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Five Points

Page 32

by Tyler Anbinder


  Others objected to the charities’ adoption programs for different reasons. In the post–Civil War decades, westerners came to believe that their reform schools and jails overflowed with juvenile delinquents from New York. By the 1890s, many western states had responded by enacting laws limiting, restricting, or regulating the importation of orphans.69

  In New York, meanwhile, the threat posed by the Protestant charities had forced previously apathetic Catholic leaders to devote significantly more energy and attention to Five Points. Archbishop John Hughes’s decision to establish a parish there in 1853, even though two Catholic churches outside the neighborhood were not very far away, must have been intended at least in part as a defense against the proselytizing activities of the mission and House of Industry. Rather than undertake the time-consuming task of building a new church, Hughes purchased the recently vacated Zion Protestant Episcopal Church at the corner of Mott and Cross Streets. On May 14, he officially rechristened it the Church of the Transfiguration. The new parish quickly became one of the busiest in the city. By 1865, only six of the city’s thirty-two Catholic churches conducted more marriages and baptisms than Transfiguration. According to a leading historian of American Catholicism, it was “the most flourishing Irish parish on the American continent.”70

  The New York Catholics also eventually began their own adoption service. It was launched in 1863—when mounting Civil War casualties began leaving hundreds of New York Catholic children without fathers to support them. In May of that year, Levi Silliman Ives established the Catholic Protectory, which sought to avoid sending children west by finding them adoptive Catholic parents within the city. But the number of children needing homes far exceeded the number of Catholic foster parents who stepped forward to claim them, so after Ives’s death, the Protectory began sending its charges to Catholic homes in the Midwest. Another organization, the New York Foundling Hospital, became an even more important force in the Catholic community. Founded in 1869, it transferred children who could not be placed in New York homes to predominantly Catholic communities in the Midwest.71

  “THE TRANSFORMATION THAT HAS OVERTAKEN

  THE ‘FIVE POINTS’ [IS] REMARKABLE”

  Religious, humanitarian, and competitive forces all combined in the upsurge of Five Points charity work. The impact on the neighborhood was unmistakable, and nearly every commentator attributed the positive changes to the work of the Five Points Mission and the House of Industry. The demolition of the Old Brewery in 1852, most agreed, had marked the start of this transformation. “Perhaps in the entire annals of organized philanthropy,” maintained the Evening Post concerning the Ladies’ Missionary Society, “no more interesting incident can be found than the change by which the Old Brewery and its abominations yielded to the beneficent influences which these ladies have brought to bear.” “The day of its demolition deserves to be distinguished as a red letter day in the annals of our city’s history,” concurred a mission publication.72

  By the end of the decade, the changes to the neighborhood seemed even more remarkable. The New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor asserted that the district had undergone a “social and moral renovation.” “The Five Points is not what it used to be,” agreed Harper’s Weekly in 1857, noting that “with its vice its romance has vanished. It has become Peasey and prosaic, and the old leaven of iniquity has nearly died out. . . . One has now to search for the bad places, whereas formerly the Five Points was one universal sore.” The Times also agreed. “Who shall persuade us hereafter that any condition of humanity is desperate beyond redemption,” it asked in reference to the House of Industry’s accomplishments as the charity prepared to dedicate the new wing of its headquarters. “The transformation that has overtaken the ‘Five Points,’” wrote the influential newspaper, was absolutely “remarkable.”73

  How were the charities able to effect such apparently far-reaching changes in the notorious neighborhood? The imposing presence of their large brick buildings at the Five Points intersection scared away many of the thieves, prostitutes, and drunks who had previously concentrated there. Others found inspiration in the organizations’ home visits, temperance drives, and religious revivals, deriving the motivation they needed to stay sober, find work, or take better care of their families. Most of the tangible improvements, however, probably resulted from the unprecedented amounts of material assistance these charities distributed to neighborhood residents. For the first time, significant numbers of hungry, cold, and homeless Five Pointers could find food, clothing, fuel, and shelter. Some unskilled workers could even learn trades.

