Swindlers lying in wait for the city’s immigrants

New York’s most recent arrivals—immigrants were processed through Castle Garden at Battery Park, until Ellis Island opened in 1892—had plenty of con artists vying for their attention and cash, according to this 1877 illustration.

It was originally published in Puck, the popular satirical weekly that took on politics and culture (and was headquartered—where else?—at the Puck Building on Lafayette Street).

The artist certainly doesn’t have a lot of faith in New York’s police force. A uniformed man on a bench appears to be asleep, while another in the back is just watching the swindlers lick their chops over a new batch of unsophisticated Europeans to prey on.

The illustration has been preserved by the Balch Institute of Ethnic Research in Philadelphia and came by way of Ephemeral reader AJ Morocco.

Monk Eastman’s notorious Bronx gang fight

Even in gang-ridden 19th century New York, with mobsters being rubbed out by rival thugs with guns and other weapons all the time, the old-fashioned fistfight was still used to solve disputes.

That’s what happened in the turf war between criminal Monk Eastman and Paul Kelly, leader of the Five Points Gang.

The simian, wild-haired Eastman (right) controlled Chrystie Street to East 14th Street, wrote Andrew Roth in Infamous Manhattan.

Paul Kelly (below), a dapper Italian with an Irish name, ruled west of Bowery.

Both gangs were under the thumb of Tammany Hall politicos. Tired of their gun battles over disputed neutral territory, Tammany brass organized an old-school fight in a barn in the Bronx in 1903 between the two men.

This “fist duel,” as a 1923 New York Times article dubbed it, didn’t solve a thing.

Eastman and Kelly went at each other in that barn for hours before it was called a draw.

The turf war mostly resolved itself when Eastman was sent to Sing Sing for robbery in 1904, then fought in World War I (he became a decorated soldier).

Kelly had control of the Lower East Side until 1908, when a deadly gun battle—and then Tammany Hall’s desire to clean up the Bowery—reduced his criminal power.

The “kissing bridges” of Manhattan’s East Side

In the 18th and early 19th centuries, lots of little streams crisscrossed country-like Manhattan island.

This necessitated small pedestrian bridges—at least three of which earned the moniker “kissing bridge” because they were secluded, scenic, and an ideal place for a colonial couple to indulge in a little PDA.

One kissing bridge crossed over the Sawkill Stream near today’s 77th Street and Second Avenue.

A little to the south was another kissing bridge, at present-day 50th Street and Second Avenue. [Illustration at right, NYPL digital collection]

A third could be found near modern-day Park Row. A stream called Wreck Brook meandered close by.

Whenever a man and woman came upon it, “every gallant Knickerbocker was supposed to express his regard for the lady he met there in the manner indicated,” explains a city historian in a New York Times article from May 1900.

Portraits of nameless Gilded Age New Yorkers

You can purchase their photos for a few bucks each at any flea market or junk shop in the city.

But who are these middle- and upper-class New Yorkers, and who did they give their portraits to?

 

      This well-dressed young woman with the fascinating bustle poses shyly with a houseplant. The photo studio is at 98 Sixth Avenue.

I’m guessing this is a communion photo on the right. I love this boy’s little suit jacket, knickers, and stockings.

The photo studio is at 920 Third Avenue in the East 50s.

Noho’s wonderfully named Shinbone Alley

It’s a colorful and curious name for a 19th century alley, isn’t it? 

Perhaps this tiny lane—which starts on the north side of Bleecker Street east of Lafayette Street and ends about 50 feet later—was a rough place where you got your shins kicked in.

Maybe it was the dumping ground for animal bones. [In 1934, photo from the NYPL digital collection]

In any event, it was laid out in 1825, according to a 1957 New York Times article, and in apparently was more substantial back then.

“It winds northward from between 41 and 43 Bleecker Street, and turns westward and again northward, coming out at 1 Bond Street and then on to Great Jones Street,” explains another Times article, from 1897.

“The alley is paved and flagged, and has for years, after nightfall, been the haunt of a crowd of idle young fellows, who give the police a good deal of concern.”

[Shinbone Alley today, now just a driveway ending at the back of Bond Street. Paved with Belgian blocks though.]

Born a slave, now on his way to sainthood

Only two city residents, Elizabeth Ann Seton and Francis Xavier Cabrini, have been canonized by the Catholic church. Next may be Pierre Toussaint.

