Paradise Alley (32 page)

•
37
•

The City lies split open on its back, like some broken beetle on the pavement. The mob springs up instantly, on every block. Men, women, and children, swarming into the street, looking for something to vent their fury or their pleasure upon. Shouting and screaming themselves hoarse, waving any crude weapon they can get their hands on—sticks and fence posts, shingles and stones, pressing irons and skillets.

They sack everything now, abandoning any pretense of looking for draft records. Looting hotels and restaurants, groceries and pawnbrokers, tailors and clothing stores and jewelry shops. The whole order of the City, broken down in the course of a morning. Down in the Fourteenth Ward, I even saw an alderman leading the mob.

I fight my way back downtown, desperately trying to get some word to somebody. But the Metropolitans are nowhere to be found. Most of their precinct houses abandoned now, or held by skeleton shifts—some of the stations even fired by the mob already.

I have to go all the way down to the police headquarters, on Mulberry Street. What a difference from when I was here just the other night! Kennedy's smooth efficiency is gone now—along with Kennedy himself, fighting for his life in the hospital. Everything is in an uproar, bruised and battered roundsmen and sergeants, wandering
in and out, messengers pouring in from all over the City, fearful and angry citizens demanding that something be done.

I manage to push my way through to Commissioner Thomas Acton, from the Police Board, who is supposedly in charge. He sits behind Kennedy's desk, his face red with fury, trying to make some kind of order out of all the chaos. Breathlessly, I tell him about the burning of the Colored Orphans' Asylum, and how I have heard some members of the mob talking about storming the Armory. But he only nods grimly:

“Yes, yes. We're aware of all that!”

His attention is taken up instead by the constant reports brought in by the messengers, or on the wires from those scattered neighborhoods where the telegraph is still up.

They are beating Negro waiters at Crook's Restaurant. . . . . A troop of Invalids has been routed by Grand Central Station, their rifles seized. . . . . Men are trying to fire the Harlem River Bridge, and Macombs's Bridge. . . . . The mob is throwing up barricades in the Ninth Avenue. . . . . They are attacking Negro homes in Baxter Street and Leonard Street, they are burning Negro boardinghouses on Roosevelt Street. . . . .

“My God, man, but have you
seen
it out there?” I can't help blurting out at him, thinking that he cannot really understand, cables or no.

But Acton has a plan. All day long he and Inspector Carpenter—the highest-ranking officer left at headquarters—have been pulling men off the streets. They are trying to put together a strike force to send against the mob, and they must have gathered a hundred and twenty-five officers at headquarters, overflowing the muster room.

They are also gambling the whole City. Already the police are stretched nearly to the breaking point, just guarding the vital arteries of the town—the telegraph lines and rail tracks and bridges, the shipyards and docks and banks, their own precinct houses. Many of the roundsmen they have gathered are already bloodied and bandaged from the fighting this morning.

Meanwhile, Sergeant Burdick and the men from his Broadway Squad stagger back into headquarters. These are thirty-four of the biggest, toughest men in the Metropolitans, usually employed in the merciless, rough-and-tumble business of clearing the traffic on
Broadway. They were armed with Colt revolvers and breech-loading carbines, ordered to hold the Armory at Twenty-first Street and the Second Avenue.

Instead they ended up squeezing out a tiny bolt hole in the back of the Armory, and running for their lives. This is the worst news yet. Even as the flying squad forms in the muster room, the mob is presumably arming itself—smashing open all the boxes of brand-new guns and ammunition they have captured. With this sort of firepower, they will be able to outgun every cop, every soldier left in the City.

Even now, in the muster room at the Mulberry Street headquarters, we can hear their orgiastic shouts and screams drifting through the windows. The mob's moving steadily closer. The policemen twitch and shuffle their feet restlessly, unsure of what to expect, of what they are to do.

Dan Carpenter stands before his men. Ramrod straight, his brow furrowed but his eyes gleaming above the thick tangle of his beard.

“Form up! Form up, men!”

They come to attention, instantly transformed. Looking on eagerly now as Tom Acton steps forward to give Carpenter his charge.

“Will you go now, sir?”

“I'll go,” Carpenter replies, in a voice like a ten-pound gun. “I'll go—and I won't come back unless I come back victorious.”

The headquarters erupts in cheers, drowning out the mad ravings from the street.
The Irish will fight.

“What should we do with prisoners, sir?” a Sergeant Copeland asks.

“Prisoners?
Prisoners?
” Acton glowers, snorting like a warhorse. “Don't take any!
Kill! Kill! Kill!
Put down the mob. Put down the mob. Don't bring a prisoner into this room until the mob is put down!”

“Men!” Carpenter booms. “You heard your orders. We are to meet and put down a mob. We are to take no prisoners!”

They are still cheering wildly, their bruises and their weariness forgotten as Carpenter leads them out into Mulberry Street.

“Follow me, boys! And when you strike, strike quick and hard!”

They march out singing, moving four abreast through the ravaged, burned-out blocks:

The Union forever,

Hurrah, boys, hurrah!

Down with the traitor

And up with the star—

I go along with them, telling myself I don't care about the danger. Wanting to see if they can save the City. Just wanting—craving—to see what happens next.

We are marching right at the mob now. We can hear them coming, drowning out our song as we approach Amity Street. It is a terrible noise a mob makes—like the progress of a great conflagration, methodically crunching and smashing everything in its path.

