The Gangs of New York Read online

  The Original Tombs

  Fish abounded in the waters of the Collect, and as the Indians were dispossessed from their hunting grounds and driven northward to the main land, the pond became such a favorite resort of fishermen that conser"ations measures were necessary, and in 1732 a law was passed prohibiting the use of nets. During this same year Anthony Rutger obtained a grant of seventy-five acres of marsh lands lying on either side of the principal outlet stream, agreeing to drain the area within a year and throw it open to settlement. He opened a canal from the pond to the Hudson River, but dug it so deep that the waters of the Collect were appreciably lowered, and sportsmen complained that the fish were dying. Compelled to fill up the drain for thirty feet from the edge of the pond, Rutger abandoned his scheme, and no further important efforts at reclamation were made for almost seventy-five years. In 1791 the city purchased all claim to the grant from the Rutger heirs, paying about seven hundred dollars for property now worth at least that many millions.

  But Rutger’s attempt at drainage had reclaimed a considerable area, and as the population of the city increased, and the lower end of the island became more and more crowded, many middle and lower class families began building their homes along the borders of the pond and swamp. In 1784 these colonies had become so large and so numerous that the city authorities appointed a committee to lay out the streets in the vicinity of the Collect, and in 1796 tried unsuccessfully to induce the property holders to cooperate in a scheme to drain the pond through a forty-foot canal. In 1802 Jacob Brown, then Street Commissioner, officially recommended that the Collect be drained and filled, pointing out that it had been fouled by vast quantities of refuse, and was a menace to health. But his proposal was rejected, and nothing was done for six years.

  During the winter of 1807-1808 business in New York was almost suspended because of the frightful inclemency of the weather and the unsettled condition of foreign affairs, and the poorer classes, thrown out of employment, were on the verge of starvation. In January 1808 a mob led by sailors whose ships lay idle in the harbor made a demonstration in City Hall Park, and surged through the streets displaying placards demanding bread and work. Alarmed at the temper of the mob, the city authorities made an appropriation for filling the Collect and draining the marsh lands, and the first important public improvement in the history of the city was thus begun. Great gangs of workmen levelled the hills east and west of Broadway, and the earth was dumped into the pond as the waters drained through canals which had been opened to both the Hudson and East Rivers. Several years later, when the earth had settled sufficiently, the streets which had been laid out along the swamp were extended through the site of the pond, and the entire area was thrown open to settlers. The first thoroughfare across the Collect was Collect street, which ran in almost a direct line north and south through the center of the filled-in district. In later years it was called Rynders street, in honor of Captain Isaiah Rynders, political boss of the Sixth Ward and as such the patron and protector of the Five Points gangs. For almost fifty years the thoroughfare was lined with brothels and saloons, and was one of the wickedest sections of the city. Its name was changed to Centre street when the dives were closed and the rehabilitation of the Five Points begun. In recent years the spelling has been altered to Center.

  THE original Five Points was formed by the intersection of Cross, Anthony, Little Water, Orange and Mulberry streets, which debouched into a triangular area about an acre in extent. In the center of this area was a small park called Paradise Square, which was later surrounded by a paling fence. Eventually the fence became a community clothesline, and was generally disfigured by garments hung upon the palings to dry, while small boys, armed with brickbats and staves, stood guard. In the course of years, as the city developed and undertook new building projects, the routes of many of the Five Points streets were altered, and the physical characteristics of the entire district underwent considerable change, as did the manners and customs of its inhabitants. Anthony street was extended to Chatham Square and became the present Worth street. Orange became Baxter, and Cross bloomed anew as Park street. Little Water street vanished altogether, and Paradise Square became the southwest corner of Mulberry Park, which has been called Columbus Park since 1911. The section now known as Five Points is the intersection of Baxter, Worth and Park streets.

