Before “The Gangs of New York” was a hopelessly overbudget, endlessly anticipated period epic starring Leonardo DiCaprio as yet another noble vagabond, it was a lurid and breezy history of the New York underworld written by Herbert Asbury.
Born in Missouri in 1889 to a staunchly Methodist family, Asbury turned his back on the religious rigidity of his heartland upbringing, devoting himself instead to chronicling the lives and deeds of the “hoodlums and rowdies, con men and pickpockets, burglars and footpads, gunmen and garroters, sneak thieves and horse-thieves,” “tricksters,” “sharpers,” “harlots” and other sundry characters who have, from time immemorial, made cities dangerous places for young men from the country.
Between 1928 and 1940, Asbury wrote a series of what his publishers called “informal” histories of the sinful sides of New York City, San Francisco, New Orleans and Chicago. All are united by their frequent use of deliciously anachronistic slang –Asbury’s world is one of brace games, bunco players and blacklegs–casual brutality, occasionally suspect sourcing and a total lack of any organizing principle other than to recount with mordant wit the best tales the city morgues and police blotters had to offer (sometimes with more concern for a story’s salacious appeal than its veracity).
“Gem of the Prairie,” Asbury’s rather snidely titled tribute to Chicago’s rich criminal past, which has been re-released by Thunder’s Mouth Press under the title “Gangs of Chicago” to coincide with the movie, is no different. It is a disorganized but fascinating romp through Chicago’s history, from its first recorded theft to Al Capone’s final arrest, as seen from its saloons, bordellos, gambling halls and–given the rampant corruption that attended each era of our fair city’s past–precinct houses.
It is also an eminently readable caution against romanticizing the past and bemoaning the present. Chicago in the 19th Century was not a genteel Victorian city of parasols and handlebar mustachios: It was a veritable swamp of criminality and random violence. For every modern ill that plagues the city–drugs, school violence, even terrorist threats–Asbury assures us that it used to be much, much worse.
Herewith, Q presents an annotated map of Herbert Asbury’s Chicago through the ages, with attention paid to those areas today’s gentle Chicagoans would have done well to avoid.
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Herbert Asbury, the archivist of underworld lore who wrote “The Gangs of New York”–the book that inspired the film–also wrote a history of Chicago’s seamy side.
Asbury’s book is as University of Illinois-Chicago historian Perry R. Duis noted in his introduction to the 1986 edition (it was originally published in 1940), “the most detailed, reliable, and readable account of the nether side of Chicago’s first century,” it is also a popular and rather sparsely sourced work.
Thus, although the events surveyed here actually occurred, some details are naturally beyond our grasp. We cannot, sadly, independently verify the precise amount ($34) stolen in what Asbury claims is Chicago’s first recorded crime.
Nor have we been able to confirm the existence of an assassin identified as Shotgun Man who, Asbury says, haunted Death Corner at the turn of the century. Death Corner certainly existed, and was so called, but Asbury, unfortunately, failed to provide the aforementioned assassin’s given name, apparently thinking “Shotgun Man” to be sufficient. (Frankly, we agree.) Herewith, a brief tour of the city’s bawdy and bloody past as seen through Asbury’s eyes.
— John Cook
1. Wolf Tavern
1833: The site of Chicago’s first recorded theft. Built in 1828, the Wolf Tavern rented out rooms to the “rogues of every description” that populated the “chaos of mud, rubbish and confusion” (in the words of a contemporaneous British visitor) that was then Chicago. The city’s pioneer thief–or, as author Asbury points out, the first to get caught–was convicted in 1833 of stealing $34 from a fellow boarder at the tavern.
2. Lager Beer Riot
1855: If you think beer riots were an invention of Ohio State football fans, think again. In 1855, the city tried to raise saloon license fees and to close watering holes on Sundays. The measures, in keeping with the anti-immigrant sentiments of the times, were largely directed at the German population on the North Side. The Germans would have none of it, and on April 21, 1855, a mob of about 1,000 North Side men marched downtown across the Clark Street bridge to cries of “Shoot the police.” One rioter was killed, 60 were arrested and two eventually were convicted.
3. The Sands
1850s: “Decidedly the vilest and most dangerous place in Chicago,” according to no less trustworthy a source than this very newspaper. In the 1850s, the Sands–a neighborhood near the lake roughly where Tribune Tower and the Wrigley Building now stand–was a thriving shantytown. According to the Tribune, the Sands was “the resort or hiding place of all sorts of criminals. . . . The most beastly sensuality and darkest crimes had their homes in the Sands.”
