The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (Oxford History of the United States)

by Richard White

the gangs of New York epitomized the dangerous classes: the Gophers, Dead Rabbits, Gorillas, East Side Dramatic and Pleasure Club, the Limburger Roarers, and the Battle Row Ladies Social and Athletic Club, led by Battle Annie Walsh, the “Sweetheart of Hell’s Kitchen.” They concentrated in lower Manhattan, not just Chelsea and the Bowery, but a set of neighborhoods whose names told their story: Hell’s Kitchen, Satan’s Circus, Rag Pickers’ Row, Cat Alley, Rotten Row, The Great Eastern, Sebastopol, Bummers’ Retreat, Mulligan Alley, Cockroach Row, and the Five Points. These streets, rutted and garbage-strewn, teemed with vehicles, animals, and people. They contained perhaps fifteen thousand beggars and thousands of homeless children. The tenement population numbered half a million. Nearly twenty thousand people lived in dank, dark, miserable basements. The antithesis of the home,