Notorious Village dive bar the Golden Swan

Golden Swan Garden, a tiny triangle at Sixth Avenue and West Fourth Street, has got to be the only city park named after a rough-and-tumble saloon.

But that’s what the Golden Swan was. Nicknamed the Hell Hole and the Bucket o’ Blood, this seedy gathering place stood at this corner in the early 1900s—when the West Village was a shabby mixed-race neighborhood of boarding houses and bars, not boutiques.

Dingy and divey, the Golden Swan was run by an ex-prize fighter and attracted locals as well as artists drawn to the seedy side of life.

Painters John Sloan and Charles Demuth (that’s his lively depiction of the bar’s back room, above) captured it on canvas. Gangsters like the Hudson Dusters made it their hangout.

Playwright and drunk Eugene O’Neill, left, who often had to be fished out of the Golden Swan for rehearsals at the nearby Provincetown Playhouse, set The Iceman Cometh there.

The end came in 1922, and the building was demolished a few years later during construction of the Sixth Avenue subway. All that remains is the garden.

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.