The vicissitudes of Jewish immigrant life in New York City around the turn of the century were far more startling than is commonly suspected. SAMUEL S. COHEN tells here of but one episode of a chequered youth through which, apparently, he passed unscathed—how around 1897 he became the “supervisor of a recreational enterprise,” as he was later to describe his period of poolroom proprietorship on an employment application blank. The present sketch forms a chapter in a book of reminiscences of New York life in the 1880’s and 1890’s that Mr. Cohen is still working on.
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In one of the “shops” I worked in at the start of the 90’s I made a real friend, a boy named Brody, who had actually been born in America. For days I could not get over the wonder of this. Brody introduced Izzy, Jack, and me to many American institutions: baseball, the penny arcades, the uptown theaters where only English was to be heard on the stage, and swimming in the East River. He also taught us to play pool.
We never became very good at the game, but it furnished a few hours’ pastime at the end of the week, after dinner, and before our various meetings started, and they always started hours late. On Friday nights when either Jack or I had any money we would go to the large poolroom in Irving Hall, a building on 14th Street and Irving Place where the progressive Tammanyites held forth. The hall had been opened originally by and for the “higher-type” Germans, who eventually had had to retreat uptown.
A Mr. Lemon, the Irish owner of this particular poolroom, after several years could hardly help being aware of our existence, even though we never became his most profitable customers. He would often point us out to other customers, within our hearing, and comment on our model behavior. For years we had been coming in, always sober, playing an hour or two, paying for our games, and leaving without ever arguing or creating any disturbance. No poolroom proprietor could ask for more than that. We began to feel like prized customers, and we were tremendously flattered whenever he referred to us as “the young gentlemen.”
One day he took us aside and told us in a confidential tone, “You probably don’t realize what a profitable business this is. There’s a good deal of money to be earned here if you can make the investment. Would either of you young gentlemen be interested in opening up a poolroom?”
“We have no money,” I told him quite simply. But this did not seem to faze him.
“Well, think about it—it might be worth your while.”
“You want competition?” Jack asked.
“I was thinking about down on the Bowery,” he told us. “With as many poolrooms as the Bowery has, it can accommodate another one very easily. And all of them will keep doing very well.”
“We wouldn’t know how to run a pool-room,” I told him, “even if we had the money.”
“Don’t worry so much. I’ll become equal partners with you. And I’ll teach you two young gentlemen the business and then you can run it yourselves. All both of you together need,” he concluded nonchalantly, “is five hundred dollars, and I’ll match it.”
Although at the moment I had something like twenty cents to my name, I saw what looked like my one opportunity to get out of the clothing business, which I still despised as much as ever. I made up my mind to start saving regularly. I stopped fighting with bosses and stopped quitting jobs, and I became a steadier worker. But getting this amount of money together was still no quick or easy matter. Not only was my salary seldom over ten dollars a week, but there would be weeks when I was the only one working and bringing home money, and in addition it was hard to turn down requests for needy causes. But I tried to restrain myself, and to help me in that respect, I opened up my first bank account.
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It took two years, and finally Jack and I had the necessary five hundred dollars, most of which was mine because Jack was more of a ladies’ man and had trouble saving. As soon as Mr. Lemon found a suitable room to rent I quit my job, but Jack kept his and we planned for him to help out evenings and weekends. The room was a very long one, extending from Christie Street to the Bowery, with windows also in back on Chrystie Hall. It could hold fifteen pool tables, which Jack and I learned to our amazement were very expensive. Although we bought these on the installment plan it was still necessary to use the whole capital of a thousand dollars, which was about ten times more of an investment than a tailor needed to start a “shop” of his own, and with everything fully paid for, too.
We cleaned the place out, bought chairs, cues, balls, clothes-trees, whisk brooms, and spittoons, and had a sign painted with the name: The Othello Poolroom, Props. S. Cohen and J. Rubenfeld. Jack would have preferred another name but remembered that most of the investment was mine, and when Mr. Lemon came over to help us on opening night he pretended not to notice. In fact, he never did refer to our name.