  The Times noted in 1870 that Pease, by offering such services in his House of Industry, had adopted a “new principle” for helping the poor—one that emphasized “residence, sympathy and cooperation with ‘the miserables.’” In this sense, the House of Industry was the nation’s first “settlement house.” Chicago’s Jane Addams made settlements famous by establishing Hull House in the 1890s. Yet Pease’s House of Industry pioneered most of her standard operating procedures—including job training, distribution of food and clothing, and instruction in health and hygiene—decades earlier. There were differences between the two, of course; women with college degrees in nursing and social work did not staff the antebellum House of Industry. And though the mission was a female-run institution, its “ladies” did not live in the slums with their clients as typical settlement house workers eventually would. Still, the House of Industry was progressive before the word came to stand for an era.74

  The Five Points Protestant charities, and especially the House of Industry, can also be credited with having organized the city’s (and perhaps the nation’s) first modern welfare program. Unlike New Deal– and Great Society–era government assistance programs, Five Points charities did not entrust their clients with direct cash payments. The institutions also required religious devotion as a condition for most forms of aid. Yet virtually all the hallmarks of the modern welfare system—food, shelter, job training and placement, substance abuse counseling, and foster care—were offered by the Five Points charities.

  Historians commonly cite the private welfare system established by “Boss” William M. Tweed and Tammany Hall in the late 1860s as the earliest precursor of the modern welfare state; but House of Industry efforts (eventually subsidized by the state government) predate Tweed’s work by fifteen years. In fact, Tammany probably created its system in response to programs such as Pease’s. Throughout the 1860s, Catholics complained bitterly that the state subsidized the House of Industry while denying aid to their own charitable efforts (legislators justified this on the grounds that the House of Industry was non-sectarian whereas Catholics preached a specific variety of Christianity). When Tweed extended his power to the state level, he reversed this policy officially in some areas, such as education, delivering state funds to parochial schools such as the one at Five Points’ Church of the Transfiguration. In other realms, such as the distribution of coal and food, he instead used Tammany Hall as the conduit, in part to ensure that grateful voters thanked him and his organization on election day. While Tweed undoubtedly saw Tammany’s private welfare system as a means to attract voters, he must also have been motivated by the desire to placate New York Catholics who wanted alternatives to Protestant aid programs such as those offered in Five Points.75

  Harper’s Weekly proved to be wrong in its nostalgic complaint that Five Points’ charities had brought a permanent end to its mystique. The “romance” of its dark-alleyed crime and misery would return with the next wave of immigrants. Meanwhile, the drama of Five Points politics became the talk of the town, first because its Irish-American citizens took the lead in fighting Republican and Know Nothing efforts to usurp important parts of the city government, and later because the neighborhood played a pivotal role in the electoral frauds that made the Tweed Ring possible.

  9

  PROLOGUE

  “HE NEVER KNEW WHEN HE WAS BEATEN”

  “
FATTY” WALSH was livid. Republicans had escalated the New York spoils war to a new level, disbanding the city’s Democrat-dominated police department in July 1857 and replacing it with a Republican-controlled, state-run squad. Irish immigrants like Walsh often used positions in the police department as stepping-stones to political advancement. The New York Democratic party also relied on the money policeman kicked back to the party from their salaries to finance political campaigns. The Republicans’ maneuver would seriously hamper the careers of aspiring spoilsmen such as Walsh.

