The Eliza Doolittle of Tenement Houses -- No. 320 W 47th Street

photo by Alice Lum

Following the Civil War the gritty West Side of Manhattan from the 30s to the upper 50s developed as warehouses, slaughterhouses, factories and docks drew immigrant workers.  Ramshackle wooden buildings became havens of crime and street gangs terrorized railroads, businesses and residents alike.  The neighborhood earned the apt but unflattering nickname Hell’s Kitchen.

By the mid-1870s tenement houses were being built to house the growing number of impoverished laborers.  One stood out.   At No. 320 West 47^thStreet a handsome brownstone-clad apartment building drew on the Italianate mansions of a decade earlier for inspiration.

photo by Alice Lum

Carved window surrounds sitting on small brackets, paneled spandrels below the first floor openings, and an Italianate cornice mimicked the private homes of Manhattan’s upper class.  A showy arched pediment capped the single-door entrance, supported by foliate scrolled brackets and flaunting a matching keystone.  Carved, paneled pilasters flanked the entrance.  To accommodate an apartment on either side of the central corridor within, however, the architect had to scrimp on the width of the entrance—resulting in proportions too narrow for the rather grand architectural elements.   

Like the character in My Fair Lady, it wore the dress of a far more aristocratic structure.

The entrance is especially handsome with arched pediment, beautifully-carved foliate brackets and paneled pilasters.  (The pigeon spikes are a later addition!)  photo by Alice Lum

Conditions in tenement buildings—despite outward appearances of No. 320—were normally crowded and dirty.  The New York Times said “there is more disease, crime, squalor, and vice to the square inch in this part of New-York.”   Health officials eyed the tenements for any hint of communicable diseases.  In July 1877 their attention was drawn to No. 320 West 47^th Street.

The family of Peter Van Keuren was among the tenants in the building.  A letter-carrier, the 49-year old was sensitive to heat exposure; a problematic condition for his chosen profession.   Van Keuren’s mail route enable him to escape the direct sun by walking in the shade or dodging into stores and doorways.  But at the end of June he was given the “pony route,” and “in serving this he was fully exposed to the heat," as explained by a newspaper.

Although he complained to his wife that he felt unwell, Van Keuren continued his route for two weeks, until he was forced to stay home.  Doctor Harwood visited, found him nauseated and prescribed medicine.  The doctor came back on July 16, a day later at 10:00 at night.  The following morning at 7:00 Van Keuren died.

The doctor had not told the patient nor his wife his fears.  “I made up my mind from his very striking symptoms that he had a genuine case of Asiatic cholera, and I was alarmed.  I feared to tell him the truth, because the knowledge would have hurt him,” he later told reporters.

Cholera was a word that struck fear and panic in crowded cities.  The disease had killed 3,515 New Yorkers in 1832 and the memory of that devastating epidemic was still fresh.

“Van Keuren’s skin the second time I called was cold and shrunk; his hands were cold and shriveled, and like a woman’s who has been a long time washing in the suds.”

Assistant Sanitary Inspector Dwyer was sent to the building to investigate.  The family was reluctant to give any information that would lead investigators to believe they were responsible for a dangerous, contagious disease.   In his report Dwyer said “the family of the deceased, for some reason, were very reticent, but he learned that the deceased had eaten copiously of corned-beef and cabbage at his dinner at noon on Monday, and in the evening had partaken of blackberries, soon after which he was taken sick.”

Dr. Harwood was unmoved.  “If ever a man died of a clear case of cholera, Peter Van Keuren did so, and there is no use in attempting to conceal the fact,” he said.

 Van Keuren’s burial was delayed pending an autopsy and The New York Times reported that “As a precautionary measure, the premises where the death occurred were thoroughly disinfected by the Disinfecting Corps of the Health Department.”

 Crisp, carved window enframements, sills and lintels add dimension to the smooth planar facade -- photo by Alice Lum

The tenants who filled the building were typical of those throughout the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood.   A mixture of racial and ethnic backgrounds peopled the apartments, not always with pleasant results.   In July 1894 the teen-aged daughters of a black family, Jessie Jeniset, and an Italian one, Rosie Lamonte, got into an argument. 

