The Gangs of New York

by Herbert Asbury

  It is very likely that most if not all of the smart sayings attributed to Chuck Connors had their inceptions in the brains of Frank Ward O’Malley and Roy L. McCardell, then writing for the Sun and the World, They found Connors a prolific source of copy; he would stand for anything, and he was always careful to read the newspapers and find out exactly what he was doing and thinking. When there was nothing else on which to build a feature story, there was always Chuck Connors, and with almost continuous publicity he was soon built up into a nationally known figure.

  His talk, or at least the talk that O’Malley and McCardell ascribed to him, found its way onto the stage, and even today is accepted as the sort of stuff that is spoken on the Bowery. Here is a typical specimen, published after Chuck had consented to grace the American theater in an act with Nellie Noonan, Queen of the Seventh Ward:

  To de woods fer mine. I bit so easy de jay must a t’ought he had a dead one on de string. Anyhow he had de show all fixed up an’ me in a sleepin’ car before even I turns me mind to de wagis for yours truly.

  Th’ first time I goes to de box offis fer me dough I near drops dead.

  De guy behin’ de bars passes me out a envelick wit’ $15 in it.

  “W’at t’ ’eU?” says I. “W’at t’ ’eU is dis?” says I, like dat, to de bloke in de windy.

  “Dat’s your wagis,” says de guy.

  Probably the only work that Chuck Connors ever did was during the year he courted the girl who later became his wife. He obtained a job as fireman on one of the little locomotives which hauled the elevated railroad trains before the lines were electrified, and remained a useful citizen until his wife died. Then he reverted to his former status and became a notable ornament of Chinatown. She had taught him to read and write, though imperfectly, and he delighted in displaying his erudition at the Chatham Club, reciting the alphabet backwards and answering questions about the multiplication table. Frequently he appeared in a Bowery skit at various theaters, and with road companies, and once was on the bill at Oscar Hammerstein’s famous variety theater, the Victoria, on Broadway. Not long after the death of his wife Chuck was shanghaied by a Water street crimp, and voyaged to England as an unwilling fireman. He promptly deserted when the ship docked, and remained for two weeks in Whitechapel, where he became enamoured of the manners and customs of the costermongers. He was particularly impressed by their dress, and when he returned to New York he had a Division street tailor fashion a pair of wide sailor pants and a blue, square cut pea jacket, adorned with two rows of very large pearl buttons. These he wore with a blue shirt and a sailors’ silk scarf of vivid hue. He attempted to introduce a costermonger’s pearl buttoned cap as an article of gentlemen’s wear in Chinatown and along the Bowery, but it failed to meet with favor and he soon abandoned it for the low-crowned black or brown derby which was then in vogue.

  When he had been exploited by the newspaper reporters so that he had become well known. Chuck Connors organized the Chuck Connors Club and gave rackets at Tammany Hall several times a year. He became a power in the politics of Chinatown and the Bowery, controlling the votes of lesser Lobbygows, and was frequently consulted by such shining lights of Tammany Hall as Big and Little Tim Sullivan. Both of these statesmen were honorary members of the Chuck Connors Club, as were also Al Smith, now Governor of New York; Richard Mansfield, the actor; John L. Sullivan, champion pugilist; Honest Johnny Kelly, the gambler; Walt B. McDougall, the cartoonist, Jim Corbett, Bob Fitzsimmons and many others. For many years during the latter part of his life Chuck Connors lived in a two-room apartment at No. 6 Dover street, near the East River, in a tenement house which was called Fox’s Flats because it had been constructed by Richard K. Fox, owner of the Police Gazette. He never paid any rent, and the fact that Fox made no effort to dispossess him gave rise to the report that the publisher had given him the flat rent free so long as he lived. But Chuck was seldom at home, except to sleep there occasionally; he spent his entire time in Chinatown, and generally could be found in the Chatham Club at any hour of the day or night.