  Paradise Square was about the only part in the city where the poor were welcome, and while the aristocrats and the wealthy merchants promenaded Broadway and City Hall Park and held high revel in the gardens of Cherry Hill, the commoners flocked to the Points for their recreation and their breath of fresh air. The Square and the surrounding district thus became the Coney Island of the period, and the resort of sailors, oystermen, laborers and small-salaried clerks. The aristocrats of the Points were the butchers, for these gentry were then the great sports of the city; they were hard drinkers and high-livers, demanding full-blooded entertainment. One of their engaging diversions was bullbaiting, a live bull being chained to a swivel ring and tormented by dogs. The principal scene of this sport was Bunker Hill, about a hundred feet north of the present line of Grand street, near Mulberry, where the Americans erected a fort during the Revolution and defended it valiantly against the British troops under General Howe. After the war the Hill became a popular duelling ground and a place for mass meetings; in more recent times the gangs of the Five Points and the Bowery used it as a battleground. Early in the nineteenth century a Fly Market butcher named Winship built a fence within the old fortifications, and constructed an arena accommodating 2,000 persons. There bulls were baited before huge throngs of butchers and their guests, who wagered on the number of dogs the animals would gore. The burial vault of the Bayard family, prominent in colonial times, was on the southern end of the Hill, and when the mound was finally levelled the bones and bodies were removed. A hermit from the Points took possession of the vault and lived there for many years, a terror to the children of the district. He was eventually murdered.

  Dancing was the principal diversion during the early days of the Five Points, and scores of dance houses soon appeared on the streets surrounding Paradise Square. These places were the precursors of the modern night clubs and cabarets, although they lacked the ornateness of the present-day jazz palaces. Curtains of red bombazine ornamented the windows, the floors were sanded to afford a better footing for heavy boots, and the only seats were long benches set against the walls. From the ceilings hung lamps or hoop chandeliers filled with candles, whale oil and tallow being the only means of artificial illumination. Dancing was free so long as the customer bought an occasional glass of ale, porter, or beer at the bar in one corner of the room, and when a wandering Croesus bought drinks for the house he was all but given the freedom of the Points. The dance houses generally remained open until three o’clock in the morning, but during the first few years, at least, they were operated in an orderly manner. High spirited pleasure-seekers sometimes engaged in fist fights, and occasionally a brickbat sailed through the air and cracked a skull, but the man who drew a dirk or a pistol was quickly seized by the crowd and ducked in the Collect sewer, which was all that remained of the stream that once had coursed from the pond through Canal street. Little hard liquor was drunk, but the merry-makers consumed enormous quantities of malt beverages.

  The modern purveyors of hot dogs, peanuts and popcorn had their Five Points prototypes in the children and old Negro mammies who peddled mint, strawberries, radishes, and steaming hot yams, and in the Hot Corn Girls who offered piping hot roasting ears from cedar-staved buckets which hung from the hollows of their arms. Dressed in spotted calico and wrapped in a plaid shawl, but barefooted, the Hot Corn Girl appeared on the streets at dusk, and throughout the night she mingled with the crowds on the sidewalks and in the dance houses, hawking her wares and lifting her voice in song:

  Hot Corn! Hot Corn!

  Here’s your lily white corn.

  All you that’s got money—

  Poor me that’
s got none—

  Come buy my lily hot corn And let me go home.

  The Hot Corn Girl became one of the most romantic figures of the Five Points, and her favours were eagerly sought by the young bloods of the district, who fought duels over her and celebrated her beauty and sparkling wit in song and story. The earnings of the best-looking girls were considerable, and it soon became the custom for a Five Points hero with a loathing for labor to send his young and handsome wife into the street each night carrying a cedar bucket filled with roasting ears, while he cruised along in her wake and hurled brickbats at the young men who dared flirt with her. The first hanging in the Tombs grew out of such a situation. Edward Coleman, one of the original gangsters of Paradise Square, became enamoured of a young woman known throughout the Five Points as The Pretty Hot Corn Girl. He married her after fierce fights with a dozen protesting suitors, and finally murdered her when her earnings failed to meet his expectations. He was put to death in The Tombs on January 12,1839, soon after its completion.

