The Morning Job Call That Decided Who Ate in New York

Three men died on the floor of a Brooklyn social club on Christmas night in 1925, and the fight had nothing to do with the dancing. It was about who got to point at men outside a pier shed at six the next morning. This is the story of the Irish and Italian gang wars in New York, told through the thing they were actually fighting over. It starts with the shape-up, the hiring system that decided which families on which blocks ate that week, and it runs from the Five Points and the Dead Rabbits riot of 1857, through Tammany Hall and the political clubs of Paul Kelly and Monk Eastman, to the Brooklyn waterfront and the White Hand Gang. Along the way there is Dinny Meehan shot in his own bed on Warren Street, Bill Lovett trying to buy his way out to New Jersey, Peg Leg Lonergan walking into the Adonis Social Club, and Anna Lonergan burying a husband, a brother and a second husband over the same mile of piers. What the war left behind was not a winner. It was a map, and if your family came up in those neighborhoods, you already know it by heart. Main sources: Wikipedia entries on the White Hand Gang, Dinny Meehan, Bill Lovett and Richard Lonergan; the National Park Service's oral history work on the shape-up, drawing on Charles Larrowe's Shape-up and Hiring Hall (1955); Untapped New York and the Warfare History Network on the Battle of Rivington Street; LESPI-NYC and WNET Thirteen on Mulberry Bend and Italian settlement; the Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor on the loading rackets.