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Volume 3 Mobsters The Old Brewery

It was called the most decadent building ever built, and there is no doubt the Old Brewery,located in the Five Points area of Lower Manhattan, was the quintessential den of iniquity.

The Old Brewery was originally what the name implies: a brewery, built by Isaac Coulthard,just southeast of a body of fresh water called the Collect Pond. After more than a hundred years ofbeing polluted by various industrial enterprises, including Coulthard's Brewery, Collect Pond was filledin during the time period of 1811-1812. New streets sprung up on the former body of water and otherexisting streets were extended.

By 1812, Cross Street (then Park Street, now Mosco Street) passed in front of the Coulthard'sBrewery, and Orange Street (now Baxter Street) intersected Cross just north of the brewery. At theintersection of Cross and Orange, Anthony Street originated, and soon two more streets intersected atthis very point: Mulberry Street and Little Water Street (which no longer exists). This became thenotorious area known as the Five Points, and Coulthard's Brewery was the hub.

After the Financial Panic of 1837, during which 363 United States banks closed completely andthousands of businesses fell into financial ruin, Coulthard's Brewery went out of business. It wasconverted into a tenement building and renamed the Old Brewery.

The Old Brewery, which was partitioned off into over 100 small rooms housing over 1000

people, was five stories high, but only the top three floors had windows. Most rooms had no sunlightand fresh air, and some of the babies born there did not see the light of day until they were into theirteens. The outside of the building was originally painted bright yellow, but by the time it had beenconverted into a tenement, the outside walls were peeling, and now had a sickly greenish color, lookinglike an old dragon ready to die.

There was a narrow three-foot-wide alley on the south side of the building, which narrowedeven further, until it ended at a large first floor room called the Den of Thieves. More than seventyfive men, woman, and children lived in the Den of Thieves without furniture, or any convenienceswhatsoever. The woman were mostly prostitutes, and they entertained their customers in this largeroom in full view of everyone who occupied the room with them.

The cellar, which formerly stored brewery machinery, was converted into twenty small rooms,

occupied only by black men with their wives, who were mostly white. In one basement room aboutfifteen feet square, twenty-six people lived under conditions that can best be described as misery andsqualor. One day, a little girl was stabbed to death there, when it was discovered she was in thepossession of a bright new penny. The girl's dead body lay in a corner for five days before her motherburied her in a shallow grave in the floor.

On the top three floors, which were occupied by Irish-Catholics, ran a long corridor aptlynamed Murderer's Alley. Along Murderer's Alley there were seventy-five rooms, occupied bymurderers, thieves, pickpockets, prostitutes, and degenerates of every type known to man. Incest wascommon and fights were a constant occurrence. During every hour of the day there was some sort ofdisturbance going on in Murderer's Alley. Victims, who had been lured into the brewery with thepromise of booze, or sex, or both, were killed and stuffed into the walls and under the floor boards. Itwas estimated that during the last fifteen years of its existence, at least one murder a night was

committed in the Old Brewery.Things were so dangerous, if only a handful of policeman entered the brewery to quell a

disturbance, they were instantly attacked and killed, and their clothes stolen, before their bodies wereburied in some small crevice in Murderer's Alley. As a result, when the police did storm the building,they came in full force of 50-75 men, armed with clubs, bats, guns, and knives.

Just as it was dangerous for people to enter the building, it was just as dangerous for thebuilding's inhabitants to venture outside into the fresh air. The denizens of the Old Brewery were sohated and feared by the general public, any human who walked out the front door of the brewery wasimmediately pelted with stones and hit with bats. This caused people who wanted to leave the brewery

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to do so through a maze of tunnels that snaked throughout the Five Points area.As outlandish as it might seem, some of the inhabitants of the Old Brewery had once been

prosperous people of some importance. The Panic of 1837 had something to do with that, but mostlypeople who knew better sank to the level of the slime-balls who surrounded them. It was rumored thatthe last of the Blennerhassetts, the second son of Harman Blennerhassett, who conspired with AaronBurr to form a Western dictatorship, died in the Old Brewery, as did other families of a higher calling.They decided of their own free will that they would spend their last days entrenched in the violence,insanity, drunkenness, and promiscuity that was the daily way of life in the brewery.

