A Seaman Remembers South Street 100 Years Ago by Peter Copeland
With their extraordinary vitality and be-damned-to-you-sir style, these drawings are a living memory of the world the Bridge was born into. Read on, in the artist's own account, to see where his feeling for the people who thronged the streets and still-surviving old brick buildings comes from. I was born down on the East Side, in St. Mark's Place, and grew up, in the 'thirties, over near the East River, in the old Gas House district. One of the heroes of my youth was a bearded old wino of the neighborhood named John Wilson. He was a Scotsman, and he fascinated us kids with wonderful tales about his years at sea as a steward in English ships. He told us about the old-time river pirates of Corlears Hook in the New York he visited as a boy. I suppose it was John Wilson's influence that sent me to sea in 1944. I shipped mostly out of New York for the next twelve years, and used to dock up a lot at the United Fruit Company's docks in Rector Street when I was in the Fruit Company ships. It was aboard the Comayagua of the great white fleet that I got to know Whitey Hardwick, a banana boat stiff from Hamburg, who told me about an association of old South Street sailors that still existed in the late 'forties. These old birds spent all their time ashore south of Fourteenth Street, vowing never to go north of Union Square except to ship out. These were some of the men who remembered the Street of Ships of the late nineteenth century. The last of these men that I have heard of was John McCarthy, a former oiler and electrician , who died while boarding at Meyers Hotel as a retired seaman in 1978 or '79. In 1960 I quit the sea for a while and was trying to make it as a free lance commercial artist in New York. I rented studio space in a building that used to stand on Fulton Street, where the Titanic light (from the old Dog House) is now-a former seafood restaurant and sailors' mission . It was then that I got to know the Paris Bar, McCormack's and Carmines, when those places still had sawdust on the floor and catered to a clientele who worked at the Fulton Fish Market. As a kid aboard the ships thirty-odd years ago I used to visit the old Union Bar and the Imperial , both on South Street. Though ships no longer docked up on South Street very often, these bars were still popular with seamen waiting for the boats of the Liberty Launch Service which ferried them out to ships anchored beyond Liberty Flats.
Above, an Old Time Sailors' Dance House of 1855. Some of the meaner Water Street dance houses were moldy cellars with whitewashed walls where the dancing was accompanied by a lone fiddler. The place shown here, larger than some, had a bar and tables in the front room and a dance hall in a larger room in the back. "In Water Street, under the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge," a chronicler of the time tells us, "every corner had its bagnio." The landlord, we are told, was a "brutal bully," and the girls ofthe house were adept at robbery and even murder. Among the more popular of these Water Street hell holes were Anne Sank's Dance House, Kit Burns ' Rat Pit and Dance House, and John Allen 's famed Dance House which boasted a string orchestra.
At right, Robert Sutton's " Darby and Joan" Tavern, 24 Roosevelt Street , 1845. Robert Sutton , an ex pugilist, part-time thiefand river pirate, kept this notorious waterfront dive in the 1840s. The National Police Gazette mentioned this tavern as one of the more infamous establishments in New York City in 1845. Some of the roughest ofthe dockside saloons and dance houses were located near the corner of Roosevelt and Water Streets, including Liverpool Mag 's and Louise Lang 's Dance House.
SEA HIS1DRY, SUMMER 1983