Staten Island Noir (14 page)

With Thompson and Tompkins in the lead, the group proceeded down the hill. Dr. Hollick, however, withdrew to his home to observe the evening's festivities from his library window. Arson, he told himself, was a job best left to younger men.

At the foot of the hill, the men crossed a dirt road and approached the gate to Dr. Westervelt's property. Normally it was locked, but on this evening it had been left open. The men walked across an unmowed hayfield to the north wall of the Quarantine, set down their loads, and hefted what had been left there for them: four wooden beams, each affixed with handles.

The men grunted as they swung the battering rams against the brick. In minutes, they reduced an eight-foot section of wall to rubble.

In Manhattan, five miles across the harbor, the shops were bedecked with placards and ribbons celebrating the completion of the Ocean Telegraph, over two thousand miles of cable that connected New York with London. A torchlight fireman's parade marched through the city. Fireworks bloomed in the night sky.

The men in Staten Island gathered up the matches, straw, and camphene, and streamed through the gap they had made.

They came first to the wooden typhus shanties, assembled before one of them, and hesitated—as if suddenly realizing the enormity of what they were about to do. Then Thompson raised a bottle of camphene over his head and smashed it against the side of the building. Tompkins struck a match and tossed it.

Whoosh!
The men heard the rush of oxygen as the front of the shanty exploded in flames. Inside, someone shouted: "What in God's name was that?"

Red tongues leaped up the dry shiplap siding and licked the tar-paper roof. Oily black smoke billowed into the overhanging oaks. Inside the shanty, the patients began to scream.

A nearby sentry sounded the alarm. Stevedores raced out of their dormitories. Thompson and the rest of the townsmen stood by and watched them run into the burning shanty and stagger out with invalids in their arms. The stevedores laid the patients in the grass and covered them with blankets. Then they grabbed more blankets from a nearby storeroom and tried to beat out the fire.

As smoke and embers spiraled into the night sky, Dr. Daniel H. Bissell, the hospital superintendent, dashed from his residence with a musket in his hands. At the burning shanty, he confronted Thompson and ordered him and his men to leave the premises.

"We shall not do so," Thompson replied. "It is our duty to help put out this fire."

"This shanty is lost," Bissell said. "Help us pull it down, and perhaps we can prevent the flames from spreading to the others."

Instead, Thompson and Tompkins led the men to the adjoining shanties. They streamed inside, dragged out straw mattresses, set them ablaze, and tossed them back in. Bissell confronted Thompson again, brandishing his musket. Thompson wrenched it from his hands and clubbed him in the head with it.

Bissell fell. In the flickering firelight, his blood looked black as it leaked onto the grass. He clutched at his wound and moaned.

The townsmen took up a chant: "Kill him! Kill him!"

They might well have done so if Tompkins had not intervened. "We are not murderers, my friends," he said. "But we shall complete the job we have come to do."

While the shanties burned, the townsmen roamed across the grounds, setting fire to the coal houses, barns, and stables. Panicked carriage horses burst out and galloped off into the night. The men torched the ramshackle smallpox hospital and broke into one of the physicians' residences to loot the liquor cabinets. Then they tossed camphene bottles through the windows and tossed in matches.

A few minutes later, Michael McCabe, a Quarantine watchman, discovered several men stuffing bundles of straw in the doorways and stairwells of St. Nicholas Hospital. He ordered them to stop. They ignored him and set the straw on fire. The building's patients, most of them ambulatory, streamed out of the doorways in their nightclothes.

Outside St. Nicholas, Dr. Theodore Walser, one of the three Quarantine physicians, encountered Tompkins and pleaded with him to stop the mayhem. "Some of our patients are very ill," he said. "Shall they have nothing but damp ground for a bed?"

Tompkins looked around and saw that the Female Hospital had not yet been set on fire. "Take the patients there," he told Walser. "I pledge to you that the building will not be touched." Then he hurried off to post a guard by it.

Outside the brick wall, about two hundred more townspeople gathered to cheer the arsonists on. Several of them fired muskets into the air, adding to the growing panic inside. Walser heard an insistent pounding. Someone was trying to break through the Quarantine's main gate. He and McCabe grabbed firearms from a storeroom and ran toward the sound.

