The Epic of New York City (39 page)

N
EW
Y
ORK
C
ITY
was “the tongue that is lapping up the cream of commerce and finance of a continent,” as Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes expressed it, but this meant nothing to Rosanna Peers. She sold rotten vegetables.

Produce was scarce and costly that booming year of 1826. Early vegetables had not yet reached here from the South, and nobody ate tomatoes because they were considered poisonous. Rosanna Peers displayed brown-streaked cabbages and tattered lettuce outside her ramshackle shop on the northern side of what is now Foley Square, but they were a cover-up. Her real business was conducted in a dingy back room, where she sold rotgut rum for less than it cost in saloons.
Lacking a liquor license, she had taken her blind piggy to market.

It was in Rosanna Peers' back room that the city's first organized gang came into existence. Called the Forty Thieves, it was led by Edward Coleman. All day long and half the night he sprawled in Rosanna's hideaway, dispatching henchmen to the nearby slum area to slug, steal, rob, and kill. Rosanna's place also bred the city's second gang, the Kerryonians, whose members had been born in County Kerry, Ireland. Less ferocious than the Forty Thieves, the Kerryonians seldom ventured far from Rosanna's and did little fighting, devoting themselves mainly to hating the British.

For the next century the gangs of New York terrorized the city, waged hundreds of street battles, and won the community the reputation of the most wicked city in the world. Except for a few freed slaves hanging about their fringes, the first gangs consisted almost entirely of Irishmen. The Irish, arriving in droves, lacked money and education and skills. They were met with contempt by native New Yorkers and welcomed only in the city's worst slum—the Five Points district.

A squalid area lying northeast of the present New York County Courthouse, Five Points was formed by the intersection of five streets—Anthony, Orange, Cross, Little Water, and Mulberry. Today Anthony is Worth Street, Orange is Baxter Street, Cross is Park Street. Vanished altogether is Little Water Street. Only Mulberry Street has kept its original name. The Five Points opened onto a small triangular park with the cynical name of Paradise Square. Today this is the southwestern corner of Columbus Park.

Such was the core of what became the largest Irish community outside Dublin. The first ten or fifteen years of its existence the Five Points was fairly decent. The city had no day police, but by night a sole watchman was able to keep peace in the Five Points. He was paid $1.87½ cents a night and wore a fireman's leather helmet from which the frontpiece had been removed. Because of this, New York's cops once were called Leatherheads.

About 1820 the Five Points began to deteriorate. It stood on the site of the old Collect, or Fresh Water Pond, and the landfill hadn't been packed solidly enough. Buildings slowly sank into the moist soil, their doors springing on hinges and their façades cracking into wooden grins. Respectable families fled from the decay to better parts of the city, and the Irish moved in. Clannish by nature and shunned by native New Yorkers, the Irish clustered by the thousands in the
wretched rookeries, with their dank cellars and fetid garrets. Lacking other means of earning a living, the Irish carved out criminal careers.

The predominant landmark in the Five Points was the Old Brewery. It stood just behind what today is the New York County Courthouse. Erected in 1792 on the shore of the Collect and known at first as Coulter's Brewery, it produced beer that became famous in all the eastern states. Time, weather, and neglect reduced its five stories to ruins. In the words of Herbert Asbury, “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.” Converted into a multiple dwelling in 1837 but still called the Old Brewery, the monstrosity became the most infamous tenement in the city's history.

The murders, prostitution, perversion, drunkenness, brutality, thievery, and idleness in the Old Brewery and the Five Points were considered by native New Yorkers to be the natural condition of Irishmen. Philip Hone sniffingly noted in his diary that “they increase our taxes, eat our bread and encumber our streets, and not one in twenty is competent to keep himself.” Genteel citizens shrank with horror from an evil they refused to analyze. It took a British historian, James Bryce, to say of the Irish: “There is a disposition in the United States to use the immigrants, and especially the Irish, much as a cat is used in the kitchen to account for broken plates and foods which disappears [
sic
]. . . . New York was not an Eden before the Irish came.”

In 1826 John Jacob Astor, himself an immigrant, was paid $27,000 in rentals, but there is no evidence that he concerned himself about the plight of the poor Irish. Any son of Erin lucky enough to find a job was paid only 75 cents to $1.25 a day. Even so, this was better than life in the old country, where a laborer's wages ranged from 8 to 16 cents a day. Although rent and food were higher here, whiskey was cheaper—28 cents a gallon.

Unlike the Germans, who later arrived in family units, most Irish came as individuals. Thus, they lacked the tempering influence of family life. Besides, far from the public opinion of their native villages, uprooted Irishmen felt free of most moral restraints. Naturally, many decent and honest Irish settled here and later swelled the ranks of the city's police—“New York's Finest.” In 1826 the city held nearly 30,000 Catholics, most of them Irish immigrants. The three Catholic churches were run by only six priests, who couldn't begin to cope with their countrymen, although one brave old priest broke up
a Five Points riot by wading into the melee with a stole about his neck and a missal in his hand.

In the Five Points the root problems were ignorance, poverty, unemployment, ostracism, and political corruption. Churches and welfare agencies bewailed these conditions, but nothing was done to help the Irish until the late 1830's. Then it was too late, and by the 1840's the area had become the most vile slum on earth.

Gang leaders bore unmistakable Irish names—Farrell, Corcoran, Connolly, Ryan, Hurley, Doyle, and Hines. The gangs themselves were called the Patsy Conroys, O'Connell Guards, Bowery B'hoys, Chichesters, Roach Guards, Plug Uglies, Shirt Tails, Dead Rabbits, Adantic Guards, Daybreak Boys, Buckoos, Hookers, Swamp Angels, and Slaughter Housers.