The bad blood simmered and finally came to a boil on July 10.  Jessie was talking to a young boy at Broadway and 47^th Street when Rosie happened along carrying her baby sister.  The Evening World reported that “The quarrel was renewed.  Each called the other hard names.  Jessie’s companion, the colored boy, when the quarrel was at its height, drew a razor, and thrusting it into Jessie’s hand, told her to ‘cut her heart out.’”

14-year old girls in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood were hardened and street tough.  Jessie slashed at the baby Rosie was carrying, but managed only to slice her dress.  She then turned on Rosie, cutting her twice across the back and face.

Rosie was taken to Roosevelt Hospital where she was held for a week.  The Evening World said “She is disfigured for life.”

In the meantime, Jessie ran home and told her father what she had done.  In an effort to shield her from police, he sent her to friends in Maryland.

Almost two months later word on the street reached Rosie that her attacker was back in the city.  The teen went to Yorkville Police Court and secured a warrant for her arrest.  Detective Bellar banged on the Jeniset door on the night of August 30 and took Jessie away.  She was held on $1,000 bond—an impossible sum for the impoverished family, about $25,000 in today’s money.

Well represented in the mix of tenants were the Irish.  45-year old Joseph Dyer, described by The Times as “an Irish laborer,” was a large man who would not be intimidated by wealth nor social status.  On February 24, 1901 Dyer was riding the downtown Columbus Avenue street car.  Also on the car were 29-year old George D. Crooks and his sister.  The Timesdescribed Crooks as “a small man, and wearing fine clothes and eyeglasses.”

When the car reached 76^th Street, Crooks and his sister attempted to disembark; however Dyer stood in the doorway and refused to budge.  “Crooks rashly tried to shove the herculean laborer aside,” reported the newspaper.

Dyer threatened the man with a barrage of street jargon “Stand back, stand back, you dude.  I’ll smash yer face.  Don’t think because you’ve better clothes nor me I’ll let you treat me like a baste.”

When the car reached the next stop at 74^thStreet, Crooks and his sister got out; but Dyer was right behind them.

“I’ll give you one good punch if it costs me $5,” he roared, referring to the fine for disorderly conduct, and he aimed his fist at Crooks’ face.

The Times reported that Crooks “dodged nimbly and then brought his silver-tipped cane down with a crash on Dyer’s head.  The laborer dropped like one shot.  His roars for the police were audible a block away, and Policeman Joseph Craig ran to Dyer’s rescue.”

An ambulance surgeon treated Dyer’s scalp wound.  The Irishman insisted that Crooks be arrested and “the Sergeant reluctantly entertained his complaint.”  Crooks was quickly bailed out by a friend and, assumedly, Joseph Dyer learned that size does not always dictate might.

Another Irish-born immigrant living here at the time was John McHugh, a guard on the elevated railroad.  McHugh managed to make himself hated city-wide when he made a rash decision to board a train on the wrong side of the tracks.  It ended in the death of one man and serious injury to three others.

Around 7:45 on the morning of September 3, 1902, while still wearing his uniform and a straw hat, McHugh finished his work and, according to him, was in a hurry to get “to a funeral of a cousin.”  So, while standing among the workers between the tracks, he grabbed the handrail of a fast-moving train on the opposite side of the train from the platform.

The Times reported that “while he clung to the handrail as the train drew rapidly out of the station, his projecting body swept the victims, who were at work between the tracks laying the conductor rail for the coming electric power, one after the other from their feet and throwing one before the advancing locomotive of a south-bound train which killed him.”

Most galling to officials and newspaper readers was McHugh’s apparent lack of regret.  He went on his way and was later arrested in his apartment by Roundsman Hertz of the West 30^thStreet Station.

“Coroner Scholer says that he has proof that McHugh looked back at the awful sight which his act had caused and laughed,” said The Times.  “The prisoner was surly and indifferent during two arraignments.”

The Coroner denounced his “apparently heartless demeanor and chastised, 'You do not seem to know or care that you imperiled the lives of these workmen; that one of them is dead and that half a dozen women who saw the horrible accident fainted.'”