As they approached, the gate burst open. Through it came Thomas Burns and the men of Neptune Fire Engine Company Number 9, some of them lugging hoses and others dragging their steam-powered pumper truck. To Walser, this was not a welcome sight. Burns was one of the most vocal opponents of the Quarantine.

"I know you, Mr. Burns!" Walser shouted. "We don't want you here!"

Burns and his men moved forward. Walser and McCabe pointed their muskets at them. "Stand back!" Walser ordered. "We will put out the fire ourselves."

But now, the mob that had gathered behind the wall pressed through the gate. Some of them had guns too. Walser and McCabe were hopelessly outnumbered. Reluctantly, they stood aside. The entering mob rushed off to set more fires.

The firemen set down their burdens, sat in the grass, and watched the hospital burn. "Should have brought sausages for roasting," one of them said.

A boat docked at one of the Quarantine's wharves and disgorged a squad of Harbor Police. Their arrival had been delayed a quarter-hour by a 150-pound sturgeon that leaped into the boat. Its thrashing had threatened to break a hole in the hull, but the beast was finally wrestled overboard. As the squad debarked, it was met with hoots, howls, and a barrage of rocks. Most of its members retreated, but two of them joined the mob and rushed off to set fires.

Flames reached the roof of St. Nicholas Hospital now. In minutes, it collapsed. The statue of a sailor that had long stood on its peak toppled into the rubble. Inside, the floors gave way. One hundred iron beds crashed through them into the basement.

From his library window, Dr. Hollick watched the fires burn all night.

 

* * *

 

At dawn, smoke curled from the rubble. Hospital staff herded ambulatory patients onto the
Cinderella
for transport to makeshift quarters on Wards Island. Those too sick to be moved crowded the two floors of the Female Hospital. Remarkably, no patients had died in the fires; the stevedores and orderlies, with help from a few members of the mob, had managed to get them all out. But overnight, a yellow fever patient had perished from his disease. His body lay on the grass, covered by a blanket.

A stevedore was dead, a musket ball buried in his back. Perhaps he had been struck by a random shot fired over the wall. Perhaps one of the mob had killed him deliberately. But Dr. Walser suspected another stevedore had done it, perhaps taking advantage of the panic to avenge an old grudge about a woman.

That morning, handbills were distributed in Tompkinsville and the neighboring villages, inviting all to a community meeting at Nautilus Hall to celebrate the destruction of the Quarantine. At seven thirty that evening, two hundred people crowded into Burns's hotel. There, amid much drinking of beer and hard liquor, they unanimously passed a resolution affirming the right of the people of Staten Island to rid themselves of the hazardous facility.

At ten p.m., Tompkins and a local hothead named Tom Garrett led celebrants out of the hotel. They crossed the street, pushed through the Quarantine's shattered front gate, and attacked the handful of buildings that had been spared the night before. They wrenched shutters and porch rails from Dr. Walser's and Dr. Bissell's residences, piled them inside, doused them with camphene, and set them alight. Then they swept across the grounds, burning the coffin house and several cottages where the boatmen lived. When that was done, they burned the wharves.

They surrounded the Female Hospital and gave the staff fifteen minutes to get the patients out. After the sick had been placed on the grass beside the brick wall, the building was torched. It went up like a bonfire.

At the wall, hot cinders fell on the prostrate patients, and the heat from the fires grew unbearable. Quarantine staff poured buckets of water on the sick to cool them.

Around midnight, as the mob straggled out of the gate, it began to rain.

 

* * *

 

The next day, Tompkinsville's saloons were packed with revilers. A thousand members of the Metropolitan Police arrived from Manhattan to restore order. The following week, the 8th Regiment of the state militia set up in the foothills outside the village to discourage any further disturbances. Sixty US Marines were deployed to protect federal property in the area.

There proved to be little for any of them to do.

Local police, under pressure from state authorities, reluctantly rounded up a dozen members of the mob. They were promptly released, their bail paid with cash that Cornelius Vanderbilt sent over on the ferry. New York's favorite tycoon, it seems, had been born on Staten Island.

