It all seems quaint now, but violent teenage street gangs were a new phenomenon to 1950s New Yorkers.
Among the most notorious of the estimated 150 gangs were the Mau Maus, Bishops, Dragons, and Egyptian Kings.
They terrified residents, who felt threatened by the rumbles and sporadic killings that took place in tightly packed postwar neighborhoods.
But no gang-related murder got as much newspaper ink as that of the Capeman—aka Salvador Agron, a 16-year-old Puerto Rican kid who had joined an Upper West Side gang called the Vampires.
On August 29, 1959, Agron and his crew met at midnight at May Matthews playground on 45th Street off of Ninth Avenue.
They were looking to fight members of the Norsemen, a mostly white gang. Instead they came across some local teenagers.
Mistaking them for gang members, Agron, dressed in a black satin cape, stabbed two 16-year-olds each in the heart. They staggered to nearby doorways before dying (right).
Part of the media uproar had to do with Agron’s dismissive, cocky attitude toward the crime.
Anti–Puerto Rican sentiment among city residents didn’t help either.
In 1960, he got the electric chair, but then had his sentence commuted in 1962.
Released from prison in 1979 (after escaping two years earlier), he became a youth counselor and died in 1986 at age 42 from pneumonia.
Paul Simon turned Agron’s life story into a Broadway musical in 1998—but it closed to poor reviews a few months after opening.
Tags: Capeman Salvador Agron, Infamous New York gangs, Mau Maus gang, New York City gangs, New York in the 1950s, Paul Simon Capeman, Puerto Rican gangs 1950s, Salvador Agron, West Side Gangs, West Side Story
Ephemeral New York 
September 10, 2012 at 8:08 am |
Was a failure for Paul Simon but not for West Side Story. The street scene of the 50s & 60s was out of Leonard Bernstein’s fantasy, “only in America,” Maria 😉
September 10, 2012 at 12:53 pm |
Good point. Interestingly, West Side Story was originally supposed to be East Side Story, about a Catholic guy and Jewish girl. But then the teen gang phenomenon hit, with Puerto Rican and white kids in warring factions on the Upper West Side.
September 10, 2012 at 4:26 pm |
“a Catholic guy and Jewish girl”
so a reverse “Abie’s Irish Rose”
September 10, 2012 at 5:42 pm |
As an aquaintance of mine – who was a teenager growing up in Hell’s Kitchen at the time of the killings – said of the Broadway musical, “Two kids get stabbed to death in the playground and now they’re singing and dancing about it?”
September 10, 2012 at 7:57 pm |
“Why not write a musical about the common cat? Or the king of Siam?”–Mr Burns
June 18, 2016 at 6:22 am |
What are examples of ethnic tension between Latinos and whites in the US in the past few decades?
There was this: which led to this: In all seriousness though, WSS was based on reality. In the mid-late 1950s Manhattan was plagued with ethnic gang issues often pitting white European immigrants against Puerto Rican immigrants. Police were often c…
July 8, 2025 at 2:21 am |
Bobby
July 8, 2025 at 2:36 am |
The incident involving Salvador Agron and the two 16-year-old boys who were stabbed to death on that evening of August of 1959, Bobby Young and Tony Krzesinski, as well as two other boys who were injured, but survived (Billy Luken and Ewald Reimer) occurred just 6 days after an unrelated series of gang shootings that happened across town in Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
Several teens were shot in that unrelated incident, including a 15-year-old girl named Theresa Gee.
In many of the news items from September of 1959, The Hell’s Kitchen playground murders involving Salvador Agron, and the gang conflict in Manhattan’s Lower East Side were often covered in the same article, along with the August 25, 1959 shooting wounding of 14-year-old Ernest Elmore in Jamaica Queens New York (another unrelated New York teen gang incident), along with the (again unrelated) school shooting murder at Morris High School involving the Royal Knights and Valiant Crowns street gangs.
This video documentary series covers these incidents from August of 1959, with part Two below having an interview with Richard Jacoby, who corresponded with Salvador Agron while Agron was on death row, and Part Three covering the other incidents, including the Manhattan Lower East Side gang war that preceded the Hell’s Kitchen playground murders.