Unlike the relatively tepid Fourth of July celebrations today, in the first years of the 20^th century small explosives were set off indiscriminately and pistols were routinely fired with abandon—often by children.  On Independence Day 1914 tenant Charles Green came face-to-face with the dangerous festivities.  The following day it was reported that he had been “shot in the back by accidentally discharged revolver in hands of unidentified person.”

But at least one resident of No. 320 got positive press.  In 1920 Herman Henry Nicholas Hillebrandt achieved the rank of Second Lieutenant in the Aviation Section of the Reserve Signal Corps.  The impressive news was widely printed.

photo by Alice Lum

In the second half of the 20^th century another wave of immigrants reached New York—the Cubans who fled their homeland following the 1959 revolution led by Fidel Castro.  One of them was Ignacio Nova.

Nova joined the Cuban Nationalist Association, the purpose of which was to denounce and defeat Castro.  On May 14, 1960 the Cuban Consulate was opened because, according to the Consul General, “the Cuban Government is taking a registration of its nationals in New York.”

Ignacio Nova and his group showed up to picket outside.   If the protest was intended to be peaceful, it ended up anything but.  “Two hundred supporters and opponents of Premier Fidel Castro clashed yesterday in front of the Cuban consulate on the East Side,” reported The Times.  “Nine persons were hurt.  Fists, clubs and umbrellas were swung in the fracas after eight anti-Castro partisans had attempted to picket the consulate.”

Dr. Rogelio Guillot, the Cuban Consul General, called the picketers “gangsters,” and Ignacio Nova countered that the picketing “was designed to protest the suppression of press freedom in Cuba.”

Before the melee was over 18 persons were arrested, nine injured and three policemen were taken to the hospital.

The Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood around No. 320 West 47^thStreet is less gritty, less dangerous, and much cleaner than it was in the 1870, 1920s, and 1960s.  The handsome brownstone tenement which tried so hard to emulate a Fifth Avenue dwelling is barely changed, and still manages to remain just a little classier than its neighbors.

The 1887 Wanaque Apartments -- No. 359 West 47th Street

In 1885 the block of West 47^th Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues was not an especially nice place to live.  Part of the notorious Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood, it was home not only to hard-working immigrant laborers; but to gangs and cutthroats like the Tenth Avenue Gang and the Hell’s Kitchen Gang that had terrorized the area for decades.

Four years earlier The New York Times had described Hell’s Kitchen saying “the entire locality is probably the lowest and filthiest in the City, a locality where law and order are openly defied, where might makes right, and depravity revels riotously in squalor and reeking filth.  The whole neighborhood is an eyesore to the respectable people who live or are compelled to do business in the vicinity, a source of terror to the honest poor, and an unmitigated nuisance to the police of the Twentieth Precinct, whose record-books are filled to overflowing with he names of the residence of these tenement houses.”

In 1882 James D. McCabe wrote about those tenements in his New York by Gas-Light, explaining “The city contains two classes of tenement houses.  Those of the first class are occupied by well-to-do working people; those of the second by the very poor.  The first are large, neat-looking structures, and are kept as clean as the great number of people occupying them will permit; the second are wretched abodes of misery, and often of vice and crime.”

In October 1884 contractor James C. Miller was getting his feet wet as a developer and the Real Estate Record & Builders’ Guide noted his address as No. 359 West 47^th Street.  Within two years he would be involved in adding what could be argued as a third class of tenements to McCabe's list.

But before he demolished his building on West 47^thStreet, Miller commissioned the architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White to design what American Architect & Architecture called on August 8, 1885, "a three-story brick dwelling costing $10,000 on West 119^th Street."  He would hire the seven-year old firm again a year later.

Miller’s property at No. 359 West 47^th Street was razed and in its place McKim, Mead & White designed a modern apartment building, slightly upscale from the working class tenements that surrounded it.  When the plans were filed in April of 1886, The City Record was not impressed enough to term Plan 4008 anything other than “for one tenement house.”

Completed in 1887, the Wanaque stood out from its neighbors.  The somewhat austere brownstone base featured an admirable stone hood over the doorway.  Squiggly balustrades of the fencing protecting the deep basement moat drew from the popular Queen Anne style, as did the multi-paned windows and unaggressive terra cotta medallions.  Above it all was a brick-corbelled cornice.

