Monk Eastman Read online

  Those who knew Monk well spoke of his devotion to his father and mother, but he most likely spent little time with his father. Although they lived as a family for a while on Lewis Street, by the time of the 1880 census, when Monk was still only six, Mary and her four children were living with her father, George Parks, on East Seventy-fifth Street, whereas Samuel had been living downtown at 10 Forsyth Street since 1878.6 Samuel and Mary never reunited, and he died of consumption in the House of Rest for Consumptives at Anthony Avenue in the Bronx on September 14, 1888, when Monk was just fourteen years old. Mary had already been describing herself as a widow for three years before Samuel’s death, but that was probably either to avoid the shame of being a divorcée or an “abandoned wife,” or because she had lost touch or severed all contact with Samuel and had no idea whether he was alive or dead.

  In 1887 or 1888 Mary Eastman moved to Brooklyn with her children, eventually settling at 93 South Third Street, and by 1890 Monk was running a bird and animal store on Penn Street in Brooklyn.7 The writer of The Gangs of New York, Herbert Asbury, alleged that Monk’s parents set him up in the store, but there is no evidence of that. Samuel had died two years before and, even if he had lived, his modest earnings as a paperhanger could not have afforded him the resources to bankroll his son.

  The most likely source of Monk’s funds was a successful businessman, Timothy Eastman, who had lived next door to the Eastmans and McSpedons on Seventy-third Street in the 1870s and was almost certainly Monk’s uncle.8 Although originating in New Hampshire, Timothy Eastman was described in 1859 as a drover from the West, and he grew rich from his interests in the meat trade, owning three or four hundred butcher shops and an export business that shipped beef carcasses to England. He was one of the “Committee of 100” prominent New York citizens, formed to coordinate the four hundredth anniversary celebrations of the discovery of America, and at his death his estate was valued at several million dollars. Rather than Samuel, Timothy Eastman must have been the wealthy relative who set Monk up in a Brooklyn pet store at the age of seventeen, either in an attempt to keep him on the straight and narrow or merely to give his nephew a start in his working life.

  The pet store was a useful “front” for the sale of stolen pigeons; like many Lower East Side and Williamsburg youths, Monk was a pigeon chaser, making money from catching or stealing the birds. He kept a few of his own, housed in a crude loft on the roof of his building; he used them as coaxers to lure strange pigeons, driving off his birds without feeding them so that when they returned, accompanied by a few other pigeons, he could quickly lure them down by showing some grain. A skilled pigeon chaser like Monk could trap thirty or forty birds a week in this way. He kept the best as breeding stock and sold the rest for from ten to twenty-five cents each. At a time when the average wage for a factory worker was only $1.50 a day, it was a useful income.

  Monk retained a lifetime affection for pigeons and small animals—anyone accused of cruelty to animals could expect a severe beating if Monk got word of it—but he soon quit the pet trade for less reputable and more profitable occupations. Monk’s uncle’s wealth meant that he could have had a good education and upbringing, but instead he “chose for his school the sidewalks and the education to be had for the asking there.”9 The lack of a father’s restraining influence may have helped to shape his character—there was no one to call him to account if he settled an argument with blows from his fists—but if so, he was hardly unique in that. In the New York of that era there were tens of thousands of children lacking one or both parents, and many of them were living wild on the streets.

  While still a teenager, Monk was already thieving, breaking and entering, and brawling with anyone who crossed his path. Always a powerful figure, he had an instinctive aptitude for street-fighting: Monk was a hard-punching, club-swinging, ear-biting, eye-gouging brawler who could flatten anyone foolish enough to oppose him. His mother, solid, hardworking, and God-fearing, had pleaded with Monk to reform, but he already appeared beyond control, perhaps even beyond redemption. In the comradeship and shared secrets of street gangs that had their own codes of dress and behavior and even their own patois, he had found his milieu.