New York's first gangs did not consist of teen-agers but of grown men. There were more and larger gangs than at present. Gangs of hundreds of men were commonplace; one numbered 1,200 members. Small gangs grouped together into constellations of gangs, led by a supreme chieftain commanding absolute loyalty. Undeniably the gangsters were brave, but their courage was due to ignorance, insensitivity, and booze. Every battle was a fight to the finish—no quarter asked and none given. Gang leader “Dandy Johnny” Dolan stuck blades in the soles of his boots to enhance the gore when he trampled an enemy. Dolan also invented copper wedges, which he wore on his thumbs to make it easier to gouge out eyes.

Thriving on excitement, gangsters often were cruel just for the sadistic fun of it. One strolled up to an old man sipping beer and hacked open his scalp with a huge bludgeon. Asked why, the ruffian replied, “Well, I had forty-nine nicks in me stick, an' I wanted to make it an even fifty.” Another plug-ugly seized a stranger and cracked his spine in three places just to win a two-dollar bet.

Themselves the victims of unhealthy slums, gang members averaged only 5 feet 3 inches in height and weighed between 120 and 135 pounds. But their bloody exploits created a legend, a bigger-than-life folk hero, like Paul Bunyan of the American Northwest and John Henry of the Mississippi River. This mythical figure, allegedly 8 feet tall, was called Mose, and a play entitled
Mose, the Bowery B'hoy
was first performed in 1849 at the old Olympic Theatre.

Among lowlifes the proper etiquette was to distinguish between American sons of bitches and Irish sons of bitches. To the non-Irish nearly every Irishman was known as “a damned Paddy.” This hostility
between native New Yorkers and Irish Catholic immigrants degenerated into the dangerous, superpatriotic, spread-eagle Know-Nothing movement. It was true that many liquor-loving Irishmen became drunk and disorderly, but native-born cops were quick to arrest them when they would have helped home an equally drunk and disorderly native American. For this reason the era's crime statistics may be distorted.

The contempt felt by most native New Yorkers for the Irish was not shared by Tammany Hall. In the beginning, what Irish Catholics sought from politics was not power but protection. Tammany, now an arm of the Democratic party organized in 1828, was eager to provide protection—at a price. Tammany helped Irishmen get their naturalization papers before the end of the waiting period. Whenever a gang leader got into trouble, a Tammany lawyer appeared for him in court, and a Tammany bondsman put up his bail. Tammany pulled strings to obtain licenses for the many Irishmen seeking to open saloons. If cops cracked down on Irish-owned bars and brothels, Tammany bribed key officials and arranged immunity from further raids. All Tammany asked in return was that the Irish prove their gratitude by voting Democratic regularly and even repeatedly. As a result of this interest in their welfare, the Irish gave Tammany fierce loyalty.

Because unskilled Irish competed for jobs with free Negroes, the sons of Erin had no love for colored men. Themselves persecuted, the Irish helped persecute Negroes and denounced the growing movement to abolish slavery. Effective in 1808, Congress forbade the importation of slaves into the United States. The ban was flouted by New York shipowners and others. In 1817 the American Colonization Society was formed to oust troublesome Negroes by settling them in Liberia, but the plan wasn't much of a success. Only 6,000 colored people were sent to Africa—a drop in the bucket, considering that in 1820 the South contained nearly 1,500,000 slaves, to say nothing of the free Negroes scattered throughout the North.

A state law, passed in 1817, abolished slavery in New York State as of July 4, 1827. The following autumn Judge William Jay alluded to this emanciption in his charge to a Westchester County grand jury:

Philip Hone, the diarist and onetime mayor, was less optimistic. To his diary he confided: “The terrible abolition question is fated, I fear, to destroy the union of our states, and to endanger the peace and happiness of our western world.”

New York's freed Negroes had no easy time of it. Most were manual laborers. Some managed small stores, fruitshops, oyster stands, and barbershops. All were excluded from the white man's churches and theaters. The nation's first Negro newspaper,
Freedom's Journal,
was established here in 1827 by Samuel E. Cornish and John Brown Russwurm, but it expired after three years. Small white boys solemnly told one another that if you kicked a Negro's shins, his nose would bleed.

Also in 1827, the New York
Journal of Commerce
was founded, in part as an abolitionist newspaper. It was created by Arthur Tappan, who, with his younger brother, Lewis, gained notoriety as one of the city's leading abolitionists. Both had been born in Northampton, Massachusetts, of solid Puritan stock and with starched Puritanical consciences. The Tappan brothers got their start in business by selling dry goods in Boston; but in 1814 Arthur moved to New York, and in 1827 he was followed by Lewis. They made a fortune with their dry-goods importing house, located on Hanover Square.

Sympathetic though they were to oppressed Negroes, the Tappan brothers acted like martinets toward their white employees. Any worker who smoked, played cards, or attended the theater was fired out of hand. Both Arthur and Lewis refused to keep chairs in their offices, for they felt that business would be conducted more briskly if visitors had no place to sit down. Yet Arthur was so ardent an abolitionist that he sank $30,000 into the
Journal of Commerce.
Later he sold the paper, which soon veered to the side of those favoring slavery.

It was remarkable that two wealthy merchants, such as the Tappan brothers should urge an end to slavery, for most businessmen considered the idea both foolish and dangerous. They were concerned
more with profits than with principles. One New York businessman frankly said to an abolitionist minister: