These feste were held despite Corrigan’s ban. Such prohibitions were difficult to enforce as more and more Italian priests began arriving in New York. In response to inquiries from Corrigan in August 1892, Lynch insisted that “no such procession has ever gone forth from this church.” But he reported that just a few days earlier “the procession of St. Donatus (which you forbade) was held . . . with all the noise of a brass band and fireworks in the streets.” Lynch walked to Most Precious Blood to investigate and found it gaudily decorated for the celebration. The “Piacenzan priests,” Lynch gravely informed the archbishop, “had disobeyed your orders.”60
Although the Italian immigrants were undoubtedly grateful to the Scalabrinians for participating in their festivals, the newcomers did not entirely trust the immigrant clergymen either. Back in southern Italy, they had viewed their priests as allies of the landed elite that had impoverished them. This traditional anti-clericalism persisted among the Italians who settled in the United States. In a particularly revealing account of the San Donato festa (the same “Donatus” referred to by Lynch), Riis reported that this feast had been organized by immigrants from the town of Auletta, located just six miles west of Savoia di Lucania. He noted that except for the days when the image of St. Donato was being used for the festival, the natives of Auletta left Donato “in the loft of the saloon, lest the priests get hold of him and get a corner on him, as it were. Once [the priest] got him into his possession, he would not let the people have him except upon payment of a fee that would grow with the years. But the saint belonged to the people, not to the church. . . . In the saloon they had him safe.”61
Banned from the main sanctuary at Transfiguration and denigrated by its Irish-American rector, Five Points Italians thus revived their beloved feste as a means of asserting some degree of religious autonomy in their new surroundings. The feste may have appeared quaint to American journalists, and sacrilegious to Irish-American church leaders, but they played a major role in helping the newcomers create a distinctly Italian-American community and identity.62
Five Points Italians were soon reminded of their precarious status within the New York Catholic community, though, when Most Precious Blood suddenly closed in 1893. The Scalabrinian who had spearheaded the building campaign for the church was a financial incompetent who had borrowed far more to construct it than the parishioners could afford. Both the church and some of the Scalabrinians’ other property in New York were soon sold at auction to satisfy creditors.
Italians blamed the Irish-American church leadership. They were convinced that the archdiocese would have loaned money to prevent foreclosure had theirs been an Irish parish. The former parishioners began soliciting money door to door in an attempt to reopen the church, insisting that “unless the church reopens ‘Italians will be the slaves of the Irish as they have been before the church in Baxter St. existed,’ and that they will always remain slaves.” A former clergyman from Most Precious Blood told a group gathered to discuss the church’s future that “the Irish priests wanted everything and gave no privileges in return.”63
Given the demands of the pope, Corrigan could not take back Most Precious Blood from the Italian community. Instead, he eventually allowed it to reopen under the auspices of a different Italian Catholic religious order, the Franciscan brotherhood. Meanwhile, a new priest, Thomas McLoughlin, was assigned to Transfiguration in 1894. According to a parish history written during his tenure there, “Father McLoughlin did his best to make the two races coalesce, by compelling the Italians to attend services in the upper church, but found that far better results could be obtained by having the two people worship . . . separately.” Although Five Points’ southern Italians became disillusioned with the northern Italians who came to dominate Most Precious Blood, they continued to leave Transfiguration for the new parish. Average attendance at Sunday mass at Transfiguration fell from 1,200 in 1894, to 700 in 1897, and to only 350 by 1901. Finally accepting that the parish could not survive as long as its leaders treated 90 percent of the parishioners as second-class citizens, Corrigan in 1901 arranged to transfer control of the parish to the Salesians of Don Bosco, placing “the whole building at the disposal of the Italian Catholics of that neighborhood.”64
The Salesians immediately appointed an Italian pastor to head Transfiguration and ended the basement masses. They allowed the Italians to place their statues of Saints Rocco, Vittorio, Anthony, and others in the church. Catholic societies dedicated to these saints and others were permitted as well. It had been a long struggle, but the Italians of Five Points finally had a church of their own. By 1901, Italians had dominated most aspects of neighborhood life for more than a decade. The transfer of Transfiguration to Italian control, after years of Irish resistance, symbolized the Irish community’s grudging acceptance that the transformation of Five Points into an Italian neighborhood was now complete.65
13
PROLOGUE
“THE CHINESE DEVIL MAN”
QUIMBO APPO WAS ranting again. He had occasional moments of lucidity when he could entertain visitors at the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane with stories of the old days in China and California. But at other times, his delusions were monumental. His son was president of the United States. He owned Madison Square Garden and all the laundries in the nation. The Virgin Mary visited him in his cell. He was “King of the World.”