  DURING the first ten or fifteen years of its history the Five Points was thus fairly decent and comparatively peaceful. Throughout the greater part of this period one watchman, his head encased in the leather helmet which gave the New York policeman his early name of Leatherhead, was sufficient to preserve order; but it was not long before a regiment would have been unable to cope with the turbulent citizenry of Paradise Square, and rout the gangsters and other criminals from their dens and burrows. The character of the district began to change for the worse about 1820. Many of the old tenements began to crumble or sink into the imperfectly drained swamp, and became unsafe for occupancy; and the malarial odors and vapors arising from the marsh lands made the whole area dangerous to health. The respectable families abandoned the clap-boarded monstrosities for other parts of Manhattan Island, and their places were taken, for the most part, by freed Negro slaves and low-class Irish, who had swarmed into New York on the first great wave of immigration which followed the Revolution and the establishment of the Republic. They crowded indiscriminately into the old rookeries of the Points, and by 1840 the district had become the most dismal slum section in America. In the opinion of contemporary writers it was worse than the Seven Dials and Whitechapel districts of London.

  At this time the Sixth Ward comprised about eighty-six acres, but the greater part of the land was occupied by business houses, and almost the entire population of the ward was massed about the Paradise Square section and in the area, later famous as Mulberry Bend, immediately north and slightly east of the Five Points. Thousands eked out a wretched existence in the garrets and damp cellars with which the district abounded, and the bulk of the population was in the most abject poverty, devoting itself almost exclusively to vice and crime. The Irish were overwhelmingly in the majority, a census conducted by the Five Points House of Industry about the time of the Civil War fixing the number of Irish families at 3,435, while the next in number were the Italians with 416. There were but 167 families of native American stock, and seventy-three which had recently come from England. More than 3,000 people huddled in Baxter street from Chatham to Canal, a distance of less than half a mile, and one lot in that street, twenty-five by one hundred feet, held slums which sheltered 286 persons. Around the Points and Paradise Square were 270 saloons, and several times that number of blind tigers, dance halls, houses of prostitution and green-groceries which sold more wet goods than vegetables.

  “Let us go on again, and plunge into the Five Points,” wrote Charles Dickens in his American Notes, “This is the place; these narrow ways diverging to the right and left, and reeking everywhere with dirt and filth. Such Uves as are led here, bear the same fruit here as elsewhere. The coarse and bloated faces at the doors have counterparts at home and all the whole world over. Debauchery has made the very houses prematurely old. See how the rotten beams are tumbling down, and how the patched and broken windows seem to scowl dimly, like eyes that have been hurt in drunken frays. Many of these pigs live here. Do they ever wonder why their masters walk upright instead of going on all-fours, and why they talk instead of grunting?

  “So far, nearly every house is a low tavern, and on the bar-room walls are colored prints of Washington and Queen Victoria, and the American Eagle. Among the pigeon-holes that hold the bottles, are pieces of plate glass and colored paper, for there is in some sort a taste for decoration even here. And as seamen frequent these haunts, there are maritime pictures by the dozen; of partings between sailors and their lady-loves; portraits of William of the ballad and his black-eyed Susan; of Will Watch, the bold smuggler; of Paul Jones, the pirate, and the like; on which the painted eyes of Queen Victoria, and of Washington to boot, rest in as strange companionship as on most of the scenes that are enacted in their wondering presence.

