Paradise Alley: A Novel

By Kevin Baker

They came by boat from a starving land—and by the Underground Railroad from Southern chains—seeking refuge in a crowded, filthy corner of hell at the bottom of a great metropolis. But in the terrible July of 1863, the poor and desperate of Paradise Alley would face a new catastrophe—as flames from the war that was tearing America in two reached out to set their city on fire.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 17, 2009
• ISBN: 9780061748981

Kevin Baker

Kevin Baker is the bestselling author of the novels Dreamland, Paradise Alley, and Sometimes You See It Coming. He is a columnist for American Heritage magazine and a regular contributor to the New York Times, Harper's, and other periodicals. He lives in New York City with his wife, the writer Ellen Abrams, and their cat, Stella.

Book preview

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

Ruth Dove, a ragpicker, from Paradise Alley, in the Fourth Ward of New York City

Billy Dove, her husband, a shipbuilder and escaped slave

Dangerous Johnny Dolan, Ruth’s former lover, and a criminal

Deirdre Dolan O’Kane, Johnny’s older sister, and a former domestic

Tom O’Kane, Deirdre’s husband, and a private in the Fighting 69th

Maddy Boyle, a hot-corn girl and prostitute

Herbert Willis Robinson, her lover, and a writer for the New York Tribune

Finn McCool, a Tammany ward heeler, and assistant foreman of the Black Joke Volunteer Fire Company

George "Snatchem" Leese, a bloodsucker

Horace Greeley, editor and publisher of the New York Tribune

Henry Raymond, editor and publisher of the New York Times

DAY ONE

Monday

July 13, 1863

I am a rambling Irishman

Ulster I was born in

And many’s the pleasant

day I spent

’Round the banks

of sweet Lough Erne

But to be poor I could

not endure

Like others of my station

To Amerikay

I sailed away

And left this Irish nation . . . .

THE RAMBLING IRISHMAN

Traditional

dinga

ding1 • 1 • ding2

RUTH

He is coming.

Ruth leaned out the door as far as she dared, peering down Paradise Alley to the west and the south. Past the other narrow brick and wood houses along Cherry Street, slouching against each other for support. The grey mounds of ashes and bones, oyster shells and cabbage leaves and dead cats growing higher every day since the street cleaners had gone out.

Fire bells were already ringing off in the Sixth Ward, somewhere near the Five Points. The air thick with dust and ash and dried horse droppings, the sulfurous emissions of the gasworks along the river, and the rendering plants and the hide-curing plants. It was not yet six in the morning but she could feel the thin linen of her dress sticking to the soft of her back.

The good Lord, in all His mercy, must be readyin’ us for Hell—

She searched the horizon for any sign of relief. Their weather came from the west, the slate-grey, fecund clouds riding in over the Hudson. That was how she expected him to come, too, fierce and implacable as a summer storm. His rage breaking over them all.

He is coming—

But there was no storm just yet. The sky was still a dull, jaundiced color, the blue tattered and wearing away at the edges. She ventured a step out into the street, looking hard, all the way downtown, past the church steeples and the block-shaped warehouses, the dense thicket of masts around lower Manhattan.

There was nothing out of the ordinary. Just the usual shapeless forms lying motionless in the doorways. A ragged child with a stick, a few dogs. A fruit peddler with his bright yellow barrow. His wares, scavenged from the barges over on the West Side, already pungent and overripe.

Nothing coming. But then, it wasn’t likely he would come from the west anyway—

With a muted cry she swung around, then ducked back into her house, bolting the door behind her while she fought for breath. The idea that he could have been coming up behind her the whole time. She remembered how quickly he could move. She could feel his hands on her, could see the yellow dog’s bile rising in his eyes. That merciless anger, concentrated solely upon her—

She had not truly believed it before now—not even after Deirdre had come over to tell her yesterday afternoon. Standing there on her doorstone, one foot still in the street as if she were hanging on to the shore. Wearing her modest black church dress, her beautiful face even sterner than usual. She was a regular communicant, Sundays and Fridays—no doubt especially agitated to have to see Ruth on the Lord’s day. She told her the news in a low voice, all but whispering to her. Deirdre herself, whispering, as if somehow he might overhear.

He is coming.

He had come—all the way back from California. It was a fearsome, unimaginable distance. But then, what was that to a man who had gone as far as he had already? A friend of Tom’s, a stevedore, had seen him on the docks—as stunned as if he had seen Mose himself stepping off a clipper ship, back from his bar in the Sandwich Islands. Coming down the gangplank with that peculiar, scuttling, crablike walk of his, fierce and single-minded as ever. Moving fast, much faster than you thought at first, so that Tom’s friend had quickly lost him in the crowd waiting by the foot of the gangplank. Already disappeared off into the vastness of the City—

Which meant—what? The mercy of a few days? While he found himself a room in the sailors’ houses along Water Street, began to work his way relentlessly through the bars and blind pigs, sniffing out any news. Sniffing out them.

Or maybe not even that. Maybe he had hit it right off, had found, in the first public house he tried, a garrulous drunk who would tell him for the price of a camphor-soaked whiskey where he might find a certain mixed-race couple, living down in one of the nigger nests along Paradise Alley—

No. Ruth calmed herself by sheer force of will. Picking up a broom, she made her hands distract her. Sweeping her way scrupulously around the hearth, under the wobbly-legged table even though she knew there was no need, they would never live here again after this morning.

When she made herself think about it logically, it wasn’t likely he could be that lucky. He had never had much luck, after all—not even with herself—and his own face would work against him. He couldn’t go out too bold. They would remember him still, after what had happened with Old Man Noe. Men would remember him, would remember that, and keep their distance. Maybe even turn him in, for the reward—

They still had time. A little, anyway. She and Billy had talked it out, deep into the night. Time enough for Billy to go up to his job at the Colored Orphans’ Asylum in the Fifth Avenue today, and collect his back wages. Then they would have something to start on, at least, to see them through up to Boston, or Canada.

Why aren’t we in Canada already? We should be there—

She swept faster, in her anger and her frustration, kicking up the fine, black grit that crept inexorably through the windows and over the transom, covering the whole City over, every day. They had talked about leaving, all these years, but somehow they had never actually gone. She had put it down to Billy’s moodiness and his obstinacy, the lethargy that seemed to hold him sometimes, particularly when he’d been drinking.