The double entrance doors were framed by carved rope molding.  The stylized sunburst filling the arch perhaps harkens to the wooded and low-mountained area of the Wanaque River.

Miller’s middle-class apartment house stood in defiance to the gritty neighborhood.  There were just two rather spacious apartments per floor separated by the entrance hall.  Although each boasted three bedrooms, a dining room, parlor, bathroom and kitchen; they were designed in the awkward but space-saving “railroad flat” layout.  In order to move from the parlor in the front to the kitchen or bathroom in the rear, one had to pass through the bedrooms.  Should a family member be sleeping, the trip could be made down the public hallway.

Respectable families moved in.  The Benjamin family was among the first tenants.  Daughter May Belle Benjamin was a teacher in the primary department of Grammar School No. 40 at No. 225 East 23^rdStreet.  Also living here in the mid-1890s was Joseph M. McMillan, a member of the New York County Medical Association, and W. L. Bingham who was Sunday School Superintendent at Bloomingdale Church, on Broadway and West 68^th Street.

May Belle Benjamin’s sister, Libbie, was 25 years old on August 1, 1897 when she stepped into the street late at night at 124^thStreet and Mount Morris Avenue.  A bicyclist struck her, fracturing her right leg.  The unknown rider sped off and Libbie was taken to the Harlem Hospital.

The intricate carving of the hood brackets is in start contrast to the relatively restrained ornamentation throughout the rest of the facade.

Policeman William Peabody was living here and making a name for himself at the turn of the century.  He joined the force on January 9, 1900 and rose to Detective Sergeant on July 11, 1901.  Now, in 1905, he arrested Dr. John A. Harris, a broker, at his high-class residence at No. 112 Riverside Drive on charges of extortion.  By 1907 he would rise to the rank of Lieutenant.

In the meantime, William Southard had telephone service installed in his apartment.  The problem for Southard was that he had to pay for it.  Evidence submitted in court on December 1, 1906 revealed that Southard’s total amount of “subscription phone” was $30.00.  He had managed to pay to date $18.00.  The judge gave him until November 28, 1907 to pay the balance—amounting to about $300 today.

Around this time millionaire Howard Gould and his wife, the former Katherine Clemens, began having marital problems.  On March 23, 1907 Detective Sergeant Peabody traveled to Baltimore “in an investigation of the so-called Gould case,” according to The New York Times.  It would not end happily for Peabody.

In June he found himself standing trial for “giving false testimony before the trial Commissioner on May 20, and with being absent from the Detective Bureau and disobeying orders two days later.”  Peabody insisted he had been sent to Baltimore by former Inspector McLaughlin.  The Deputy Police Commissioner said he had traveled without authorization.

On June 25, 1907 Commissioner Bingham dismissed William Peabody from the force and issued a scathing statement which read in part “It is to be noted that only after Peabody’s false statement was proved from outside sources did he finally admit his guilt.  This shows him a stubborn and insubordinate liar…I have personally talked with and studied Peabody, and have no hesitation in saying that he is utterly untrustworthy, and does not hesitate to lie.”

William F. Peabody did not take his removal from the police force lying down.  On May 3, 1908 the New-York Tribune reported that he “began a suit for $50,000 damages against Commissioner Bingham yesterday…Commissioner Bingham is charged with having brought Peabody into public scandal, infamy and disgrace by delivering or causing statements to be circulated that he was more loyal to outside influence than to the Police Department.”

Although Peabody’s position with the force was restored and he continued to rise in the ranks; he would get himself into hot water again.  A headline in The Evening World on October 16, 1914 read “Police Captain Peabody Up Again On Charges.”  When Commissioner Woods visited the police station on the afternoon of October 3, he discovered that Peabody was falsifying his sign-in time on the blotter.  The newspaper said he “has been brought up on charges again, this time of conduct unbecoming an officer neglect of duty and violation of the rules.”

Brick is used mainly for the decorative elements, such as the quoins and frames and the corbel table below the parapet.

