Girl gangsters of 19th century Manhattan

When you think of the criminal gangs of New York in the 1800s, ruthless young men probably come to mind.

But these gangs had female members as well, some of whom were notorious fighters.

There was Hell-Cat Maggie, a member of the Irish-American Dead Rabbits in the 1850s. Her home base was the Five Points slum, near today’s City Hall. Supposedly her teeth were filed into sharp points and she clawed rivals with brass fingernails.

Another was Sadie Farrell, aka Sadie the Goat. Reportedly she robbed East Siders by first head-butting them in the stomach. In the 1860s she joined the Charlton Street Gang, river pirates on the West Side.

Ida Burger, called Ida the Goose, was a prostitute and Lady Gopher, part of the Gophers of Hell’s Kitchen. In the 1910s she was lured away to the Lower East Side’s Eastman Gang, led by Monk Eastman, but eventually went back to the Gophers after a bloody shootout.

The illustration above, from the New York Public Library, depicts tough chicks rumming it up at a Five Points tavern in the 1870s.

A vintage ad towers over West 51st Street

Gre-Solvent was a hand cleaner that promised to wash away serious industrial-strength gunk and grime. This 3-story faded ad on Ninth Avenue and 51st Street looks like it could date back to the 1930s. It’s remarkably well-preserved.

This corner of Hell’s Kitchen seems a bit off the beaten path for such a large ad. It must have been aimed at workers and residents who toiled away at the factories and light manufacturing companies that once flourished in the neighborhood.

New York is a hell of a town

More than a few city neighborhoods currently or used to start with “Hell.” Hell’s Kitchen is the most famous—and enduring. (C’mon, does anyone really call it Clinton?)

The nabe’s moniker but it may have first been used in the late 1800s to describe the revolting slums and ferocious gangs in the West 30s and 40s.

Hell Gate is the name of the once-dangerous tidal strait separating Astoria from Randall’s Island. It’s also a lovely bridge that connects these two land masses across the East River.

Was Hell Gate once the name of the neighborhood on the Manhattan side of the East River too? I’m not sure, but maybe—there’s a Hell Gate Station post office on East 110th Street.

And let’s not forget the fantastically named Hell’s Hundred Acres, a gritty term for pre-1970s Soho. The beautiful cast-iron buildings that today house million-dollar lofts were used for decades as warehouses and manufacturing sites. 

Safety codes weren’t followed and the buildings allowed to deteriorate, so they often went up in flames—hence the nickname. This photo documents a 1958 fire in a Wooster Street factory that killed six firefighters. Hell’s Hundred Acres indeed.

Mysterious building names on Ninth Avenue

Most city tenements are marked at the top by a name, presumably of the builder, and the year the structure was completed. 

But at 744 Ninth Avenue, off 50th Street, the tenement is named “9th. Ave. Flat.” It seems to be a pretty fanciful moniker for a typical red-brick tenement building; “French flats” at the time were usually higher-end apartments for middle-class New Yorkers. 

Perhaps the builder had amenities inside—private baths?—that put it a notch above the usual late 19th century tenement apartment.

Also on Ninth Avenue in Hell’s Kitchen is another strangely named tenement building. I wonder what “Foresters Home” was—just a tenement put up by a man named Forester? Or maybe some kind of charity residence that housed orphans or the indigent. 

Only two 8s remains from the two inscriptions announcing the date it was built: 1880.

Brownstoner’s Montrose Morris has more on the French Flats building boom. 

The Gophers: Hell’s Kitchen’s most brutal gang

Given the name because of their penchant for hiding in cellars, the Gophers formed in the 1890s and went on to rule the West Side between Ninth and Eleventh Avenues around 42nd Street through the 00’s and teens.

Their main target: the  New York Central Rail Yards, which ran up the far West Side. 

One Lung Curran, Happy Jack Mulraney (who always looked like he was smiling but supposedly had some kind of facial paralysis), Stumpy Malarkey, and Goo Goo Knox. Gang leaders back then had some colorful names.

They also had a female auxiliary gang, the Lady Gophers, headed by notorious tough chick Battle Annie—the “Queen of Hell’s Kitchen.” Reportedly she was “the most feared brick hurler of her time.”