Yet it was more than that, and she knew it. They both felt safer here—on their block, miserable as it was, in the bosom of their friends and neighbors. They told themselves there would be risks if they ran, perhaps even worse risks. A white woman and a black man, with their five mixed-race children, moving through one small town after another, with no real money to sustain them. They would be leaving tracks for him like they were written in the sky—

So where were they to run now?

Ruth forced the question from her mind. It didn’t matter now, now they had no choice. She had everything packed and ready to go. In a little while she would get the children up and give them their breakfast. They would leave as soon as Billy got back from the Colored Orphans’, with the two weeks’ wages he was owed.

She would stay home from her job with the German bonepickers, it would be safe enough here for the time being, on their street. At least that was what they had told themselves. It was too bad Tom was off with the army, but there was Deirdre. They could count on her to keep an eye out, at least. Ruth had seen her when she’d first looked out this morning—already sitting by a window, standing the watch.

Deirdre knew well enough what to expect from her own brother.

All it required was a few more hours of grace, then they would be gone. Over to Hoboken on the Desbrosses Street ferry, then a schooner up to Halifax, or Montreal. Or if they didn’t have enough money for that, they could just set out at random, across the countryside, head west or north—

There was a low, rumbling sound. She risked poking her head out a window, wanting to see if it was storming after all. But no—the tattered yellow sky still hung balefully over the harbor, and the North River.

The sound went on and on—one continuous, unending roll of noise—and she realized it must be something man-made. Something both more and less than the daily going to work, the bawdy, boisterous awakening of the City that she liked to listen to every morning from her doorstep before joining it herself. This had more of a purpose, a direction. The sound of hundreds, even thousands of feet, and voices, moving relentlessly, indivisibly north, toward uptown.

Something had been brewing in the City all weekend, she knew, though she had barely set foot outside her home. There were little things she had picked up, when she poked her head out to throw the washing water in the gutter. Something in the snatches of talk from the men in their taverns, and the brayings of drunks on street corners. Something in the agitation of horses, the thinning of traffic, the urgency of a policeman’s voice. In the unhappy silence of the other women on the block like her—listening and waiting.

The men were unhappy, and when men were unhappy, no one could rest easy. Something about the draft, but whatever it was, she knew it would be bad for people like them. Maybe, at least, it would delay him—

A couple hours’ grace, that’s all we need. Surely that is possible.

She tried to think, to make sure there was nothing she had forgotten. Her memory had never been very good since her time with Johnny Dolan. She would leave the beans or the corn bread over the fire until they burned. She would forget to run an errand, to get something important, unless she carefully thought out everything on her way to work in the morning, or while trying to fall asleep in her bed at night. Sometimes she thought he had knocked it out of her, beaten it right out of her brains—

What needed to be done, then? She forced herself to concentrate. The children were still asleep in the back room but she had their things bundled up beside their beds. They could carry that much on their own. Everything else was already tied up and waiting by the back door—their bolt hole—where it could be easily tossed into the barrow just outside.

There was little enough. Her kitchen wares, two tin pots and an iron frying pan. Six long spoons, a few bent knives and forks. The two other dresses she owned, plus another small bag for her underclothes, and the ribbons she wore in her hair on special days. Billy’s one suit, and his shirts and his overalls. His seaman’s kit, and his tools, still as meticulously wrapped and oiled—and as untouched—as when he had first purchased them, over a dozen years before.

There was almost nothing of a more personal nature. Only their Bible, and a few books that belonged to Milton, their oldest boy. The framed daguerreotype she had finally persuaded Billy to have made of the whole family. All of them in their best clothes, standing solemnly around Billy where he sat in a broad, cushioned chair. The paterfamilias, a little stand in the picture parlor tucked carefully behind his close-cropped hair to make sure he held his head steady, the rest of them clustered all around him in various shimmering shades of light. Hers the only fully white face, looking bleak and blanched, nearly invisible next to the rest of them.

She had wanted to have one made of the little girl who had died, of Lillian, who had passed from the croup before she was two. A proper funeral picture, made up with the girl in her best dress, lying in the coffin, but Billy had stopped her. It was too dear, they needed to spend the money on the living, and she was glad he had persuaded her now. There was no need to haul the picture of that poor dead girl up and down the roads, as Ruth had once hauled herself. She would be left behind where she lay, out in the pleasant, shady cemetery in Brooklyn—

That was all. Everything they had to show for thirteen years in this cramped little house. They could be gone in a moment, out through the back privvy lots and down to the ferries. Gone before even he could catch them—

All that remained was that thing. His magic box. She paused over it with her broom in hand, as if considering whether to just sweep the whole thing out the door, out of their lives. The strange pile of gewgaws and odds and ends which Johnny Dolan had put their immortal souls in danger in order to have. Somehow, she had never been able to get rid of it.

Because of what it had cost?

It lay in a far corner of the front room now, like some malevolent old dog. The black, funereal cloth that still covered it now coated with dust. The same cloth they had found it in, had brought it all the way here from that ruined abbey outside Cork. She folded the cloth back, staring at the cracked glass. Behind it lay the whole collection of shiny odds and ends that had fascinated him so, and that she had not been able to so much as look at since he had gone. The broken sword and the blackamoor’s ear, the miniature engine and the giant’s eye and the pictures of lovers, and a thousand other wonders. All of them once glued and arranged so perfectly within the box, now mostly jumbled together in a heap at the bottom.

Yet still it shone. Deep down, through the depths of all that junk, still glinted dozens of tiny mirrors. Glued to the back of the cabinet, meant to make it all seem larger, more splendid, to gleam like jewels. In the yellow morning light, she caught a dusty, broken reflection of her own face. Squinting, peering ignorantly back through all the wonders, impossibly old and distorted. Her cheeks beginning to hollow, the lines creasing her chin and brow, her brown hair starting to grey.

She threw the cover down over the box and went back to her sweeping. She wasn’t sure why she had never gotten rid of it, sold it off long ago to the street sweepers for whatever pennies it would bring. Was it to remind herself of her sin—of all her sins?

Or was it the last hold Johnny Dolan still had on her? Some lingering hope that if she kept it, the box might appease him even after all they had done to him.

If he returned. When he returned—

She thought she would leave it. It might at least slow him down for a few more hours while he brooded, and wondered over it like he always used to. Maybe even make him forget about them altogether.

Or would it simply be another track for him to follow?