In the end, charges were brought only against Thompson and Tompkins.

New York City newspapers demanded retribution. The
New York Times
was especially relentless, branding the two ringleaders "diabolical," "savage," and "inhuman." The pair had been motivated not by fear of disease but by greed, the
Times
thundered. They had cared about nothing but the Quarantine's deleterious affect on the value of their property.

That fall, Thompson and Tompkins were tried before Judge Metcalf. Dr. Walser and Dr. Bissell testified about what they'd witnessed on the nights of the fires. So did the watchman, McCabe, and a host of others.

The defense, led by Attorney Atherton, disputed none of their testimony. Instead, they offered a string of witnesses, including Dr. Hollick, who testified to the sickness and death the Quarantine had long visited upon the people of Staten Island. And they entered into evidence the Castleton Board of Health's resolutions as proof that the townspeople were justified in taking action "to abate a nuisance."

At the conclusion of the three-week proceeding, Atherton rose to make his closing statement: "I demand their immediate release on the grounds that they have committed no crime, but have simply done their duty as citizens and men. Here among their fellow citizens and neighbors, they will be looked upon as men of noble hearts who have acted fearlessly and zealously for the public good."

Judge Metcalf issued his ruling without delay: "Undoubtedly, the city of New York is entitled to all the protection in the matter that the state can give, consistent with the health of others. She has no right to more. Her great advantages are attended by corresponding inconveniences; her great public works by great expenditures; her great foreign commerce by the infection it brings. But the legislature can no more apportion upon the surrounding communities her dangers than her expenses; no more compel them to do her dying than to pay her taxes. Neither can be done."

And so he set Thompson and Tompkins free.

The decision surprised no one. The judge's sympathies were well known. His house was located just a quarter-mile from the Quarantine. And a decade earlier, he had attended his own brother, caressing his brow with cloths dipped in ice water and changing the sweat-drenched bedding three times daily, in the week that it took him to die of yellow fever.

PAYING THE TAB

BY
M
ICHAEL
L
ARGO

Four Corners

Eddie Lynch had opened the doors every afternoon at two since 1980. Even when his mother died, he came back in his funeral suit to fill the bins with long necks and dump them over with pails of ice. He wiped out the speed racks, dipped the glasses in the first sink of soap, and the two others for rinse. The day he bought the Sunnyside Lounge from old man Sully he promised not to change a thing, and he hadn't. The same wood panels painted black, L-shaped mahogany bar with a pipe for a foot rail, and swivel stools with red seat pads. He had reskinned the pool table in the back room many times, but always in red felt the way Sully said a bar pool table should be.

"Character," Sully had said. "Bars take on their own—and you can tell it by its aromas, if you let them fester. If I hear you add hanging ferns or make this shithole fancy, I'll come back from my urn and burn you alive."

Eddie knew that Sully was selling it to him for less, and not giving it to Sully's daughter like she wanted, because of his name: Eddie Lynch, the onetime famous local kid who had his name stolen as an alias by one of the greatest banker robbers of the twentieth century.

"Every busted nose, clogged toilet, and last-call puke lives in the walls." Sully wanted Eddie to know what he was getting into. Eddie remembered that day, looking at the small hexagonal floor tiles, and came to know that no matter the mopping of ammonia, Sully was right.

Today, Eddie left the front door unlocked while he stocked. He knew the soda gun guys were coming, wanting their cut, once again raising their fees. He saw the wedge of bright daylight slice in when the inner doors opened and thought it was them. But it was the first customer of the day, a man in a suit carrying a long-stemmed rose. When he took the stool that was normally Max's, he asked for a glass of water, bourbon in a rock glass, and a glass of red wine.

Eddie served him what he wanted and figured he'd have plenty of time to hear the winded BS of why the man was putting a flower in a water glass—since they all had their stories. That was what bars were for: telling your side of life's injustices to the captured bartender. But Eddie went outside to see if they had picked up the black trash bags piling ever higher on top of the dumpster. He'd start getting fines from the health department soon. Eddie refused to pay the rate hike on trash pickup and could get no new service to break waste removal routes and territories, all of that racket long established and divvied up.