Wretched Recommendations!
Jessie has a book recommendation for us:
Gangs Of New York
by Herbert Ashbury
“And no, not the movie, which is okay. But the book by Herbert Ashbury, which I came across by way of The Gangs of the French Quarter. As a good New Orleanian, I have that book on my wishlist, and maybe Santa Claws will bring it. But I picked up New York at a library sale.
“I’m 35 pages into this book and have come across two passages that made me raise an eyebrow, and I gather it promises much, MUCH more. It’s very poorly cited, he just lists some papers and shit. Not MLA standard, but this was a book put out in 1927. Anyway, enough teasing, onto the two passages that made me sit down and email you.
“In talking about the Old Brewery in Five Points, which became a tenement:
‘Most of the cellar compartments were occupied by Negroes, many of whom had white wives. In these dens were born children who lived into their teens without seeing the sun or breathing fresh air, for it was dangerous for a resident of the Old Brewery to leave his niche as it was for an outsider to enter the building. In one basement room of about fifteen feet square, not ten years before the Civil War, twenty-six people lived in the most frightful misery and squalor. Once when a murder was committed in this chamber (a little girl who had been stabbed to death after she had been so foolish as to show a penny she had begged) the body lay in a corner for five days before it was finally buried in a shallow grave dug in the floor by the child’s mother. In an 1850 an investigation found that no person of the twenty-six had been outside of the room for more than a week, except to lie in wait at the doorway for a more fortunate denizen to pass along with food.’
“Later, the Old Brewery is being wrecked in order to make spiffy new Christian work houses by the Missionary Society:
‘The laborers who wrecked the Old Brewery carried out several sacks filled with human bones they had found between the walls in the cellars, and night after night gangsters thronged the ruin searching for the treasure which rumor had it was buried there.’
“They don’t say how big the sacks were. Slovenly reporting, obviously.
“Hopefully you’ll like this one. If I come across more horrible things I’ll send them on. Enjoy!”
More Horrifying History books can be perused at The Library Eclectica’s Horrifying History aisle.