These might have been typical ravings for a mental patient, but Quimbo Appo was no ordinary asylum inmate. In the 1850s, Appo had been the best known Chinese immigrant in New York. Journalists had sought him out as a guide to the insular world of the New York Chinese and quoted him at length. He was even patriotic. When his Irish-born wife gave birth to a son on the Fourth of July 1856, he named the boy George Washington Appo. Quimbo Appo was, in short, an “exemplary Chinaman.”
Appo’s name appeared again in the press in March 1859, but this time as a murder suspect. Over the next two decades, he would be implicated in two more murders and a number of violent assaults. Journalists soon rechristened the exemplary Chinaman “the Chinese devil man.” He spent nearly all of the last half century of his life incarcerated, first at the state penitentiary at Sing Sing and later at Matteawan. How had Quimbo Appo fallen so far, so fast?1
Appo was born Lee Ah Bow in 1825 on Zhusan, an island off the Chinese coast about fifty miles southeast of Shanghai. Western opium traders frequently visited the island, and it was probably through these contacts that Appo secured passage to California in 1847. His early years in North America remain something of a mystery. He seems to have stayed in California until 1853, probably prospecting for gold. He eventually made his way to New York and married Catherine Fitzpatrick, a widow who bore him his son George.2
In New York, the five-foot three-inch Appo found work as a clerk and “taster” at an upscale tea shop. He may have even owned his own Greenwich Village tea emporium for a while. Virtually every Times story on the New York Chinese mentioned him by name. In 1856, the paper’s reporter was especially taken with his five-month-old son George, gushing over the “handsome, healthy boy,” who was “very sprightly, [and] as white as his mother—a Yankee boy to all appearances.” The same journal noted in 1859 that while most Chinese New Yorkers lived in decrepit boardinghouses in the worst neighborhoods, Appo resided in a “first class house.”3
So it must have come as something of a shock to New Yorkers when they read in their morning papers on March 9, 1859, that Quimbo Appo stood accused of murder. The Appos’ life, it turned out, had a darker side. The couple fought frequently about Catherine’s heavy drinking, and neighbors in their Fourth Ward tenement at 47 Oliver Street often complained about the noise. On the eighth, when Quimbo returned home from work around 7:00 p.m. to find that his intoxicated wife had prepared him no dinner, he flew into a rage and began beating her. Their landlady, Mary Fletcher, came to Catherine’s aid—the two had been drinking together that afternoon to celebrate Fletcher’s birthday. The building’s other
Irishwomen came running to support their friends as well, but Quimbo, determined to teach Catherine a lesson, would not relent. Catherine eventually broke free and fled the room, but Quimbo and the Irishwomen continued to scuffle. He called them drunks; they called him a “China nigger.” One of the Irishwomen even pummeled Appo with a “smoothing iron.” Finally, as the struggling mass of fists and curses moved from the Appos’ apartment into the hallway, Appo drew a knife and stabbed Fletcher in the neck. She collapsed and quickly bled to death. Appo grazed another woman in the head during the struggle and stabbed a third in the arm as he escaped out the tenement door. Police found him a few hours later hiding under a bed in a nearby Chinese boardinghouse. They charged him with murder.4
It seemed that Appo’s days were numbered. When the police escorted him through the streets of the Fourth Ward to appear at the coroner’s inquest, an angry mob of Irish Americans bent on revenge tried to kidnap and lynch him. At his one-day trial a month later, his desultory attorney offered no defense whatsoever, and after only a few minutes of deliberation a jury convicted him of murder. The judge sentenced Appo to hang.5
Had Appo killed Fletcher in California, where anti-Chinese sentiment ran deep, he undoubtedly would have perished on the gallows. But native-born New Yorkers in the antebellum years still regarded the Chinese as hardworking, enterprising, and thrifty, whereas hard-drinking Irishwomen were not to be trusted. A sympathetic editorial in the Times questioned the competence of Appo’s attorney and implied that he had not received a fair trial. Still, no court could condone the use of a deadly weapon against inebriated women, even if one of them wielded a flatiron. An appeals tribunal consequently upheld Appo’s conviction. Yet New York’s governor commuted his life sentence to ten years, and Appo was released after serving seven years and nine months in Sing Sing.6