First comes a wild flutter of refugees, driven before the mob like so many flushed doves. Negroes and women, mostly, but also whites, entire families
—citizens of an American city—
running for their lives. They nearly break our ranks in their panic. Desperately toting whatever possessions they were able to salvage, their little handcarts and wheelbarrows bouncing over the paving stones.

“Hold, men, and let them pass!” Carpenter orders—the policemen parting to let them through, their faces paling at the sight.

But there is no time to panic. Right behind the refugees comes the mob. They are swaggering now, full of confidence, filling all of Broadway for as far as the eye can see. There must be at least ten thousand of them, shouting and jeering as they come. Waving their crude clubs and stones and knives; their poles and grappling hooks, muskets and pistols—even a few swords they have stolen from somewhere.

When they spot us, they send up a wild, lusting cry. Far from retreating, or giving up, they run straight at us, roaring like a locomotive. The Metropolitans halt again, and the song dies in their throats. I can sense that they are ready to break, to run before the rioters, and I can barely fight down the urge to flee myself.

But Carpenter leaps out ahead of his men, deliberately turns his back on the mob. He waves his locust-wood club over his head, then begins to tap it rhythmically against the cobblestones—the universal rallying call of the police. The men pick it up at once, rapping their own nightsticks along the street until it becomes a steady, pounding beat that is heard even over the yelp of the mob.

The crowd slows at the sound, but they are less than a hundred
yards away, and still closing. A giant Celt hod carrier runs out in front of the rest, waving a huge American flag he has stolen from some hotel.

“
At 'em, boys! They can't stop us now!
” he bellows, and races straight at Carpenter, swinging the flagstaff itself at the inspector's head.

But Carpenter runs out to meet him, his own club at the ready. He ducks easily under the long swing of the flag—and hits the Celt so hard it sounds like a man smashing a pumpkin. The behemoth staggers back a step, blood trickling from his temple, and falls dead in the street. The mob behind him pulls up abruptly, stunned by this show of resistance—while two roundsmen run out to grab the flag before it hits the street.

“By the right flank!” Carpenter coolly barks out his order. “Company front! Double quick!
Charge!
”

With a single shout, the men raise their nightsticks and charge. They tear through the mob like a wheat thresher. Arms rising and falling, rising and falling, their locust-wood clubs smashing down with each stroke.

The mob quivers at their impact—then gives way. They unleash a hail of bricks and stones and fence staves and some of the cops fall, but more move up at once to take their place. Their arms still rising and falling, rising and falling, cutting a swath clean up Broadway.

Carpenter is still in front, his eyes gleaming like a demon's as he leads his men. All of a sudden he is face to face with that creature from the park—their leader—still carrying around his neck the block of wood with the
NO DRAFT!
sign chalked on it. The two men grapple hand to hand, and for a moment it looks as if the creature might be able to overwhelm even Carpenter. Then Sergeant Copeland and another officer come up from behind the man and beat him with their nightsticks until he is lying prone on the ground. They pick up his inert body, hurl him right through the front window of a saloon.

The phalanx of police moves on, still smashing anything that dares to stand in their path. I follow right behind, like a man riding the waves out at Coney Island—miraculously untouched while men are falling all around me.

It is a harrowing, primitive fight, fought with the most elemental tools, rocks and clubs and spears. But the street is too narrow, even on
Broadway, for the mob to bring its numbers to bear. Soon they panic, and break before our onslaught—stumbling and tripping back up the avenue, leaving hundreds of the dazed and dying in their wake. Carpenter's men look barely winded, only a handful of them seriously injured. But there is more still to be done.

“On men, on!” he urges, spurring them toward the Armory.

It is a formidable building, four stories high and built of solid brick, with small windows and a heavy, solid oak door at the top of a steep front stoop. An easy place to defend—and we can only guess what kind of reception we will get there, now that the mob has had plenty of time to fortify it, and break into the weapons.

But they have been slow about it, thank God, the way that mobs always are when they have no opposition to concentrate their minds. The oaken door still hangs open off its hinges, where they first broke it down. Most of the crowd is preoccupied, sacking the nearby dry-goods stores, and saloons—a few rioters only now beginning to pull the muskets and carbines from their packing.

We are on them before they know it, surrounding the Armory, trapping the looters inside. Any who try to flee are beaten, and pitched down the stoop as soon as they step through the door. We can hear the rest of them inside, though, still shouting their hatred and defiance at us. Carpenter draws a pistol, and leads his men in.

“On them men,
now!
”

He shoves the ruined door back with his foot. The rioters stand before us, leaning over some rifles—the crates crowbarred open, but the guns still uncleaned and unassembled. The Metropolitans are on them like dogs on a rat, beating anything that moves. Those rioters who can, leap right through the window glass, desperate to escape the flaying clubs.

A few turn to fight. Carpenter's men push them slowly back across the floor and up the stairs—stumbling up the steps, cursing and snarling as they go. They cannot stand against the relentless, machinelike advance of the police
—those arms still rising and falling, rising and falling.
I watch as Sergeant Copeland knocks a five-foot pole out of a man's hands with his nightstick, then pitches him, flailing, over the banister. Another brute tries to take a swing at the sergeant with a longshoreman's hook—but Carpenter, still up in front, shoots him point-blank in the face.