UK-born Owney Madden, fourth from left in this 1910 gang photo, earned a rep as one of the most brutal Gopher leaders. Nicknamed The Killer, he’s responsible for numerous deaths of other gang members, especially from the rival Hudson Dusters.

After serving time in Sing Sing, he became a bootlegger and co-owner the Cotton Club, Harlem’s flashy club in the 1920s.

The Butcher of Tompkins Square Park

Twenty years ago, in August 1989, East Village police began hearing rumors of a gruesome crime: A person had been killed, the body dismembered and boiled into soup—then the soup fed to unsuspecting homeless people in Tompkins Square Park. 

Shockingly, the rumors turned out to be true. That September, cops arrested Daniel Rakowitz, a 28-year-old park regular who carried a chicken on his shoulder and called himself a “marijuana guru.”

Rakowitz was charged with murdering and dismembering the body of his girlfriend, 26-year-old Monika Beerle. The murder was committed in Rakowitz’s tenement building at 700 Avenue C, on the corner of Ninth Street. 

The details are pretty lurid. Rakowitz left Beerle’s skull in a storage area at the Port Authority Bus Terminal (in a bucket of cat litter no less).

Though he denied killed Beerle, a Swiss resident studying dance who supported herself as a topless dancer (gritty old Billy’s Topless on 24th Street, according to some accounts), he admitted to chopping her corpse, bleaching her bones, and hiding her body.

In 1991, Rakowitz was found not guilty by reason of insanity. He was sent to a maximum-security psychiatric facility on Ward’s Island, where he still lives today.

The opening of the West Side Express Highway

Planned in the 1920s to ease New York’s traffic hell, the West Side Express Highway opened in various stages beginning in 1930. Also known as the Miller Elevated, it stretched from downtown to 72nd Street.

It looks pretty and spotless in this 1930 postcard. By the 1960s, it was rusted out and in disrepair, and huge chunks occasionally fell onto the streets beneath it. Wisely, the city tore it down in the 1970s and 1980s.

A couple of vintage ads on Eighth Avenue

Looming over an empty lot on 46th Street is a two-fer: an ad for a a cheap hotel (hot & cold water!) superimposed over a cigar advertisement.

Vanishing New York and Fading Ad Blog spotted this one months back, but it’s in such a wonderful bit of old New York, it deserves more exposure.

Meanwhile, a pre-war apartment building near Carnegie Hall obscured by a post-war yellow residence of some kind features the kind of cigarette ad never seen anymore. This suave man smoking Barclays looks very 1980s. 

The pleasure is back! Actually, do they even sell this brand anymore?

An actor’s funeral procession down Broadway

Judging by the 100,000 people lining Broadway, you’d think the hearse in the photo below would be carrying the coffin of a politician or war hero. 

Nope, it’s Rudolph Valentino, the silent movie heartthrob who died suddenly in a New York City hospital in August 1926. He was 31. Before becoming one of the first A-list actors, he clocked in time as a busboy at city restaurants and then as a dancer at Maxim’s, a swanky Manhattan nightclub.

His body was brought to the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Church at Broadway and 66th Street. An estimated 30,000 fans tried to get a glimpse into his open casket, smashing windows and causing a near riot.

From there funeral home staffers orchestrated a Hollywood-like procession, driving the casket down to St. Malachy’s Church—the Actor’s Chapel—on Broadway and 49th Street for a mass. Crowds of young women swooned and cried as the procession passed. 

Ninth Avenue’s shrinking Little Italy

There used to be several Italian neighborhoods in Manhattan, like the Pleasant Avenue vicinity in East Harlem (still home to Rao’s, the Mafia and celeb hangout) and in the South Village centered along Bleecker Street.

Ninth Avenue in Hell’s Kitchen was another one. The neighborhood is now Duane Reade-ified and its ethnic groups (Irish, Italian, Greek, among others) dispersed, but some of these old Italian-American businesses survive.

Like Mazzella’s Market, selling produce for more than 75 years:

Not too many store signs contain the word “grosseria” anymore:

Rib bellies! Smoked loins! Pig toes! All that and more are available at Esposito Pork Shop: