SOUTH OF CANAL STREET IN NEW YORK CITY, A FORMER COW path called Mulberry Street ran through the heart of the city’s most infamous slum. Locals knew this area as The Bend. Notorious saloons brewed here, blocks east of Broadway. Women walked through crooked alleys, holding aprons over moldy vegetables, babies to their breasts, and firewood on their heads. Emaciated children with hacking coughs and spotty faces ate stale bread, and grocers paced in front of old, rotten slabs of meat hanging from their store doors.
On summer mornings in 1874, bartenders sidestepped bodies sleeping on lager-drenched wood shavings. The men, remnants of the past night’s drinking crowd, had rented a spot on the floor for a nickel. By the time bartenders opened the doors, sunlight had awoken the neighborhood’s street children, who yawned and stretched away from those lying next to them. The children stepped over sewage trickling through the streets and foraged for food as they began their morning errands. Some walked west to Newspaper Row, where newsboys collected their daily papers, and others meandered north toward Broadway, where they would look for a spot to polish boots or sell flowers. If the oldest boys made enough money to buy a lager or a whiskey by noon, they could return to the saloons for a free lunch.
Many of the city’s saloons were on corners, accessible from several directions. As women sat in front of tenement houses and watched their youngest children play in the streets, husbands and fathers entered the swinging doors of saloons for their afternoon meals. Posters of sports stars, paintings, pictures of nude sirens, and brewery advertisements cluttered the walls. Bartenders pushed tables and chairs, pianos and pool tables to the sides to make room for free lunches of bread, crackers, meat, salad, and soup or stew. Along the bar, men propped tired feet on the brass foot rail and spilled lager onto sawdust scattered over the floor. A mirror behind the bar reflected the back of the saloon keeper’s oily head and stiff, white shirt. From the street, hungry children could look through the wrought-iron windows and see men reaching over the bar to pay a nickel for a beer and a dime for a whiskey shot.
Charles Stromberg had owned a nearby saloon on Mott Street for a few months. It wasn’t difficult to open a tavern—even a poor man could scrape together $200 and attract a brewer to provide beer, food, and decoration in exchange for a keeper’s commitment to sell only his beer and to pay a tax on it. Stromberg, like most bartenders, usually had some time to himself between the free lunch that ended at 3:00 P.M. and the busy evening hours. Occasionally, he paused from his chores in the late afternoon to service a few customers, such as the three men who sometimes met at this time in the back of his saloon.
Stromberg knew one of the men, and he could tell the others were convicts before he met them. The younger of the two was tall, and he had red hair. He usually dressed well, so perhaps he alone could have passed as a working man. The other stranger, though, drew attention to both men. He was older, shorter, and had an odd-looking face. The index finger on his left hand came to a point, and he wore two gold rings on his middle finger. One of them had a red stone set within it. Stromberg knew the third man through Henry Hartman, one of his saloon keepers. His name was William Westervelt, and like Hartman, he was a disgraced New York police officer. The force had dismissed him earlier that year for failing to shut down an illegal lottery office. Westervelt blamed the dismissal on his refusal to contribute to a political fund-raiser. Since then, he, his wife, and his two children had moved into a one-room apartment in a tenement house. To make rent while Westervelt looked for work, his wife had sold some of their furniture.
Westervelt introduced Stromberg to his two friends. He called the redhead Smith, and he introduced the man with the odd face once as Anderson and another time as Henderson. Westervelt said they were business associates of his from Philadelphia. Together, they peddled an insect repellent they called “Mothee” around New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Stromberg didn’t trust any of them. After seeing the strangers twice, he began to record their visits. He could never successfully eavesdrop on their conversations, but he noticed that Westervelt usually came in first, followed by the others in fifteen minutes or so. As they talked, Westervelt appeared calm and the others looked frustrated. Smith often seemed nervous, and Anderson/Henderson’s voice sounded angry. Each time Stromberg saw them, the strangers left after about fifteen minutes. Westervelt would then wait another fifteen before leaving. Sometimes, Westervelt came to have a drink alone, and when he did, he spoke with his old friend and bartender Henry Hartman. Hartman asked Westervelt one night for his opinion on the Philadelphia kidnapping. He replied that if the authorities arrested the kidnappers, the Ross child would not live for three days.
Stromberg didn’t turn to the police with his suspicions or his notes. At night, saloons turned into community centers that represented the ethnicities and political values of the neighborhoods. In the Five Points bars, the patrons shared Irish heritages and lives of poverty and crime. Men turned to them to escape angry wives and hungry children, to talk to friends, to read the paper or play a game of pool. Some who stayed too late bought a box of candy nicknamed “wife pacifiers,” and others stumbled outside, joined arms, and sang about lost loves or their dear mothers. The next day, they returned to the brotherhood on the corner, where they looked for work, cashed checks, and left letters for friends, lovers, or associates. So when Westervelt asked Hartman to contact him whenever a chalk mark appeared on a cellar door outside the saloon, he agreed. And when Westervelt once left a letter at the bar for one of his friends, Stromberg kept it despite his discomfort. He returned it three days later, after neither of Westervelt’s friends appeared.
Stromberg sometimes met Westervelt for a drink at one of the other bars in Five Points. He asked him some questions about Anderson/ Henderson and Smith. Westervelt didn’t answer the questions directly, but he did say, “I can tell you confidentially that I can make from ten to fifteen thousand dollars, but by doing so I would have to give somebody away, which would send them to the state prison for ten, or fifteen, or twenty years, or for life.” Over another drink on another night, Stromberg asked Westervelt what he thought of the Charley Ross case. Westervelt said he couldn’t name any names, but he could bet “two shillings” on the identities of the kidnappers.
Around closing time, stowaways, newsboys, orphans, and beggars walked past the Five Points saloons in search of a space to sleep. Some ducked into one of the lodging houses, originally built as stately homes for the Dutch Knickerbocker settlers. They paid a few cents for a space on the floor and climbed creaky stairs. Kerosene lamps cast small shadows on the walls, wet with moisture, and smells of unclean bodies and boiled cabbage floated through the halls. When a boy found an open spot in a room, he often lay with at least a dozen sleeping men and women, any number of whom were prostitutes, river pirates, and disease sufferers who coughed through the night.
The criminals of Five Points weren’t so different at heart from the city leaders who lived blocks away. They just suffered more. In both neighborhoods, swift hands earned money, and money earned power. People expected their leaders to be crooks. The good men cared too much about reputations and business interests to pretend to fight crime.