EXILE ON BRIDGE STREET
A NOVEL BY
EAMON LOINGSIGH
VOLUME TWO OF THE AULD IRISHTOWN TRILOGY
THREE ROOMS PRESS
NEW YORK
*Best when read with J. S. Bach’s Suite for Solo Cello no. 2 in D Minor, BMV 1008 Sarabande
Lyrics from song “Haul Away Joe” (traditional) used in this book.
Lyrics from song “Old Fenian Gun” by P. O’Neill used in this book.
Lyrics from song “Dear Old Skibbereen” by Patrick Carpenter used in this book.
Words from medieval Requiem Mass hymn “Dies Irae” used in this book.
This book is fiction. Although many characters retain their original names and many events are historically accurate, the story as a whole is fiction.
Exile on Bridge Street
A NOVEL BY
Eamon Loingsigh
“Volume two of the Auld Irishtown Trilogy”
Copyright © 2016 by Eamon Loingsigh.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. For permissions, please write to address below or email [email protected]. Any members of education institutions wishing to photocopy or electronically reproduce part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Three Rooms Press, 561 Hudson Street, #33, New York NY 10014
ISBN 978-1-941110-42-3 (print)
ISBN 978-1-941110-43-0 (ebook)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016936894
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FOR UNCLE JIMMY “MAC”
A kind soul, unfairly treated
AULD IRISHTOWN CHARACTERS:
NARRATOR
William Garrity—Teenage Irish immigrant
THE WHITE HAND:
Dinny Meehan—Gang leader
The Swede—Enforcer
Vincent Maher—Enforcer
Tommy Tuohey—Irish traveler, enforcer
Lumpy Gilchrist—Accountant
Mickey Kane—Dinny’s cousin
DOCKBOSSES:
Wild Bill Lovett—Red Hook, old Jay Street Gang leader
Cinders Connolly—Jay & Fulton street terminals
Harry “The Shiv” Reynolds—Atlantic Avenue Terminal
Cute Charlie Red Donnolly—Navy Yard
John Gibney “The Lark”—Baltic Street Terminal
LONERGAN CREW:
Richie Lonergan—Leader
Abe Harms—German Jew, Richie’s right-hand
Petey Behan—Feuds with Liam Garrity
Matty Martin—Follower
Timothy Quilty—Follower
THE BLACK HAND:
Frankie Yale—Leader in Brooklyn
Jack & Sixto Stabile—Father & son owners of Adonis Social Club
Paul Vaccarelli—Old Five Points leader, ILA VP
INTERNATIONAL LONGSHOREMAN’S ASSOCIATION:
Thos Carmody—Recruiter
King Joe—VP, New York City
T. V. O’Connor—President
Henry Browne—ILA leader in the Navy Yard
Police:
William Brosnan—Detective
Daniel Culkin—Patrolman, son-in-law of Brosnan
Ferris—Patrolman
WATERFRONT ASSEMBLY:
Jonathan G. Wolcott—President
Silverman—Muscle
Wisniewski—Muscle
Vandeleurs—Landlord
OTHER GANG MEMBERS:
Big Dick Morissey—Gibney’s right-hand, muscle
Philip Large—Connolly’s right-hand, fool-mute
Paddy Keenan—Bartender, Minister of Education
Dance Gillen—Half black, half Irish, King of the Pan Dance
Chisel McGuire—Craps King of Ballyhoo
Needles Ferry—Drug addict
Ragtime Howard—Dock Loaders’ Club stalwart
Dago Tom Montague—Half Italian, half Irish
Non Connors—Lovett’s right-hand
Darby Leighton—Banished from The White Hand, Lovett follower
Pickles Leighton—In Sing Sing, framed by Dinny Meehan in 1913
Frankie Byrne—Lovett follower, old Frankie Byrne Gang leader
Jidge Seaman—Frankie Byrne/Lovett follower
Sean Healy—Frankie Byrne/Lovett follower
Garry Barry—Old Red Onion Gang leader, psychotic
James Hart—Truck driver