She had to stop then—crouching down, nearly doubled over in her own front room. To think of him again. The return of that presence she had dared to believe she had shaken out of their life forever—come to repay her now for all she had done. Worse yet, come to visit all his fury upon those she loved, on Billy and all the rest of her family, he would not care who he hurt. If he could catch them—

Of course he would come back. Of course he would, after the trick we played him—

He is coming.

ding1 • 2 • ding2

HERBERT WILLIS ROBINSON

The boy grins up at me from the gutter, his face smeared with blood. He squints into the morning sun, and wipes a hand across his mouth. Spreading more gore from ear to ear, as if to make a threat, like running a finger across his throat.

But no—he is neither grinning nor threatening, only trying to see who I am against the yellow glare of the sun. My shadow spreading over his playground, the pool of blood on which he is sailing his paper boat. As he looks up at me, distracted, more thick fingers of blood creep slowly up his little boat. They collapse its sail, pull it slowly down into the gutter. He shrugs and produces another brown scrap of butcher’s paper, folding it expertly into a set of three triangles. He christens it and launches it, on a fresh red stream eddying up through the sewer grate.

My streetcar arrives and I swing on up over the boy, on my way to the Tribune, where I am employed writing articles for Mr. Greeley’s newspaper. The faded yellow signboards on the side of the car loom inches from my face:

TREMENDOUS EXCITEMENT: THE IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT! ONLY—

—R. H. MACY—

CAN PROVIDE BOTH THE ENORMOUS REDUCTIONS

AND THE SUPERB QUALITY THAT WILL SATISFY BOTH HIM

AND HER AND LEAVE YOUR HOUSE DIVIDED NO MORE!

I move back out of the inner car, clutching one of the outside poles by another adamant sign: NO COLORED PEOPLE ALLOWED IN THIS CAR.

Out here at least the air is not as close as it is inside, fouled with sweat and body odor. The car jammed already, mostly with workies and mechanics, sewing girls and maids making their way to their jobs. Not yet six o’clock in the morning but they are in a holiday mood. Singing and joking, even rocking the car on its rails, the sour smell of whiskey seeping through the windows.

From Eighth Street down

The men are making it

From Eighth Street up

The women are spending it

And that’s the story of this great town

From Eighth Street up and Eighth Street down—

Today is Getting Out Day. Today is All Fools’ Day, today is Carnevale and Christmas and the Fourth of July, all rolled up in one. And all that’s needed is a match.

All weekend I went among them as a spy. That is my job, as a reporter. Listening to them in their taverns, on their street corners and in their parlors. Posing as the out-of-town drummer, the friendly, credulous stranger. There were the usual wild oaths and threats, the drunken boasts—but something else as well. Something real, some kind of dangerous undercurrent beneath all the loose talk. Like all the blood and offal the butchers shove down in the gutters until, when it rains, everything comes bubbling up, the streets swimming in entrails and pigs’ ears, cloven hooves and horses’ teeth, and puddles of blood.

Trouble in this town usually starts like a musket flash, sudden and unpredictable. A fight, a joke, a routine arrest. Some halfhearted protest that turns into a riot before anyone can quite understand what is happening.

But this is different. More deliberate—even, perhaps, intentional. I don’t mean that there is some outside conspiracy, a little group of men sitting around a table in a cellar room. Those rumors have been flying for weeks now, at the Union Club, and the bar in the Astor House, and in the lobby of the St. Nicholas Hotel. Confederate agents have slipped over the border from Canada. Hired assassins have been brought over from Ireland, the Knights of the Golden Circle are stashing muskets in a secret basement in the Five Points, ready on a signal from Richmond to fire the town—

The usual nonsense. The wild talk that precedes any real crisis in the City, like the seabirds swooping in off the North River ahead of a storm. No, what I mean is that they have been talking. The Other City, the Dark City, the City with Its Face Turned Away From Us. The City of Night, the City of Fire, murmuring in low, deliberate, angry voices that we can never quite make out. The workingmen in their party halls. The fire companies in their station houses, the gangsters in their subterranean hideouts. So much talk, so much plotting, bubbling slowly to the top.

It started when the new Draft Law was announced. All able-bodied men, ages twenty to forty-five, married or single, are now eligible to be drafted by lot into Mr. Lincoln’s army, and shipped south to the war. There to be fed on wormy hardtack, and saltpork, and butchered by incompetent generals while their families try to subsist on begging and government relief. Unless—and, ah, there’s the rub!—unless they have three hundred dollars to buy themselves a substitute. An easy enough thing, for any man of means—but two years’ salary to an Irish hod-carrier from the Five Points—

The relief that swept the City after Gettysburg faded, when the casualty lists began to trickle in. Loyal Republicans who had illuminated their windows and put up bunting to celebrate found their stoops blackened with tar the next morning, ominous crosses chalked on their doors. Then, last week, the Provost Marshal’s patrols started working their way through the Fourth Ward, demanding that men give up their names. There were fights, and arrests, brick chimneys toppling mysteriously off rooftops, just missing the Provost’s guard.

The draft was scheduled to commence last Friday, up at the Ninth District office, on East Forty-sixth Street by the Third Avenue. Right to the end, no one thought they would really go through with it—not in this city full of Democrats and Copperheads. By the time I arrived, the mob was already filling the street, a boisterous crowd of workies and their wives. Plainly uncowed by the handful of police and the squad of invalided soldiers standing guard—shouting out their insults and scatological comments.

Three hundred dollars! Oh, you can take that and shove it up my—

Oh, they will, Billy boy! Oh, they will!

Nervous, rueful laughter floating up from the mob.

Three hundred dollars! Tell Abe Lincoln to come an’ collect it hisself!

Oh, he will!

Nevertheless, they went ahead with it. The soldiers hauled a big, squared wooden drum up into the open window, and mounted it on the scaffolding there in full view of the crowd. A well-known blind man was led up by the arm, and the marshals gave the drum a heavy, lumberous crank, rolling it over and over until it resounded like thunder up and down the street, silencing even the mob.

Then they opened the hatch and plunged the hand of the blind man deep inside. Watery yellowed eyes staring straight ahead. His fingers rooting in the drum like so many thick pink pig snouts until he had dredged up the first handful of names, written down on simple scraps of paper. An impressively groomed and uniformed major plucked them one by one from the blind man’s palm, unfolding them and reading out the names and addresses in a fearsome voice:

O’Donnell! Thomas! Fifteen Great Jones Street!