There was no homecoming celebration to greet Appo on his return to New York sometime after April 1869. Soon after Appo had entered Sing Sing, Catherine and George had left for California, where Catherine’s brother lived. During the trip west, Catherine perished, apparently in a shipwreck. George survived, however, and was sent back to New York to await his father’s release from prison. The authorities found the three-year-old a home with a poor longshoreman’s family, the Allens, in a part of Five Points known as “Donovan’s Lane.”7
In the decade after the Civil War, Donovan’s Lane was one of the most notorious addresses in Five Points. It was not an officially recognized thoroughfare, but rather a pair of alleys (one leading west from Baxter Street, the other running north from Pearl Street) that intersected at a decrepit courtyard ringed by four tall and dark rear tenements. “There lived in this Donovan’s lane,” George remembered years later, “poor people of all nationalities and there were four old tenement houses and a large horse and wagon stable and sheds in the Lane and 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 the five cent rum bought at ‘Black Mike’s’ saloon.” Contemporary accounts confirm Appo’s. “This Arcadia of garbage,” reported the Daily Graphic in early 1873, “is approached from Baxter street by a covered alley, running under a reeking structure that seems impinged with filth and redolent of disease.” At the other end were “rambling hovels and Alpine ranges of garbage heaps.” Italians dominated one Donovan Lane tenement, Irishwomen another, and Chinese men a third. Authorities probably considered the ethnic mix in Donovan’s Lane a perfect match for little George Appo.8
When Quimbo was released from prison, he and George, now about twelve, moved to a boardinghouse at the south end of the Sixth Ward near City Hall. Quimbo returned to work as a tea tester, but was jailed a few months later after fighting in a liquor store with a man he claimed was robbing him. George once again moved in with the Allens in Donovan’s Lane and started working as a newsboy. But he soon followed his father into a life of crime, falling in with a gang of juvenile pickpockets. Arrested for robbery in early 1871 at age fourteen, he was sentenced by Police Justice Joseph Dowling to duty on the Mercury, a prison ship of sorts, where juvenile delinquents learned nautical skills. Appo served about a year aboard the vessel, sailing to ports as far away as Rio de Janeiro and Africa before he jumped ship in New York Harbor in about 1873. He made his way back to Five Points and moved in with his “stepsister,” Mary Ann Allen, who had an apartment on Worth Street at the Five Points intersection.9
The senior Appo had long since been released from jail, but he could still not control his violent impulses. On the night of August 9, 1871, the apparently homeless Appo was sleeping under a stoop near the entrance to Donovan’s Lane when some boys began harassing him. He chased after them, throwing a large stone at them as he pursued. The stone missed the boys and instead hit a Polish Jewish shoemaker in the head as the man stepped out the door of his workshop. The severely injured victim spent three weeks in the hospital recovering. No witnesses could swear to having seen Appo throw the stone, and his trial resulted in a hung jury. But at his retrial he was convicted of assault, and served nearly four years at Sing Sing. Toward the end, he was reunited with George, who was sent “up the river” in mid-1874 to begin a thirty-month sentence after police again caught him picking pockets. Quimbo completed his sentence first, in August 1875, but a month later he was arrested yet again for assault and battery. A judge jailed Appo for three more months. When he was released in early January 1876, he supported himself peddling cigars on the streets. But before the end of the month he was incarcerated yet again, this time for “insanity,” on the complaint of one of his Baxter Street neighbors. After his release a few months later, he was caught selling tobacco products without the proper excise stamps (he apparently served no jail time for this minor offense).10
George Appo, from Louis J. Beck, New York’s Chinatown (New York, 1898): 251.
