Gangsterland
A Tour Through the Dark Heart of Jazz-Age New York City
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
WELCOME TO JAZZ-AGE MANHATTAN’S KALEIDOSCOPIC UNDERWORLD.
A site by site, crime by crime, outlaw by outlaw walking
tour through the seedy underbelly of Roaring Twenties Manhattan—where gamblers
and gangsters, crooks and cops, showgirls and speakeasies ruled the day and,
always, the night.
In Gangsterland, historian David Pietrusza tours the Big
Apple’s rotten core. The Roaring Twenties blaze and sparkle with Times Square’s
bright lights and showgirls, but its dark shadows mask a web of notorious
gangsters ruling New York City. At the heart of this wickedness nests a “Prince
of Darkness,” Arnold Rothstein, the kingpin most noted for fixing baseball’s
infamous 1919 World Series, who also bankrolled high-stakes gambling dens,
speakeasies, trigger-happy bootleggers, and even a record setting Broadway
show.
Sharing center stage are con artists Nicky Arnstein and “Dapper
Don” Collins; crooked cop Lt. Charles Becker; politicians Mayor “Gentleman Jimmy”
Walker and “Big Tim” Sullivan; master drug smugglers George Uffner and Sidney Stajer;
murderous racketeers Lucky Luciano and Legs Diamon; show biz legends Flo
Ziegfeld, Fanny Brice, and Texas Guinan; and many more. As Pietrusza prowls
city boulevards and back alleys, exposing Tammany Hall, sports, Broadway, and
Wall Street, jewels are fenced, bullets fly, and unmarked bills buy bribes and silence.
Readers get up close and personal with this rogues’ gallery
but better check their wallets before they leave.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Pietrusza (Roosevelt Sweeps Nation) tours 1920s New York City's tawdriest neighborhoods in this comprehensive survey of the stomping grounds of mobsters, bootleggers, and murderers-for-hire. At the center of the story is gambler and mob kingpin Arnold Rothstein, best known for helping to fix Major League Baseball's 1919 World Series, who had a hand in a wide range of rackets throughout the city. Other characters include Tammany Hall operatives such as "Big" Tim Sullivan, featherweight boxing champion Abe Attell, and Fanny Brice, the "Funny Girl" of the Ziegfeld Follies. Pietrusza catalogs and maps out 189 sites of infamy in Manhattan, including Rothstein's gambling house on West 46th Street, madam-to-the-stars Polly Adler's brothel on West 54th Street, and the Park Crescent Hotel on West 87th Street, the site of a 1929 drug bust that netted more than $1 million in cocaine and opium. This encyclopedic account, broken up into bite-size sections, amounts to a roll call of Jazz Age New York's rich and infamous, couched within a tour of the underworld hot spots where they lived and died. ("Few of the characters we meet here end well. Fewer deserve to," Pietrusza writes.) N.Y.C. history buffs should take note. Photos.