  At the age of sixty-one, in 1913, Chuck Connors died in the Hudson Street Hospital. The doctors said he had heart disease, but really it was neglect that killed him. He became old and garrulous and uninteresting; he complained of rheumatism, and frequently had to stay away from his accustomed haunts for several days at a time. The reporters, having exhausted him as a source of interesting copy, dropped him, and without publicity Chuck Connors was soon forgotten. The final nail was driven into his cross when Frank Salvatore, an Italian bootblack known as Mike the Dago, began to call himself Young Chuck Connors and organized the Young Chuck Connors Association. He acquired political influence as the prestige of the original Chuck declined, and when he announced that he would give a grand ball in opposition to the affair of the old Chuck Connors Club, the one time King of the Lobbygows consented to abdicate, or at least share his throne with the newcomer. It was agreed that on the program of Young Chuck’s ball the name of Chuck Connors should appear as a patron immediately after that of Jim Jeffries, then heavyweight champion of the world, and before the name of Jim Corbett.

  Chuck lingered on for several years after that, but his heart was not in his work, and finally he died. He was buried by members of the Press Club, and of the thousands upon thousands of persons who had known him fewer than forty attended his funeral.

  WHILE Chinatown was becoming notorious as the battleground of the tongs and a place of evil resort, the Bowery was undergoing one of its frequent metamorphoses, and was rapidly descending to depths of vice and misery such as it had not known since the palmy days of Billy McGlory and Owney Geogheghan. From Astor Place to Chatham Square the beer gardens, concert saloons, dance halls and theaters which had continued the struggle to make the Bowery a place of entertainment, gave way to dives as low as those of the old Bowery and the Fourth Ward when Kit Burns’ rat pit, the Hole-in-the-Wall and John Allen’s house were in the heyday of their glory. And places of equal meanness throve in Park Row southward from Chatham Square to City Hall Park, in the streets which crossed the Bowery, and along the thoroughfares of Cherry Hill. Probably no American City has ever been able to boast of resorts as depraved as the Doctor’s, the Plague, the Hell Hole, the Harp House, the Cripples’ Home, and the Billy Goat, all in Park Row; the Dump, the Princess Café and Johnny Kelly’s dive, in the Bowery; the Inferno in Worth street; the Workingman’s Friend in Mott street. Union Hall in Elizabeth street; the Cob Dock in Hester street, and Mother Woods’ in Water street. Of only a slightly higher class were Chick Tricker’s Fleabag and McGuirk’s Suicide Hall, both on the Bowery. McGuirk’s and Mother Woods’ were the favorite haunts of the prostitutes and women thieves of the Bowery and water front districts, and McGuirk used to boast that more women had killed themselves in his establishment than in any other house in the world. In later years the building became the home of the Hadley Rescue Mission.

  Not only were these places frequented by the gangsters at such times when their finances were low, and by pickpockets, burglars, and thieves of every description, but they particularly swarmed with panhandlers, beggars, cocaine and morphine addicts, and those homeless dregs of humanity who have never been known otherwise than as Bowery Bums. Whiskey, compared to which the modern bootleg product is nectar, was sold for five cents a large glass, and for those whose jaded palates failed to respond to the raw liquor there was a villainous mixture of water and liquid camphor, an even fiercer beverage than the concoction once sold by Johnny Camphine. There was also a hot punch compounded of whiskey, hot rum, camphor, benzine, and cocaine sweepings.

  which generally sold for six cents and was guaranteed to contain a case of delirium tremens in every drop. In some of the dives, notably the Doctor’s, a premium check was given with every drink, six checks entitling the holder to one drink free. In the Billy Goat two drinks were sold for a nickel to every person who appeared between 5 and 5:30 o’clock in the morning. Sometimes such a long line would form to take advant
age of this generosity that police reserves were called to hold the struggling bums in check.

  Many of the habitués of the Bowery and Park Row dens had once been men of substance and standing in their communities— in 1910 a reporter for the New York World who spent an hour at the Doctor’s met a man who had been a wealthy merchant in Baltimore, another who was the scion of a distinguished Boston family and a graduate of Harvard, and still another, called the Scholar, who claimed Yale as his Alma Mater. The Scholar scorned to panhandle; he utilized his learning by writing, for a drink or a small sum of money, piteous appeals for the use of professional beggars. For two drinks he would produce a poem. One of his masterpieces, which was used with great success by panhandlers whose graft was pretended blindness, was:

  Help a poor blind man and don’t turn him away.

