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. The building was already old by then, put up around 1773 for the sea captain Joseph Rose. In 1868 Burns rented the pit to revival preachers, and for a time clerks crowded the benches above the dog ring to pray; Mark Twain described the scene for a California newspaper.
The end came in November 1870, when police, urged on by Henry Bergh of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, raided an advertised rat fight and charged Burns under the state's anti-cruelty law. He died of illness within weeks, in December 1870. The house went on as a saloon, a warehouse and finally a shell, gutted by fire in 1974 and taken by the city for back taxes. In 1997 it was sold for one dollar and rebuilt as apartments, and it is counted among the oldest buildings in Manhattan.
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40.7085, -74.0011
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