McGowan—Former right-hand of Dinny Meehan, killed in Sing Sing by Pickles Leighton
Beat McGarry—Old timer, storyteller before William, after The Gas Drip Bard
OTHERS:
Sadie Meehan—Wife of Dinny Meehan
Mary Lonergan—Mother of Richie Lonergan
Anna Lonergan—Sister of Richie Lonergan
Tanner Smith—Greenwich Village dockboss, Meehan associate
Joey Behan—Older brother of Petey Behan
James Quilty—Older brother of Tim Quilty, best friend of Joey Behan
The Gas Drip Bard—Irishtown storyteller, old timer
Dead Reilly—Gang lawyer
Thomas Burke—Lives below Liam
Christie Maroney—Bartender, gang leader of many gangs circa 1900–1912
Coohoo Cosgrave—Original leader of The White Hand Gang
Father Larkin—Priest at St. Ann’s Roman Catholic Church
OTHER GANG MEMBERS:
Mick Gilligan—Low-end White Hand follower
Eddie Hughes—White Hand Gang member
Freddie Cuneen—White Hand Gang member
The Simpson brothers, Whitey & Baron—White Hand Gang members, WWI soldiers
Joseph Flynn—Drunkard, childhood friend of Lovett’s, WWI soldier
Johnny Mullen—White Hand Gang member, WWI soldier
Happy Maloney—White Hand Gang member, WWI soldier
Quiet Higgins—White Hand Gang member, WWI soldier
Gimpy Kafferty—White Hand Gang member, WWI soldier
Fred Honeybeck—White Hand Gang member, WWI soldier
OBSCURES AND EXTRAS:
Mr. Lynch—Greenwich Village saloon owner, Hibernian societies
Mrs. McGowan—Mother of McGowan
Emma McGowan—Sister of McGowan
Rose Leighton—Sadie’s mother
Frank Leighton—Oldest Leighton brother, manager at Kirkman Soap Factory
Tiny Thomas Lonergan—Lonergan child
Ms. Gilligan—Wife of Mick Gilligan
Sammy de Angelo—Italian hit man
Seamus “Red Shay” Meehan—Dinny’s uncle
Lefty & Costello—Two followers of Tanner Smith
James Cleary—Garry Barry follower
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Prologue: T’was a Day for Legends
Chapter 1: The Butcher’s Apron
Chapter 2: Pulcinella
Chapter 3: The Old Protective
Chapter 4: Faction Fight
Chapter 5: Abattoir and Exodus
Chapter 6: Black Tom’s
Chapter 7: Mother of Caution
Chapter 8: Miscarried Betrothal
Chapter 9: The Dead Coming
Chapter 10: A Mute Fury
Chapter 11: The
Old Wall
Chapter 12: Always Closing In
Chapter 13: Scalpeen Memories
Chapter 14: Hope for Summer
Chapter 15: The Black Bottle
Chapter 16: Two White Men
Chapter 17: Four Guys, One Black
Chapter 18: Against All I Know
Chapter 19: The Ritual
Chapter 20: Save Our Souls
Chapter 21: Lonergans’ Tumult
Chapter 22: Work ’til Holes Are Filled
Chapter 23: Long Shadows
Chapter 24: Dinosaurs and Fire
Chapter 25: Gale Day and the Grippe
Chapter 26: Lace Curtains
Chapter 27: Everyone Knows
Chapter 28: Deliberation
Chapter 29: Tunic and a Big Man
Chapter 30: Vin
Chapter 31: Treasurer, New York
Chapter 32: Cinched by Blood
PROLOGUE
T’was a Day for Legends
“HER EXILED CHILDREN IN AMERICA ARE not hatched of the city’s womb,” Paddy Keenan once said, his back to me as he tapped a barrel of ale in the daybreak darkness, only amber beginnings of light under the bridges rising and reaching up toward the coal-soot windows outside the Dock Loaders’ Club. Always there at first of light. Fixed on that constant position of change, the passing through of poles and the inequitable polemic between the remembrance of night and the unknown day, we lived. Do we always live hovering, be sure.