By this point, fifty-one-year-old Quimbo Appo was clearly a man of conflicting impulses. On one arm, the devout Roman Catholic had a tattoo of the crucifixion; on the other was a Spanish dancing girl and a skull and crossbones. For years, he had heard voices he believed to be revelations, telling him, in the words of a doctor, that “whatever he should consider it right to do would be considered a good act by God Almighty.” Given these delusions and his propensity to respond to threats with excessive violence, it was only a matter of time before Appo killed again.11
On October 19, 1876, Appo spent the evening at his Five Points boardinghouse playing checkers with another resident, John A. Kelly. Appo won the checkers games and the small bets made on each contest, then retired. Kelly went out for a few drinks and returned to the house between midnight and 1:00 a.m., still fuming over his defeat. He dragged Appo out of bed and began beating his nemesis, finally knocking him down a flight of stairs. The night clerk tried to restrain Kelly, while Appo tried to flee, but Kelly would not relent, landing additional blows each time he managed to reach him. Finally, Appo grabbed a penknife and stabbed the onrushing Kelly through the heart. Appo was charged with manslaughter in the second degree, convicted at a trial two months later, and sentenced to seven years in prison.12
At Auburn State Prison, Appo became increasingly delusional, and authorities eventually transferred him to the mental hospital at Matteawan. George, meanwhile, had become a notorious criminal in his own right, first as a thief and later as a counterfeiter. He was also prosecuted three or four times for stabbing men during fights—one of these incidents, over a game of cards, was eerily similar to his father’s final crime. George lost an eye when he was shot by one of his counterfeiting victims.
The public would have learned very little about these exploits had George not given detailed descriptions of police corruption to a state investigative committee in 1894, testimony that made him one of the best known criminals in the city. Appo apparently hoped to use his testimony as a springboard to going straight, but such a transformation was not easy. A few months after his committee appearance, an assailant cut George’s throat and nearly kille
d him, an act he interpreted as police revenge for his testimony. Two years later, he complained to the Times that he could not find honest work. Employers would not hire him because of his criminal record, but he could not return to a life of crime because his testimony had made him a pariah to his underworld friends. A few weeks after making this statement to the press, George was arrested for a stabbing at the corner of Mott and Chatham Streets, just a hundred feet from the spot where his father had knifed John Kelly. At his trial, the judge declared George insane and sent him to Matteawan, where he was once again reunited with his father, whom he had not seen since Sing Sing twenty years earlier. But whereas Quimbo’s dementia continued, George’s persecution complex eventually subsided, and he was released in 1899. Though he aspired to be an actor and a poet, George spent the remainder of his life in a variety of menial jobs in New York, Philadelphia, and Trenton. He died in 1930.13
In many ways, the Appos’ story parallels the changing course of New Yorkers’ attitudes toward the city’s early Chinese community. Just as they had once viewed Quimbo Appo as an exemplary immigrant, New Yorkers had initially welcomed the city’s Chinese newcomers, stereotyping them as hardworking, thrifty, and law-abiding. But during the postbellum years, New Yorkers came to see the Chinese as a threat. They were a depraved race, incapable of restraining their “appetites,” just as Quimbo Appo could not restrain his violent impulses. And George’s career proved to many that the racial and ethnic mixing typical in Five Points was creating, in the words of one journalist, a “hybrid brood” of “half-breeds” who were especially prone to lives of crime.14
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