Bad Guy Vignettes

 

"Manhattan: Central Park - The Majestic Apartments"
(New York Public Library Digital Collections)

When my mother was a student at Hunter College during the late 1940s, she routinely traveled south on the A train from her family’s apartment in Inwood, a neighborhood at the tip of northern Manhattan.

She’d get on at 207^th Street and ride until 72^nd Street. Then she would transfer to a crosstown bus to the East Side, where Hunter is located.

Walking by the luxurious Majestic, one of several Art Deco apartment buildings that had been built along Central Park West around 1930, my mother often spied a violet-colored Cadillac waiting at the curb. One day she asked the doorman to whom it belonged and he told her “Mr. Costello.” That was Frank Costello, the mobster who lived upstairs.

Ten years later, in May 1957, Costello would survive an assassination attempt in the Majestic’s lobby. A few months went by before the FBI and the New York City police homed in on the shooter: an “ex-pug”—pugilist—known as “the Chin.” He was Vincent Gigante, acting on behalf of the Genovese family.

The 25-year old Gigante wore a size 50 suit and waddled when he walked. Some newspaper accounts referred to him as “the Waddler” rather than “the Chin.”

Gigante, his wife, and four children lived downtown on Bleecker Street. The detectives staked out his house around the clock. Yet Gigante eluded them until one August afternoon when he showed up at the West 54^th Street police station (accompanied by his lawyer). “Do you want me in the Costello case?” he asked.

“We sure do,” said Deputy Inspector Fred Lussen. But Gigante would not cooperate, refusing to answer questions.

I explained this to my mother and she smiled and nodded. She wouldn’t have been paying attention in the spring of 1957 because she had a brand-new bouncing baby boy, my older brother.

1931 Dyckman Street shooting

Then I told her that she’d had a closer brush with gangsters up there in Inwood in 1931 when she was three years old. It turns out that another three-year old girl, also named Gloria, was shot to death at the end of a 90-minute gun battle between the police and two robbers.

Advertisement for Mendoza
Fur Trade Review, 1931

Just before 5 o’clock on a warm Friday afternoon, a policeman escorted the paymaster of the Mendoza Fur Dyeing Company, who carried a payroll of $4,619 from a bank, through the plant’s parking lot. Two robbers approached the car and shot the policeman and threw the paymaster on the ground.

Then they led a chase that ranged along twelve miles of streets in upper Manhattan and The Bronx. Six people would die, both patrolmen and bystanders who were starting the weekend a few minutes early as the season wound down toward Labor Day. The youngest victim was little Gloria Lopez, whose mother Matilda told reporters that she and her husband, a fireman, had tried for a decade to have a baby.

The story made it into the Great Falls, Montana newspaper.

The chase finally ended near the corner of Dyckman Street and Broadway in Inwood, an intersection that remains a touchstone of my mother’s childhood memories.

She was too young to remember playboy Mayor Jimmy Walker, who presided over the city. At the time of the shootings, Walker was traveling in Europe because New York State Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt had appointed a commission which threatened to investigate the Tammany Hall corruption that Walker enabled.

Meantime, Mayor Jimmy Walker was in
Germany "for his health."

In this way Walker resembled previous mayors beholden to Tammany. But his indifference to the robbery and deaths—which inspired the American Legion to offer to mobilize 30,000 members to patrol the city with bayonetted rifles—was exceptionally offensive.    

“Being 3,000 miles from New York,” Walker told reporters, “I am ignorant of the circumstances of the shooting. I cannot give any opinion.” Then he was off to a brewery in Pilsen, whose mayor announced that Pilsen beer was not only an excellent but sanitary drink.

Jimmy Walker quaffed a stein and commented that none of the cathedrals or museums he had visited in Europe gave him greater pleasure than the beer. He hoped that the Pilsener sign would soon return to New York, he said.

My mother, Gloria (left), with an Inwood playmate, 1931

It would be two more years before the repeal of Prohibition. In the meantime, Governor Roosevelt forced Walker to resign and my mother continued to toddle around up and down Dyckman Street, holding her mother’s hand. It could have been her caught in the crosshairs, but then I wouldn’t be telling this story.

*In 1933, Mr. and Mrs. Lopez became the parents of John. Jr. 

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2022/03/view-from-train.html?m=1

A Census Century

 

 from Increase of Population in the United States, 1910-1920
by William S. Rossiter (1922)

An entire century separates the 1920 and 2020 censuses, so one might think that the issues surrounding the two surveys would be as different as night and day. But that is not the case. Immigration and political power were front and center 100 years ago, just as they are now.

Those most frightened by the prospect of the 1920 census were members of Congress. Today, the same fear strikes politicians as the 2020 results become known to the public. What is at stake is the number of seats that each party will hold in the House of Representatives.  

Reapportionment is mandated by the Constitution to assure that representation reflects the distribution of the population. It occurs every ten years, based on census data.

In 1910, when the results of the census were made known, they revealed a total population of 92,228,496, with a rural population of 50,164,495 and an urban population of 42,064,001. Obviously, the next census would report a population greater than 100 million.

Equally significant would be the shift from rural to urban. The next census would show that—for the first time in American history—more people resided in U.S. cities than on farms.

Thus, in the wake of the 1920 census, the nation faced a major shift in political power. Reapportionment would dictate that less populous states would lose House seats and urban areas would gain them. In anticipation of the shift, some representatives declared, as early as 1917, that the census had little value. Others urged that immigrants be eliminated from the count. 

Reapportionment brings a new political balance each decade, but it also marks significant cultural and social change. Hence the Anti-Saloon League hustled politicians to rush through Prohibition before the 1920 reapportionment, for a constitutional amendment to ban liquor never would have passed if urban legislators had been the majority in the House.

In fall of 1920, just seven months after the enumerators—as they were called—set forth with their questionnaires, the government revealed the first results of the new census. Ten states would lose seats (Indiana, Iowa, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, Maine, Maryland, Nebraska, Vermont, and Virginia) while ten states would gain seats (New York, California, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Texas).

The prospect of such a drastic realignment led the House Census Committee to violate its constitutional duty by repeatedly postponing and voting down reapportionment after the final census report of 1920. It became a perennial dance.

In their first attempt to avoid reapportionment, Congressional legislators proposed a measure that would have enlarged the House to 500 seats from 435 seats. It was voted down.

In 1922, President Harding said he’d had enough and insisted that reapportionment occur by March 1923. That vote was deferred.  

In 1924, the Census Committee announced that it would drop reapportionment because “adoption of the 1920 census would seriously affect agriculture and farming sections.”

In 1926, the House again rejected reapportionment, claiming that it was not mandatory. Despite public anger and editorial outrage, the House again refused to move on reapportionment in 1928. 

Finally, after the results of the 1930 census were announced, the House acted. But the damage had been done.

If Congress had performed its duty, the Immigration Act of 1924 would not have been enacted. That xenophobic law set severe quotas for Eastern European immigrants and excluded most Asians, Indians, and Arabs. Prohibition probably would have been repealed far earlier than 1933 due to overwhelming opposition among city dwellers.

It’s evident that no one intends to postpone the reapportionment dictated by the 2020 census results. Observers have noted, however, that redistricting and voter suppression—already in full swing—will have the effect of maintaining the status quo. In this way, to put it politely, we may see further postponement of social transformation.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2021/08/a-census-century.html?m=1