Patrolman Edward Costigan joined the force in 1914 and was a no-nonsense officer who commanded respect in Akron’s “tenderloin district.” From the Akron Beacon Journal.
If Hell’s Half Acre was the trouble spot of South Akron, its northern counterpart, Furnace Street, was a hundred times worse. The crowded neighborhood just north of downtown was a rough-and-tumble district where gambling joints, dens of iniquity and houses of ill fame ran full tilt beside working-class homes, mom and pop stores and other legitimate businesses.
Furnace Street owed its name to the Cuyahoga Furnace, an 1816 smelting plant that manufactured plows and other farming equipment along the Little Cuyahoga River. In the nineteenth century, the neighborhood was nicknamed Dublin because it housed Irish laborers who helped dig the canal. New waves of European immigrants, including a colony of Italians, made Furnace Street their home in the early twentieth century.
Patrolman Edward J. Costigan walked the district for most of the three years that he had been an Akron officer. The unmarried thirty-nine-year-old cop lived on Mount View Avenue with his widowed mother, Catherine, and four of his six sisters from their nine-sibling Irish family. Before joining the force, he worked in the mechanical department at the Akron Press newspaper.
The six-foot, two-hundred-pound Costigan was a no-nonsense officer who commanded respect in the city’s “tenderloin district.” The Furnace Street neighborhood had more than one hundred homes, twenty restaurants, fifteen saloons, ten billiard halls, six hotels and dozens of small businesses, including grocery stores, coffeehouses, barbershops, cigar stores, meat markets, tailor shops and confectioneries.
Patrolman Edward Costigan joined the force in 1914 and was a no-nonsense officer who commanded respect in Akron’s “tenderloin district.” From the Akron Beacon Journal.
It’s another gray, sooty winter day in Akron in this 1919 view overlooking the rough-and-tumble Furnace Street neighborhood. Author’s collection.
Quarrels, brawls, stabbings and shootings erupted with regularity on the street. One afternoon, Costigan heard a gunshot in the 120 block of Furnace and rushed to investigate. A young Italian man bolted out of a bar and complained that a neighbor had just tried to shoot him. While Costigan talked to the witness, the angry gunman walked up and shot the snitch dead. Bang! Just another day on Furnace.
Costigan had no qualms about stopping suspicious-looking people and frisking them for weapons. The searches stirred resentment in the neighborhood because some immigrants felt they were being unfairly targeted. Behind the cop’s back, neighborhood ruffians began to call Costigan the “Red Policeman,” or “Red,” a disparaging nickname based on his ruddy complexion.
Patrolman William McDonnell had known Costigan for most of his life and was his closest friend on the force. As youngsters in Akron, they attended grade school together and occasionally played hooky to go fishing. McDonnell joined the force on St. Patrick’s Day 1913, and Costigan followed his footsteps.
“Big Will,” so called because of his 235-pound girth, walked an adjacent beat on North Howard Street from Federal Street (later Perkins Street, now Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard) all the way to the Gorge between North Hill and Cuyahoga Falls. “Anything could happen down there—and usually did,” McDonnell recalled years later. “We didn’t have cruisers or radios in those days, so I seldom got as far out as the Gorge. I usually had enough to keep me busy downtown.”
When their shifts ended, McDonnell and Costigan usually met up at Furnace, the nexus point between their two beats, and walked back to police headquarters at South High Street and East Bowery Street. On the cool, clear evening of Thursday, January 10, 1918, they made plans to stop at the East Ohio Gas Company office on High Street to pay their heating bills. “It’s our last chance,” Costigan told McDonnell.
Patrolman Joseph Hunt was a rookie officer of four months who had a wife and three young children. From the Akron Beacon Journal.
Patrolman Joseph H. Hunt, a German American rookie who joined the force in September after working as a millwright at Quaker Oats, agreed to go with them. It had been a long day on Furnace Street. The thirty-three-year-old cop had paid a few visits to saloons to persuade unsavory patrons to stop “molesting women.” In one heated confrontation, a hoodlum warned Hunt that he had better watch his step in the neighborhood.
The three patrolmen set off around 7:00 p.m., but a pedestrian stopped McDonnell to tell him that a drunken man was unconscious in the middle of North Street. McDonnell told Costigan and Hunt to go pay their gas bills and he’d meet them later that evening. It was cold and gloomy as the two cops walked north on High Street past the giant shed for Northern Ohio Traction & Light Company’s new interurban terminal.
They did not notice three shadowy figures trailing them from Furnace Street. One stayed a block behind to serve as a lookout while the others quickened their pace. Costigan and Hunt were passing the Union Fireproof Storage Company at 41–45 North High Street when they were gunned down at 7:15 p.m. “We didn’t hear anyone following us,” Hunt later said. “In fact, we didn’t hear or see anything unusual until we were shot in the back.”
Two men with .38-caliber pistols pumped steel-nosed bullets into the patrolmen from a few feet away while a third man watched from a distance. Hunt said he felt a twinge in his back and legs, wheeled around, drew his revolver and returned fire. “I guess I emptied it, but do not know whether or not I hit them,” Hunt said. “Probably I didn’t because I was becoming wobbly on my pins. I believe the three were Italians. Two of them wore dark overcoats and soft hats. I’m not sure about the third one, although I noticed that he wore a cap. They ran north on High Street.”