The crowd began to hiss and groan, and I saw the two pickets standing at either end of the drum exchange nervous looks. They held muskets with fixed bayonets, but it was clear to me that if anything had started, they would have bolted like rabbits.

Condon! Jack! One-eight-four Avenue A!

There were more groans, more hisses and boos—but nothing else. No well-placed brick or two that might have set off a whole barrage, provoked a volley. The spark wasn’t there yet. The crowd was in too good a mood, the weather too moderate still. As the next few names were called out there were more catcalls, more rude noises, but even most of this was good-natured.

Brady! Patrick!

Good for you, Brady! someone in the crowd yelled out, and then everyone was laughing. Soon every name was greeted with a joke—

O’Connell—

How are you, O’Connell?

O’Connor! Sean!

Good-bye, Sean!

A rest from the missus for you, Sean!

Old Abe’s done for you now, Sean me boy!

—the whole scene devolving into another extended street-corner entertainment. The kind they love—like a good dog fight or a family argument. At one point a particularly ignorant young b’hoy walked out of the crowd when his name was called and, with a resigned shrug, pulled himself up through the window. The major looked as if he were going to have a fit of apoplexy, his face reddening and his hand reaching for his holster, wondering what kind of prank this was.

Who the hell’re you?

I’m McMullen, sir. I’m here to give meself up, the lad said.

The crowd roared, the whole exchange like a scene out of some Paddy stage farce. The major cursing at his would-be recruit—"Get the hell down from there, goddamn you, man!"—the youth just grinning sheepishly back at him.

After that it was clear nothing was going to happen. The crowd was almost festive, so close to the end of the working week. Soon they began to drift away, to their homes or the local taverns, looking for new entertainment. The blind man still rooted for names, handing the little white pellets over to the bellowing major until the office finally closed its doors in the late afternoon. The marshals hauled the drum down from its platform then, and shuttered the big open front window, the guard of invalided soldiers hurrying away, grateful to be going back toward their barracks on Governor’s Island.

Yet the whole time there was another draft going on as well. I could see it on the fringes of the crowd—the boys, runners for the volunteer fire companies, scurrying back and forth to tell their wards and their blocks who had been drafted. After a while another fringe of young men began to gather—butcher boys and apprentices, gang b’hoys and fire laddies. Their hands in their pockets, looking angry and sullen. Walking back and forth, smarting with the insult, repeating the same things over and over to each other.

Three hundred dollars! Sold for three hundred dollars, when a nigger goes for a thousand!

They lingered still, muttering on the edge of the crowd, as if waiting for something to happen. But it never did. The spark never came, and soon they drifted away with the rest of the crowd, looking back over their shoulders at the shuttered draft office.

The streetcar struggles futilely down the First Avenue, the horses slipping and falling on the slick granite paving stones. Our driver curses and whips at the other teamsters with their wagon loads of dry goods and potatoes, beef and beer. They curse back, cutting across our rails until we are slowed almost to a standstill. My stomach lurches and my poor heavy head feels as if it will topple like a twelve-pound shot from my shoulders and roll up and down the aisle of the car, at peace at last. I jump down at the next corner, deciding it will be quicker to make my way to the newspaper by foot.

The cars should operate on steam, of course, but after several spectacular crashes, the Common Council banned all locomotives south of Forty-second Street. Instead, they are unhitched from their engines at the Grand Central Station, hooked up to teams of horses, and pulled the rest of the way downtown. They make no better progress than the ambling stagecoaches or the omnibuses, or, for that matter, the dauntless pedestrians, picking their way past endless piles of steaming manure and teams of rearing horses.

This is the way we live now, in the City of Smash and Burn, Sulphur and Blood. Nearly one million souls, packed down into the tail end of Manhattan island. Some few thousand more scattered among the villages of Haarlem and Bloomingdale, the rambling shantytowns of niggers and Irish niggers around the central park they have finally laid out above Fifty-ninth Street. A city where herds of pigs still run loose in the streets. Where stagecoach drivers race and whip each other along the avenues, and steam ferries race and collide and explode in the harbor. The population double what it was twenty years ago, and double again what it was twenty years before that. And every year, the City getting denser, louder, filthier; more noisome, more impossible to traverse.

Presiding over it all is our upstanding Republican mayor, fuming regularly and ineffectually over each iniquity like some Italian volcano. Just beneath him sit our unspeakable aldermen and councilmen, better known as The Forty Thieves. Would that it were so. In fact, there are eighty-two. (Only New York City would take it upon itself to support a legislature of bicameral crooks.)

And beneath them a whole vast, imponderable hive of crooked street commissioners and demagogues, dead-horse contractors and confidence men, hoisters and divers, shoulder-hitters and fancy men, wardheelers and kirkbuzzers and harlots. And all of them with a profit motive, all of them with an angle and a game, and an eye on the main chance. So many with their hands out, so much corruption that even if you wanted to clean it all out you could never do it, you could never even get past the first, most inconsequential layers of dirt.

In short, it is a great town in which to be a newspaperman.

ding1 • 3 • ding2

HERBERT WILLIS ROBINSON

I am a connoisseur of hangovers.

To the uninitiated they may seem merely unpleasant, but to the more experienced there are both fine and subtle gradations. Wine is the worst, even a good wine. The sediment clogs the mind like grit in the gears, and roils the stomach. A brandy hangover, on the other hand, is like a bell smashed with a hammer, ringing, but clear and hard. Sweet liqueurs fill one with a sense of sticky self-disgust the next day, like wriggling on some gigantic curl of flypaper.

No, the best hangover is just the right combination of beer and whiskey. Beer to fortify the stomach and give it something to chew on. Whiskey to soften the mind to a cloudy, cosmic mush, sparked by flashes of completely unjustifiable optimism. Done properly a good hangover can carry one through the next day like a thick cotton cloud, leaving everything a little unclear but at a sublime distance. A bad hangover can make one wish to die or—same thing—swear off drinking altogether.

This is not a good hangover.

There was no avoiding it, though. When you wish to know what men are thinking in New York, you must go to a saloon. Over the week-end, all last Saturday and Sunday, I worked my way down through them, and in this town you can find every gradation. There are high bars and low bars, blind pigs and blind tigers and respectable snugs. Free-and-easy halls and bohemian bars and groceries, elegant club rooms and hotel bars on the dollar side of Broadway, hose joints and clip joints and shock joints and dives.