  But what particularly incensed Walsh was that when he and his Democratic Five Points friends went to the Bowery to harass and assault the new policemen just after midnight on the Fourth of July, a gang known as the Bowery Boys—led by Irish-American Democrats from the northeast corner of Five Points—had the audacity to defend the Republican police! The Bowery Boys and Walsh’s “Mulberry Boys” had been engaged in an intra-Democratic feud for some time, but that did not justify aiding and abetting their Republican enemies. Adding injury to insult, the Bowery Boys later that day ventured well off their Bowery turf and onto Walsh’s to protect the police from further attacks. When Walsh’s gang fought to defend the Mulberry Street area against this incursion, the outnumbered Bowery Boys resorted to pistols and rifles. In the ensuing gun battle, they picked off Mulberry Boys with frightening ease despite the huge barricades of overturned carts and old furniture that both sides had erected on Bayard Street for protection.

  Walsh was not about to let a bunch of Bowery toughs humiliate him and his gang without a fight. He knew Five Pointers looked to him as a leader. A few months earlier, they had made the twenty-two-year-old the assistant foreman of Engine Company No. 21, the very same politically prominent unit that had launched the political career of Walsh’s idol, Matthew T. Brennan. Brennan had never backed down from a fight, no matter how tough the opponent, and neither would Tom Walsh.

  So Walsh found a musket and boldly jumped in front of the Mulberry Boys’ barricade. He may have been the “great strapping Irishman in a red shirt” described by one riot witness. But when Walsh squeezed the trigger, nothing happened. He tried again, but still the weapon would not fire. While he examined the gun in an attempt to diagnose the problem, a shot rang out from the Bowery Boys’ side. The lead slug tore into Walsh’s leg, shattering a bone near the knee. “The injury was very severe,” reported the New York Tribune the next day. “. . . There is a chance that he will be maimed for life by the amputation of his leg.” Walsh’s fruitless bravery inspired many of his friends. By the end of the day, a dozen New Yorkers—mostly Mulberry Boys like Walsh—lay dead.1

  Inciting one of the deadliest riots in New York history would doom the political careers of most men, but Five Pointers did not judge their leaders by the same standards as other New Yorkers did. In fact, the illiterate Walsh went on to become perhaps the most beloved politician in nineteenth-century Five Points. His career epitomized a momentous transformation in New York City that began with Five Points in the mid-1850s: the Irish took control of city politics.

  Thomas Power Walsh was born in County Limerick, Ireland, in 1834. When he was three, his parents immigrated to New York with Tom and his one-year-old brother William. They settled on the West Side between Canal and Houston Streets, a district with relatively few immigrants. In their teens, Tom was apprenticed to a goldbeater, while William began learning the bookbinder’s craft. Little else is known about their youth, though according to a later biographical sketch, it was in these years that Tom “developed the fighting tendencies which later made him somewhat famous.”2

  Tom continued to live on the West Side on Greenwich Street into his early twenties. But his social circle increasingly revolved around Five Points. He must have been well known in the Sixth Ward, especially in its political ranks, in order to have been elected assistant foreman of a fire company there. Walsh would have previously demonstrated his loyalty to the Democratic party and won the trust of Brennan or one of his key lieutenants. As assistant foreman, Walsh became intimately familiar with and personally involved in Five Points political disputes. This explains why Walsh, an Eighth Warder, leaped in front of the barricade and took a bullet in the leg for his Five Points friends.3

  Despite the initially gloomy reports, Walsh did not lose his leg. The Tribune’s announcement that his brother William was killed by a shot to the head also proved untrue. Perhaps the praise the brothers received for defending Mulberry Street from the Bowery interlopers finally convinced them to become Five Pointers themselves. In early 1859, they quit goldbeating and bookbinding and opened a saloon in the heart of Mulberry Boy territory at 7 Mulberry Street. The three connected buildings at 5 and 7 Mulberry were among the most crowded in Five Points. The rear tenement, a converted Baptist church, was fast becoming one of the most squalid in the city. But the Walsh brothers chose the location primarily out of political rather than business considerations. This was the block where most of the Mulberry Boys lived, and the Walshes were determined to become their standard-bearers.4

