Con artists set up innocent citizens by appealing to their greed. In the “horse game,” two con men argued loudly about the price of a horse, set at, say, $350. The innocent man would then offer one of them a lesser amount after one of the two arguers walked away. The con man took the money and promised to deliver the horse, but, of course, there was no horse.95
New York’s numerous residents all seemed to be victims of some game. The “drop game” was another. A con man “found,” say, fifty dollars on the street and announced it to the man standing near the money. As the man looked down at the money, another man would walk up to him and say that he, as well as the man who found the fifty dollars should both share in their newfound loot. The con man then gave the mark a hundred-dollar bill, and the man gave him change. The two con men then walked away. The innocent mark had his hundred dollars, but it was counterfeit.
Illegal counterfeit rings were notorious in 1840s New York because America did not yet have a paper-based national monetary system. Each bank issued its own notes, and criminals with special paper and printing presses duplicated them. The counterfeit rings were so proficient at their trade that in the 1840s one ring had a warehouse full of counterfeit bills from eight different city banks.
A small but profitable criminal industry was shoplifting. By the early 1840s, the city had hundreds of shops, led by huge dry goods emporiums, and they were usually crowded with customers, usually female. The smaller stores had little security protection against shoplifters. The large stores hired private detectives, or off-duty constables, to look out for shoplifters. They arrested some, such as Jane Louisa Reilly, who pilfered forty-three dollars in goods from the Lozee & Mott store and hid them under her clothes, but most went undetected.96 Security only spotted the very well known thieves; the rest walked right past them. Hundreds of them poured into the stores and, after careful thievery, walked out with goods stuffed into handbags or under large dresses. “The shoplifter carries a bag, with straps fastened around the waist, into which she may easily drop anything she can steal. Some women arrange their skirts so that the whole front top to bottom forms a bag which can be stuffed with feathers, laces, etc, without any outward sign,” said one cop.97
Frustrated managers said the culprits they feared the most were not the poor women trying to steal clothes to wear to keep warm but the rich women who wanted expensive small things but did not want to pay for them. So the wealthy made petty shoplifting a hobby and departed from the most expensive stores with the priciest goods. Altogether, the wives of the rich merchants and lawyers walked home with as much loot as the poor women thieves in the stores. Many young women, well dressed, helped themselves to clothing they wanted, too. Anne Riley, eighteen, was arrested after leaving a shop because she strolled out the door with a pile of lingerie stuffed under her dress.98
They all paled in comparison to robbers, though. Thieves took everything they could and wherever they could. Residents relied on locks, but thieves could jimmy them with bars or open them with false keys. The plunder from robberies was so great in New York that by the mid-1830s, rings of burglars were put together by a mastermind. Normally three to five men worked in a ring. One man got into a house, one man stood guard outside as a watchman, and the others looted the house. They brought large suitcase-style bags or canvas satchels to haul away their loot. Many rings were so busy that they kept calendars, with thievery marked down for particular days and nights.
“One day a robbery uptown, the next downtown, then east, then the west, and then in the center of the city. No band of brigands ever displayed less regard for property which would not pay for carrying away,” Captain Walling said of one highly organized ring.99
There was so much lawbreaking that people saw criminals everywhere. George Strong said that walking down a street he saw “loafers of the most unquestionable genuineness on the lookout for anything they could lay their hands on.”100
One editor was so distressed about the increase in thieves that he wrote at the start of one winter that “the honorable society of burglars are now on their usual winter professional tour, and as every attention should be paid to each distinguished guest, we hope that they may be entertained at the public expense.”101
Bennett of the Herald was just as upset about crime and forlornly began one of his columns in the summer of 1841 by writing dismally, “This is the season for murder.”102
CHAPTER TEN
Five Points and the Boundaries of Hell
[A policeman] was violently attacked by a Five Points thief, nicknamed Monkey, who gave him a blow with a sling shot in the mouth, displacing some of his teeth and otherwise injuring him severely.