I worked my way down to the very bottom layers of sediment and sentiment, determined to hear the Other City where it was murmuring. Disguised again as a drummer, a rube—even one of them. Until by Saturday night I had reached the very worst crimp bars along the waterfront—The Morgue and The Yellow Man; The Glass House and the Hole-in-the-Wall. Terrible places, with their paint thinner passed off as alcohol, and a side business in murdered and shanghaied sailors. Bars where you go only to prey or to be preyed upon, or if you are too weary anymore to tell the difference.

Near midnight on Saturday, I found myself outside Finn McCool’s place, The Sailor’s Rest, where a few years ago Slobbery Jim knifed Patsy the Barber over twelve cents they had stolen from a murdered German. It is no more than a sagging, ancient pile along South Street. The nasty, ironic name, carved on a wooden board that made an awful creaking and flapping sound above the entrance. The saloon itself like all such places, furnished with no more than a bar, a few tables, and some long benches pushed up against the walls. Shelves filled with dusty, opened bottles of brown and amber liquid. Crude prints depicting the usual gabble of Irish heroes in America: O’Connell and Mitchel, and poor old Corcoran, and Meagher of the Sword.

In the back hang the slitted red curtains of the Velvet Room, with its solitary bed and notorious trapdoor. Most of the crimp bars have something like it—a room where strangers too drunk to know any better are plied with a great, complimentary bowl of whiskey or rum and escorted through the thick red curtains to sleep it off. Only to awaken the next morning well on their way to China or Peru or Shanghai, not to be seen on the dockside again for years—if ever.

Something was up, I knew from the moment I walked in—something beyond the usual shenanigans. I had been here before on a Saturday, had even taken Maddy to such establishments. There was always a fiddler, and someone banging away like a pagan on a goatskin drum. The red bombazine curtains blowing in the window, the only light a couple of smoky-wicked whale-oil lamps. The men dancing wild reels and polkas across the sawdust floors, with young girls just over from Ireland, who showed their teeth when they grinned.

This night, though, there was no lunatic drummer, no dancing. There was, only, a palpable sense of menace. The saloon was packed, but the men sat nursing their porter and ale, speaking in low and bitter tones.

I stood at the bar, where I could pretend to drink while I looked them over. Many of them were the same men and boys I had seen at the draft, brooding at the edge of the mob. Fire laddies, especially from the Black Joke company, and butchers’ assistants, and gang b’hoys. Daybreak Boys and Swamp Angels, Dead Rabbits and Plug Uglies and Roach Guards. All of them repeating the same muttered litany:

Sold for three hundred dollars! When a nigger goes for a thousand—

The very spine of our City, such men are—the ones who do all the low jobs and the hard ones, who keep the whole great machine running. Indispensable men, really, and doing it all for wages that will barely feed them.

How I loathed them! I know I should love the poor, but I don’t, they are dirty and loud. Dressed up in their ludicrous gang paraphernalia—stovepipe hats and soaped temple locks, gaudy kerchiefs and baggy Oxford pants tucked into the tops of their boots. Brass knuckles and giant Bowie knives falling out of their pockets. They jeer and heckle in our theatres, shout obscenities at each other on the street, break up any political meetings their masters don’t like. Always bellicose but helpless, cynical but self-pitying.

I want to love the poor, but I don’t, perhaps not even Maddy—

Drink up!

McCool’s bouncer trudged over to force a whiskey on me. She is a famous harridan of the ward, a six-foot-tall Irishwoman with red hair down to her knees. They call her Gallus Mag for the bright yellow suspenders she uses to keep her skirt up, though she wears a belt as well—a revolver and a slung shot tucked conspicuously into the front of it.

C’mon now, don’t make me get rough with ya!

The Mag has brass claws on her fingertips, and when she smiles you can see that her teeth have been filed down to long, white points, as sharp as a rat’s. It is said that she will bite the ears off any customer who doesn’t go quietly, and that she stores her trophies in a tall jar of formaldehyde that is prominently displayed on the bar. It is the saloon’s running joke. Greenhorns reaching into the jar for the usual pickled eggs jump in the air when they find themselves holding an ear. It never fails to get a good laugh.

I duly ordered up a drink, and Gallus Mag grinned and slung it across the bar to me. I took a sip, tried not to make too sour a face, and failed—the whiskey’s flavor and body no worse than the finest acids. Gallus Mag, watching for my expression, burst into laughter, throwing her head and her long red hair back, and setting the whole bar laughing along with her. I grinned weakly, trying to hide how much I detested them all.

Usually Finn McCool himself was behind the bar. This night, though, he moved among his customers like a venomous bee, spreading his poison from one little cluster of men to another. Shoulders rounded, prematurely wizened head sunk nearly to his chest. Going about his duties as a Tammany ward captain, and assistant foreman of the Black Joke.

The Black Joke and the other fire companies are the breeding swamps of our wonderful new mass democracy. There are dozens of such companies, supposedly protecting our highly combustible City. In fact, they are little more than headquarters for our street gangs and political machines—you go tell the difference. They pull their machines recklessly through the streets, brawl with each other over the Croton hydrants while our homes and businesses burn.

Each company has dozens of members, necessary to tote the heavy wagons by hand through the narrow lanes of the City. All of them volunteers, nearly all of them Irish by now—rough, arrogant young men who love to paint gaudy scenes on their fire wagons, hold elaborate chowders and dances.

They are cultivated by aspiring Tammany Hall politicians such as McCool. Dispensing favors and gossip, perennially booming his brother, Peter, who is the captain of the company, for alderman. Usually, on a Saturday night, Finn’s saloon would have been lousy with the leaders of the Democracy—but for some reason there was no sign of them now. In fact, they had vanished from every dive I visited, all week-end.

No Captain Rynders holding court in the back rooms, his omniscient gambler’s eye flitting over everything. No Fernandy Wood, oozing his smug, perfumed way through the crowd. No sign of the enormous Tweed, with his oddly open, innocent boy’s face—the monstrous mirror image of Greeley’s own. All of them conspicuous in their absence. Their disappearance as unsettling as the flight of birds, or the howling of dogs and cats before an earthquake—

Ye see how it is, I heard a low voice behind me. Ye see how our Mag deals with them who like to overhear what they shouldn’t.

I took a small sip of the varnish the Irish giantess had served me before I turned around. There was McCool, perched by my elbow, a smirk creasing his face, nodding significantly at the jar of ears. Seeing through any disguise I might want to adopt.