  Just give him a dime and for you he will pray;

  You may get afflicted the same way some day,

  Help a poor blind man and don’t turn him away.

  The Doctor’s was also a favorite resort of the panhandlers who preyed upon the public by simulating cripples, and the owner of the dive. Burly Bohan, thoughtfully provided a locker wherein crutches and canes were stored while the owners spent their gains for whiskey, rum and liquid camphor. One of the most successful of this type was old Tom Frizzell, a noted Bowery character who succeeded to the title of King of the Panhandlers after Jim Farrell, blinded by the fiery concoctions which he had been imbibing for many years, had been carried screaming out of John Kelly’s dive at No. 10 Bowery to die in the alcoholic ward of

  Bellevue Hospital. Old Tom generally sat at a table from which he could see the engraved portraits of fourteen Presidents of the United States which hung above the bar; he said that the sight of the statesmen always gave him courage, and that it was owing to their inspiration that for twenty years he had never been caught without pad money, that is, a nickel or a dime for lodging.

  Against the rear wall of the Doctor’s were two long tables. These were the rooms of the hotel, and sleeping places on and beneath them were sold for five cents. But the darkest corner under the table was reserved for Jack Dempsey, an ancient panhandler who earned his lodging by washing glasses and scattering sawdust upon the floor. Dempsey was probably the lowest of all the Bowery Bums. It was his proud boast that he had not owned a suit of underwear or a pair of socks in five years—this was in 1910—and that for eight years he had not slept in a bed. He was a camphor fiend and a cocaine addict, and when he obtained a drink of whiskey always added to it some eight to fifteen drops of liquid camphor; and while his body was still racked by the crash of the beverage he plunged a hypodermic needle laden with cocaine into his arm. Dempsey was a needle jabber, an aristocrat of the drug addicts. Lower in the scale were the sniffers, who inhaled the drug through the nose, and lowest of all were the ice cream eaters, who chewed the crystals of cocaine, morphine, or heroin. The ice cream eaters generally obtained a quicker result, but were scorned as greedy, and lost many of the delightful preliminary sensations.

  The Dump at No. 9 Bowery, run by Jimmy Lee and Slim Reynolds, was a favorite resort of the panhandlers for many years, and it was there that many of their schemes were hatched. Goat Hinch and Whitey Sullivan, who eventually expiated their crimes in the electric chair, were among the noted patrons of the Dump; the former is said to have originated the practice of swallowing a concoction which would make him temporarily ill and so arouse the sympathies of people in the street. Sometimes the Goat chewed a cake of evil-smelling soap, producing fearful symptoms which invariably brought a shower of nickels and dimes. In common with other dives, the Dump provided sleeping quarters, but Reynolds and Lee were more ingenious in their arrangements. They screwed short iron stanchions into the floor about seven feet from the rear wall, and into the wall affixed an iron framework. From the latter to the stanchions was a net of coarse rope, and when a bum passed out from dope or the effects of whiskey and camphor, he was simply tossed into the net to sleep it off.

  Frequent raids by the police during the few years immediately preceding the World War, together with improved economic conditions, compelled the passing of a majority of the low Bowery dives and the gradual disappearance of the old time Bowery Bum.

  A few of the latter remain, and a few of the former also, but they are now speakeasies and drinks can no longer be obtained for a nickel. They generally cost from fifteen cents to a quarter. One of the last of the Bums is the Hoakie, who says he is a graduate of the University of Heidelberg, and points with pride to several scars on his face, which he vows were received in duels with other German students. Summer and winter the Hoakie wears a long, heavy overcoat tied under his chin with a string and girt with a heavy cord. When he walks he rattles and clanks, for beneath the overcoat, about his waist, dangle a skillet, a tin cup, a can of solidified alcohol, a spoon, knife and fork, and odds and ends of food, most of which he obtains by a skilful searching of garbage pails. With these utensils the Hoakie cooks his meals beneath the East River docks, and is beholden to no man.

