An infamous murder on Brooklyn’s Lincoln Place

Ever notice that Brooklyn’s Degraw Street suddenly becomes Lincoln Place after crossing Fifth Avenue?

The name change has to do with a gruesome murder near this intersection in 1873, then the media attention that gripped the block for the next few years.

In March, Charles Goodrich, a 41-year-old widower, was found with three gunshot wounds to the head in his brownstone at what was then 731 Degraw Street.

At first, police thought it might be suicide or a robbery. But strangely, his body had been laid out neatly and cleaned of blood.

So when neighbors reported that a young woman had been living in the house and that they often saw Goodrich with her on the stoop, police took the investigation in a new direction.

They believed the woman’s name was Kate Stoddard (right); she was a Massachusetts native in her 20s who worked in a hat factory in Manhattan. But for months, she proved to be elusive.

Finally, after a sighting by Stoddard’s ex-roommate on the Fulton Ferry, cops tracked her down.

During questioning, she denied everything—until detectives found Charles Goodrich’s personal items in her room in a boarding house on High Street.

Reportedly she confessed. Turns out her real name was Lizzie Lloyd King. She’d met Goodrich through a personal ad, and they soon married.

Then Goodrich told her the marriage was a sham and he wanted her to leave him alone, as he was now engaged to another woman.

During an argument in the house on Degraw Street, a spurned King drew a gun and shot Goodrich dead.

In 1874, she was committed to an upstate insane asylum for life—but not before residents of Degraw Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues  (left) petitioned the city to have the street’s name changed, fearing the “unpleasant associations” with the murder.

A haunted speakeasy in a Greenwich Village alley

Crooked little Gay Street looks like the perfect place to open a speakeasy.

So it’s hardly a surprise to learn that one existed here in the 1920s.

Called the Pirate’s Den, the illegal bar was run out of number 12, a Federal-style house built in 1827—back when Gay Street was just a slender stable alley in up-and-coming Greenwich Village.

See the metal arch placed in front of the building? It supposedly marked the bar’s basement entrance.

Located near other Village speakeasies, such as Julius’ on West 10th Street and the Red Head on Sixth Avenue, the Pirate’s Den was more of a tourist trap than a place for locals.

“[It featured] clanking chains, clashing cutlasses, ship’s lanterns, and patch-eyed buccaneer waiters,” writes George Chauncey in his book Gay New York.

Twelve Gay Street isn’t only known for its liquor joint rep. After the Pirate’s Den closed down, Mayor Jimmy Walker, a notorious partier and playboy, moved his showgirl mistress here, turning the house into kind of a second Mayoral home.

Could he be the mysterious figure in a top hat and tails, dubbed the Gay Street Phantom, who is said to creep around the stairs at night?

“The historic Gay St. property, on the corner of Waverly Place, is rumored to be inhabited by a restless spirit who walks the creaking floorboards at night,” states a 2009 New York Daily News article.

[Top photo: Streeteasy; bottom, NYPL Digital Gallery]

A riot sparked by a rumor erupts on 125th Street

There are differing accounts of the violence and mayhem. But one thing seems clear: it all started because of a rumor.

In March 1935, a Puerto Rican teen was caught shoplifting a pen knife at the Kress Five and Ten store (“known for its reluctance to hire black clerks,”) on West 125th Street.

“A Negro woman saw store employees search the thief; she became hysterical and shouted that the prisoner was being beaten by his captors, although he was not harmed, and soon the word got about that a Negro boy had been killed,” summarized The New York Times that week.

By evening, Communist organizations and a group calling itself the Young Liberators gathered outside the Kress store, handing out flyers that claimed the boy had been brutally beaten.

Crowds grew, and Harlem simmered with rage. Mayor La Guardia urged calm, but at about 6 p.m., rioting had begun.

“Roving bands of Negros, with here and there a sprinkling of white agitators, stoned windows, set fire to several stores, and began looting,” reported a separate Times story. “By 1:30 a.m., the worst of the rioting was ended, but sporadic outbreaks occurred up until 4 a.m.”

The next day, order was restored. “Overall, three African Americans were killed and nearly sixty were injured,” reports Blackpast.org.  ”Seventy five people, mostly blacks, were arrested by the police. The riot caused over $200 million in property damage.”

An investigation found that widespread discrimination, police aggression, and racial injustice contributed to the violence.

What’s called the Race Riot of 1935 was a forerunner of riots in 1943 and 1964, and has been deemed a sign that the “optimism and hopefulness of the Harlem Renaissance was dead.”