She must be a regular Circe, I told him.

I had noticed long ago that the ears, bobbing there in the deep, red liquid behind the glass, looked suspiciously pointed and large and hairy, even for the sailors and bummers who liked to frequent The Sailor’s Rest.

Who? McCool asked.

Circe was a witch—with a habit of turning men into swine.

Ah, but the bitch was a liar, then. For it don’t take a woman to turn a man into a pig.

No?

No. All you have to do is treat men like swine an’ they will live up to the rule every time.

Is it swinish, then, to stand up on two legs and fight for our country?

I was drunk enough to be that reckless with him, though I suspected I had nothing really to worry about. Finn could have already had me beaten to a pulp; thrown into the black and oily river outside, or shipped down to Port o’ Spain, had he chosen to. No, there had to be some reason he wanted to speak to me, a reporter for Horace Greeley’s Tribune. Something he wanted to find out—

"Strange how it becomes our country when there’s fightin’ to be done, he said, with a smile that went as deep as his teeth. Anyway, I gets confused these days. Is it the country we’re still fightin’ for? Or is it the niggers."

Do you not think slavery is evil, then?

There are many evil things in the world. But I don’t remember Abe Lincoln come hallooin’ about with half a million men when all of Connaught was starvin’ to death in its cabins.

Do you mean to stop the draft? I asked him straight out.

He gave a short shrug, and stared at me more intently than ever, as if he didn’t quite understand the question.

But it don’t matter what I want to do.

Is that what you’re telling those men? I asked him, gesturing over at his clientele, the fire laddies sullenly nursing their drinks.

Finn only shrugged again. The grin gone, but a slight frown along his forehead now, as if he were trying to explain something to an exceptionally dull child.

You go ahead an’ see, he said. You go an’ draft the men who put out the fires in this town. Honest workingmen, what never wanted a thing from this life but to raise their families an’ love their wives.

He was well into his campaign speech by now, I knew, but there was something in what he was saying that chilled me to the bone nonetheless.

You go ahead an’ ship good Irishmen south like so many niggers, while their wives an’ families have to beg the relief agency for money to eat. You just start that drum rollin’ again on Monday morning an’ you see what happens.

He nodded curtly, then went back to his rounds, moving away as abruptly as he had appeared. I decided it was time to take my own leave, making sure to leave a healthy tip for the female behemoth behind the bar.

Once outside I walked immediately over to the dockside—even leaning out over the water. There, deep below the shifting currents, I could see the remains of an ancient ship. There was little enough of it left—a couple of broken spars, a few planks of its bulwark visible along the shallow, silted bottom. The name, in gold-painted letters—"JERSEY"—just barely illuminated by the lanterns from the ships riding at anchor beside it and the lights from the dockside bars. One of the ancient British prison ships from the Revolution, left to slowly fall apart and sink into the harbor.

Thousands of men died on such ships, chained in the holds for years, allowed up for exercise only at night. Never seeing the sun before they perished from starvation, or the fevers. A typical, diabolical British punishment. Taking men who claimed to fight for freedom—some great, glorious, abstract notion of freedom—and putting them to the test. Making sure they would never again have the simple freedom of standing outside on a brilliant day.

I had seen the Jersey many times before, though. My real attention was focused on the door of The Sailor’s Rest. As I watched from the corner of my eye, a huge, hulking shape ambled slowly outside and pretended to light up a pipe. Someone meant for me?

Yet even as I watched him, I glimpsed another figure—one rising noiselessly from where he had hidden himself in a pile of old rope and crates. He came straight for me, making the blood freeze in my veins. Some desperate rummy or thief who had spotted my suit, or my watch fob, and my unsteady gait.

The hulking figure by the door was on him as quick as a dog upon a snake, slung shot in hand, moving with extraordinary speed and silence for such a big man. He seized my would-be assailant by the neck, giving him a single sharp blow. The man fell at his feet with a low moan—my protector lifting him up immediately, dumping him into the black river where he sank with a small splash, barely audible in the night. Then he moved back against the wall, watching me again, no longer bothering to fiddle with his pipe.

I knew then that Finn McCool wasn’t trying to find out anything at all. Rather, that he was trying to deliver a message, had even provided protection to make sure I got safely off the docks with it.

Like all cowardly criminals, they’re trying to set up an alibi for themselves in advance.

Later that same Saturday night I stopped in at 300 Mulberry Street, the police headquarters, to see Superintendent John Kennedy, chief of the Metropolitan police. He only nodded, head down, making another notation at his desk when I told him all that I had seen and heard. Still working away vigorously although it was the early hours of Sunday morning by then. He dismissed the whole idea that the mob was beyond the control of Tammany, or Mozart Hall, or all of the endless layers of demagogues and scoundrels in this City.

The big fish have swum away, so no one can blame them. McCool would have us believe the mob is beyond his control—but I’d wager good money he’s only taking orders from afar. Maybe even Richmond!

John Kennedy is one of those brisk, efficient Irishmen, a testament to what the race might do if they could only stay away from the drink. His uniform as neat and pressed as McClellan’s itself, his white beard trimmed close to the chin.

I understand the Black Joke lost thirty men to the draft. Including their captain, I told him.

Yes, I’ve heard that. Kennedy nodded again, barely bothering to look up.

They’re all up in arms, I went on, ticking off all the murmurs of revolt I had heard among the fire companies. Also the Shad Belly, and the Dry Bones. Even the Big Six is supposed to be ready to go on the warpath, though I can’t imagine Tweed would allow them to get mixed up in anything.

Yes, I know. The fire laddies all want to be exempted from having to serve in the militia again, Kennedy acknowledged drily, unsurprised. "They all want it back the way it used to be, before the war. But where would we be then, if we gave them the old exemption? Nearly every young man worth his salt is a volunteer fireman in this town. Who would do the fighting for us?"

There was another brisk shuffle of papers. The sheer masculinity and vigor of such men as Kennedy is overpowering. Skin as pink as a pig’s, chin cut sharper than a clipper’s bow. He seemed to me Father Christmas and an Old Testament prophet all rolled into one—ready, alert, faintly amused. The sort of captain one might have trusted with the defense of a city, in medieval times.

Nothing to worry about! he assured me. They should have made their move on Friday, when the mob was already out.