  “Open the door of one of these cramped hutches full of sleeping Negroes. Bah! They have a charcoal fire within, there is a

  A Five Points Den

  smell of singeing clothes or flesh, so close they gather round the brazier; and vapours issue forth that blind and suffocate. From every corner, as you glance about you in these dark streets, some figure crawls half-awakened, as if the judgment hour were near at hand, and every obscure grave were giving up its dead. Where dogs would howl to lie men and women and boys slink off to sleep, forcing the dislodged rats to move away in quest of better lodgings. Here, too, are lanes and alleys paved with mud knee-deep; underground chambers where they dance and game; the walls bedecked with rough designs of ships, of forts, and flags, and American Eagles out of number; ruined houses, open to the street, whence through wide gaps in the walls other ruins loom upon the eye, as though the world of vice and misery had nothing else to show; hideous tenements which take their names from robbery and murder; all that is loathsome, drooping and decayed is here.”

  The most notorious street in early New York was Little Water, a very short thoroughfare which ran from Cross street across the base of Paradise Square to Cow Bay. The latter was so named because the site was once a small bay in the old Collect, to which farmers drove their cattle for water. During the palmy days of the Five Points district Cow Bay was a cul de sac, some thirty feet wide at the mouth and narrowing unevenly to a point about a hundred feet from the entrance. This dark and dismal alley, which was generally filled with filth above the shoe-tops, was lined on either side by clapboarded tenements from one to five stories in height, many of which were connected by underground passages where robberies and murders were committed and victims buried. One of the tenements was called Jacob’s Ladder, because it was entered from the outside by a rickety, dangerous flight of stairs. Another rejoiced in the name of Gates of Hell. A third was known as Brick-Bat Mansion.

  ‘Tf you would see Cow Bay,” says a book called Hot Corn, published in 1854, “saturate your handkerchief with camphor, so that you can endure the horrid stench, and enter. Grope your way through the long, narrow passage—^turn to the right, up the dark and dangerous stairs; be careful where you place your foot around the lower step, or in the corners of the broad stairs, for it is more than shoe-mouth deep of steaming filth. Be careful, too, or you may meet someone, perhaps a man, perhaps a woman, who in their drunken frenzy may thrust you, for the very hatred of your better clothes, or the fear that you have come to rescue them from their crazy loved dens of death, down, headlong down, those filthy stairs. Up, up, winding up, five stories high, now you are under the black smoky roof; turn to your left—^take care and not upset that seething pot of butcher’s offal soup that is cooking upon a little furnace at the head of the stairs—open that door—go in, if you can get in. Look: here is a Negro and his wife sitting upon the floor—^where else could they sit, for there is no chair—eating their supper off the bottom of a pail. A broken brown earthen jug holds water—perhaps not all water. Another Negro and his wife occupy another corner; a third sits in the window monopolizing all the air astir. In another corner, what do we see? A Negro man and a stout, hearty, rather good-looking young white woma
n. Not sleeping together? No, not exactly that—there is no bed in the room—no chair—no table—no nothing but rags, and dirt, and vermin, and degraded, rum-degraded human beings.”

  THE Old Brewery was the heart of the Five Points, and was the most celebrated tenement building in the history of the city. It was called Coulter’s Brewery when it was erected in 1792 on the banks of the old Collect, and the beer brewed there was famous throughout the eastern states. It became known simply as the Old Brewery after it had been transformed into a dwelling in 1837, having become so dilapidated that it could no longer be used for its original purpose. It was five stories in height,(2) and had once been painted yellow, but time and weather soon peeled off much of the paint and ripped away many of the clapboards, so that it came to resemble nothing so much as a giant toad, with dirty, leprous warts, squatting happily in the filth and squalor of the Points. Around the building extended an alley, about three feet wide on the southern side, but on the north of irregular width, gradually tapering to a point. The northern path led into a great room called the Den of Thieves, in which more than seventy-five men, women and children, black and white, made their homes, without furniture or conveniences. Many of the women were prostitutes, and entertained their visitors in the Den. On the opposite side the passageway was known as Murderers’ Alley, and was all that the name implies. Many historians have confused it with another Murderers’ Alley—also known as Donovan’s Lane, in Baxter street not far from the Points, where the famous one-eyed pickpocket and confidence man, George Appo, son of a Chinese father and an Irish mother, lived for many years.