  THE LAST OF THE GANG WARS

  WHEN LOUIE the lump put a sudden and dramatic end to the earthly career of Kid Twist in the midst of a gaping Coney Island crowd, control of the three most important remnants of the old Monk Eastman gang fell into the hands of Big Jack Zelig, Jack Sirocco and Chick Tricker. But only Zelig achieved lasting renown as a gang chieftain, for Tricker and Sirocco were primarily saloonkeepers, and for the most part subordinated leadership of their gangs to more legitimate affairs. Sirocco, whose appearance was almost as awe-inspiring as that of Monk Eastman himself—he invariably wore a plaid cap drawn down over his eyes and seldom shaved—operated a prosperous gin-mill in the Bowery which became a favorite haunt of the gangsters after some of the Chinatown dives had been closed. Tricker’s place in Park Row was closed on complaint of the Committee of Fourteen in 1910, but a year before the reformers descended upon the resort he had begun to transfer his principal interests to the district which in earlier times had been celebrated as Satan’s Circus. There he purchased Dan the Dude’s old Stag Café in West Twenty-eighth street near Broadway, renamed it the Café Maryland, and speedily converted it into one of the wickedest dives in a notoriously wicked neighborhood. His gangsters, numbering probably thirty choice thugs, made their rendezvous in the Maryland, and busied themselves with burglaries, dope peddling, holdups, and blackjackings, and otherwise conducted themselves according to the standards of the underworld. Tricker retained a connection with the lower East Side by acquiring an interest in Jack Pioggi’s drinking den in Doyers street, near the Bloody Angle, and a year or so later became the owner of the Fleabag, a fragrant dive at No. 241 Bowery.

  Misfortune frequently beset the Café Maryland during the few years it was in operation. Three men were shot to death there late in 1909, when several of Tricker’s own followers quarrelled over a woman, and about a year later the gang chieftain made the serious mistake of flouting the Gophers. It may be that Tricker underestimated the strength and ferocity of the terrors of the West Side, or that he credited the reports that the Gophers were embroiled in internecine strife; whatever the reason, he made no objection when one of his thugs ventured into Hell’s Kitchen, captured the impressionable heart of Ida the Goose, and bore her in triumph to West Twenty-eighth street, where she was formally installed as belle of the Maryland. Ida the Goose was a noted beauty of the underworld and had been the beloved of a long succession of Gopher captains, so that her defection caused much comment.

  The Gophers indignantly demanded that she return forthwith to Hell’s Kitchen, and when she refused to desert her new lover they sent an emissary to deal with Chick Tricker, and threatened to regain the lady by force of arms. Tricker refused to interfere, and the West Side ambassador retired from the conference seething with anger. Preparations for war immediately went forward in the Kitchen, but for several weeks nothing happened, and the Tricker gangsters, who had been going about heavily armed in anticipation of an attack,
relaxed their vigilance, and the garrison of the Maryland was considerably reduced. Then, on an October night which saw the first snowfall of the year, four of the most noted of the Gopher fighters, including the thug who had been the favored of Ida the Goose, entered the café and approached the bar in the manner of customers. They ordered beer, while half a dozen Tricker gangsters who lounged at the tables eyed them nervously, so amazed at the audacity of the Gophers in thus invading the rendezvous of an avowed enemy that it never occurred to them to launch an immediate attack upon the intruders. None spoke save Ida the Goose.

  “Say!” she cried, indignantly. “Youse guys got a nerve!”

  The Gophers ignored her. They calmly drank their beer, and when the mugs had been drained one said:

  “Well, let’s get at it!”

  They whirled from the bar and eight revolvers flashed from as many pockets; and before the dazed henchmen of Chick Tricker could draw their weapons a hail of lead sprayed against the bar fixtures and splashed among the tables. The two bartenders, who were not members of Tricker’s fighting forces, promptly dived headlong to the floor, and five of the six Tricker gangsters fell with disabling wounds. The sixth, the same young Lochinvar who had galloped out of Hell’s Kitchen with Ida the Goose, flung away his gun, hastily scrambled across the floor, and found shelter behind the voluminous skirts of his inamorata. The Gophers made no effort to shoot him; they waited with ready revolvers to see what Ida the Goose would do. And that lady responded nobly to the best tradition of Hell’s Kitchen. For a moment she stared at the craven wretch who had won her affections and lured her from the Gopher domain, and then with a contemptuous shrug of her shoulders she reached down and plucked him from his refuge. “Say, youse!” said Ida the Goose. “Come out and take it!”