—New York Herald, November 3, 1849
The sleazy centerpiece of crime in New York City was the neighborhood called Five Points, so named because five streets intersected within it—Mulberry, Worth, Park, Baxter, and Little Water (the neighborhood was in today’s Chinatown). Five Points had been developed as a haven for criminals in the middle of the 1820s, when young street toughs moved there, and hid there, while they formed powerful street gangs that were the scourge of the city until the Civil War. The street ruffians, nearly always armed with knives, hatchets, and guns, selected exotic names for these gangs, such as the Forty Thieves, Dead Rabbits, Roaches, Plug Uglies, Whyos, Kerryonians, Chinamen, Shirt Tails, Roach Guards, Atlantic Guards, True Blue Americans, Chichesters, Bowery Boys, Eastmans, Gophers, and Five Pointers.
The Forty Thieves was the first, formed in the late 1820s at the back of a grocery store that served as a liquor emporium. The Kerryonians, all men from County Kerry in Ireland, came next. Each gang protected its turf in Five Points through street patrols and, when necessary, all-out warfare in which streets were blocked off with carts and crates, and pitched battles were conducted in which several men were usually killed and many were maimed. Gangs sometimes banded together to fight gangs outside of the Five Points area.1
The Dead Rabbits had become so powerful, and so famous, that writers even attached their name to political slogans. The Brooklyn Daily Times, as an example, said that because a few evildoers always tried to ruin the United States, America had to be called the “Dead Rabbit Democracy.”2
British novelist Charles Dickens was appalled when he visited Five Points on a tour of New York in 1842. He wrote, “This is the place; these narrow ways diverging to the right and left, and reeking everywhere with dirt and filth.… The coarse and bloated faces at the doors have counterparts back home. Debauchery has made the very houses prematurely old. See how the rotten beams are tumbling down, and how the patched and broken windows seem to scowl dimly like eyes that have been hurt in drunken frays. Many … pigs live here. Do they ever wonder why their masters walk upright instead of going on all fours and why they talk instead of grunting?” He concluded that Five Points was representative of all that was “loathsome, drooping and decayed.” Even so, he enjoyed his ramble through it. In a dim, noisy subterranean Five Points dance hall he saw a “corpulent black fiddler, and his friend who plays the tambourine, stamp upon the boarding of the small, raised orchestra in which they sit, and play a lively measure,” enticing half a dozen couples onto the dance floor.3
The British novelist did not have anything good to say about the rest of the city’s law-and-order system, either. When he wrote of it he highlighted its “ill-managed lunatic asylum, a bad jail, a dismal workhouse and a perfectly intolerable place of police-imprisonment.”4
Americans were just as aghast at the depravity of Five Points as the British visitor. George Foster, who roamed the streets of Manhattan at night looking for stories, stopped whenever he entered the Five Points neighborhood. It was, he said, “a sad, an awful sight, a sight to make the blood slowly congeal and the heart to grow fearful and cease its beatings.” Foster called the poor and the criminals who resided there “human swine.”5
Reformer Lydia Child was one of the few women adventuresome enough to explore Five Points. “There you will see nearly
every form of human misery, every sign of human degradation. The leer of the licentious, the dull sensualism of the drunkard, the sly glance of the thief—oh, it made my heart ache for many a day. It stunned my senses with the amount of evil and fell upon the strong hopefulness of my character, like a stroke of the palsy,” she wrote.6
What made Dickens, Foster, and Child really cringe, though, was the outrageous public sex that was conducted right in front of them and the guides who took them on their rambles. On one disconcerting night, Dickens and his friends visited a tavern in which five men and women, completely naked, were having sex on the floor. Dickens, shaken, backed out of the tavern. In other trips, he witnessed other acts of public sex that were probably far more upsetting than anything he had seen in even the most sinful and criminal neighborhoods of London. Those practicing sex were breaking the law, but nobody seemed to mind.7
In Oliver Twist, Dickens created a London street gang headed by Fagin and populated by teenagers with marvelous names he made up, such as the Artful Dodger. The boys preyed on the public. They were the same type of gang as those that roamed through Five Points.