That same year the Hatch family was living in the Wanaque.  On September 12 little 6-year old Frederick was playing in the street in front of the building when he was struck by the “pleasure car driven by Mrs. Margaret B. Chapman,” according to The New York Times the following day.  The newspaper said she lived at the Hotel Astor.  “Mrs. Chapman lifted the boy into her car and took him to the Polyclinic Hospital.  He was not seriously injured.”

In 1915 investors C. F. Pool, G. F. Anderson, and F. Gerbi gave the Wanaque as the address of their newly-incorporated Typhoon Ventilators Company.  The men were going into business manufacturing “heating, cooling and ventilating apparatus,” according to Steel and Iron on April 1.

The neighborhood around the Wanaque remained rough.  In 1939 the Works Progress Administration’s New York City Guide described the varied ethnic population—Irish, Italians, African Americans and, the newest group, Puerto Ricans.  By mid-century racially-based gangs staked out territories and fought one another; a tense situation made famous by Leonard Bernstein’s play West Side Story.

Conditions were such that in October 1957 when the Butnick Hotel Corporation leased the building, it was referred to as “The Wanaque Hotel.”  Little had improved by the 1980s.  On September 16,1984 The New York Timesreported “Two men were shot to death in a midtown Manhattan hotel early yesterday, apparently in a dispute over money, the police said.”

At 3:25 in the morning shots rang out in the hallway of the Wanaque Hotel.  Police arrived to find George Gandia, 28 years old, and 30-year old George Morena dead.

Five years after the shooting, in 1989, the building was converted by architects Farrell, Bell & Lennard into Fountain House, a not-for-profit residence for psychiatric patients.  (Coincidentally, the firm was the latest incarnation of the building’s original designers, McKim, Mead & White.)

McKim, Mead & White’s Wanaque Apartments stands out today as it did in 1897—a little known, relatively early work by the firm which would soon top the list of architects nationwide.

photographs by the author

A Real West Side Story -- No. 330 W. 47th St.

The modest apartment building sat in a tumultuous neighborhood -- photo by Alice Lum

New Yorkers, as with all Americans, have an airbrushed view of the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of the 1950s due to the popular musical play and film “West Side Story.”  Based in fact, the story faced off Puerto Rican and Italian teen-aged gangs in territorial and racially-motivated warfare set to music and dance.   The reality was a life-and-death daily struggle for the street-tough boys.

Hell’s Kitchen gained its nickname shortly after the Civil War.   According to Herbert Asbury in his then-shocking 1928 book “The Gangs of New York,” the term originally referred to the Hell’s Kitchen Gang, organized around 1868 by notorious criminal Dutch Heinrichs.   The gang specialized in raids on the Hudson River Railroad, but its repertoire included breaking-and-entering, extortion, and “highway robbery.”

The Hell’s Kitchen gang merged with the equally-notorious Tenth Avenue Gang which had terrorized the neighborhood for decades; going so far as to hold up and rob a Hudson River Railroad express train.  Other gangs in the gritty neighborhood included the Hudson Dusters and the Gophers.

In September 1881 The New York Times described the neighborhood as “one of the most miserable and crime-polluted neighborhoods in this City” and said “there is more disease, crime, squalor, and vice to the square in this part of New-York.”

The newspaper followed up on September 22 that year saying “the entire locality is probably the lowest and filthiest in the City, a locality where law and order are openly deified, where might makes right, and depravity revels riotously in squalor and reeking filth. The whole neighborhood is an eyesore to the respectable people who live or are compelled to do business in the vicinity, a source of terror to the honest poor, and an unmitigated nuisance to the Police of the Twentieth Precinct, whose record-books are filled to overflowing with the names of the residents of these tenement houses.”

The tenement houses that The Times mentioned were, for the most part, squalid and filthy.  A year later James D. McCabe, Jr., in his “New York by Gaslight,” described the buildings.  “The city contains two classes of tenement houses.  Those of the first class are occupied by well-to-do working people; those of the second by the very poor.  The first are large, neat-looking structures, and are kept as clean as the great number of people occupying them will permit; the second are wretched abodes of misery, and often of vice and crime.”

