OPINION:
Podcast host Pete A. Turner observed, “If Dave Pietrusza has written it, it’s going to be fun.”
And fun “Gangsterland” is. As a former New York City commissioner, I’ve driven or taken the subway to every neighborhood in the five boroughs, a point of pride for me. Yet upstater David Pietrusza schooled me on most of his book’s pages, pointing to crimes and other vices taking place on every street and avenue he traverses.
These are thoroughfares I’ve traveled on, in some cases hundreds of times, never realizing, for example, that an ordinary office building before me was once a Beaux-Arts mansion built with ill-gotten cash.
A special focus of Mr. Pietrusza’s is Arnold Rothstein and other gangsters of his time, who preceded the Cosa Nostra underworld we know better through movies and gruesome news stories. In both criminal incarnations, the prohibition of consuming, selling and producing liquor provided enormous opportunities for lucrative bootlegging through mobbed-up black markets. Rothstein may have been the first to see Prohibition as a business opportunity.
There were as many as 100,000 speak-easies in New York alone by the late 1920s, as the lure of illegal adult beverages vastly outpaced the influence of the temperance lobby and, in most instances, the reach of the law.
Perhaps the centerpiece of Rothstein’s criminal enterprise was the fixing of the 1919 World Series, with the implicated Chicago White Sox players tarred with the “Black Sox” moniker in criminal trials. Millions in rigged betting gains were “earned,” with enough left to pay crooked ballplayers handsomely.
Open to nearly any page in “Gangsterland,” and you will marvel at Mr. Pietrusza’s research and sometimes piquant narratives of Manhattan streets and buildings, revealing histories that I, for one, never realized in my self-conveyance around the city.
Who knew that 22 W. 63rd St. was once the home of Daly’s Theater, the venue for the city’s first all-Black musical, “Shuffle Along,” which provided a springboard for the careers of Josephine Baker, Florence Mills, Fredi Washington and Paul Robeson? Arnold Rothstein’s final Broadway venture took place there, and in 1927, 33-year-old Mae West was arrested by New York police at that theater. The charge: obscenity for her role in the play “Sex.” The theater was dormant for years and was finally torn down in 1957 to be replaced by a nondescript 1960s residential building.
Then there’s 161 W. 54th St., which housed the 300 Club speak-easy that was closed by the authorities, only to be reopened as Club Argonaut before Prohibition was repealed. In 1932, a mob kidnapping took place there. Just down the street, at 151 W. 54th, were the Congress Apartments. In 1928, this was the site of a legendary card game, attracting local gamblers and high rollers from as far away as San Francisco.
The biggest loser in the card game was Rothstein, who was suspected of cheating and refused to pay his $319,000 debt ($5.3 million in today’s dollars), with serious future consequences. On Nov. 4, 1928, Rothstein went to the Park Central Hotel (200 W. 56th St.) for a meeting to discuss his gambling debts. After declining to pay up once again, he was shot, though perhaps accidentally. Conspiracy theories continue to make the rounds.
Fans of HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire” series will recognize an appearance by the star character, a real political and rackets boss from Atlantic City, Enoch “Nucky” Johnson. Enamored with a showgirl named Hilda Ferguson, who eventually opened Manhattan’s Club Hilda, Mr. Johnson purchased a nightclub in his beloved Atlantic City to showcase Hilda and later, other love interests.
Another large personality Mr. Pietrusza presents is Timothy “Big Tim” Sullivan, the Tammany Hall boss who marshaled the votes of Irish, Jewish and German families to keep local Democrats in power. Sullivan became a state senator and congressman and kept offices at 1440 Broadway, near 40th Street. That was my office building at WOR-TV in the 1970s and 1980s. I only learned of Sullivan’s tenancy there through “Gangsterland.”
In the state Senate, Sullivan was the primary sponsor of one of the nation’s first gun control laws, which made “the carrying of a firearm without a license a penal offense.” For more than a century, the Sullivan Act has been infamous nationwide among Second Amendment and self-defense advocates.
As Mr. Pietrusza and historian M.R. Werner discerned: “The Sullivan Law was useful to Sullivan and to Tammany Hall [the Democratic Party machine running New York City government for many decades], because it enabled them to control their gunmen friends when they [became] their enemies.”
Historians have also observed that the Sullivan Act “never prevented” any criminal from obtaining a weapon or committing a violent crime. It did block ordinary New Yorkers from protecting their families.
“Gangsterland” chronicles a unique era in which the zeal for illegal spirits and other pleasures brought together people from unrelated sectors of society, from the shadiest to the most venerated. For example, the best man at Arnold Rothstein’s Saratoga wedding was Herbert Swope, winner of the first Pulitzer Prize.
There is no shortage of tours of New York City, themed or geographical, on land or by boat. Take “Gangsterland” in hand, and you can create your own self-guided walking tour, heading in the directions you choose, to visit the buildings where Legs Diamond or Dutch Schultz were rubbed out or where Fanny Brice lived before marrying Rothstein enforcer Nicky Arnstein.
As you realize how many Greek Revival, Beaux Arts, or other classic architectural structures we’ve lost since 1900, you’ll surely have a deeper appreciation of the landmarks and history we have preserved.
• Herbert W. Stupp is the editor of Gipperten.com. He served as commissioner of the NYC Department for the Aging from 1994 to 2002, appointed by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.
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GANGSTERLAND: A TOUR THROUGH THE DARK HEART OF JAZZ-AGE NEW YORK CITY
By David Pietrusza
Diversion Books, 2023
310 pages, $17.99
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