BLOODY BOWERY BATTLE
Dandy gangsters, deadly clashes on New York City’s oldest street
ON May 10, 1849, at least 22 people were killed in the Astor Place Riots, one of the deadliest brawls in New York City history. According to Stephen Paul DeVillo, author of the new book “The Bowery: The Strange History of New York’s Oldest Street” (Skyhorse Publishing), the riot was as only-in-New-York as it gets, spurred by a rivalry between two actors in competing productions of “Macbeth.”
At a time of boiling nativist tensions and violent street gangs, when New Yorkers of English descent fiercely resented the new German and Irish arrivals, a popular Bowery-based actor named Edwin Forrest was a favorite of a vicious and “militantly nativist” gang known as the Bowery B’hoys.
Despite being Scottish with an English wife, Forrest was a diehard nativist, often speaking publicly for the cause.
The B’hoys, based at 40 Bowery, were, DeVillo writes, “at once a street gang, a fashion statement, and an attitude,” adorned in long frock coats, tight pantaloons, colorful vests with open shirts and black leather plug hats. They were also known to walk with “a certain rolling swagger.”
Along with gangs like the Five Pointers, the Plug Uglies, and the Dead Rabbits, the B’hoys kept the Bowery and the surrounding Five Points neighborhood a violent and bloody place.
“The members of these groups were renowned street fighters,” DeVillo writes, “but unlike the straightforward fisticuffs of the old-time [gangs], the new youth gangs included clubs, knives, and eye gougers in their arsenals, and thought little of beating and stomping someone to death.”
WHEN a “restrained” English actor named William Macready began to challenge Forrest for the unofficial status of best actor on the New York stage, he represented “everything the nativists and Bowery B’hoys hated.”
Forrest began speaking out against him, even heckling his performances.
Macready announced that he would be playing Macbeth at the Astor Place Opera House the same night Forrest would perform the role at the nearby Broadway Theater, and it was too great a challenge for the B’hoys to ignore. Driving Macready away was seen by the nativists as a way to “secure the purity of the American stage.”
When he came out for his May 7 performance, the audience was packed with B’hoys exchanging hand signals. They pelted him with rotten eggs and lobbed stink bombs into the crowd. Macready escaped out a back door.
Three nights later, the B’hoys were successfully barred from the theater, but they and a crowd of fellow nativists grew angrier as the night went on. Sensing trouble, the police called in militia and cavalry troops to help contain the crowd. Coming up Broadway and approaching Astor Place via Eighth Street,
the authorities were met with “a shower of paving stones and marble chips. The militia stood their ground, with one-third of the men injured.”
While several top officers tried to calm the crowd, warning those in it the troops would have to shoot if they continued, the assemblage responded with more projectiles and shouts of, “Fire and be damned!” One bold protester placed himself in front of the militia’s muskets and screamed, “Fire if you dare — take the life of a freeborn American for a bloody British actor!”
Tensions mounted, with the troops threatening to shoot and the crowd retreating, then surging forward. Then the troops discharged their weapons, with half firing down Eighth Street, the other half down Lafayette.
In the end, somewhere between 22 and 34 people were killed, and more than 30 were wounded. In the wake of the riots, embarrassed by the street’s baser elements, “the more affluent residents of upper Bowery petitioned the city to rename the stretch above Astor Place as Fourth Avenue.”
THE Bowery has been well known — and frequently infamous — since the Dutch West India Company established permanent settlements in New Amsterdam in 1624, setting up six farms — or “bouweries,” in Dutch — and calling the trail that connected them Bouwerie Lane.
Almost immediately, Bouwerie Lane became the site of New York’s first mugging.
“A Lenape [Indian] came down the trail with his young nephew, bearing a load of furs for trade to the Dutch,” DeVillo writes.
“As the pair approached [a] pond, they were jumped by three men who murdered the Lenape and made off with the furs.”
The Revolutionary War gave the Bowery significant historical import. Paul Revere galloped down the street twice en route to Philadelphia, and Colonial troops gathered there in July 1776 to hear the new Declaration of Independence read aloud.
When the British surrendered New York City to Gen. George Washington in 1783, they did so at the Bowery Gate, where the Bowery connects with Grand Street today. Washington waited at the Bull’s Head Tavern, at Bowery just below Canal Street, before the event, and officially raised the Stars and Stripes at Fraunces Tavern, which still stands on Pearl Street.
The Bowery also featured the first signs that New Yorkers would be big drinkers. During the war, British encampments were located near the Bowery’s many taverns, but the British soldiers weren’t paid enough to buy beer.
“The result was the Bowery’s first crime wave, which made the area dangerous to civilians,” DeVillo writes, “and provoked complaints to officers about the ‘constant robberies’ taking place there.”
BY the late 1800s, the Bowery was notorious. McGlory’s Dancing and Variety Hall, which opened in 1885 at 158 Hester St., “became a destination for the early gay and transvestite scene in New York,” with “curtained compartments for intimate same-sex encounters.”
Other area bars offered debauchery in all its forms.
“Paddy Martin’s saloon down on 9 Bowery had an opium den in the basement,” DeVillo writes, “while across the street at 12 Bowery, Dan Moos had a pit with weekly, or even nightly, cockfights.”
In terms of danger, though, noth- ing beat the World Poolroom at 19 Bowery.
“By the early 1890s, it was known as a place haunted by ‘peter players,’ meaning a gang that knocked out drinkers with drops of chloral hydrate and robbed them, sometimes leaving them stripped of their outer clothes, which could be quickly sold.”
The street’s recent gentrification makes the current era a historical outlier — overall, the neighborhood has been more “Game of Thrones” than Park Avenue. But especially now that the Bowery is the sort of place that can call The New Museum home, its fascinating, hardscrabble past provides an educational history of how cities evolve.
“Much of the Bowery’s history was the kind that many New Yorkers preferred not to remember,” DeVillo writes, “but the growing gulf of time turned repulsive memories into a colorful gaslit past.”