4. Mickey Finn’s joint
1896-1903: In 1896, a thug and sometime bartender named Mickey Finn opened up the Lone Star Saloon and Palm Garden along what was then known as Whiskey Row, at State and Harrison Streets. The Lone Star was a dive with an innovative business model: Finn would serve unsuspecting customers his Mickey Finn Special, which consisted of a mixture of raw alcohol and an unidentified white powder Finn claimed to have procured from a local voodoo doctor.
The saps would drink up and promptly pass out, at which point Finn would rob them and dump them in an alley behind the bar. The Lone Star was shut down in 1903, but the name “Mickey Finn” forever became synonymous with knockout drinks, potions and pills of all varieties.
5. “The Monster of 63rd Street”
1892-94: Henry H. Holmes–real name Herman W. Mudgett–is known as America’s first serial killer. He was a medical school graduate and, Asbury tells us, “almost irresistible to the ladies.”
But he also was a “forger, a bigamist, a swindler, a horse-thief and a murderer who maintained a fantastic ‘castle’ equipped with trapdoors, secret stairways . . . torture chambers [and] vats of corrosive acids,” not to mention an apparatus resembling a medieval torturer’s rack.
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“He had a theory,” Asbury writes, “that the human body, by proper manipulation, could be stretched to twice its normal length, and held that universal application of the process would produce a race of giants.”
Holmes built his bizarre mansion on the southwest corner of Wallace and 63rd Streets, and he advertised it in the local papers as a boardinghouse for the thousands of out-of-towners who attended the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. The police traced no fewer than 50 missing visitors to Holmes’ castle, and Asbury says that in all Holmes has been estimated to have murdered anywhere between 30 and “several hundred” victims.
6. Dead Man’s Corner
1850s-early 20th Century: The corner, at Sangamon Street and 14th Place, was just two blocks away from a police station. Consequently, Asbury writes, “more policemen were killed there by criminals, and more criminals by policemen, than at any other locality in Chicago.”
Dead Man’s Corner was the heart of Bloody Maxwell, the popular appellation for the Maxwell District, a neighborhood between Wood Street and the Chicago River on the South Side. Bloody Maxwell was “a ‘terror district,’ swarming with hoodlums, cop-fighters, footpads, burglars and other criminals,” and served as “Chicago’s foremost crime nursery.”
7. Walsh School
1881-1905: The children of Bloody Maxwell attended the Walsh School, which was the “scene of one of the most remarkable feuds in American annals–a war between rival gangs of schoolboys that started in 1881 and continued for almost 30 years, during which time several were killed and at least a score were shot or stabbed or seriously injured by brickbats and clubs.”
The combatants ranged in age from 10 to 15. They carried their guns to school and “fought desperate and often bloody battles in the streets and playgrounds.”
The Walsh School began to calm down in 1905 after officials began searching the children for weapons as they entered the school each morning. The practice continued for several years.
8. Automatic Trio
1903: Also known as the Car Barn Bandits, Gustave Marx, Harvey Van Dine and Peter Neidermeyer were Chicago’s first celebrity criminals. From July 8 to Nov. 27, 1903, they conducted a spectacular crime spree during which they “killed eight men, including two detectives, wounded five others and committed eight robberies” totaling roughly $2,400. One of those took place at a North Avenue saloon (today it’s a playground), where the trio killed two patrons in the course of robbing the bar of $8.
Marx was caught first–“You can’t do anything to me,” he protested upon being locked up. “I only shot a cop! Anybody’s got a right to shoot a cop!”–and he ratted out his comrades, revealing the location of their hideout in the Indiana dunes.
Returned to Chicago for a trial, the three were “treated more like conquering heroes or visiting celebrities than like desperate criminals,” with the detectives who captured them extolling their marksmanship before crowds of reporters and onlookers.
9. Death Corner
1890s-1910s: Oak and Cleveland Streets (then Milton Street) was the focal point of so-called Black Hand activity in Chicago during the turn of the century. The Black Hand gangs, made up predominantly of Italian immigrants, excelled at extortion: They would select a prominent citizen, send him a letter bearing the imprint of a black hand demanding a certain sum of money, and bomb his home or place of business and, later, kill him if he failed to pay up.
