Police made little progress in apprehending Heney’s assailants until a week later, when she told then that “she had received information” enabling her to identify five of them. The police immediately arrested the men and charged them with rape. They were native-born Americans ranging in age from seventeen to twenty-three, and all worked at the Centre Street Market (four as butchers and one as an oyster seller). Two of the five, twenty-three-year-old Jacob Evans and seventeen-year-old John Quitman, eventually pleaded guilty to lesser charges of assault and battery. Prosecutors dropped charges against a third. In late February, the Herald reported that Holberton and the fifth suspect would soon stand trial, but none was ever described in the New York press, and the indictment papers do not indicate a resolution.40
In rare cases, women were the perpetrators of serious crime. Incidents of infanticide, for example, occurred sporadically in Five Points throughout the antebellum period. In 1841, passersby found a newborn baby dead on Anthony Street. In 1849, the Herald reported the case of a lifeless baby girl discovered “in the sink at the dwelling house No. 6 Doyer street. From the appearance of the child when found, it was evident that foul means had been used, as, around the neck of the little innocent, a cord had been tied tight, causing strangulation.” The building’s residents told police that the mother was probably Eliza Rafferty, a thirty-year-old Irish immigrant with a husband and child living in Liverpool. On entering her apartment, the officers found Rafferty “sitting very composedly in a chair in her room, making a dress, that being her profession.” After first denying that she had given birth to the child, she then admitted it, but insisted that “the child was dead before it was thrown into the sink.” Police took Rafferty to jail to await an autopsy by the coroner, who ruled that the baby had been born alive and subsequently strangled to death.41
Much more common was child abandonment. In 1867, the Five Points Mission took in a one-month-old baby whose mother had asked a neighbor to watch it “for a few minutes” while she went to the store. The mother never returned. Three years later, a mother offered to buy kindling and food for an old woman if she would watch her baby while she shopped. This mother disappeared as well. In rare cases, parents even abandoned older children. Mary and Maggie Sherman were abandoned by their father at Mary McCarty’s boardinghouse at 54 Mulberry Street in June 1860. After hearing “nothing of him,” McCarty gave the children to the mission. In September 1856, a Five Points woman brought another abandoned child, eleven year-old William Morton, to the mission. He had lived in the rear tenement at 38 Baxter until the previous spring, when his parents had moved to California and left young William behind. Since his abandonment, William had “got his food by picking papers in the street and selling them at the junk shops. Slept in entries and carts.” Cases such as William’s were not common. For every child or infant abandoned in Five Points, there were dozens brought for adoption to the Five Points Mission and House of Industry by tearful mothers.42
Despite oft-told stories to the contrary, murder was—like infanticide and child abandonment—another rare crime at Five Points. The murder rate did rise dramatically in the prewar decade, however, as handguns became more widely available. As many New Yorkers were convicted of murder from 1852 to 1854 as had been found guilty of homicide in the entire 1840s.43
A significant number of murders involved the drunkenness of either the murderer or his victim. On June 12, 1853, for example, Patrick McNulty of Bayard Street and a number of fellow Five Pointers decided to go “skylarking,” a drinking binge in which the inebriated participants insult, harass, and create mayhem wherever they go. The group had already been drinking heavily, first at a saloon on Bayard Street, then at another on Mulberry, and then at a third on Centre before entering the bar of Herman Doscher, also on Centre Street. McNulty and his companions stood atop the bar demanding drinks and threatening the other customers. They also chased Doscher’s wife into her residence in the back of the house, forcing her to lock herself in a room and eventually to climb out the window to escape them. While the group ran amok, the least drunk among them announced that this was all innocent skylarking and promised to pay for everything the others drank and destroyed.
