cut with a spirit—allegedly whiskey—so potent that men would often collapse before they’d finished their drink. In many dives, the dregs of drinks, together with “the washin
gs of the bar and the rinsings of the cloths with which it is wiped,” were thrown into a tub and sold as “dog’s-nose,” “all-sorts,” or “swipes.” Two cents bought a mug of this filthy brew and the opportunity to slump with your head on a table as rank as its surroundings. Boards placed on the tops of beer kegs served as seats. Underneath were those too drunk to sit or stand. Few people ever hauled themselves back from such depths as these.
Along with the dirt went depravity, and nowhere more so than on the most notorious thoroughfare in America: the Bowery. Broadway and the Bowery offered similar entertainments—dancing, drinking, gambling, and sex—but while Broadway was “the theater of the bourgeoisie,” catering to wealthier patrons in discreet, opulent surroundings, the Bowery was “the circus of the masses … the street of amusement for all of the Lower East Side.”25 Well-to-do “shimmers” from uptown also “explored the Bowery, as those of a later fashion went into the South Seas,” and street-arabs would accost passengers arriving at Grand Central and offer to “show you the Bowery for a dollar, mister.”
In the Bowery, everything was on display, everything was on sale—cheap—and everyone from the rubbernecking tourist to the bum with a few cents in his pocket was equally welcome, and equally vulnerable to the bottom-feeders who prowled sidewalks and alleys in search of prey. Even newsboys often doubled as pickpockets, brandishing a paper in a streetcar passenger’s face and using the distraction to pick his pocket or steal his watch and chain. One bragged that “if you will stand for a newspaper under your chin, I can even get your socks.”26 By 1905 even the Grand Street streetcar conductors were rifling passengers’ pockets.
Packed with humanity at all hours, the Bowery came into its own after dark, when it was ablaze with light from end to end, “the most brilliantly lighted thoroughfare on this planet.”27 In the glare of the lights, newsboys and shoeblacks jostled with street peddlers hawking everything from hair oil, trinkets, and fake cologne to the sheet music of the latest popular tunes and paper cups full of ice cream. Children dodged around them, earning pennies or candy for distributing the cards of prostitutes. Making their way among them all, almost unnoticed, were the sandwich-board men, usually alcoholic or otherwise destitute men bearing advertising boards that often emphasized their own dereliction: “An anemic, hollow-eyed, gaunt-bodied man carrying the announcement of a good dinner,” or a man dressed in rags advertising a warm winter overcoat.
Fourteenth Street was the haunt of a number of fortune-tellers, attractive young women with caged songbirds trained to pick up in their beaks one of a score of envelopes containing horoscopes. Nearby, street organ players ground out popular songs and snatches of opera, and silhouette artists, ragmen, and beggars also added their voices to the clamor and bustle of the streets. Overhead, forests of pictorial signs offered New York’s polyglot inhabitants wordless advertisements for a multitude of goods and trades.
The crowds filling the sidewalks also had a stream of handbills thrust at them and were continually accosted by ropers-in, barkers, cappers, and steerers, whose pitches “combined elements of the carny barker’s routine and the preacher’s harangue, the confidence man’s patter and a sort of stream-of-consciousness poetry.”28 They tried to lure passersby into fake auction rooms, shooting galleries, tattoo parlors, gambling dens, “free and easys”—confusingly, a term for both a whorehouse and a place where boxing bouts were staged—and dance halls, where a dime bought a dance and almost anything else was available for the right amount.
The dime museums were emblazoned with richly painted signs promising exotic wonders to delight the most jaded palate: mermaids, giants, pygmies, wild men, cannibals, and tattooed ladies—a thinly veiled pretext for the display of semi-naked female flesh.29 Tourists were warned to avoid such places, as the illustrated advertisements were always far more lavish than the dismal reality that confronted the patron who had parted with his cash. “Palming” and shortchanging were routine; hulking figures—often Monk’s gang members—with scarred knuckles and clubs or weighted lengths of pipe protruding from their pockets ensured that few asked for a refund and fewer still got one. Those who pressed their complaints too far might have had need of the services of the “black-eye fixers,” whose self-explanatory trade was itself testament to the rough-and-ready habits of the Bowery’s vast, transient population.