Costigan was shot four times in the back and collapsed facedown on the red-brick street. Five bullets struck Hunt—two in the right leg, two in the left arm and one that pierced his intestine and gallbladder and exited below his navel.
Marie Azar, who lived at 55 North High Street, testified that she heard gunshots, rushed to her front porch and saw two men run past while an officer fired at them. She hurried to Costigan’s body, but there was nothing she could do. “I thought if he was alive I would give him air, and then I called for help,” Azar said. “Hunt was staggering, ready to fall, when some men caught him. He said, ‘Well, boys, they got me.’ Then the machine came on the scene and took the officers away.”
The patrolmen were rushed to Akron City Hospital, where Costigan was pronounced dead on arrival and Hunt underwent surgery. Police Chief John Durkin sounded an alarm: “Get every man tonight who cannot give a good account of himself. Get the men who killed Costigan and shot Hunt.”
By the time Patrolman McDonnell got to North Street, friends had already carted off the intoxicated man, so the officer phoned headquarters from a call box around 7:30 p.m. and received the horrifying bulletin that two cops had been shot on High Street, only a five-minute walk from the police station.
“I knew immediately that it was Ed and Joe,” McDonnell told a reporter the next day. “If I had been with them, I would have got it, too, and would have been in the morgue or hospital this morning.” He regretted not being with his comrades to fight the gunmen, though. “I think if I hadn’t gone back to tend to that drunk, the three of us might have at least wounded one of them,” he said.
Sheriff Jim Corey served from 1914 to 1918. His office was in the Summit County Jail between South Broadway and South High Street. Author’s collection.
Akron had never seen a frenzied manhunt like the one that transpired that weekend. Chief Durkin ordered every cop to hit the streets in search of the killers, turning the city into zones and scouring neighborhoods from block to block—beginning with Furnace Street. “Practically every foreigner in the city who could not give an account of himself during the period from 5 until 8 o’clock was rounded up and brought to headquarters as a suspect,” the Beacon Journal reported on January 11. “Coffee houses were visited, every saloon, pool room and other meeting place in the city was inspected and suspects gathered in.”
Officers barricaded roads, halted drivers and searched vehicles. They stopped trains, frisked passengers and interrogated “suspicious-appearing characters.” Sheriff Jim Corey had Summit County deputies raid gambling parlors and shady resorts on the outskirts of town.
Detective Bert Eckerman must have experienced ghastly déjà vu as he kept a vigil at Hunt’s bed less than three weeks after doing the same for Patrolman Guy Norris. Eckerman and H.B. Kerr, city editor at the Akron Press, interviewed a wheezing, moaning Hunt for details about the ambush. “I guess I’m done for,” Hunt told the men. “Ain’t it hell to be a policeman? And I’ve only been on the force four months. There’s the wife and three little kiddies, too.”
Distraught wife Adale Hunt joined her husband at his bedside and tried to keep a brave face. She hadn’t wanted him to become a cop because she feared something terrible might happen. During the first few weeks after Joe joined the force, she barely got any sleep at their Bellows Street home. Now her worst nightmare had come true.
The officer battled valiantly for two days at the hospital, even showing signs of improvement, but the internal damage was too severe. Patrolman Hunt died at 10:00 p.m., Saturday, January 12, leaving behind his thirty-year-old widow and sons Leonard, eight; Louis, five; and Laurence, one.
Bells tolled the next week as two patrolmen were laid to rest. Hundreds attended Costigan’s funeral Monday at St. Vincent Catholic Church, where Reverend John J. Scullen eulogized, “He not only proved his worth in the fulfillment of his duties, but the reflection of his whole life makes his fate the more appalling.”
Pallbearers were Gus Baehr, Jack Cardarelli, Thomas Costigan, Charles Costigan and Patrolmen William McDonnell and Grover Starkey. Honorary pallbearers from the police force were Ed Heffernan, John Duffy, Frank McAllister, Patrick Sweeney, Patrick Conley and George Fatherson. “They were two of the best boys ever on the force,” Chief Durkin said.
Costigan was survived by his eight siblings—Catherine, Margaret, Thomas, Anna, Bridget, Julia, Mary and John—and sixty-seven-year-old mother, Catherine, whose despair was so great that she died broken-hearted six weeks later. They were buried in a family plot at St. Vincent Cemetery.
Hundreds gathered again Wednesday morning at St. Mary Catholic Church for Hunt’s funeral. In his eulogy, Reverend Joseph O’Keefe noted, “A little more of the law of God practiced in the everyday life of the world, more regard for the Ten Commandments, would make such terrible murders unheard of—for with regard for God’s law, civil law could be more readily enforced.”
For the second time that week, McDonnell, Heffernan, McAllister and Starkey served as pallbearers, along with Officers Adolph Oberdoerster and Frank McGuire. “It is seldom we are fortunate enough to get a man like Costigan,” Captain Alva Greenlese said.
Uniformed police led a somber procession to Holy Cross Cemetery, where Hunt was buried. Following the ceremony, the cops wiped away tears and returned to work. There was no more time to mourn. Gangsters were hunting Akron officers and had to be stopped.
“We’ll get them,” Detective Eckerman vowed.