Local Stories in New York
16 places
History
Bandits' Roost
Bandits' Roost was an alley off the west side of Mulberry Street, in the block once called Mulberry Bend and now Columbus Park. It is remembered through a single photograph from 1888: a narrow, washing-hung passage with men in bowlers and slouch hats staring at the camera, published by Jacob Riis in How the Other Half Lives in 1890.
Entertainment
Kit Burns's Rat Pit
In the 1860s the house at 273 Water Street held Sportsmen's Hall, where Christopher Keyburn, known as Kit Burns, ran the best known animal-fighting ring in New York. Around a fenced wooden pit, a crowd of two hundred or more sat on rough benches and bet on how fast a terrier could kill a pen of wharf rats. A stuffed dog named Jack, credited with a hundred rats in under seven minutes, was kept over the bar, and Burns's son-in-law, Richard Toner, would bite the heads off rats for paying customers.
History
Martling's Long Room
The Tammany Society, which grew into New York's most famous political machine, spent its first political years in the back room of a wooden tavern at the corner of Nassau and Spruce Streets, then called George Street. The tavern belonged to Abraham Martling. From about 1798 the society's members gathered in its Long Room, at the back, and became known around town as Martling Men. The building was low, unpainted and rough, and Tammany's enemies called it the Pig Pen.
History
Plunkitt's Bootblack Stand
George Washington Plunkitt, a Tammany Hall district leader and former state senator, kept no office. According to the newspaperman William Riordon, his headquarters was the bootblack stand in the New York County Courthouse on Chambers Street, the building now called the Tweed Courthouse. There, Riordon wrote, he received his constituents, transacted his business and poured forth his philosophy.
History
The 1920 Bomb Scars
The pitted stone on the Wall Street front of 23 Wall Street was made at one minute past noon on 16 September 1920. A horse-drawn wagon standing across from J.P. Morgan and Company exploded, carrying about a hundred pounds of dynamite and five hundred pounds of cast-iron sash weights. Thirty-eight people died, most of them young messengers, clerks and stenographers on their lunch hour, and well over a hundred were seriously hurt. Damage ran past two million dollars.
History
The Barge Office
Twice in the 1890s the front door to America was a customs building at the foot of Whitehall Street, on the east edge of Battery Park. The Barge Office, a granite Romanesque building with towers designed by James G. Hill and finished in 1882, was built for customs inspectors to check the baggage of steamship passengers. When Castle Garden closed in April 1890, immigrants were landed and examined at the Barge Office instead, until Ellis Island opened on 1 January 1892.
History
The Barrel Murder
Early on the morning of 14 April 1903 a woman walking to work found a man's body stuffed into a sugar barrel among the lumber outside the New York Mallet and Handle Company at 743 East Eleventh Street, near Avenue D. His throat had been cut almost through. The victim was Benedetto Madonia of Buffalo, whose brother-in-law was in Sing Sing for passing counterfeit five-dollar notes.
History
The Bloody Angle
The sharp bend in Doyers Street, a crooked lane about two hundred feet long between Pell Street and Chatham Square, was known by 1910 as the Bloody Angle. In the first years of the twentieth century two Chinatown associations, the On Leong tong under Tom Lee and the Hip Sing tong under Mock Duck, fought over the gambling and opium trade of Mott, Pell and Doyers Streets, and the blind corner was said to suit an ambush: a gunman could wait out of sight and be gone before anyone came round it.
Transport
The Bowery El
From 1878 until the middle 1950s the Bowery lay in the shadow of the Third Avenue elevated railway, the El, and the street's reputation as New York's skid row grew up underneath it. The line opened in August 1878, and its iron structure was built out over the sidewalks to clear the streetcar tracks already in the roadway, so that sooty steam locomotives rumbled a few feet from second-storey windows.
History
The Charities Pier
After the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 25 March 1911, the city morgue could not hold the dead. The bodies were carried by patrol wagon and ambulance to a covered pier at the foot of East 26th Street on the East River, the Charities Pier, which New Yorkers called Misery Lane. There, in two long rows of rough wooden coffins, lay the dead of a fire that killed 146 workers, 123 of them women and girls.
History
The Dead Rabbits Riot
On the evening of 4 July 1857 a street war broke out along Bayard Street between Mulberry Street and the Bowery, between the Bowery Boys and the Five Points men the newspapers called the Dead Rabbits. Estimates put the fighters at eight hundred to a thousand, with hundreds more who came to loot. Barricades went up across Bayard Street, bricks and paving stones came off the rooftops, and the fighting ran on into the next day. At least eight people were killed, and some historians count twelve.
History
The Lung Block
The Lung Block was the name the young writer Ernest Poole gave in 1903 to the tenement block bounded by Cherry, Catharine, Hamilton and Market Streets, near the East River. Writing for the Charity Organization Society's committee on tuberculosis, Poole counted nearly four thousand people on the block, about four hundred of them babies, and two hundred and sixty-five reported cases of tuberculosis in nine years, a number he believed was only half the true one.
History
The Old Brewery
The most notorious building in Five Points stood on the south side of Cross Street, facing the little triangle called Paradise Square, where the New York County Courthouse now rises on Centre Street. It was built in 1792 as Coulter's Brewery and turned into a tenement in 1837, and by the 1850s its passages were known as Murderer's Alley and the Den of Thieves. The Methodist women who bought it counted at least three hundred people living inside.
History
The Pig Market
In the 1890s Hester Street around Ludlow Street held the Lower East Side's great open-air market, which Jacob Riis called the Pig Market. He thought the name was given in derision, because pork was the one thing nobody sold there. On Thursday nights and Friday mornings, before the Sabbath, pushcarts lined Hester and spilled into the side streets for two or three blocks, selling chickens and geese, eggs, fruit, tin cups, spectacles, hats and suspenders.
History
The Street of Ships
In the first half of the nineteenth century South Street was known as the Street of Ships. From Coenties Slip to Roosevelt Street the East River piers were crowded with sailing vessels, and the bowsprits of the largest reached across the street and almost into the office windows on the far side, as the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission put it in 1968.
History
Wall Street Slave Market
In 1711 New York's Common Council ordered that enslaved Africans and Native Americans hired out by their owners be hired at the market house at the Wall Street slip, where the street then met the East River just east of Pearl Street. For the next fifty years the city's official market for enslaved labour stood at the foot of Wall Street.