Born a slave in Haiti in 1766, Toussaint came to New York with his master’s family, the Berards, during the Haitian slave revolts of the 1780s.

After the Berard fortune dwindled, he became a society hairdresser, supporting the family until Mrs. Berard freed him on her deathbed.

Deeply devout, Toussaint and his wife spent their lives building orphanages, nursing cholera patients, and raising funds for the original St. Patrick’s Cathedral, on Mott and Prince Streets (below, in 1859).

When he died in 1853, Toussaint was buried in old Saint Patrick’s churchyard. Catholic leaders re-interred his body at the uptown St. Patrick’s in 1990.

Touissant has made it to the second step on the path to sainthood: He’s been deemed Venerable.

Still, he’s a controversial choice. Reportedly some Catholics take him to task for staying with his master’s family rather than joining the slave revolt that forced the Berards to flee Haiti in the first place.

The dates topping New York City buildings

Developers in the late 19th century couldn’t get enough of topping their buildings with the year it was constructed—usually on the cornice or upper facade.

And lots of builders couldn’t help but put their own names up there too. Like P. Martino, who put up this tenement in Williamsburg in 1871.

Mr. Gessner built this lovely structure in 1871 on Bleecker Street in the West Village.

St. George Greek Orthodox Church on 55th Street and Eighth Avenue is a modest little chapel, with the Hearst Tower looming behind it. 

What happened to Manhattan’s “Piggery District”

Mid-19th century New York City had its genteel side, but mostly it was a collection of rough edges. One long-forgotten hardscrabble neighborhood was the Piggery District, between Sixth and Eighth Avenues in the West 50s.

It was a dirty, smelly, rocky area of hog yards and shanties housing the poor Irish and Dutch families who eked out a living raising and slaughtering pigs.

No one seemed to care about the Piggery District until Central Park opened in 1859. With the city accelerating northward, the neighborhood was deemed a filthy nuisance, and the Department of Health wanted it gone.

That year, the city sent dozens of armed men into the Piggery District to forcibly shut down the offal-boiling places and round up the pigs. 

On at least one occasion, they also ended up ripping apart residents’ homes. A Times article from July 27, 1859 about the raid quoted one woman whose shanty was demolished:

“Very poor revenge,” said she, “to tear down people’s buildings after the pigs is all sent away entirely.”

Here’s another West Side neighborhood that once thrived, then disappeared around the turn of the century.

This Lincoln Center–area neighborhood held out a little longer, but it too is dead and gone.

The “moving sidewalks” the city never built

It probably sounded like a civilized solution to the increasingly congested New York City of the 19th century: to ease crowded streets, “moving sidewalks” or “moving platforms” would be built underground.

The idea was first proposed in 1871, then more seriously in 1902 for the Brooklyn Bridge.

Widely debated in newspapers at the time, it went no where: Mayor Seth Low killed the project.

But it popped back up again around 1910, this time as a network of moving sidewalks at a top speed of about 10 miles per hour that would replace the new subway system.

So why didn’t the idea fly? Perhaps the subway companies had too much political clout to let it happen. Or maybe subterranean roller coaster cars didn’t move people as efficiently as a subway car could. 

In the end, the idea kind of lives on—inside city airport terminals.

How sparrows got their start in Brooklyn

The New York Post has an interesting piece today about the origin of lowly New York City pigeons: They were brought here as food in the 17th century by French settlers.

Soon they escaped their confines and eventually adapted to urban areas, where only they occasional falcon or pigeon shoot worker prey on them.

The ubiquitous house sparrow, the most common bird in New York, was never meant to be dinner. But like the pigeon, it isn’t a native American bird.

About 100 were brought over by Brooklyn scientists in 1854, released in Green-Wood Cemetery and along the Narrows to get rid of inchworms that were destroying trees. They ate some—but they also thrived on fruit, seeds, and oats spilled in the streets from horse feed.

Within a few decades they were everywhere, regarded as an “unmitigated nuisance” by a 1889 New York Times article, which urged that they all be poisoned. Clearly that didn’t happen. But as horses disappeared from the streets, their numbers fell.

Today there are only about 100 million in the city, happily chattering away and fighting starlings (above photo), among other birds, for tossed bagels, pizza crusts, and hot dog buns.