Our grand opening was a huge success, and once started, our prosperity continued. We took in more money than we ever dreamed we could. I divided the profits with Mr. Lemon and paid Jack his share.
Of course it was very hard work and the hours were long. Although I didn’t start at seven in the morning as I had done in the clothing factories, we kept open until one in the morning, and were open every day, even on Sundays. Jack and I worked on Saturdays for the first time in our lives, and holidays meant nothing. But I was so happy to be doing that well, and to have no boss over me—in fact, to be out of the clothing trade altogether, which was my one ambition in life—that I never minded having little time off. I did manage to attend a few theater matinés, but that was all. My family moved from our old Staunton Street apartment to a much finer one on Delancey Street, to become “fancy Delanceys,” and although I had no opportunity to spend all the money I was earning, it gave me great pleasure to earn it.
After a few months Mr. Lemon announced that it was really he who had been the business brains behind the enterprise. He informed us that he would give us back the five-hundred-dollar investment, plus a hundred dollars’ profit, we could keep the profits which had already been divided up, and we could drop out.
“Why did you want us in the first place?” Jack asked.
“Frankly,” he confessed, after much hedging about, “I had enough money to open the poolroom by myself, but I never dreamed it would go over this big. I figured that with you two in it, I wouldn’t have to risk the entire amount.”
“We’re staying,” I told him, “and you can get out.”
Mr. Lemon forgot for the moment that we were young gentlemen. “I’m the originator of this business and I’m going to stay in it. You’re only poor, stinking tailors. You never made more than ten dollars a week in your life in the shops and here you made more than twenty-five. You should consider yourself lucky to get a hundred dollars’ profit.”
“Ill give you the hundred,” I told him, “and you can get out.”
“I’ll give you two-fifty,” he offered.
“I can give you two-fifty,” I replied, wondering where I’d get it, plus his original five hundred investment.
He finally offered us five hundred dollars’ profit plus the five hundred investment, but now I kept still. “I can’t offer you that,” I admitted, “but I’m still not going to give up the business. What are you going to do about it?”
After many days of this we finally agreed to let an impartial body arbitrate the matter. We each picked one man, and these two men picked a third. They decided in Jack’s and my favor: that we were to return Lemon’s investment, plus two hundred and fifty dollars’ profit, and he would get out.
This was obviously such a good business that Jack borrowed money from all his relatives, and some from me, and we paid Lemon off. Jack quit his job, for I needed his full-time help now.
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Our most notable customer was B. T. (“Big Tim”) Sullivan, the Tammany leader, and he was not above spending a lot of his time at our place. There wasn’t a bar or poolroom, a theater or restaurant or brothel on the Bowery where he wasn’t well known. He knew absolutely everyone’s name and business and was ideally suited for the assignment Tammany had given him—to “take charge” below 14th Street and bring the Bowery into the Tammany machine. This he eventually did, and most successfully.
B. T. had been born in an East Side tenement. He knew lower New York and could converse equally well with the Irish and Jews and Italians. Every time he came to our place he made it a point to speak to every person in the hall whether he knew him or not. He would find out all he could about him, give him a sales talk on the glories of Tammany, then buy him a drink, or send him a bag of coal with Tammany’s compliments, especially just before election time when he and his hustlers were after all our customers to vote half a dozen times.
Tammany was very briefly out of power during our poolroom days, when a reform mayor was voted into office. The boys didn’t have as much money as they would have liked and they worked doubly hard to make friends. Even so, there was plenty of money for pool, liquor, and other vices during Election Week.
My father was still not having too much luck finding work and he lost no time in opening a cigar and soda water stand in a corner of the poolroom. He had never been in such a place before and he was at first quite bewildered by the looks and ways of our clientele. They did not much resemble the people he met in the clothing trade or in the synagogue, and there was seldom a Jewish face in the place except for Jack’s and mine, and an occasional Socialist friend who dropped in to joke with us about the entrepreneur’s future doom in the classless society.