In the amber glow of the gas lamps, men bustled impressively in and out of his office, bringing endless dispatches and telegrams. Kennedy perused them all, jotting his notes on each one before passing it over to another subordinate. His lieutenants were as neat and well-groomed as their chief, collars buttoned up to their throats despite the wilting heat.

Now it’s too late, he went on. We’re ready for them. I’ve canceled all leaves, called in every man I have. They know better than to try anything, now that we’re prepared.

Together with Commissioner Acton, Kennedy has made the City’s police as honest, as reliable and efficient a force as we have ever had in the City. His Metropolitans were created by the state legislature just six years ago, a last desperate effort to do something about Mayor Wood’s corrupt old Municipals, who had reached a new nadir of depravity. Fernandy Wood refused to yield, of course, standing on high, constitutional principles—not to mention the bribes that were the lifeblood of his administration.

A judge then sent the Metropolitans to arrest him—the mayor of the City—and before the whole thing was resolved, our rival police departments, Metropolitans and Municipals, actually got into a fight on the steps of City Hall. Burly, uniformed policemen, wrestling and punching and gouging at each other’s eyes, right out in broad daylight. If the Seventh Regiment hadn’t happened by and broken it up, they might all have killed each other. Has any city, down to ancient Rome with its gladiators, ever offered its citizens the spectacles that New York does on a daily basis?

Since then, though, Kennedy has cleaned out the deadwood, whipped his police into shape. His headquarters is more efficient than that of any division staff I saw down in Virginia. Laid out on a table in his office is a map of the entire City, with pins stuck in it indicating the locations of the police precinct houses and the draft offices; City Hall, the Sub-Treasury building down on Wall Street; the major banks and stores, the homes of leading citizens, and all the other potential targets.

"Any trouble will probably start at the provost’s office. But we also have to cover the shipyards, and the ironworks along the rivers. Then there’s the Union Steam Works here, and the State Armory there—"

He pressed a pink, clean-nailed thumb down upon the old steam works, at Twenty-second Street and the Second Avenue—important only because it was made into a munitions factory after Bull Run. Just below it on the map, at Twenty-first Street, is pinned the State Armory, where the army has ten thousand rifles stored.

"—but we’ve already got the Broadway Squad there. It will take some mob to get past them. Even if they do, we have telegraph operators at every precinct house. We can rush men to any trouble spot, anywhere in the City, within minutes!"

There was no reason to doubt his system. Yet I couldn’t help noticing how many pins there were in his map. A whole City, the greatest in the Americas, to be held by his twenty-three hundred Metropolitan officers.

How many men can General Wool let you have? I asked him about the City’s army commander.

Kennedy frowned a little at this, but stood up straighter than ever.

Not many. Mead stripped the City of every man he could for Gettysburg. Maybe fifteen hundred, at most, and a lot of them Invalids.

He tried to reassure me again as he showed me out, squeezing my arm and balling his other hand into a confident fist.

There is no cause for alarm. The important thing is to stay on top of them! Give it to them good and hard before they get started!

We passed on out through the headquarters, back to the streets and the usual chaos of a Saturday night in our City. As we went through the station house, though, I noticed what any sentient New Yorker does every day—that all of the men policing his City are Irish. Great big bruisers, to be sure, even their long mustaches bristling aggressively. Polite and well-groomed, a trim-looking fighting force if there ever was one. They even have to pass a literacy test now.

Yet they are all Irish, all the same, right up through their captains and commanders, and Kennedy himself.

We cannot do without them. But if there is real trouble, what will they do? Can we rely on them—if it means putting down their friends and neighbors?

Or is the enemy already inside the gates?

ding1 • 4 • ding2

RUTH

Seven o’clock.

The block was nearly silent. Usually by this time of the morning there would be a small riot outside her door. The street teeming with men and women joking and jostling each other on their way to work. The shopkeepers and vendors making their long, singsong pitches.

But today none of the little shops across the street was opening up. Their doors and windows were still shut, though Ruth could make out shadowy movements behind some of them. Their owners were still inside, she knew, watching and waiting. When anyone did move down the street, they walked with quick, jerky movements, heads pivoting as if to see what might be coming after them.

The back lot was just as quiet. She peeked out there—Just to be sure, just to make certain he wasn’t coming that way. Usually, by this time, there would be a commotion there, too, as whole families made their way down and out to the stinking back privvies. But there was nothing now.

She peered past the privvy shacks, at the back of the tenements on the next block, where the Jews lived. They were a family named Mendelssohn, a glazier and his wife, and their three daughters. She knew them a little, mostly from fetching water at the pump or exchanging nods with the woman when they were both hanging their laundry on their roofs, above the reeking gulf of the back-lot outhouses. All of them murphys, they wouldn’t take a drink between them. The eldest daughter dark and beautiful of face but lame, walking with a cautious, lurching tread. Sometimes Ruth would stand by the back door on Friday nights and listen to the strange songs and chants coming from their kitchen, spy the candlelight dancing through their windows.

The Jews are a mark upon us, Deirdre liked to fret, but around the pump in the morning, the women were divided. Some said they were indeed a mark, and a bad element, but others felt they might be good luck, at least if one knew how to use it.

Have ye touched the oldest one’s leg?

"No, it’s the hair you got to touch, to get the luck. Otherwise it’s no good."

No, it’s the leg, of course, that’s where she was smote—

They would argue on and on—and find ways to sidle up to her, to run a hand along the Mendelssohn daughter’s head or her hip when she was in the pump line, thinking she wouldn’t notice. Ruth thought that she did, that she could see her eyes go wide and her body stiffen whenever she felt their hands grasping at her. Yet she had never noticed that anyone along Paradise Alley had much luck, no matter where they contrived to touch the Jew girl.

She saw no one—but now she could hear the noise again, rising up from all around her. The same marching sound she had heard before. The low, ominous murmur of men’s voices and the tramp of their feet, as if all the City were on the move.

The mob was out.

At least they weren’t stopping yet. Still moving uptown, past them, God’s mercy for that.

Billy was still uptown, at the Colored Orphans’ Asylum at Forty-third Street and the Fifth Avenue. He would be trapped up there, she realized with a jolt, unless he was already swinging back down the Bowery. She tried to picture him—moving warily but fast, his pay in his pocket. They could be out of the City before anything even got started—

No. She forced herself to face the truth of the situation. It was no good to do otherwise, she had learned that if she had learned nothing else in this life. Better Billy go to ground, and be safe, if the mob was really out. Even if he got back in the next few minutes, it still wouldn’t be a smart idea to head out on the streets now.