McCabe placed the monthly rent on a tenement apartment at between $10 and $30—a range of around $200 to $600 today.   It is little wonder that the impoverished families turned to crime and vice to pay their rent.

Around this time a tenement house went up at No. 330 West 47^th Street that attempted to bridge McCabe’s two-tier classification.  Only 20-feet wide, as wide as a typical brownstone residence, the five-story building not only offered just one apartment per floor, it made a valiant attempt to be attractive and modern.

photo by Alice Lum

Sitting on a rusticated stone base, the red brick façade was trimmed with limestone lintels and bandcourses as well as attractive terra cotta tiles drawing on the popular Queen Anne style.  The additional expense, for no other purpose than make the building more attractive, was unnecessary on a street peopled by workers in the nearby freight yards, factories, stock pens and warehouses.

Early tenants, like Annie E. Reed, often found themselves on the wrong side of the police force.  On April 29, 1890 Annie was on Sixth Avenue near 22^nd Street, in the heart of the shopping district known as the Ladies’ Mile.   Unlike most of the women along the avenue that day with their parasols and plumed hats, the 33-year old Annie could be coarse and loud.  And that got her into trouble.

She got into a loud argument with a “man calling himself ‘Count’ Justus de Sussini, a cigar dealer of Cuba,” reported The New York Times the following day.  The ruckus was such that a police officer attempted to arrest the pair.

“The Count resisted and had to be forcibly taken to the Thirtieth Street station, where he raved and the woman cried,” said the newspaper.  “The Count attempted to draw a pistol, but was disarmed, and the pair were locked up over-night.”

The following morning Annie was discharged.  The “Count” seems to have gotten off fairly easily, too, by today’s standards.  After pulling a firearm on police officers, he “was fined $10 for carrying a pistol without a permit.”

Despite its questionable tenants, the building was apparently profitable.  In July 1893 The New York Times noted that “a Mrs. Lehman” had purchased the “five-story single-flat house” for $21,000—nearly half a million dollars today.

One of Mrs. Lehman’s renters was Howard Green who, together with John W. Noble, came up with a lucrative, if dishonest, scheme in 1896.  The pair extorted money from saloon and hotel owners who were selling liquor on Sunday.  Posing as Excise Commissioners, they promised not to report or arrest the managers if they would pay a bribe.

In July of that year Samuel Collins, the manager of the Burt Lewis Hotel on Surf Avenue in Coney Island, got suspicious.  He complained to police who arrested the men.  The Times said “Collins alleges that he gave $50 to the ‘Commissioners’ to say nothing about his place of business.  His tax certificate did not permit him to do business yesterday.”

As for Green and Noble, “They deny that there is any truth in the story,” said the newspaper.

In 1939 the Works Progress Administration’s “New York City Guide” optimistically said that “Gangster rule of Hell’s Kitchen continued until 1910, when a special police force organized by the New York Central Railroad launched a counter-offensive.”

The methods to eliminate gang criminality seem, perhaps, a bit extreme today.  “Clubbing, shooting, and arresting indiscriminately, they soon had most of the Gopher leadership in hospitals or behind the bars and a majority of the lesser lights in flight.  Remnants of the mobs functioned throughout the Prohibition era, but the backbone of Hell’s Kitchen gangsterdom had been effectively broken.”

The authors described the varied ethnic population of the area—Irish, Italians, blacks and, the newest group, Puerto Ricans.   While the organized criminal mobs of the 19^thcentury were essentially wiped out, a new type of gang was arising.

By mid-century racially-based gangs staked out territories.   Just as in Leonard Bernstein’s play, teen-aged boys carried deadly weapons and fought hand-to-hand combat in pre-determined “rumbles.”

In 1959 Frances Krzesinski was a hat-checker at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on Park Avenue—a world away from her apartment in the brick tenement building at No. 330 West 47^th Street.  Frances was separated from her husband and struggled to raise her four children ranging from 9 to 16 years old.

photo by Alice Lum

Anthony was the eldest.  He attended Junior High School 17 until 1958 when he dropped out and took a job as a messenger for a publishing house.   Despite the obstacles that confronted him, Anthony was described as “a good boy.”