Another celebrity was Jack Connor, a prominent gangster, and we had many prize fighters too, but whatever our patrons looked or sounded or acted like (and I had to remind Papa that he looked as queer to them as they did to him), they all smoked a good deal and drank considerable quantities of soda water when they didn’t have enough to go next door for liquor, or when they were recovering from a hangover. Papa also fared very well, and he couldn’t stop commenting on the habit the really big shots had of waving away their change. This was the closest he had ever come to finding gold on the streets in America.
My younger brother Morris was attending City College at this time and he helped Papa out after school and during weekends, for of course Papa never came in on Shabbes. Sometimes Morris helped me brush off the tables at night, but generally we didn’t bother him, for it was more trouble to pry him away from a book than to do something ourselves. The customers used to tease him about his constant reading and they would apologize in the most elaborate manner for disturbing him in order to buy something.
Jack and I had never been good players, which poolroom owners traditionally are. Newcomers would come in, hang up their hats, and shout, “Owner!” Jack and I would look at each other weakly and take turns answering and playing a game. They generally did not call for us a second time.
Sometimes honest workingmen would come in to play after work, and we much preferred them, but we had no choice in the matter. For the most part our patrons were boxers, gamblers, politicians, and thieves. The Bowery poolrooms and saloons were the official hangouts of these gentry, certain groups congregating in certain ones. The saloons were even more notorious.
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Steve Brodie’s saloon was catty-corner from our poolroom, not far from the pawnshop of Isaac Meyer, who claimed that he was the one who had suggested that Brodie jump from the Brooklyn Bridge in order to become famous. He had indeed become so, and there was even a figure of him in one of our wax museums, but none of us on the block ever believed that he had actually made the jump. He would answer, when asked for a repeat performance, “I done it onct,” and that expression became famous, too. But whether we believed him or not, we would still ask anyone about to take a big chance on something, “What are you trying to do, take a Steve Brodie?” Tourists came from all over just to be able to say they’d been in Brodie’s saloon, and part of the success of the ventures on our block was due to his proximity.
But Jack and I liked to believe that we ourselves were partly responsible. Our place was clean, and that was unusual for a poolroom. We had a full-time janitor picking up after the customers all the time, for they threw tobacco wrappings, ashes and butts, racing sheets, gum, trash of all kinds everywhere except in the many trash baskets we had put out. Nor did they pay much attention to the cuspidors. The place was always so crowded it was almost impossible to clean up until after closing time, but as many times a day as the man could work his way into the crowd he would try to sweep or mop up.
One night after we’d gone home the poolroom was broken into and Papa’s entire stock of merchandise stolen, even the soda water dispenser. This was a terrible calamity but the business warranted a reinvestment and Papa replenished the stock, although from then on never buying too much in advance. He also started carrying a small satchel home with him at night that he filled with the more valuable items, particularly cigarettes.
Gradually, an even rougher element than what we already had to contend with began drifting in to play pool or carouse around without playing. When they did play they would refuse to pay. The worst part of it was that we had to fight with some of them, either to quiet them down or get them out. Often good friends, they would batde with each other, throw billiard balls and break windows, then walk out, arm in arm, to the nearest saloon.
Being hardly the type for it, I managed to sidestep this pugilism as spryly as I had kept out of the way of the police on the strike lines, but Jack was a scrapper and was always walking around with one or both eyes blackened. We very soon hired a “bouncer,” a former prize fighter named Johnson, without whose help we could not possibly have gone on. Johnson claimed to be related to a Lord Johnson in England who had deprived him of his inheritance and title, and he was always telling us how he was going to beat this man up once he’d saved enough money for passage. Fortunately for the lord, Johnson was always broke.