  The road to gang membership led on in easy stages. Young toughs who could keep their mouths shut and hold their own in a fight were always useful to criminal gangs, whether as “lighthouses”—lookouts—keeping watch for police or rival gangs, or as pickpockets, sneak thieves, or holders of weapons for senior gang members. If they looked old enough—and Monk was certainly never the angelic-featured choirboy type—they could earn a few dollars a day at election times, “repeating” at the polls: voting several times under different names, wearing different disguises. If a youth was caught by the police while committing a crime and held his tongue and served his time without complaint, he emerged with his gang reputation enhanced.

  As a young boy in the early 1880s, Monk had watched the Brooklyn Bridge—“the big bridge”—slowly rising above the East River. The great towers were already a familiar landmark, but steel erectors and riggers still strode, sure-footed as cats, along the girders and suspension cables above the dizzying drop to the river, and the clamor of jackhammers and steam shovels echoed through the streets. When he moved to Williamsburg with his mother and sisters in 1887 or 1888, the newly opened bridge was a tangible link to the neighborhoods he had left behind. For a young man of his singular talents—brawling, theft, intimidation—there were riches to be grasped across the East River, beyond the jetties of the Manhattan waterfront, where the black, oily waters slapped against the timber piles with a sound like a fist on flesh. In 1892, at age eighteen, Monk turned his back on Brooklyn and on the name that his father had bequeathed to him. The young tough striding toward Manhattan would henceforth be known by any one of a dozen aliases, but to his criminal peers, he was simply known as “Monk.”

  As Monk crossed the bridge with the rolling, bandy-legged gait of a seaman pacing the deck of a ship, the river below him would have been dense with ships of every description: ferryboats; great sailing vessels from foreign ports; tugs; coasters; tramp steamers; fishing boats; and garbage scows. On the far bank were the ranks of close-packed tenements, warehouses, and sweatshops of the Lower East Side, and beyond them the spires and towers of Manhattan, where the term skyscraper was just coming into widespread use. By day sunlight was reflected from myriad windows; after dark, the warm glow of gaslights and the brighter, bluer glare of the new electric lighting lit up the night, leaving many newcomers to the city breathless with wonder. New York City, a British visitor observed, half in admiration and half in fright, was a “triumph of mechanics, of iron, steel, bricks and electricity, built by the titans, laid out by Euclid, and furnished by Edison.”10 Others took a less lyrical view. New York, said one, was “a sparkling gem set in a pile of garbage.”

  When Monk reached the Manhattan side of the bridge, he was entering familiar territory. Beneath a sky stained mud-brown by the smoke from coal fires and the stacks of locomotives and factories, the Lower East Side spread northward from the foot of the bridge, a sprawling, dun-colored warren of tenements pierced by narrow, claustrophobic alleys that were shadowed and dark even in the midday sun. Names like Bandit’s Roost, Ragpickers’ Row, and Thieves’ Alley were an accurate evocation of their character.11

  The tenements lining every street had rusting iron balconies and fire escapes festooned with bedding, “clinging to the street fronts like some form of creeper unknown to horticulture elsewhere,” and “the flags of the tenements” fluttered from washlines strung between buildings. Monk knew these streets well from his childhood, but even in the few years he had lived across the river in Brooklyn, the Lower East Side had been undergoing one of its periodic transformations. The old Irish neighborhoods he had known were now teeming with newer immigrants, the sidewalks awash with streams of ragged humanity. Many faces were ravaged by smallpox scars and there were many people, hobbling on crutches and jostled by mustachioed street toughs
in derby hats. Orthodox Jews with long beards and earlocks; women in shawls or headscarves with long skirts trailing in the dust; grimy, barefoot children; stooped old men; and shambling beggars all pushed their way between stalls set up on pushcarts, planks propped on oyster or ash barrels or improvised from boxes, prams, and baskets. They lined the roadside and the sidewalks and filled the tenement doorways.

  The stalls were piled with “Jew bread”—black as tar, and carrying the faintly sour smell of new-baked rye—meat, fish, and other foodstuffs; household utensils; clothing; and shoes.12 People haggled and bought in Yiddish and a Babel of other tongues, and “an English word [fell] upon the ear almost with a sense of shock.” As many as fifteen hundred peddlers operated around Hester Street alone, a market given the derisive name of “The Pig Market” by the Irish, “for pork is the one ware that is not on sale.” Many of the peddlers, who hired their pushcarts for ten cents a day, sold the cheapest gleanings from Canal Street’s wholesale stores, from articles of clothing down to remnants and scraps of cloth and ribbon.