[Above photo by Sid Grossman: Eighth Avenue and 125th Street, that site of the riot, in 1939. Second photo: Bettmann/Corbis; the teenage shoplifter and the police. Top: New York Daily News newspaper headline]

The Titanic love story of Isidor and Ida Straus

If you’ve seen the movie, you might remember this tragic side story. But on the 101st anniversary of the demise of the unsinkable liner in the Atlantic, it bears another telling.

Germany-born Isidor Straus came to the U.S. in 1854. He got started in the dry-goods business, and by 1902, he and his brother co-owned Abraham & Straus and Macy’s, opening the famous Herald Square store that year.

Isidor and his wife, Ida, also a German immigrant, married in 1871. Successful and wealthy thanks to Isidore’s business efforts, they became generous philanthropists.

In 1912, after a trip to Germany, they were booked to return to New York on the maiden voyage of the Titanic. In the early morning hours of April 15, with the fate of the ship sealed and women and children getting into lifeboats, Ida Straus refused to leave Isidor.

“Mrs. Straus almost entered lifeboat 8 but changed her mind, turned back, and rejoined her husband. Fellow passengers and friends failed to persuade her otherwise,” states Stuart Robinson in Amazing and Extraordinary Facts: the Titanic.

“She is reputed to have told Isidore: ‘We have lived together for many years. Where you go, I go.’”

Passengers reported seeing the couple “standing alongside the rail, holding each other and weeping silently,” according to a 2012 New York Post article.

Isidor’s body was recovered, but Ida’s was never found. A memorial service for the two held at Carnegie Hall a month later drew thousands, including Mayor Gaynor, Andrew Carnegie, and other notable New Yorkers.

In 1912, the city renamed a park at 106th Street and Broadway Straus Park in honor of the couple, who had lived on 105th Street.

A monument dedicated three years later featured the biblical inscription, “lovely and pleasant they were in their lives, and in their death they were not divided.”

A 1996 East Village murder remains unsolved

Abe Lebewohl had a routine, his employees later told police.

Every morning around nine, the 64-year-old owner of the Second Avenue Deli would take the previous day’s earnings from the 10th Street restaurant, then drive to a bank on Fourth Street and make a deposit.

On March 4, 1996, he got to the bank, but never made it inside. According to a 2010 New York Post story, “at least two thugs approached him as he sat in his van and pumped three bullets into him.

“The monsters dragged Lebewohl into the back of van and drove one block before fleeing the vehicle with his black shoulder bag that held the $8,000 deposit and his wallet containing another $2,000.” Lebewohl lay mortally wounded.

The cold-blooded killing was all the more stunning because Lebewohl was so well-liked and embraced by the community.

Born in the Ukraine, he came to New York with his family in 1950 after years in a refugee camp in Italy.

He worked as a waiter at a coffee shop on Second Avenue and 10th Street, then bought the property, turning it into a Jewish culinary institution that served locals and celebrities.

His generosity was legendary. “[Sic] he often provided free food to homeless people, striking workers, and neighborhood events,” states the web page for Abe Lebewohl Park, a small space across Second Avenue dedicated in his honor (above).

At first, cops had a solid clue. Soon after the slaying, they found the murder weapon, a handgun, in Central Park.

But after chasing false leads and circulating thousands of witness sketches of the suspects, the case went cold.

Seventeen years later—after the Second Avenue Deli moved to midtown and the Upper East Side and the old location has become another bank branch—the men behind the murder remain at large.

[Top photo: 2ndavedeli.com; middle: NYC Parks Department; bottom: Forbes.com]

The daring con man who sold the Brooklyn Bridge

George C. Parker was one audacious con man.

This New Yorker is supposedly the guy who came up with ballsy idea of “selling” the Brooklyn Bridge to unsuspecting rubes after it opened in 1886.

Shockingly, the scam worked. Parker is said to have sold the bridge twice a week for years.

His typical marks: gullible tourists and immigrants. And it wasn’t just the bridge he sold but Grant’s Tomb, the Statue of Liberty, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and other monuments.

“He preyed on unsuspecting foreigners who believed that America was the land of opportunity, assuring them they could buy as an investment the right to charge tolls or fees for access to the landmarks,” writes Tamar Frankel in The Ponzi Scheme Puzzle.

Parker’s success convinced other swindlers to try their hand at selling the bridge. But they may not have gone as far as Parker did, who set up a fake real estate office and forged documents proving he was the owner.

He was arrested for fraud a few times and finally sent to Sing Sing for life in 1928. His one legacy: the phrase “I’ve got a bridge to sell you” was inspired by his ruse.

[Images: NYPL Digital Gallery]

A priest, a maid, and a Second Avenue murder

Ordained in his native Germany in 1904, Roman Catholic priest Hans Schmidt was assigned to St. Boniface Church, at Second Avenue and 47th Street, in 1908.