I was but a stripling back then. A slight teenage soldier of the dawn in Brooklyn’s Irishtown, up and ready for the day’s labor with the many of us. Wool caps donned, and ties and coats and boots and tools aplenty in the saloon corner.
I think back now on what Paddy’d meant, the inner eye of an old man having the gift of vision, and seeing now as I can that he was alluding to our people’s age-old struggle to survive in this ever-changing darkness to day. To be free to live as we, ourselves. An exiled and migrated people under demand again of assimilation.
Many Irish were berthed by ship here in Brooklyn two and three generations before I arrived in 1915. They’d been sent ’way by starvation and by British law, yet still retained the ways of their forebears by insulating themselves against the waterfront in their neighborhoods where, just like home, the oceanic winds and the brine in the unsettled sea air create a sense of timelessness again. The aura of the past felt to be within our grasp and endlessly repeating itself in the now.
Back when, our mother’s land and her milk was still fresh on our lips here in America, and the egg of our discontent a great hunger thriving. In his off-handed way, Paddy was right, this timeless and unsettled air and the sorrowful poetry of our past gave us to thinking that we were not of New York City’s womb at all. We were still but children having crossed the Atlantic, exiled from the mother. Long without her, but never forgetting. Never forgiving.
Oh, the police and the papers called us many things in our day during the Great War. Always had, of course. But it was as a gang we became known. The term originally came about because as longshore laborers of the busiest port in the world, we had pier gangs, deck gangs, hull gangs, hatch gangs, and many others. They all served a purpose in the loading and unloading of ships. But collectively we were known as “The White Hand,” in opposition to the Italian longshoremen of South Brooklyn and their leaders, “The Black Hand,” that sought to take over the tribute money we’d always imposed in the north on waterfront businesses and immigrant laborers. But it was ours from the start, and although the Italians played hard, in those days we played harder still.
They called us these things to degrade and disparage us. To change us. But our deeply held ideas, the ways of our people remembered, were inherited over many, many generations. The unified disbelief in foreign law and the rejection of the overarching establishment of organized logic that’d been bequeathed us were universally present in each individual in Irishtown and along the waterfront. And it’s that cynicism that kept us alive too, for we could not trust in their ways. Ask any Irish woman or man why we bear such great distrust in law and they’ll tell you, that the foreigners’ ways had never benefitted our like and repeatedly proved itself our greatest enemy, endlessly throughout our history. The culmination coming in the 1840s that sent us to roadside graves, coffin ships, and if we were lucky, to the shores of Brooklyn and elsewhere. No no, we could only believe in the ways of our own. The endless past endlessly being relived and seen in everything, everywhere.
And only from the womb of this collective psyche is our type of hero born. The martyr! Sweet and fatal. The martyr forever relegated to breaking his body against a greater power. In America or Ireland, the weight of organized logic pressing down on us, an Irish chieftain bulbs out of the crush. Made a leader for his flouting their power with a reckless courage. Creates and enforces our own law by the old codes. And finally, after having his people divided by the greater power, is murdered by one of his own. Another Irish leader martyred for the bogland of our history.
I am William Garrity and it’s me who tells this story you now, many years on. Although I come from a long line of oral storytellers, I became known in Brooklyn as a thief of pencils. An old man now I am, and I slowly stand from my writings and hobble to the kitchen with an empty teacup. It shakes in my straining. I have the mind of an able youngster, I’ll have you know, but it’s true my body is that of a tin-can old man. Bockety and stiff. In the kitchen I steep the next cup and lean on the blackthorn. The same kind of cane my father took out of the chimney the day I left with him for the country train and the Atlantic steamer that took me across, steerage class. The same weapon used in the faction fights of lore, I lean on now.
Shuffling with it, I wobble back to my typewriter, pencil and papers and look out the window over the harbor where I spent the breadth of my life. And I think of the man who taught me about that great harbor. And taught me to be a man too. His name was Dinny Meehan. The leader and the spirit of all us who ran with him back in our day. A great ghost of our past, was he, there always to remind us that to create is to truly rule. In him, there was always that sense of timelessness that stood erect in the unsettled air and, as if by some imagining, the streets of Brooklyn were paths in open fields, the buildings ancient Irish mountain shields.