  In some spots the canvas awnings of more formal stores shaded the sidewalk. Cigar stores announced themselves by carved wooden figures of Indians, baseball players, Uncle Sam, and even a Scotsman in a kilt. Rival saloons offered meals for a few cents, “hot spiced rum,” “sherry with an egg in it,” and “oysters in every style.” Coffee could be had for two cents, and a stale roll for one. There was at least one saloon on every block, the air thick with cigar smoke and the smell of stale beer; prostitutes patrolled the neighboring alleys.

  The street noise was deafening, the shrill voices of newsboys yelling from every corner merging with the tramp of feet, the endless rattle of horses’ hooves and iron-shod wheels, the jingle of the bells of the streetcars, and the peremptory clang of a fire engine’s gong. The streets were jammed with carts, wagons, and white-painted omnibuses. Horse cars rested between the pillars of the elevated railway on Second Avenue—there were three others: at Third Avenue on the East Side, and at Sixth and Ninth avenues on the West—and the horses seemed oblivious to the thunder of trains overhead, so loud it made the whole street tremble. Almost three stories above street level, trains stopping with a screech of steel sent steam swirling around the gable-roofed stations, while fat black smut drifted down like snowflakes into the street below. Chicago had long since converted to electric power, but in New York the trains still burned soft coal and dropped live ash into the streets, distributing soot and cinders “with rare impartiality.”13 Respectable women often wore veils and, when they emerged from a journey on the “El,” the pattern was sometimes stenciled upon their faces with soot.

  Largely a lower-middle-class neighborhood during the first wave of Irish immigration, when two million Irish people fled “The Great Famine” between 1846 and 1860, the Lower East Side’s streets were now awash with German and Russian Jews. One and a half million arrived in America between 1880 and 1910, as pogroms in Russia provoked an exodus of biblical proportions. There were also floods of Italians, Sicilians, Greeks, Bohemians, Rumanians, Hungarians, Slovaks, and Poles, “the kind of dirty people that you find today on the sidewalks of New York.”14 The influx provoked ever more extreme xenophobia, with one New York newspaper editorializing that “the scum of immigration is viscerating upon our shores. The horde of $9.60 [the price of the cheapest transatlantic ticket] steerage slime is being siphoned upon us.”

  In the twenty years between 1880 and the turn of the century, almost ten million immigrants, the majority with little more than the clothes they wore, poured off transatlantic steamers and passed through Castle Garden in Battery Park or, after 1891, the “Hall of Tears” on Ellis Island. Many of them traveled onward no farther than the Lower East Side, where most found that the American “Promised Land” offered them only more misery and deprivation. Such were the numbers of immigrants that in 1897, only one in seven East Side children had even one American-born parent.15 What work there was for these tidal waves of people was paid at subsistence rates, but for many the only means of survival was to live on their wits, picking rags and sifting garbage; others turned to crime or prostitution.

  The northern boundary of the Lower East Side was marked by Fourteenth Street, the frontier between two worlds, coexisting cheek by jowl, yet as remote from each other as the shores of the Atlantic. The notorious slum of the “Great Bend” on Mulberry Street, where “one finds the blackest and most abject human misery,” was only two minutes from Broadway. Yet most wealthy New Yorkers lived in a state of ignorance or denial about this and the other slums that scarred their city. They knew that the Lower East Side existed, rather in the same way that they knew that Mexico existed, but few of them were ever likely to travel there.

  Cosseted by servants, New York’s wealthy lived in luxury in spacious uptown houses and apartments, and dined on the delicacies of the Old World and the New. They rode out through Central Park in gleaming phaetons, landaus, barouches, and rockaways, pulled by high-stepping carriage horses, with liveried drivers and footmen sitting up behind. They attended the Metropolitan Opera and fled the heat of the city for their summer residences on Long Island. Most never ventured downtown into the neighborhoods below Fourteenth Street where, penned in by invisible fence lines, the poor lived and died in crowded, festering tenements and the most basic human needs—fresh air, clean water, even daylight—were hard to come by.