Doscher finally succeeded in chasing the rowdy gang out of his watering hole, at which point the revelers proceeded south to the Jenny Lind saloon, an oyster cellar at 48 Centre run by Doscher’s brother John. Although the establishment ostensibly specialized in mollusks, a neighbor testified that its proprietor primarily “sold liquor and kept girls.” The skylarkers arrived at John Doscher’s den around midnight, started a fight, and invaded the bedrooms in search of courtesans and their lovers. Apparently fearing for his safety and that of his wife, John Doscher found his pistol, and when the revelers refused to desist, he shot McNulty three times—once in the head. The hearty Irishman survived, leaving the hospital after only four days, but he began complaining of headaches a few weeks later and died soon thereafter. Doscher was charged with murder, but despite the testimony of McNulty’s friends that they had merely been engaged in some harmless fun, the jury found him not guilty.44
Although alcohol played a role in many Five Points murders, other killings involved love-related jealousies. When African-American Charles Thomas “saw his paramour in close conversation with another black man called Henry Ford” behind the tenement at 53 Orange Street in 1846, Thomas ran up and stabbed Ford, killing him “instantly.” Two decades later, twenty-one-year-old iron molder William Connell was accompanying two women into the Live and Let Live Saloon on the Bowery at Bayard when Richard Casey of 80 Mott Street shook some money under their noses, apparently in an attempt to embarrass Connell for consorting with prostitutes. When Connell complained of the insult, Casey knocked his hat into the gutter and then shot him as he stooped to pick it up. A jury found Casey guilty of second-degree murder, and the judge sentenced him to life in prison.45
Some Five Pointers needed little justification to kill a man, as the 1851 case of Aaron Stookey demonstrates. Stookey “kept a drinking cellar in Anthony street” near Little Water that was frequented, according to the Herald, “by the lowest grade of the male and female residents” of Five Points. On the night of April 17, Stookey and another man were passing in front of Crown’s Grocery when African-American Edward “Teddy” Moore of Broome Street bumped into Stookey’s friend. According to the testimony of one of Moore’s companions (an African American who lived in Cow Bay), Moore begged his pardon but Stookey exclaimed to his friend, “‘why don’t you kill the black son of a b——?’” Not waiting for a response, Stookey drew his own knife and stabbed Moore in the side. Moore died minutes later.
Given that Stookey had also pulled a knife on a black man a few days before, prosecutors today might label Moore’s killing a hate crime. But in the trial that took place just fourteen days after the slaying, Stookey’s attorney tried to play upon the presumed prejudices of the all-white jury, pointing out that all four prosecution witnesses—each a Five Points African American—were convicted criminals. The most damning testimony, the attorney noted, had come from a witness who had told the district attorney that he had never been in prison, when in fact he had served three terms on Blackwell’s Island and one at Sing Sing. The defense also suggested that Moore had bumped against Stookey to pick his pocket. A policeman testified that bumping was not a common pickpocket’s device, but he did admit that Moore was a known thief and “a very bad character.” To their credit, however, the jurors were not swayed by the defense tactics and returned a guilty verdict in just fifteen minutes. Stookey was hanged in the Tombs courtyard.46
Ethnicity, prostitution, and politics each played a role in the most talked about antebellum Five Points murder, the killing of brothel keeper Wilhelm Decker by aspiring politico John Glass. The twenty-three-year-old Glass was well known in the Sixth Ward, having served in 1858 as one of the district’s constables (an elected post equivalent to that of a ward sheriff) and as foreman of Engine Company No. 21. On the evening of J
anuary 16, 1859, just days after relinquishing his post as constable, Glass rang Decker’s doorbell at 21 Elm Street (now Lafayette). Accompanying Glass were twenty-four-year-old James Higgins (the Herald described the two of them as “active politicians”), twenty-two-year-old Constable James Loftus, and Glass’s brother James, who ran the saloon next door at 19 Elm. When Decker opened the door, the four men burst in and began smashing lamps and furniture. The assailants then rushed out, but when Decker closed the door, John Glass fired a shot through it, killing him. Meanwhile, Richard Owens, a Brooklyn resident passing by the crime scene, began scuffling with Higgins on the street, prompting James Glass to shoot Owens. Like Decker, Owens died at the scene.