There he met Anna Aumuller, a beautiful 21-year-old housekeeper for the church rectory. Aumuller was an immigrant too; she came to New York from Austria five years earlier.

They started an affair. Schmidt even obtained a wedding license and performed a secret but obviously illegal marriage ritual.

In early September, Aumuller found out she was pregnant. Terrified that his affair would be exposed, Schmidt slit Aumuller’s throat, cut up her body, and dumped it in the Hudson River.

Unfortunately for Schmidt, a pillowcase containing some of Aumuller’s body parts washed up on the Hoboken side of the river later that month.

Police quickly traced the pillowcase back to an apartment Schmidt and Aumuller shared in Harlem.

Schmidt confessed, and officials realized that in addition to being a murder suspect, he was also running a counterfeiting ring.

At his trial, he claimed God ordered him to kill Anna. Nonsense, prosecutors replied; he was simply faking insanity to escape execution.

The jury gave him the chair in February 1914. Several months later, Schmidt changed his story: He now claimed that he accidentally killed Aumuller during a botched abortion, and should only be penalized for manslaughter.

He went to the electric chair anyway on February 19, 1916—still the only priest in U.S. history ever executed for murder.

The car accident that could have changed history

At 10:30 p.m. on December 13, 1931, Winston Churchill was in a hurry.

In Manhattan on a lecture tour, the British statesman was late for a meeting with his friend, financier Bernard Baruch. Stepping into 76th Street, he made a potentially fatal mistake: He didn’t look both ways to see if a car was coming.

Unfortunately one was. The car dragged Churchill and then left him in the street.

The accident scored him eight days in Lenox Hill Hospital with a gash to the head, among other injuries (they gave him a prescription for medicinal alcohol—it was Prohibition, after all).

Churchill admitted the accident was his fault and arranged to meet the driver of the car that hit him, a jobless immigrant named Mario Contasino.

“Mrs. Churchill, hearing of the ill fortune of Contasino in his quest for work, suggested her readiness to help him financially. But when a member of the party proffered a check Mr. Contasino declined it,” wrote The New York Times.

Churchill’s injuries weren’t life-threatening, obviously.

But if he was killed on Fifth Avenue, and didn’t return to England to serve as prime minister during World War II, perhaps history would have taken a different course?

The Phantom of the Opera murder at the Met

It happened during a performance of the Berlin Ballet at the Metropolitan Opera House on July 23, 1980.

Helen Hagnes, a gifted 31-year-old violinist (left), left her instrument on her chair in the orchestra pit during an intermission at about 9:30 pm.

When the performance resumed, Hagnes’ seat was still empty. After the show, police were called in.

Following an all-night search, Hagnes’ naked body was found inside a six-story air shaft. She’d been tied up, gagged, and thrown from the roof.

As brutal as the crime was, it didn’t take police long to solve what had been dubbed the “Phantom of the Opera” murder.

First, there was the partial palm print found on the roof. And because the knots used to bind her limbs were the same knots used by stagehands, investigators figured the killer was employed by Lincoln Center and knew the opera house’s layout.

That led police to question a 21-year-old stagehand named Craig Crimmins. Eventually, Crimmins confessed: He told cops that he was drunk when he encountered Hagnes in an elevator.

He tried to rape her in a stairwell, and when she resisted, he forced her to the roof and kicked her into the air shaft.”Something snapped in my brain,” he told a judge in 1981, who sentenced him to 20 years to life.

[Top photo: New York Times. Bottom photo: Blehgoaway]

The Financial District’s “hard-hat” riot of 1970

New York has some ugly riots in its history.

One of the strangest is the Hard Hat Riot, a clash between construction workers and war protesters in May 1970.

The spark was the Kent State University shootings. After the deaths of four students at the hands of National Guardsmen there, antiwar protesters here announced a rally memorializing the dead at City Hall.

Early on May 8, hundreds of peace activists gathered at Wall and Broad Streets. After their numbers swelled to about a thousand, they marched to the steps of Federal Hall and demanded the U.S. get out of Vietnam.

That’s when about 200 workers, carrying American flags and pro-USA signs, approached the protesters. Police reportedly did nothing as the hard hats chased protesters and beat them with their helmets for an hour.

“The workers then stormed City Hall, cowing policemen and forcing officials to raise the American flag to full staff from half staff, where it had been placed in mourning for the four students killed at Kent State University on Monday,” wrote The New York Times.

An estimated 70 people were injured, and six were arrested. Mayor Lindsay slammed the police for not stopping the rioters.

This earned the wrath of union leaders, who said the riot was a spontaneous act by workers who were tired of antiwar activists criticizing their country . . . an explanation disputed by some witnesses, who claimed to see two men in suits directing the rioters with hand motions.