Some said that while Dickens was quick to illustrate crime, he had no solutions to the problem. He “puts the searing iron to wickedness, whether among poor or rich; and yet when he describes the guilty, poor and oppressed man, we are always in some way reminded how much need there is that certain systems of law and habit which lead to this poverty and consequent crime, should be remedied,” said Walt Whitman, who disagreed with Dickens’s portrayal of society as all good or all bad people.8 The editor of the Sun, too, nodded his head knowingly when writing about Dickens’s visit. He said journalists, both British and American, were making too much out of Boz’s (Dickens’s pen name) travels to Five Points and other destitute neighborhoods. “A corps of sneaky reporters, most of them fresh from London, are pursuing him like a pack of hounds at his heels to catch every wink of his eye, every motion of his hands, and every word that he speaks … to be dished up with embellishment,” the Sun chief wrote.9
Despite the denunciations of Five Points by writers and travelers, the temperance movement saw the conversion to Jesus of the Five Points residents as its holy grail. Every Sunday, for years, a different temperance group would set up a large tent on the street and stage daylong meetings that drew a few disinterested neighborhood dawdlers.10
It was an era when hundreds of novelists, short story writers, and playwrights joined Dickens in writing scalding indictments of the New York metropolis and painted it as Sin City on the Hudson, teeming with murderers and robbers in Five Points and other districts. Those works of fiction helped to make New York such a notorious city.
Five Points was a grimy amalgam of urban decay. Colored papers were taped over broken windows. Narrow alleys twisted this way and that, and all seemed to contain saloons, some large and some small. The stench of urine and beer was everywhere. Dozens of tired African Americans slept in piles in some saloons and sailors did the same in others, while dogs slept quietly next to them. Prints of oceangoing ships or George Washington seemed to hang over the liquor bottles in every saloon. Garbage was piled up outside the doors, front and back, and smelled. Those who chose normal sleeping arrangements went to Five Points dives that rented out beds for three cents a night and charged a penny a night to sleep on the floor. Many of them had garbage strewn throughout their rooms. A state investigatory committee reported that in some streets in the neighborhood, piles of garbage were two feet high.11
“If some of our disbelieving readers would take a night stroll down into that sickening neighborhood and look around amongst the wretches who hide away during the day and come out at night, reeking with filth and gin fumes, they would think them fit for any crime which the devil could invent,” said 1850s writer Ned Buntline.12
Other visitors to the neighborhood chronicled filthy, vermin-infested tenements where “rum-degraded human beings lived” and warned readers to watch their step when walking through them. The steps of buildings were covered with garbage, rotted sticks of wood, and torn clothing; on the landings of stairs, people whom one did not know lay dead or dying. One writer called the buildings “dens of death.”13
James McCabe warned visitors, “It is not safe for a stranger to undertake to explore these places for himself. No respectable man is a match for the villains and sharpers of New York.… The city is full of danger.”14
The street toughs from Five Points had no trouble starting fights. One would simply walk up to someone and say he heard he wanted to fight him. The target would say he did not say that, and the tough would tell him that he had just called him a liar and hit him. It never failed.15
The neighborhood of about 3,500 people was anchored by a large, three-story-high abandoned factory called the Old Brewery. It was across the street from Murderer’s Alley, named for its killings, and an area of bars called the Den of Thieves. Few outsiders ever went into the Old Brewery, where, it was rumored, hundreds of vagrants lived. Some reports had its population at slightly over a thousand, living either in small family apartments, single and double apartments, or dormitories, sleeping at night and committing crimes in the daytime. (A missionary group purchased it in 1852 and tore it down the following year. Workers who razed it found hundreds of human bones between its walls, said to be the remains of sailors slain in cheap hotels and vagrants killed in the streets.)16 There were few gaslights on the street corners of Five Points, and the streets and alleys were dimly lit, affording criminals an easy opportunity to strike at visitors. The police had only a single watchman patrolling the beat there, and anyone he sought was swallowed up by the darkness or easily hidden in a cellar hovel or in the back of a dark, twisting alley. The single patrolman was one of the great weaknesses of the early police.
