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Lower East Side
Contents
Development as an Immigrant Neighborhood >
The Immigrants > The Physical Landscape > Continuity
and Change following World War II > Gangs
on the Lower East Side > Orchard
Street Shopping: From Pushcars to Discount Clothing to Fashion Boutiques
Gangs on the Lower East Side
The first street gangs in New York were formed at the end of the
18th century by journeymen and apprentices free from their masters'
control outside the workshop. These single young men organized loosely
structured gangs associated with neighborhoods, streets, and trades.
As neighborhoods in the city became divided along class lines, gangs
congregated in saloons that increasingly became political as well
as social institutions. Violence escalated in the 1840s as economic
depression and an influx of Irish immigrants spurred a power struggle
between native-born and immigrant groups within Tammany Hall. Indeed,
gang activity during this era was tied to nativism and local politics.
Gangs such as the Spartan Association, led by radical Democrat Mike
Walsh, fought pitched battles using fists, clubs, and guns. In Irish
working-class wards such as the "bloody 'ole" sixth, where
the infamous Five Points neighborhood was once located, gangs defended
their neighborhood against outside forces and rival gangs like the
nativist Bowery Boys.1
By the turn of the century, the Lower East Side was home to dozens
of small youth gangs. Jewish and Italian boys drifted to the streets
where, in small groups, they played ball, flirted with girls, and
occasionally engaged in acts of petty crime. According to contemporaries,
almost every street had its own gang. While parents and teachers
worried that their children would graduate into the ranks of more
hardened criminals, most gangs served only as urban rites of passage
on the road to adulthood. Some, however, later entered the world
of small-time organized crime and engaged in city-wide racketeering.2
In the decades after World War II, tremendous demographic and economic
shifts combined with a transformation of the urban landscape to
shape the form of New York's youth gangs. Large influxes of Puerto
Rican and African-American migrants to neighborhoods like the Lower
East Side initiated a competition for resources between these newer
ethnic groups and older first and second-generation immigrants.
Urban renewal and the construction of large-scale public housing
reshaped urban neighborhoods and upset traditional boundaries, forcing
residents into increased competition for residential and commercial
space, while suburbanization worked to segregate working-class and
poor minorities in deteriorating neighborhoods like the Lower East
Side. New York's once-dynamic manufacturing center began a gradual
exodus from the city. With this hemorrhaging of industrial jobs,
a critical feature of working-class male life was seriously weakened.
In forming youth gangs, adolescents were feeling and acting upon
this apparent crisis.3
On the Lower East Side of the 1950s and 1960s, gangs such as the
Puerto Rican Dragons, African-American Sportsmen, and the Irish,
Jewish, and Italian Mayrose regularly engaged in turf battles for
control over certain sections of the neighborhood. Like those that
came before them, these gangs offered their members a way to prove
their honor and worthiness of respect, important features of working-class
masculine identity. Armed with fists and sticks, tough youths faced
off in street battles that sometimes resulted in serious injuries
and even death.4
During the late 1960s and 1970s, gangs sometimes harnessed their
organization and authority to create community organizations. The
Real Great Society, an organization whose agenda included tenants'
rights, improvement of quality of life, and economic empowerment,
emerged out of two street gangs, the Lower East Side Dragons and
the Assassins, who were centered in the Chelsea neighborhood.5
Today, although gangs continue to operate on the Lower East Side,
their ethnic composition and the nature of their activities has
changed. Mirroring overall demographic trends, Chinese gangs have
been on the rise since the 1960s in greater numbers while the involvement
of Euro-Americans in gangs is on the decline. More recently, Vietnamese
and other Asian gangs have begun to contest Chinese gangs' position
on the Lower East Side. Contemporary gangs are more involved in
criminal activity, especially drug trafficking, and engage in deadlier
violence that their predecessors.6
1 Tyler Annbinder, Five Points:
The Nineteenth Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented
Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World's Most Notorious
Slum (New York: Free Press, 2001); Kenneth T. Jackson, The
Encyclopedia of New York City (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1995).
2 Jenna Wiessman Joselit, Out Gang:
Jewish Crime and the New York Jewish Community, 1900-1940 (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1983).
3Eric C. Schneider, Vampires,
Dragons, and Egyptian Kings: Youth Gangs in Post War New York
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
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