Many who failed to heed the Black Hand letters met their ends at Death Corner–it was, Asbury says, “the favorite slaughtering place of a professional assassin called the Shotgun Man.”
10. Sweeney the Bomber
1920s: Jim Sweeney was the dean of the Chicago bombers, and his hangout was at Harrison and Halsted Streets. The bomb was a favorite tool for criminals in Chicago, Asbury tells us: More than 800 of the “infernal machines” were detonated in Chicago during the first 30 years of the 20th Century. Many of those bombings can be credited to the Black Hand, but most were “exploded by gamblers, to destroy rival houses or call the attention of the police to them. . . by politicians, to intimidate voters and discourage opposition; and by labor-union terrorists, as a form of direct action.”
11. The Jungle
Circa 1903: The Jungle was a collection of shacks at Peoria and Monroe Streets inhabited by 60 to 100 prostitutes. They were “known as ‘air-walkers’ because of their peculiar bouncing gait,” the result of the excessive use of a cheap drug similar to cocaine.
The women, who were never permitted to leave unaccompanied by a pimp, solicited by standing naked in the doorways of the Jungle, charged between 25 and 50 cents for their trouble and “robbed every man who failed to keep his wits about him.”
12. The Everleigh Club
1900-11: Though the Everleigh Club was in the heart of what then was known as the Levee–a neighborhood on the South Side roughly between Chinatown and the McCormick Center, known as “the largest, the most notorious and the most vicious of all Chicago’s concentrations of vice”–it was an outpost of class and luxury. Operated between 1900 and 1911 by two sisters, Ada and Minna Everleigh, it was internationally known as one of the most successful and elegant bordellos in the world, featuring “curtains and hangings of golden silk,” “gold spittoons,” “cages of sweetly singing canaries” and “a half-dozen pianos.”
13. Invasion of the prostitutes
1912: The Cook County state’s attorney, under increasing pressure from the burgeoning temperance and Christian reform movements, ordered that every “vice resort” in Chicago be closed.
The raids began on Oct. 4, 1912: “The streets of the Levee were jammed with scurrying prostitutes and pimps and with thousands of curiosity-seekers who had hurried southward from the Loop to watch the raids.”
The next day, the prostitutes struck back: Hundreds of women, wearing painted faces and garish clothes, swarmed onto Michigan Avenue downtown, parading back and forth and making as much a splash as possible to publicize the fact that they’d been driven from their homes. They occupied downtown for two days but to no avail–the clampdown did not let up.
14. Pony Inn
1926: On April 27, 1926, the machine gun made its inaugural criminal appearance in Chicago. Jim Doherty and Tom Duffy, members of the West Side O’Donnell gang, and William H. McSwiggin, an assistant state’s attorney whose association with the
O’Donnell gang has “never been explained,” were shot and killed in front of the Pony Inn in Cicero.
The shooter was rumored to be none other than Al Capone.
15. Dion O’Banion’s flower shop
1924: O’Banion–“a swashbuckling, ambidextrous, flower-loving, cheerful murderer, who wore a carnation in his buttonhole”–was a North Side gang chieftain foolish enough to doublecross Johnny Torrio, the Chicago overlord who mentored Al Capone.
In 1922, O’Banion bought a half-interest in a North Side flower shop. “As gangland’s official florist,” Asbury writes, “O’Banion sold thousands of dollars’ worth of flowers to the friends and foes of slain gunmen, for underworld etiquette demanded that a killer send expensive floral tributes to the funeral of his victim.”
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He was gunned down by Torrio and Capone’s men in the flower shop on Nov. 10, 1924.
16. Bugs Moran Gang garage
1929: O’Banion’s successor as leader of the North Side gang, Hymie Weiss, was shot to death two years later outside the very same flower shop, and his successor was shot by the police a year later, leaving George “Bugs” Moran in charge of the North Side.
In 1927, Moran moved his headquarters to a garage at 2122 N. Clark St. that, on Feb. 14, 1929, became the site of gangland’s most notorious killing: the Valentine’s Day Massacre.
Moran himself wasn’t there, but seven of his men were lined up against the garage wall by three of Capone’s men wearing police uniforms and raked with machine-gun fire. They had been waiting for a truckload of booze to be delivered. After the massacre, Capone was overheard to remark: “I am the most powerful man in Chicago.”