“The excitement in the Sixth ward was intense,” commented the Herald, as word of the murders spread through the neighborhood. Yet despite the feverish speculation and various trials, no clear motive for the slayings ever emerged. Testimony established that John Glass had frequently visited the Decker house in the past, apparently in the company of prostitutes, and one witness implied that Glass attacked the house because Decker had turned him away earlier in the evening. Although such a rebuff hardly seems to justify murder, Glass was also known to have a violent temper. Prosecutors had previously charged him with assault on several occasions, which may have accounted for his expulsion from Engine Company No. 21 a few months before the murders. Or Glass and his accomplices might have been punishing Decker for failing to pay protection money for his brothel. Whatever the case, John Glass and James Higgins were convicted of manslaughter in the death of Decker and sentenced to twenty-year jail terms. James Glass, also found guilty of manslaughter, received a life sentence. Yet due to the Glass brothers’ political connections, John served only five years and James only six before receiving pardons from the governor.47
As the Glass case demonstrates, law enforcement officials were sometimes no more law-abiding than the criminals they were paid to pursue. Some policemen refused to search for stolen property without a prepaid reward. Others demanded payoffs from the owners of brothels and dance halls. A number of policemen were “said to have been engaged in a regular system of levying contributions on the keepers of disorderly houses in the districts they represent,” threatening indictment or arrest if they did not “fork over” a fifty- to hundred-dollar monthly payment. Officers became so brazen in their demands, reported the Tribune in 1855, that despite the risks of publicly airing their grievances, bordello operators in the Fourth Ward complained about the shakedowns to Mayor Fernando Wood. Some corrupt policemen must have extorted protection money from Five Points bawdy-house keepers as well.48
Police corruption resulted in part from the character of the men on the force. Some earned the coveted posts through party loyalty, but others snared a spot by bribing local political leaders. One Sixth Warder promised around midcentury that he could deliver a police appointment for twenty-five dollars, which he would convey to the appropriate aldermen. As a result, complained the head of the fire department, “convicts, freshly emerged from the dungeon cells of Blackwell’s Island, are appointed by Aldermen as policemen.” Others used elected law enforcement positions to extort graft. Writing in 1860, a newspaper columnist recalled the Fourth Ward’s infamous constable, “Porgie Joe,” who spent liberally to assure his nomination by all the district’s Democratic factions. “It would be a bad go for a dance house to refuse to send up to Joe his weekly allowance,” stated the reporter, “as a failure would quickly be followed up by an indictment, or a midnight arrest.” Although Joe’s authority ostensibly ended at the Fourth Ward’s borders, “on the Points he had his tools and spies” as well, “and I have no doubt, his receipts per day were often more than a hundred dollars.” The writer remembered, for example, a gang of young thieves with a “rendezvous . . . in Mulberry street, near Cross.” They robbed empty apartments while the inhabitants were at work, taking money and jewelry out of locked bureaus. If police captured one of the crooks, the gang summoned Joe, who would put “the officer making the arrest to sleep with a fifty,” receiving his quid pro quo “in a rake with the first good swag.”49
The extent of police corruption in Five Points is impossible to determine. The countless press accounts of neighborhood officers sustaining serious injuries attempting to apprehend crime suspects indicate that many (and probably most) took their work seriously, especially when violent offenders were involved. An 1849 Herald story reported that a Sixth Ward policeman, while taking a prisoner into custody, “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.” Yet after Five Points native Joseph Dowling rose through the Sixth Ward’s police ranks to become the district’s police justice, he complained from the bench that too many petty thieves escaped prosecution due to police payoffs, a charge a department veteran would not have made lightly. Police corruption—especially involving the vice industry—would remain a significant problem both in Five Points and citywide throughout the nineteenth century.50