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Previously I had been able to take a day off every once in a while just to stay in bed and rest, but now this became impossible. We worked every day, Saturday, Sunday, even on Yom Kippur, and Jack and I could not even spell each other occasionally, for running the hall required both of us, plus the bouncer, particularly at night when we couldn’t have been busier than we were. Jack and I would try to anticipate fights and avert them by peaceful methods while Johnson, whose mere presence saved us considerable trouble, took over if one was already in progress. We had no cash register and all three of us collected cash, with Johnson turning over his to us when he felt like it.
Johnson was drunk a good deal of the time, and during one of his drunks he became involved in a loud argument with Jack. A man at the other end of the room wanted the balls set up on his table, and he knocked on the floor with his cue. To stop the quarrel I called, “Johnson, go spot the balls up.”
Although he had been quarreling with Jack, he turned on me and announced that he was going to kill me. “That Jew son of a bitch,” he growled, “isn’t going to tell me what to do!” And he walked over to a table about four tables away from me, where there were fifteen billiard balls set up in a pyramid. Johnson had also been a crack baseball pitcher.
“Sam, duck!” everybody yelled, and as Johnson threw every one of the fifteen balls at my head, I ducked fifteen times. He showed up for work as usual the next day and claimed he couldn’t remember a thing. We didn’t dare fire him or he really would have tried to kill us.
We had a select group of pickpockets and petty-larceny grafters hanging around all the time, and whenever one of them would get his hands on some money in whatever way —which was known as “making a hit”—he would come straight to the poolroom and call out, “Boys, we eat!”
They would all follow him out to Rankin’s Restaurant across the street. It happened to be a very good restaurant, though many gangs congregated there, one of which was to cause us more than considerable concern because of “the Yiddish Napoleon,” one of our customers.
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He Was a very young-looking, short, dark boy, one of our few Jewish customers, and he did look like Napoleon, of whom he claimed to be an illegitimate descendant. He belonged to one of the gangs that frequented our place, and “the Yiddish Napoleon” was only one among his many nicknames.
One day he robbed a sailor of a good deal of money. Somehow, word spread to another poolroom, whose customers were not too friendly with those who patronized the Othello, and this rival gang delegated two of its members to visit our establishment. The two came in, walked right over to this boy, and one of them said to him, “You just picked my pocket.”
The little fellow answered, “I picked your pocket? Why should I do such a thing? Look at the bunch of money I’ve got.” He took a large roll of bills out of his pocket and showed it to them. The two tried to snatch it away from him, whereupon the other boys in the gang, in spite of the attempts of Jack, Johnson, and me to intervene, promptly grabbed the pair, beat them up, and threw them out.
I saw the two go across the street to Rankin’s. Half an hour later they marched back across the street into our place, but this time with a dozen of their gang marching right behind them in single file. They walked right over to the cue rack, and, quick though they had to be about it, all managed to select the sixteen- and eighteen-ounce cues instead of the lighter ones. They broke these in half over their knees, holding on to the butts, which had lead bottoms, and then charged forward, swinging at anyone in their way. In a few seconds sides had been formed on each side of one of the tables, the invaders with the cues, the home team armed with billiard balls.
A while before, Jack had begun to carry a gun in his pocket regularly. Where he got the nerve I don’t know, but now he took the pistol out and threatened to shoot the first one who struck a blow. Restraining those with the balls in their hands, he gave the outsiders a chance to back out into the street, which they did, taking the cue butts with them. We knew they would be lying in wait outside, and our boys ran into the street after them.
Jack and I immediately announced that the poolroom was closing, and as we hurriedly locked up and went out the back door through Chrystie Street we could hear the fight starting.
We were nervous for weeks afterward. We weren’t the only ones who were afraid to come near the place, and for a while we had hardly any business. Some of those who had taken part in the fight were not yet able to walk around, much less play pool. A few were in jail. Nevertheless, before long we were as busy as we had ever been. However, Jack and I had appreciated the brief rest, fraught with tension though it was.