Ruth ran her eyes over their possessions, waiting by the door. All her thoughts of how free she would feel, how relieved once they got on the ferry, dissipating instantly. Instead, she forced herself to think about what they had, here and now, and what they would need.

There was enough food to last a few days, she had seen to that for their travels. What else, what else? Water. They were nearly out; she hadn’t sent Milton to the pump last night, figuring they would be gone. There was no help for it now, she would have to go out. She took a deep breath, picked up the two buckets by the door.

She looked in on the children again in their room, thinking she would simply lock them in while she walked to the pump in the square. But Milton, her oldest, was already up. He smiled sheepishly at her from the bed where he lay, reading his book. Looking serious at once when he saw her face, listening with her to the growing noise outside.

What is it? he asked, and she had to smile despite her worry, just to look at him.

Her boy. Her firstborn. Always so quick to understand, to sympathize.

Nothin’ to fret yourself about, she told him, as easily as she could. Just some men about—

Are we goin’ still?

Well, I don’t know now. Not right away, at least.

It had been impossible to keep their preparations from him, the boy was too alert for that. They had not told him why, at least. She had never told him much of anything about her life before his father. It was not so much to spare his feelings as she was ashamed to have him think of her like that, the way she had been, when she had lived with Johnny Dolan.

Where’s Da? he asked.

Up with his orphans—

He looked a little relieved, she was sorry to see. Billy was always too hard on the boy. He never liked him reading so much, even though it was he who had insisted on sending Milton to the free schools for as long as he could go. He wanted him up fresh and well rested when he went out to help him on a job.

You’re no good to me like that, he would harry the boy, especially when he was in his more sour, hungover moods. You get up from that bed, you come in to wash, get your breakfast, first thing you do.

But there was no stopping him. Milton reached for a book when he woke up in the morning, he read after supper until he fell asleep before the coal fire in the grate. He would rather read than sleep, or eat, and she tried to puzzle out what he was at now. Once it had been patriotic histories of the nation, books such as The Life of Washington, with the picture of the fine man on the white horse.

These days, though, it was a different kind—adventure stories of some sort. She read the title slowly out loud, sounding out the letters—"The-Green-Aven-ger-of-the-Fields." Knowing he would like that, and indeed he beamed at her, a great, delighted child’s smile.

Sweet, sweet boy, as sweet as the berry—

She forgot sometimes how young he still was. Dark-eyed child, with his big book, sneaking a look back at its pages even now. It was he who had taught her what reading she knew. Nearly fourteen, still without so much as fuzz on his smooth, almond-shaped cheeks but so serious at times that he seemed much older. His body already as taut and muscled as a man’s, from the full day’s work he put in whenever his father could find it for him. Taller than

Reviews for Paradise Alley

[maryreinert · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The details of life in NYC during this time are amazing - one can almost smell the air (thankfully, we can't). After seeing "Gangs of New York" I was impressed with how the details from the book and the details in movie held true. Baker has done a marvelous job of creating characters who are from different backgrounds and putting them into circumstances beyond their control. The short chapters told from the different view points is particularly effective. Anyone who loves NYC should read this book.

[rochellejewelshapiro · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

How did Kevin Baker manage to weave all that research on the Civil War, the famine in Ireland, slavery, the draft riots in the Five Points in Mew York City and seven voices into such a powerful and urgent tale of love, loss, what it means to be free vs. enslaved, redemption and revenge? The language is poetry really. "The city is a picked skull, but the maggots are still in the streets." I'm so sorry I finished it, because I'm afraid I'll never find a book I love as much. This is, I think, a masterpiece, and should rank with Grapes of Wrath. I hope this review helps to keep it alive with readers.

[chucknorton · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Baker provides a richly detailed and harrowing account of the New York City draft riots of 1863, told through the fictional lives of Irish immigrants, an escaped slave and a jaded journalist. With his customary attention to historical accuracy and his ear for dialect, this novel creates a world that is both fascinating and horrifying- and true to one of the most dramatic and searing episodes in American history.

[gairid · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

'Paradise Alley' is a fascinating glimpse into American History and the evolution of New York City. Mr. Baker has a way with description that goes above and beyond most writers of historical novels; 'Paradise Alley' paints a picture of American life in New York City and the politics therein, the trenches of the battlefields of the Civil War, the origins of the FDNY and the desperate landscape of the terrible potato famine 1846-1848 in Ireland. The telling of the tale of the Draft Riots is daunting indeed; Kevin Baker brings that time vibrantly and hauntingly alive by showing us the events through the eyes of people that very well could have lived through it.

[pghdragonman · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Chronologically, this book predates Baker's previous book about early New York City, "Dreamland". This time the action takes place in Civil War era New York City and leads up to one of the greatest urban riots, the New Your Draft Riot. Baker highlights the early Irish immigrant population of the City, the influx of African Americans, some freed people and others escaped slaves and the interactions of these two groups.Baker once again shows us the ugly underside of this often romanticized City and probes the history of prejudice and race relations in America. Fascinating in its own right as a story, it also leave you wondering just how far we've come in accepting one another.

[jeffrey414 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Paradise Alley is a particularly disturbing chapter in American history not unlike civil unrest around the world and genocides in Africa. Kevin Baker's tale takes place near the end of the Civil War. I was unaware and uneducated on this sordid tale of our own history. Another chink in my particularly ignorant personal ethnocentrism thanks to the watered down social studies curriculum in the public schools. From another reviewer, "It was one of the ugliest moments in American history and chances are very good you never heard of it, no matter how well you paid attention in high school history class." I enjoyed this story of early times in Manhattan although the story could have been about any city from that time as unrecognizable as New York City was to me in this novel. The filth and depravity were as real thought "Angela's Ashes" by Frank McCourt was depressing. This story of man's inhumanity to man was both shocking and eye-opening. I could sense Johnny Dolan coming around the corner and feel the slime in the streets and the foul scents in the air from Baker's writing which almost brought them to life. And as our current returning President, Ron Eaton, often reminds us, some times fiction has more fact than non-fiction!

[jamie638 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is an excellent historical novel which is set at the time of the infamous draft riots that took place ten days after the battle of Gettysburg in NYC. Several things I learned after reading this book were: the enormous level of racism and pro-Southern sentiment that existed in NYC at the time, the appalling living conditions of the poor, and how the city was almost destoyed by the violence.