Background and Commentary: Bowery Boys Gang
The Bowery Boys, based in the Bowery neighborhood of Manhattan during the early to mid-19th century, were many things: volunteer firemen butchers, mechanics, tradesmen and other upstanding citizens. However, above all, they were one of the most infamous gangs in the history of the City which - from saloon murders to street brawls to the infamous New York Draft Riots - embodied the bloody history of antebellum New York.

Moreover, while the Bowery Boys thus followed many walks of life, perhaps the most important thing to them was that they were New York born and bred! As far as they were concerned, people who didn’t meet these criteria were not worth associating with, much less had any claim to the City or even a right to be there. They also felt the same about America on the whole. Thus, when in 1855 immigrants began pouring into the Emigrant Landing Depot in Castle Garden, New York’s first immigration processing station, the Bowery Boys were there to ‘greet them’. Additionally, beyond being anti-immigrant in general, the gang also was anti-Catholic in particular.

Many of the Bowery Boys kept their working-class jobs while still engaging in gang activity, especially amongst the ranks of volunteer firefighters, a fact that rival gangs sometimes exploited. Thus, their  archrivals, the Dead Rabbits, would set fires to draw the B’hoys out and catch them off guard.

This kind of fighting made legends of men like Bowery Boys founder William “Bill the Butcher” Poole. For most of his adult life, Poole worked by day in his family’s butcher shop. By night, he would brawl in the streets taking on rival gang members to wreak havoc across the city. A sworn enemy of the largely Irish-immigrant Dead Rabbits gang, Poole lifelong entertained a personal animosity against their leader John Morrissey... Until, in 1855, gunmen allied with Morrissey shot Poole dead in a saloon and ended his reign over the New York underworld. According to The New York Times, Poole used his dying breaths to say, “I think I am a goner. If I die, I die a true American; and what grieves me most is, thinking that I’ve been murdered by a set of Irish – by Morrissey in particular.”

Alongside Poole, Mike Walsh was another one of the gang’s most recognizable faces. However, Walsh wasn’t as fully immersed in the underworld as Poole had been. Instead, he went into politics, winning seats first the New York State Assembly and subsequently the U.S. Congress. While in office, Walsh fought to ameliorate conditions in the New York slums from where the Bowery Boys emerged.

In keeping with the idea that the Bowery Boys and their ilk could be respectable members of society, Walsh opened a political clubhouse he called the “Spartan Association.” Consisting mostly of working-class laborers, the group was intended to make political leaders take notice of the hardships of the poor, leaving Walsh considered a “champion of the poor man’s rights.”

Consistent with the aim of respectability, Bowery Boys’ culture placed particular importance on appearance, fashion and demeaner. B'hoys, dressed for flair, but also convenience, often in a stovepipe hat, red shirt, dandy waistcoat and dark trousers. Always they walked and posed with swagger. As author James Dabney McCabe in 1872 observed of the Bowery B'hoy:

“You might see him ‘strutting along like a king’ with his breeches stuck in his boots, his coat on his arm, his flaming red shirt tied at the collar with a cravat such as could be seen nowhere else... None so ready as he for a fight, none so quick to resent the intrusion of a respectable man into his haunts.”

   

 

The Bowery Boys also made a name for themselves in the world of theatre. The gang often attended performances together in the theaters surrounding their wards around the Bowery. Richard Butsch in his “The Making Of American Audiences” notes, "they brought the street into the theater, rather than shaping the theater into an arena of the public sphere".  The Bowery Theatre in particular was a favorite for them. Built in 1826, it soon became a theater for the working man. Walt Whitman described it as "packed from ceiling to pit with its audience, mainly of alert, well-dressed, full-blooded young and middle aged men, the best average of American-born mechanics"... And,  in around 1840, where he could look up to the first tier of boxes and see ‘the faces of the leading authors, poets, editors, of those times,’ while he sat in the pit surrounded by the ‘slang, wit, occasional shirt sleeves, and a picturesque freedom of looks and manners, with a rude, good-nature and restless movement’ of cartmen, butchers, firemen, and mechanics.

Rowdy Bowery B'hoy audiences mostly sat in the theater's pit, and often requested that songs, dances, and scenes be repeated multiple times. Or they added impromptu to the performance,  even taking over the stage and participating in the drama .  Bowery B'hoys also threw food and booed or hissed performers they didn't enjoy. 

It wasn’t uncommon for men to drink, smoke, and meet with prostitutes in the theater. The Bowery Boys dominated the theater in the early 19th century and theater was considered a "male club". To whatever extent the Bowery Boys maintained an air of civility outside theater doors, inside the theater they felt safe to participate in a host of depravities.

However, the Bowery Boys’ culture of community-minded civility, even beyond theater doors, ended quickly when Walsh died in 1859. With the poor man’s champion gone, the gang was looking for a new leader to follow in his giant footsteps. In 1863, with Congress working on new laws to conscript large numbers of men to fight for the Union in the American Civil War, all the more important became this search. Many of the draft’s targets were among the poor and immigrants like those from New York’s slums. Notably, the draft targeted the Bowery Boys’ main rivals.

On July 13, 1863, as the draft went into effect, the Bowery Boys’ rivals began rioting in lower Manhattan against the draft. Thus, the B’hoys decided to get in on the fight and take advantage of their rivals’ distraction. They stormed the Five Points neighborhood where so many of their rivals lived, began looting and pillaging shops and markets, fighting with locals, and tearing the slum apart. The New York Draft Riots continued for three chaotic days. The police, called in to stop the violence, only ended up being drawn into it themselves. This bloody fighting ultimately was the deadliest rioting in American history.

With this, the Bowery Boys made their biggest impact on history. However, by the end-1860s, the gang had met their end and the Five Points neighborhood, house-by-house, was torn down. Although the Bowery Boys ultimately disbanded, their legacy as one of the most infamous gangs of old New York lives on to this day.