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A Great deal of betting went on all the time, all kinds of policy and numbers rackets as well as bets on horses running at Sheepshead and Rockaway. The betting was heaviest of all for the Fitzsimmons-Corbett fight in Carson City, Nevada, in the spring of 1897.1 was the only one who thought Fitzsimmons would win but unfortunately I did not put a bet down, for Jack and I never betted, drank, or smoked. We felt that the owners of the place at least should have sober habits, although it didn’t seem that we set any example the customers wished to follow. Theodore Roosevelt was police commissioner of New York City at this time. He had been appointed by the short-lived anti-Tammany reform administration, primarily to clean up lower Manhattan, put an end to the graft there, and weed out corruption among top-level police officials, Tammany men if possible. I did not know too much about this Republican in office over at Mulberry Street Police Station, but I felt well disposed towards him because I heard from my friends that he had ordered the police to be less brutal towards strikers.
A car stopped in front of the poolroom one day and several policemen in uniform got out, along with a man in civilian clothes. The policemen all waited on the sidewalk while the man, Roosevelt himself, walked into our place alone. After that I never doubted stories of his bravery.
In a loud, booming voice he asked to see the owner. He seemed quite surprised when I walked over to him, and he asked to see my father, but I assured him that I was really the owner. He immediately bellowed at me, “Your place is infested with nothing but thieves and panhandlers and robbers! I know about the betting that goes on, too! Some day I’m going to back in here with a wagon and pull you all in!”
I looked at him, shrugged my shoulders, and replied meekly, “There isn’t anything I can do about it if you feel like it. I hire a bouncer, I call in police, and nothing helps.” He mumbled something I didn’t understand and walked out. The only things he hadn’t accused us of were peddling dope and running a house of assignation. I’m sure, though, that many of the pimps and dope fiends who came in to play pool conducted some preliminary business in our place and made contacts there. Negotiations of all kinds were constantly going on in corners. We had no control over the private affairs of our clientele, and probably many a robbery or murder was planned on our premises. All we knew was that none took place there.
We never heard from Roosevelt again. He did not pay us another visit, or close us out, and I understand that he cleaned up the rest of the city in a similar manner. Roosevelt and “reform” soon departed. Tammany elected the next mayor and went on with its graft.
All the police in the neighborhood were very kind to us and we never had to bribe anyone, gangsters or police, in order to remain in business or get “protection.” Yet this was common practice at that time, particularly in the big saloons and wealthy houses of prostitution, and Roosevelt was supposed to put a stop to all that, too. I considered ours a prosperous business, but it seemed that others did not regard it as such, for we were never bothered.
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The element was now beginning to get really tough as more people drifted over from Chinatown—none of them Chinese themselves, however. We took it as long as we could, but one day more than a year after we’d opened, as we were locking up after a particularly hard day that I don’t know how we got through, I said to Jack, “I don’t know about you, Jack, but I can’t take this life any longer.”
“Not only can’t I take it,” Jack answered, “but I think we’d better get out if we want to go on living.”
Money was still due on our pool tables. The mortgagee, a man named Walker, gave us back all the money we’d already paid on them, in return for which we left the tables where they were, together with all the other furnishings. Walker immediately sold the whole set-up to a man better fitted for the work, and able to move right in. All the new owner wanted changed was the name.
Jack and I took our leave without breaking down, but the boys seemed genuinely sorry to see us go. They had also become quite fond of Papa, who had accepted them in his philosophical way, although never ceasing to be shocked. On the last night our customers bought out his entire stock. I suppose they really had liked our management. We never took sides in any quarrel and we had always tried to be fair in our dealings with them. But the three of us were still glad to see the last of the place. We would have stayed on and continued to run it if it had been at all possible to do so, for we were not likely to come across such a gold mine in the children’s-jacket trade, but we realistically accepted the fact that we had to give it up.
Jack and I, after turning over the keys, immediately started trying to figure out a way to avoid going back to the clothing industry. But first we took a much needed rest, and caught up on the theater. For several months we would not go anywhere near the Bowery. In time all our savings were gone, but the troubled memories of that year did not vanish so easily.
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