Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [710]
Targets identifiable as Republican came under attack. A crowd entered the Columbia College grounds on Fifth Avenue at 49th Street, knocked on the door of President Charles King’s house demanding to know if a Republican lived there, and were stopped from burning the building down only by the intervention of two Catholic priests. Farther down Fifth, a crowd menaced Republican Mayor Opdyke’s house until dissuaded by Democrats. Sumptuous Fifth Avenue mansions were sacked, looted, and burned. George Templeton Strong, watching the stoning of a house on Lexington off 45th rumored (wrongly) to be Horace Greeley’s, concluded that “the beastly ruffians were masters of the situation and of the city.”
Some of the crowd now hived off downtown toward an armory at 21st Street and Second Avenue, really a rifle factory operated by a son-in-law of Mayor Opdyke, which contained a thousand weapons. The rioters so far had had few guns. The Broadway Squad arrived to defend the armory but soon found themselves surrounded and stoned by thousands of men and women. Strong, who had followed along, depicted a crowd of Irish day laborers, including “low Irish women, stalwart young vixens and withered old hags. . . all cursing the ‘bloody draft’ and egging on their men to mischief.” Finally they stormed and occupied it around four P.M. and began carrying off carbines. When police reinforcements arrived, the crowd torched the building, trapping some rioters inside on the upper floors; of the thirteen who died at the armory, ten perished in the fire.
At about the same time, an ugly second front opened up across town, as crowds hitherto focused on rich whites turned their fury on poor blacks. Patrick Merry, an Irish cellar digger, led two to three hundred men and boys down Broadway to West 29th Street where, at five o’clock, they burned the deserted Eighth District provost marshal’s office. Then they began attacking homes of African Americans in the west 30s. The race riot had gotten under way.
Bands of Irish longshoremen, with quarrymen, street pavers, teamsters, and cartmen following along, began chasing blacks, screaming, “Kill all niggers!” Blacks were dragged off streetcars and stages around City Hall. The owner of a colored sailors’ boardinghouse on Roosevelt Street in the Fourth Ward was robbed and stripped, his building fired. Maria Prince’s boardinghouse in Sullivan Street was trashed, as rioters dug up paving stones, smashed the windows, and ransacked it. A crowd tried to attack black waiters at Crook’s Restaurant in Chatham Street but was repulsed. Uptown, at Fifth Avenue and 43rd, rioters attacked the Colored Orphan Asylum, screaming, “Burn the niggers’ nest.” The 237 children (most under twelve years old) escaped—young Paddy McCafferty heroically shepherding them to the 20th Precinct house—while the crowd smashed pianos, carried off carpets and iron bedsteads, uprooted the trees, shrubs, and fences, then set the building ablaze. Crowds would attack other moral reform projects, even those not associated with blacks. They stoned the Magdalene Asylum on Fifth at 88th Street and burned down the Five Points Mission.
When night fell, the racial assaults worsened. Some blacks were attacked on the corner of Varick and Charlton streets by a crowd led by an Irish bricklayer. One of the pursued turned, shot the bricklayer with a pistol, and escaped; the maddened crowd grabbed one of the others, lynched him, and then burned the corpse. Gangs attacked and torched waterfront tenements, dance houses, brothels, bars, and boardinghouses that