During the Progressive Era, there were parts of New York City that police understood as being immune to the exertions of state power. These areas could be rendered illegible and uncontrollable for a number of reasons. In some instances, as I have discussed on The Metropole before, the foreignness of immigrant populations, especially people of Chinese descent, often made it hard for the majority of Anglo-Irish police officers to communicate with witnesses or understand the motives behind alleged crimes. In other situations, the city’s unknowable alleyways, shadowy dead ends, dangerously unstable infrastructure, and rebellious residents prohibited police interventions.
The Mulberry Bend served as one of the most notorious examples of a location seemingly immune to state intervention or local attempts to instill law and order. A crowded collection of tenements and alleyways, the Bend formed in the elbow-like turn of Mulberry and Baxter streets in the Five Points neighborhood. Before the administration of Mayor Strong took on the Bend in 1895, reformers concerned with overcrowding, squalid conditions, and the breeding of crime and disease, had for years advocated the destruction of the crooked cluster of buildings and its crisscross of alleyways. Jacob Riis, the journalist, reformer, and close personal friend of President of the Police Board of Commissioners Theodore Roosevelt, was partially responsible for the eventual push that resulted in the destruction of the Bend. His 1890 book, How the Other Half Lives, shocked upper class New Yorkers with its sensationalized and often demeaning depictions of working class life in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. One of the more disturbing photographs to aristocratic sensibilities was that of the “Bandit’s Roost,” at 59 ½ Mulberry Street. The image shows a narrow alleyway in the Bend, darkened by the closeness of the buildings and the prevalence of laundry draped from clotheslines above. On either side of the alley men, presumably immigrants, stare down the photographer—some hanging from windows, one holding a plank menacingly.
“There is but one ‘Bend’ in the world, and it is enough,” wrote Riis. “In the scores of back alleys, of stable lanes and hidden byways, of which the rent collector alone can keep track, they share such shelter as the ramshackle structures afford with every kind of abomination….”[1] The Bend depicted by Riis was one in which police feared to enter—where fleeing criminals could run down an alleyway, or into a tenement, and be lost to authorities. “Post Thirteen,” as police referred to it, was everyone’s last choice to patrol and often where officers would send recent appointments to scare them, or perhaps as a hazing ritual.[2]