  The move paid immediate dividends. In November 1859, twenty-two-year-old William was elected to the state assembly. Two years later, Sixth Warders made him their alderman. Tom, meanwhile, stayed out of the limelight. He did wield influence behind the scenes, however, first in Con Donoho’s old (and very powerful) post as Sixth Ward street inspector and in 1864 as the city’s superintendent of markets. Tom also took full control of the Mulberry Street saloon, while William opened his own on Centre Street. By the Civil War years, Tom’s watering hole was a neighborhood institution, characterized by one critic as “a great resort for low politicians, prize-fighters, bounty-jumpers and tough men.” William’s political career continued to soar during the war. In 1863, he became president of the board of aldermen and a member of the influential Tammany Society general committee as well.5

  But soon all that changed. One man, “Boss” William M. Tweed, increasingly controlled affairs in Tammany, the city’s dominant Democratic organization. The Walshes refused to cooperate with Tweed and found themselves political pariahs as a result. William became a leader of the anti-Tammany movement in the Democratic party, running unsuccessfully for county clerk in 1867 and the state assembly in 1870. The Walshes’ careers seemed doomed.6

  Yet when Tweed was arrested in late 1871 and his Ring collapsed soon thereafter, well-known enemies of the Boss such as the Walshes were perfectly positioned to fill the resulting power vacuum. William was elected county clerk in 1873 and became one of the two or three most powerful Democrats in New York. Tom continued to work behind the scenes. He ran his saloon and secured a patronage post at the Tombs prison on nearby Centre Street. By this point, Tom had moved to a house at 36 Mott Street, on a block where many of the most affluent Five Pointers lived. It was there, in 1873, that Walsh’s wife Armenia gave birth to their only child, Blanche.7

  After William died in 1878, Tom began to seek elective office himself. Voters sent him to the state assembly in 1881, but he broke with Tammany again in 1882 and was not renominated. Running for alderman a year later on an insurgent Democratic ticket, the popular Walsh lost to the Tammany nominee by just 16 votes. Though he blamed his defeat on electoral fraud, in the end he was glad that he lost because many of the aldermen elected that year were indicted in a bribery scandal. “God is good to the Irish,” he said afterward. “If I had been in the Board, where would I be now?” The following November, he won the race for alderman.8

  By this point, Fatty Walsh was an influential member of the “County Democracy,” the anti-Tammany Democratic organization. But he knew how to work with Tammany when it suited his interests. In return for his support during the 1886 campaign, Mayor Abram S. Hewitt appointed Walsh warden of the Tombs. Because Hewitt had a reputation as a reformer, many New Yorkers were outraged that the new mayor would name “a pothouse politician of a low type,” one who “had no respectable occupation,” to guard the city’s criminals. After all, continued the Times in another sto
ry, Warden Walsh would “inevitably become the custodian of many of his former associates in lawbreaking.”9

  Yet according to the Times, it was his life as a typical Five Points politician, rather than any specific crime, that disqualified Walsh from the office of warden. Referring to him in terms that applied to virtually every neighborhood politico, the Times condemned Walsh because “he is the product of the roughest elements of the Sixth Ward. . . . For years he was not only a gambler and a keeper of gambling dens, but a ward heeler of the lowest type, an associate of thieves and blacklegs, spending his life in gin-mills and a congenial associate of lawbreakers and law defiers.” Whether due to his background or not, Walsh soon lost his sinecure. Accused of having levied excessive fees on Tombs inmates (they had to pay for many services in those days), Walsh was forced to resign in April 1888 after little more than a year in office.10

  Now in late middle age, Walsh could at least console himself with the success of his daughter. Blanche was both a beauty and a gifted actress, and in 1888 at fifteen she made her professional stage debut. By age twenty-two she was one of Broadway’s leading ladies, and over the course of the subsequent decade she became one of the best known actresses in the United States. With her fame and substantial income, Blanche wanted to put Five Points behind her. She and her mother begged Tom to move the family uptown, but he steadfastly refused, “and declared that there he would live and die.” Fed up with his intransigence, Blanche and her mother moved anyway.11

 

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