Five Points was filled with prostitutes. The number ranged widely, depending upon whom you talked to and what newspapers you read. Some lived there, and some visited to walk the streets in search of business. The whores in Five Points were different from those in the rest of town, though. In Five Points, whores simply lounged in wide-open saloons and propositioned whoever walked in. Then they left and found a cheap room for a few cents somewhere nearby for sex.17
The neighborhood was also full of Irish. Statistics vary, but most indicate that between 60 and 70 percent of Five Points residents were Irish. Ironically, many Irish police officers grew up in the Five Points area; as eyewitnesses to crime there and throughout the city, they had firsthand knowledge of how criminals operated. One of them was Thomas F. Byrnes, son of a saloon bartender, who went on to join the force in 1863 and over the years became one of its most famous members, the hero in several police novels in later years.18
Five Points was full of bars, but most were small and sleazy. Nearby, on Hester Street, was McGlory’s, one of the most infamous bars in America. The bar, which used Five Points gangsters as bouncers, was a favorite of out-of-town male visitors. You walked through double doors into a long black hallway and then into the two-story-high bar, which was perpetually mobbed with very loud people. Men and men in drag slinking through the table pathways served drinks. Sexual parties were held in second-floor walled-off boxes, liquor flowed, a three-piece band played, and, for a fee, women danced in front of your table. A Cincinnati Enquirer reporter spent a night there and was shocked. He said that, much like in today’s “red-light” districts, women entered boxes and disrobed if money was placed in their stockings. Five or six women would assault you at once, begging for quarters. Women on the floor danced the cancan, very immodestly, for fifty cents. Men drank until they fell off their chairs, and any rowdies that arrived were taken care of by the bouncers. “Billy McGlory himself is at the bar.… A medium sized man, he is neither fleshy nor spare; he has black hair and mustache, and a piercing black eye. He shakes hands all around as if we were obedient subjects come to pay homage to a king,” the reporter wrote.19
The Five Points residents were night owls.”They are obscene n
ightbirds who flit and howl and hoot by night.… Day is hateful to them,” wrote Foster.20
The Points was full of narrow streets and postage-stamp-sized illegal gambling houses that were open nearly twenty-four hours each day and filled with men losing good money and drinking bad whiskey. Small ground-level shops usually had an apartment or two at the rear for the proprietors. Most of the residents of Five Points were armed with knives, clubs, and, later, revolvers. They smelled of liquor.
One man said of the neighborhood, “No spot of ground on this continent had the reputation of having been the witness of more crime … or where want or woe were more apparent. Every house was a brothel, the resort of persons of every age, sex, and color; every store a dram shop where from morning till morning the thieves and abandoned characters of the town whetted their depraved tastes, and concocted future crimes and villainies.”21
The street gang members all lived here or hung out here. They stayed side by side with a black population separate from the general black population of the city. Within the shadows of Five Points black men and women could do whatever they wanted; many lived with or even married white partners. They steered clear of the street posses, though. The neighborhood vigilantes fought each other within the confines of Five Points and fought any police officers or squadrons who invaded the area looking for a suspect in a crime.
While few willingly stepped into Five Points, all seemed to have an opinion of the people who lived there. Most derided them and called them names, but sociologists were afraid this class of people would beget another generation of criminals just like them, and that generation would beget a third, and in the end these people, not checked by law enforcement, would overwhelm America. “The greatest danger that can confront a country like ours is from the existence of an ignorant, debased, permanently poor class in the great cities. It is more threatening if this class is of foreign birth and of different habits from those of our own people,” wrote Charles Loring Brace, who went to work establishing large homes for wayward boys to keep them out of the clutches of the denizens of the street in Five Points and other New York neighborhoods.22
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