The gin palaces and saloons of the Bowery itself, the bucket shops, dives, and opium dens in the side streets, and “Cocaine Row”—Third Avenue from Twelfth to Sixteenth streets—offered intoxication to patrons of all means and circumstances.30 In the Eleventh Precinct there was not a block that was not lined with “dives and houses of assignation without number,” and cigar stores and cider mills that were also thinly disguised brothels. There were gaming clubs guarded by locked doors with sliding panels for the inspection of potential patrons, low gambling dens and on-street card games played in the shadow of the elevated railways. Few people left the lower-grade gambling den to which ropers-in had brought them without leaving most or all of their money behind. Those reluctant to gamble heavily were plied with drink until their inhibitions faded, and any still resistant would be rendered insensible with drink, drugs—chloral hydrate “knockout drops” were particularly popular—or a blunt implement, and their pockets emptied.31 A carriage was then summoned to a nearby street and the unconscious victim dumped in an uptown doorway. If he was doubly unlucky he was taken in by the police, charged with drunkenness, and, without the money to pay a fine, might end up in jail on Blackwell’s Island for a ten-day stretch. Other men, less fortunate even than these, might simply disappear, their bloated bodies hauled from the East River some days later.
The bright lights of the Bowery merely served to throw the surrounding side streets into even deeper shade, and there, where the glow of the lights faded into darkness, began the sprawl of lodging houses and tenements. There was a New York saying, “The nearer the river, the nearer to hell,” and the dismal districts bordering the East River showed that there was some justification for it, especially after night had fallen.32 Pearl Street had once been the riverfront and the home of rich merchants, but over the decades, as New York’s restless, relentless expansion continued, piers were pushed out farther and farther and the docks were filled in and built over, giving birth in turn to Water Street, Front Street, and, finally, South Street.
Between Water Street and the East River, from the Brooklyn Bridge as far as James Street, was all reclaimed land, damp, inhospitable, and prone to flooding at high tides. The floors of sixteen basements and cellars, home to nineteen families—110 people—were below the high-water mark; as well as the damp, the contents of neighboring privies frequently oozed through the walls.33 Rats swarmed everywhere; then as now, there were more rats than people in New York.
Along the waterfront, the air of purpose and industry did not spread far beyond Water Street even by day, and at dusk the riverside districts were abandoned to the denizens of the night. Iron gates clanged shut as dockworkers, longshoremen, porters, and factory workers made for home or for the saloons, and only the distant rumble of the elevated trains broke the silence of the deserted streets. On the Lower East Side, however, the end of the working day merely marked a transition point; as some left, others emerged to take their places, people whose natural habitat was the night-darkened street. On every corner, standing around the saloons and lurking in the side streets, were whores and their pimps, drunks, nook-and-corner men, robbers, hustlers and con men, pickpockets and street toughs, predatory as rats, all seeking marks.
The East River, lined by the rows of black hulls and the forest of masts piercing the river mist, was the scene of a constant losing battle fought by night watchmen to guard their cargoes against the endless depredations of thieves and smugglers. The riverbank was lined by warehouses and machine shops, but behind them lay a network of narrow lanes and squalid tenements where the gangs of river thieves based themselves. The streets were unlit, and the occasional yellow glow of light fro
m a saloon only stained the surrounding darkness a deeper black.
In the side streets, cock-pits vied for trade with rat-pits, dog-pits, and yards where bare-knuckle fights were staged. Rat-baiting and dog- and cockfighting were so popular that the price of admission was usually greater than for an illegal prizefight. A typical rat-pit, often housed in a basement, was lit by a single dim bulb above a dirt ring, with five-foot wooden walls, the lower part clad in zinc. Surrounding it were rough wooden bleachers. Bets were placed on the speed with which a terrier could dispose of a set number of rats, and there was never any shortage of the raw material for the patrons’ sport. The stench that filled such rooms suggested that the bodies of dead rats and dogs were routinely disposed of in the dirt beneath the bleachers.
Few strangers ever strayed into these districts, safe havens for criminals and vagrants and clapped-out whores, far gone in alcoholism or addiction, for whom this riverside district was often the last step on a downward spiral that would end in the river itself. The speed of their decline was shocking. One policeman, speaking in 1909, talked of “generations” of prostitutes; by a generation he meant just two years.34
3
AS A POOL REFLECTS THE SKY
This “modern Gomorrah,” a crime-ridden sink of crumbling tenements, brothels, and dives, worse than the meanest old-world slums, was the Lower East Side kingdom Monk Eastman had set himself to conquer.1 His rise to power depended on no single incident, but more on a long, slow process of attrition. Monk’s gang warfare began with genuine or manufactured provocations and incidents on the frontiers separating his territory from that of rival gangs. Disputes, small fights, and regular incursions would follow in a steady escalation that eventually led either to a series of humiliating retreats by his rivals or an all-out gang war and their complete elimination. Monk was also enough of a skilled diplomat to build alliances with some potential rivals and isolate others.