On the night of August 29, 1959 Anthony Krzesinski’s life would tragically collide head-on with Hell’s Kitchen gang life.

A Puerto Rican gang, the Vampires, had been expanding southward into Hell’s Kitchen from their turf in the West 70s and 80s.  The gang was led by the near-sociopathic Salvador Agron, known as the “Capeman” or “Dracula” because of the red-lined nurse’s cape he wore.  When the Vampires heard that some Puerto Ricans were being ill-treated by Irish and Italian Hell’s Kitchen teens, a rumble was arranged with the Italian gang, the Nordics.

Near No. 330 West 47^th Street was a playground that stretched through the block from 45^th to 46^thStreets, between Ninth and Tenth Avenues. The New York Times said “The playground has no lights, but is kept open at night so that residents of the area can go there for a breath of air.  A street light on West forty-sixth Street floods the northern half of the playground, devoted to handball, but the concrete benches and tables at the south end, intended for checkers, lie in deep shadows.”

It was in this playground, called “the park” by neighborhood youths, that the rumble between the Vampires and the Nordics was scheduled to take place around midnight on August 29.  Unfortunately for Anthony Krzesinski, it was also where he and five other white friends decided to congregate.

Harold Luken brought his 14-year old sister, Sandra, along as the youths met at the park to talk, unaware of the gathering storm.   A little after midnight the Vampires arrived looking for the Nordics—but the Nordics never showed up.

The gang engulfed the benches where Anthony and his friends were sitting.  “Where’s Frenchie?” one of the gang members demanded.  The group said they did not know and it appeared for a moment that the Puerto Ricans had gone.  Nevertheless, the six neighborhood youths decided it was time to go home.

The New York Times reported the following day “Harold Luken and his sister headed for the near-by Forty-fifth Street exit.  Suddenly, the intruders loomed out of the shadows and blocked the exit.

“’They told me: ‘you aint leavin,’ Harold said.

‘They allowed the girl to pass.  Then one of them smashed a bottle on Harold’s head.”

The boys fled towards the 46^th Street exit, but the Vampires overtook them.   Argon, “the Capeman,” wielded a 12-inch Mexican dagger.   Although Anthony and his friend, 16-year old Robert Young, were stabbed before reaching the street, they continued running in terror.

“The Krzesinski boy fell dead, stabbed in the chest and groin, in the hallway at 447 West Forty-sixth Street.  Robert Young, who had been stabbed in the back, was helped by the Woznikaitis boy into the hallway of the tenement next door, 449 West Forty-sixth Street,” said The Times.

Robert Young died later that night in the hospital.   The other three boys were treated for their injuries.

When later arrested, Salvador Agron told reporters his gang had gone to the playground “to fight Italian and Irish boys.”    He arrogantly told reporters committed the murder “Because I felt like it.”  He added, “I don’t care if I burn.  My mother could watch me.”

The sensational murder trials of Agron and Luis Antonio Hernandez (known as the Umbrella Man because he used an umbrella with a sharpened point as a weapon) drew wide-spread attention for a year.  The nation was, perhaps, nonetheless shocked when the 17- and 18-year olds were sentenced to death on October 7, 1960.

After he spent a year on Death Row, Salvator Agron’s death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by then-Governor Nelson Rockefeller in February 1962.   The decision did not sit well in the apartment where Anthony Krzesinski had lived.

“At 330 West Forty-seventh Street, another tenement house, Mrs. Frances Krzesinski, mother of Anthony Krzesinski, refused to talk.  But a note on the door of her apartment, addressed to the press, expressed feeling against the commutation,” said The New York Times on February 8, 1962.

The note read “Agron will live on our tax which we must pay, but I wish he never has a good day for the rest of his life.  May he die a thousand deaths a day.”

The turbulent days have passed when the life in Hell’s Kitchen was made even more difficult by the racial tensions between teen gangs.  The tenement house at No. 330 West 47^thStreet where Anthony Krzesinski lived his brief life still stands out with its Queen Anne tiles and irregular façade.  While the entrance was been updated and altered; the building stands as a mute witness to troubling, tumultuous times romanticized in a Broadway play and Hollywood musical.

photo by Alice Lum