One might imagine that the press exaggerated the extent of crime in Five Points in order to sell papers. But arrest records confirm that Five Points was particularly crime-ridden. Excluding the three downtown commercial wards, where there were few inhabitants and many warehouses to be robbed, the Sixth Ward led the city in per capita arrests. The arrest rate there was two to three times higher than in most other wards. Yet the rate for violent crime in Five Points was not drastically higher than in other parts of the city. Much of the Sixth Ward’s elevated arrest rate derived from three misdemeanors: public intoxication, vagrancy, and disorderly conduct. Some of those arraigned on the latter two charges must have been prostitutes, but women were arrested as often as men for all three crimes. Even in 1869, when the bulk of the sex trade had moved uptown, the Sixth Ward was still the only place in the city where police arrested virtually as many women as men.51
“IF YOU LIVED IN THIS PLACE YOU WOULD ASK FOR WHISKEY INSTEAD OF MILK”
From Hogarth’s “Gin Lane” in Georgian London to the crackhouses of late-twentieth-century American ghettos, the abuse of stimulants has plagued the Western world’s impoverished souls. Five Points was no different. Alcoholism destroyed the lives of hundreds of residents, impoverishing some, driving spouses and children away from others, leading many to jail, and countless others to their deaths through alcohol-related illnesses, injuries, or crimes. Given our appreciation of the anti-Irish bigotry harbored by so many Five Points charitable workers, it is tempting to disregard their many stories of drunkenness. Yet descriptions of alcohol-related crimes and tragedies appear throughout the documentary record—in sources written by Protestants and Catholics, by outsiders as well as Five Pointers themselves. The pervasiveness of alcoholism in Five Points played a significant role in shaping life there.
Drunkenness was everywhere. George Appo remembered that in the alley between the front and rear buildings at 14 Baxter Street where he lived as a boy, “it was a common sight to see every morning under the wagon sheds at least six to ten drunken men and women sleeping off the effects of . . . five cent rum.” Many of the neighborhood’s basement boardinghouses were filled with inebriates. When the wooden tenement across the street at 15 Baxter burned down in 1863, tenants stated that the three residents who perished could have escaped the burning building “had they not been under the influence of liquor.” As to who started the fire, the tenants’ list of suspects consisted of the drunken African-American couple on the ground floor and the drunken Irishwoman who lived above them, all of whom survived. Five Pointers’ complaints about their neighbors’ habitual drunkenness could be repeated ad infinitum. It is impossible to determine the exact extent of alcohol abuse, but it seems clear that hundreds of Five Points residents found it painful to go a day without a drink.52
Some area alcoholics asked workers at the mission and the House of Industry for help sobering up. “Harriet Bertram came in and said
she wanted to reform,” wrote one of the mission’s employees in the group’s logbook in 1856. The thirty-five-year-old Indiana native “was in a state of intoxication at the time, and after being sent up to bed, had a very severe attack of the horrors.” After two weeks without liquor, the mission found her work as a domestic servant in Brooklyn. Others with similarly noble intentions left the charitable groups after a day or two, unable to cope with the physical and emotional symptoms of withdrawal.53
Children often suffered terribly due to their parents’ alcohol abuse. “Last winter, my father drank so hard that we [ran out of money and] had to leave our room and move into a stable just before the heavy snow fell,” eight-year-old Mary Jane Tobin told officials at the mission. The stable roof had large holes in it, “so the snow came down on us and we were almost frozen; but we wrapped us up in an old blanket and tried to keep warm the best we could.” Mary Jane’s older brother eventually took her to live with an aunt on Mulberry Street. Children without older siblings to care for them might fare even worse than poor Mary Jane. House of Industry agents found a small child starving to death in a rear tenement on Worth Street in 1859 because her mother spent almost every penny on liquor. The mother had pawned all the family possessions except a broken table. The House of Industry agents fed the girl and returned her to her mother, but a few weeks later a policeman brought her back because the neglect continued. A New York street urchin recalled frequently seeing “little children starving to death for something to eat, while their parents [were] lying dead drunk.”54
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