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. The worst night came in August 1905 at the Chinese Theatre on Doyers Street, when Hip Sing men threw lit firecrackers into a crowded performance and shot into the On Leong members in the audience under cover of the noise. At least three men died.

The killings went on for years. The tongs signed a peace in May 1913, and fighting broke out again in 1924. The claim that more men were murdered at the bend than at any comparable spot in the world comes from Herbert Asbury's 1928 Gangs of New York, which credited it to unnamed police and offered no count, and it has been repeated ever since. The lane itself is older than Chinatown. Its curve is generally traced to an eighteenth-century distillery run by Hendrick Doyer, and the street still bears his name. Doyers Street is closed to cars today, and the Nom Wah Tea Parlor, which opened on the street in 1920, still serves dim sum at number 13.