The churches of that time voiced great distress at the goings-on in the brewery. However, theywere unable to make a dent in the brewery's myriad of problems because those churches were mostlyPresbyterian, while the inhabitants of the brewery were overwhelmingly Irish Catholics, who detestedthe Protestants due to the prosecution of the Catholics back in Ireland, where most of these wretchedpeople were born.

In 1840, a Congregational Church called the Broadway Tabernacle was built on Broadway nearAnthony Street, just a short walk from the brewery. But although many attempts were made to dohumanitarian social work at the brewery, nothing of consequence was ever accomplished.

In 1850, the Ladies' Home Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church sent the Rev.Lewis Morris Pease into the Five Points, along with his wife, to open a mission on Cross Street near

the brewery. Pease was considered one of the great humanitarians of his time. But he soon realized thatthe ills in the brewery could not be combated unless the conditions that caused the crime, vice, andpoverty were eliminated. Pease stared schools for both adults and children, and he also establishedwork rooms in the brewery where clothing manufacturers sent clothing materials, so that Pease and hiswife could manufacture decent clothes for the brewery inhabitants. This did not please the LadiesHome Missionary Society, who insisted that preaching the word to God was Pease's job, not gettinginvolved with worldly activities.

A year into his work at the Old Brewery, Pease was replaced by the Reverend J. Luckey, anoted evangelist. The reason Pease was let go was because a group of ladies from the Ladies HomeMissionary Society visited Pease's mission and discovered, that since Pease and his wife were so busymanufacturing clothes for the poor, Pease had not give a religious sermon in more than two days.

However, Luckey fared no better than Pease, and it was decided that in order for the misery anddecadence to end, the brewery had to be razed to the ground and replaced by a church.In 1852, the Ladies Home Missionary Society, with money raised from a group of

philanthropists headed by Daniel Drew, bought the Old Brewery. The purchase price was $16,000, andthe city of New York contributed $1,000 to the purchase. On December 1, 1852, the Ladies HomeMissionary Society asked the police to raid the brewery and evict the wretched people still livingthere. Scores of armed policemen stormed inside, and numerous vicious battles at close quarters tookplace.By the end of the day, the police had arrested twenty known murders, and children, who had neverseen sunlight, blinked in terror as they were led from the building by the police.

The next day, the demolition of the Old Brewery commenced. As the building was being torndown, laborers were seen carrying numerous sacks of human bones that had been found inside the

walls, underneath the floorboards, and in the cellar. In the next few days, dozens of gang membersraided the premises looking for buried treasure they heard had been hidden there. Yet, nothing of valuewas ever found.

It cost $36,000 to build, and on January 27, 1853, Bishop Jones laid the cornerstone for theMethodist Episcopal Church, which was now on the site of the Old Brewery.

The City of New York rejoiced at the demolition of the Old Brewery and the creation of thechurch. The Reverend Thomas Fitz Mercein was so moved, he wrote a poem celebrating the occasion.It said:

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God knows it's time thy walls are going!Through every stone

Life-blood, as through a heart, is flowing:Murmurs a smothered groan

Long years the cup of poison fillingFrom leaves of gall;

Long years a darker cup distillingFrom withered hearts that fall!

O! this world is stern and dreary,Everywhere they roam;

God! Hast thou never called the wearyHave they in thee no home?

Foul haunt! A glorious resurrection,Springs from thy grave!

Faith, hope and purified affection,Praising the Strong to save!

God bless the love that, like a angel,

Flies to each call,Till every lip hath this evangel,

Christ pleaded for us all!Oh! This world is stern and dreary,

Everywhere they roam;Praise God! A voice has called the weary,

In thee has found a home!