Crazy Joe Gallo’s last moments in Little Italy

Joseph Gallo, nicknamed “crazy” by fellow mobsters, was a Red Hook–born gangster specializing in typical 1950s and 1960s mafia activities such as extortion and racketeering.

He was also flamboyant, charming, and well-read, and in the early 1970s he became kind of a celebrity, hanging out with writers, actors, and other New York scenesters. 

But he made a fatal mistake on the night of his 43rd birthday, on April 7, 1972. After visiting the Copacabana nightclub, he stopped into Umberto’s Clam House on Mulberry Street in Little Italy. It was around 5 a.m. Supposedly a rival mobster saw him enter Umberto’s; within minutes, gunmen entered the restaurant and start firing. 

Gallo was hit five times, staggered out to the street, and died. He’s buried in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery.

There’s the crime scene at Umberto’s early the next morning. Apparently Gallo thought he was safe there because of an unwritten agreement among gangsters that Little Italy was off-limits to bloodshed. 

Umberto’s Clam House has since relocated a few blocks away, on the corner of Broome and Mulberry Streets in ever-shrinking Little Italy.

What happened when Gallo loyalists tried to avenge his murder? Here’s the story of a hit gone very, very wrong.

Bob Dylan’s 1976 song “Joey” tells Gallo’s story. Watch Part I and Part II here.

Old phone exchange: Digby 4-8260

This 1950s-era Traveller’s Luggage discount card fell out of a recently purchased used book. The Digby exchange covered lower Broadway down by Bowling Green, where Traveller’s headquarters were.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So why was the local phone exchange named Digby? It comes from Digby’s Bar, which used to be located at One Broadway.

The Queensboro Bridge: “mystery and beauty”

This postcard of the Queensboro Bridge—also known as the 59th Street Bridge or the Blackwell’s Island Bridge in its early years—reveals a structure surrounded by industry and grit. It opened in 1909, linking Manhattan’s East Side to the factories of Long Island City.

The Queensboro still doesn’t get the appreciation the Brooklyn or Williamsburg Bridges receive. But it has fans who extoll its virtues.

In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that “the city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time in its wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.”

And of course, there’s Simon and Garfunkel’s ode to feelin’ groovy: “The 59th Street Bridge Song.”

The New York City-Gotham City Connection

Long before Batman first appeared in a comic book in 1939, New Yorkers were calling their city Gotham—thanks to Washington Irving, who came up with the moniker in 1807.

 Gotham is the name of a British village where, legend has it, residents were “wise enough to play the fool.” It was kind of backhanded compliment from Irving regarding how cunning New Yorkers were, even in the 19th century.

 

Just as Gotham, England was the inspiration for New York’s nickname, New York inspired Gotham City. Batman’s hometown is supposedly based on Manhattan below 14th Street.

In this still from the 1989 Batman movie, Gotham City’s skyline looks awfully similar to ours.

The weight loss quacks of East 22nd Street

Tucked away on a side street near then-fashionable Madison Square Park was the “United States Medical Dispensary,” a shady-sounding outfit that sold diet advice through ads in magazines at the turn of the last century.

I like the part about readers of this ad being afraid “the remedy is worse than the disease.” What could the treatment have been—tapeworms? 

Looks like the city’s obsession with thinness and weight loss didn’t get its start with amphetamine-popping Upper East Side ladies in the 1960s or during the heroin chic days of the ’90s. New York has worshipped skinny people for at least a century.

Vintage store signs in the Village

Joe’s Dairy—Latticini Freschi—is just off Houston Street:

 

T.S Hardware, still making keys on 8th Street near University Place:

 

Looking at this sign on Seventh Avenue South, you’d think it’s 1939, not 2009:

Before it was the Hotel Carter . . .

Before being crowned Tripadvisor.com’s dirtiest hotel in America, before a corpse was found stuffed under a bed, before the wonderfully nonsensical sign “You Wanted in Times Square and Less” went up in the lobby, the seedy, one-star Hotel Carter was the Hotel Dixie.

And it must not have been too bad, since someone deemed it worthy of a postcard.

Whatever the name, the hotel has a slightly tawdry history. It opened in 1930, and almost immediately, the owners went bankrupt. It had its own bus terminal, which went out of business in the 1950s because it couldn’t compete with the Port Authority. 

Several decades and suicides later, in the 1980s, the city used it as a homeless shelter. By the late 80s, the homeless were mostly out—and unsuspecting tourists and visitors with very little cash became the main clientele.

EV Grieve has rounded up some cool Hotel Carter signs. 

Stopping in for dinner at the Black Eagle

Something tells me you could get a hearty meal at the Black Eagle Restaurant, courtesy of a proprietor with the great name of Gus Koblitz. 

The address on this yellowed, crinkled business card would have put the Black Eagle on the edge of Yorkville, the once heavily German part of the Upper East Side.

The telephone exchange in the upper left corner looks mighty old. It must predate the two-letter, five-digit formula that lasted into the 1960s.