By the time Dinny was eleven years old, two older brothers, two younger sisters, his mother, and his uncle “Red Shay” had all died or been killed. Two other girls married off to Albany to a Phelan family. The last son of the once great Meehan clan of Hudson Street in Manhattan, he was forced to cross the East River to Brooklyn at the turning of the century with his Irish-born, sick father. On a windy day he landed on Bridge Street in old Irishtown, and started as a no one. His father soon dead, he an orphan. A gypsy boy. The son of an exiled child and a hallowed apparition of our past rising up. Taking power by force and violence. Killing Christie Maroney, a gang leader who sought to sell Irishtown to outsiders. Dinny Meehan, he who spited law by being found innocent of murder charges and brought together an army of early rising soldiers with whom I fell in with, joined. It is for Dinny Meehan this story is told by myself, a thief of pencils in a place where the written word was seen as dangerous, and evidence.
Back in our day, the territories were held down by dockbosses and went from the Navy Yard down to Red Hook where our people had controlled labor for many years. All of the dockbosses had followers, but each and every one reported to Dinny Meehan at 25 Bridge Street, a saloon underneath the Manhattan Bridge that we called the Dock Loaders’ Club, though there was no sign outside stating such a thing. All orders emanated from it where Dinny Meehan held power, and down through the terminals where the dockbosses held sway in his name. It was a system that had worked for many years before my arrival when my father sent me, the youngest son to New York just months ahead of the Easter Rising in Ireland to secure passage for my mother and sisters. I’d been sent to work with my uncle, who was well established himself in Brooklyn with the International Longsho
remen’s Association—another of the gang’s enemies. Soon enough though, my uncle and I had a falling-out that left me homeless in an Irishtown winter. It was then I was picked up off the street and taken to Dinny, surrounded by his bodyguards and rowdies. He put me to work on the docks and running messages from one terminal to the next. And with the work I saved every dime earned to get my mother and sisters out of the Great War’s way, and out of the way of the Brits too, our ancient enemy who would come to clean the Easter Rising up as they’d done throughout history, with our own blood.
My mother and sisters facing the hoary tradition of British reprisals, Dinny vowed to help me get them out. The price was high though. He wanted my uncle, for uncle Joseph was a union recruiter in Brooklyn. I paid that price in full too. A heavy one. It’s too hard for me to openly say what I had done to him. But done, it was.
“Do you know what done means?” Dinny had asked me, his wide, muscular jaw flexing as he stared at me with stone-green eyes. “Done means done.”
My own uncle, stabbed and left to the flames we’d relit in Brooklyn. The Irish once again taking hold of power and claiming the inherited land where the waterfront zephyrs timelessly blew in our ears and in the poetry of our pained remembrances. All this happening at the same time bold Irish rebels stormed Dublin on Easter Monday in 1916 to declare their independence from the British Empire. And I took my uncle’s life to begin my own journey into manhood. Rising up and out from the child in me.
Just like the rebelpoets of Dublin, we in Brooklyn had so much against us. So many elements; dock and shipping companies wanting to control their profits, unions vying for power over labor, Italians groping to the northern piers, American law demanding our subservience and the threat of revolt within our own gang. Alone, Dinny Meehan put an ingenious plan in place and our gang made a violent declaration on the waterfront. The White Hand took power back on the lucrative Brooklyn docks when three hundred and fifty angry Irish went from pier to pier and beat any man refusing to pay us tribute. Burned down their strongholds too. I was there. And although we had many battles in those times, t’was a day for legends, that one.
In Ireland, the Easter rebels were executed right off. In Brooklyn we were jailed. We ruled the marine terminals here, where the riches of hard labor fed the tenements that lined the waterfront among the factories and storing houses. Young men on the streets and docks of Brooklyn bound together by old codes and who were not hatched of the city’s womb at all, but by the mother of our discontent.
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