  At the end of the Civil War, one hundred thousand inhabitants of New York lived in slum cellars, twelve thousand women worked in brothels to keep from starving, and the garbage, alive with rats, lay two feet deep in the streets. Throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century, civic corruption, indifference, and incompetence prevented these ills from being addressed. The city of New York, the Imperial City, was already the standard-bearer of the American century that was about to be born, yet its institutions, its public servants, its housing, its services—water, roads, sewage, public health, and police—were a national disgrace. Nowhere were those conditions worse than on the Lower East Side.

  A miasma of corruption hung over the Lower East Side like the winter fogs drifting in from the East River, and every measure of human despair—poverty, overcrowding, crime, filth, disease, and premature death—was found there. The Tenth Ward, at the heart of the district, was known as “The Suicide Ward” or “The Typhus Ward,” and infant mortality rates there were so appalling that on one notorious street one in seven children under five years old died during the year of 1888.16 Typhus, cholera, and tuberculosis were endemic, and whenever epidemics erupted, just as in plague-ridden London two centuries earlier, “the rich fled the city; the poor stayed and died.” Epidemics were devastating to the children of the poor because in those overcrowded tenements it was virtually impossible to isolate the sick. The death rate in the notorious Cherry Street tenement of Gotham Court during New York’s regular cholera epidemics was the worst in the entire city; in one outbreak that barely touched the more affluent districts, one in five of the tenants of Gotham Court died.

  Even the measles, a relatively innocuous disease among the better off, was often fatal to the poor. “Tread it ever so lightly on the avenues, in the tenements it kills right and left.”17 When an epidemic ravaged three crowded blocks of Elizabeth Street just to the west of the Bowery, the path of the disease through those teeming districts was as clearly defined as “the track of a tornado through a forest.” Children’s coffins were stacked mast high on the charity commissioners’ boat for the biweekly crossing to Potter’s Field on Hart Island in Long Island Sound, the cemetery for the city’s indigent and unknown, where the deprivation of their lives pursued them even to the grave. “In the common trench of the Poor Burying Ground, they lie packed three stories deep, shoulder to shoulder, crowded in death as they were in life.”18

  Meanwhile, every year forty thousand still-living casualties of the fight for survival were shipped on a boat known as “the tub of misery” to the asylums and workhouses of “The Island”: Blackwell’s
Island (now Roosevelt Island), in the middle of the East River. Once an oasis of flowers and orchards of apple, cherry, peach, and plum, it was now home to some of New York’s grimmest establishments: a penitentiary; a reformatory; a workhouse; almshouses for men and women; the echoing, soulless wards of the charity hospital for incurables; a blind asylum; a lunatic asylum; and, half-hidden among the trees at the downstream end of the island, the isolation hospitals for contagious diseases.

  The buildings on the island were turreted and battlemented like medieval castles, and the treatment meted out within their stone walls could be equally feudal. Clad in their dirt-brown uniforms, the occupants of the workhouse, many of them “old hags long given to drink, who began life in low dance-houses and are ending it in the gutter,” were forced to carry out the most menial tasks.19 The penitentiary included punishment cells known as “dark cells,” sited on the lower floor, from which even the faintest trace of light was excluded. Prisoners who lost their minds were transferred to the lunatic asylum, where, behind its high fence, stood three separate buildings: the asylum, the retreat, and the lodge, or madhouse, where the most violent cases were confined and visitors were never allowed.

  Unable to survive in New York, many other immigrants headed west in pursuit of the American dream that had lured them from their homelands. Others returned home broken by poverty and failure. But the tides of new immigrants always far outnumbered those who left. They created a permanent housing shortage and a labor surplus that together drove the treadmill of poverty, forcing down wages while rents rose ever higher.

  Periodic economic crashes increased the sum of human misery. In the year after Monk returned from Brooklyn to the streets of Manhattan came the Great Crash of 1893—the worst economic crisis in the history of the United States, heralding a depression that lasted four years. Within twelve months two and a half million men were out of work; when an army of the unemployed marched on Washington in protest, they were arrested for walking on the grass of the Capitol lawn.