Here’s the set-up for my new novel, No. 10 Doyers Street: in the aftermath of a bloody shootout at a Chinese theater, Archana (Archie) Morley, a woman journalist from India, investigates the gang boss, Mock Duck. Barely out his twenties, Mock is already a legend who strikes fear in New Yorkers’ hearts: “Street urchins sang ditties in his honor. They said that he could hear a pin drop, see around corners, and that his rhinoceros-thick skin protected him from injury.” Whenever there’s trouble in Chinatown, the cops come looking for him.
Dressed in trousers, jacket and a hat, Archie keeps her head down and guard up as she follows her lead. She’s able to navigate New York City’s streets without attracting much attention because in the 1900s, the port city of two million people was a diverse place, attracting newcomers from all over the world—including Asia. In certain parts of town, no one gives Archie a second look.
No. 10 Doyers Street is inspired by real events that took place in New York City in 1907. The title refers to the real Mock Duck’s address, and even today, readers can trace Archie’s footsteps as she makes her way from the New York Observer on “Newspaper Row” to the gangster’s Chinatown home. The geography of the city, its streets, neighborhoods, and open spaces, are crucial to the plot. Then, as now, in New York City, real estate is everything.
Newspaper Row is what Park Row (by the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge) used to be called. Right across the street from City Hall, it was where many of the city’s newspapers had their headquarters, and was the perfect spot from which to keep tabs on the city’s political goings-on and socialize with sources.
City Hall, a marble-clad building with French windows and an imposing cupola, was built in 1812 and is the oldest city hall in America still in use for its original purpose. At the time it was built, New York City consisted only of the island of Manhattan. As she passes by, Archie observes that the building seems modest in comparison to the ambitions of the growing, modern city: In 1898, New York consolidated into the city we know today—a city of five boroughs (Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island).
The leaders of the new metropolis were trying to figure out what kind of place the city should be and how it would take its place on the world’s stage. They recognized the need for improved infrastructure, a reliable water supply, more schools, libraries and parks. They also felt the need to “clean up” immigrant neighborhoods which were believed by some (erroneously) to threaten the city’s safety. And that’s what happens in No. 10 Doyers Street. Shortly after the Chinatown shooting, Mayor George B. McClellan, a Princeton educated, forward-looking leader, holds a press conference on the front steps of City Hall and announces that the solution to the “Chinatown problem” is to raze the entire neighborhood and replace it with a park. Public opinion supports his proposal.
Enroute to Doyers, Archie stops at Foley Square on Centre Street, right outside the New York County Courthouse. It’s a bustling place where “[o]yster sellers, roasted peanut vendors, and tea and coffee purveyors conducted a brisk business.” It’s also where one of New York City’s most colorful characters, George Washington Plunkitt, the “Tammany Hall bard,” delivers lessons on what he calls “practical politics.”
In one of his lectures, Plunkitt describes the difference between honest and dishonest graft. He tells his listeners: “Say the Democracy’s in power… [and] I’m tipped off, say, that they’re going to lay out a new park, or a school or such, at a new location. So what do I do? I see my opportunity and I grab it… I go to that place and buy up all the land I can. Then The Board of This or The Board of That makes its plan public, and there’s a rush to get my land, which nobody cared particularly for before. Ain’t it perfectly honest to charge a good price and make a profit on my investment and foresight? Of course, it is. That’s honest graft.’”
As she veers east, Archie passes the southern end of Mulberry Bend Park (now known as Columbus Park in Chinatown), which was created in the 1890s by razing tenements in the Five Points neighborhood. Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants settled here when they first arrived in New York. Although the Five Points quickly developed a reputation for poverty and crime, it was also where immigrants raised their families and worked hard to build new lives. Mayor McClellan feels he can do to Chinatown what his predecessors did to the Mulberry Bend section of Five Points.
Mulberry Bend Park was supposed to improve the locals’ living conditions, but it also exemplified the difference between recreational spaces for the rich and poor. Unlike the undulating, romantic landscape of Central Park, here “sturdy benches, a flat expanse of lawn, and trees in metal cages placed along the perimeter delivered a clear message: stick to the assigned paths, and no funny business. The unobstructed lines of sight made it easy for coppers to keep watch [on the locals] and discouraged the possibility of mischief.”
Archie continues up along the Bowery, where on two parallel tracks, elevated trains thunder over flophouses and brothels. She approaches Chatham Square, adjacent to Chinatown’s three main streets: Pell, Mott, and Doyers.
Chinatown bustles with activity when Archie arrives: “Men in quilted vests transported loads on handcarts or from tumplines looped across their foreheads. Nuts and seeds in all colors and sizes overflowed from sacks outside a grocery store. I could have been in Canton…I could have been in Calcutta, but I couldn’t afford to become complacent.”
On Pell Street, she spots the restaurant where one of Mock Duck’s enemies plunged to his death as a fire engulfed the upper floors of the building. She stops in at the Pelham Café where the proprietor, “a Russian Jew, hired singing waiters to entertain his motley clientele, who ranged from eccentric bohemians to the Astors and the Vanderbilts.” One of the singing waiters who serves Archie would later become famous under the name Irving Berlin.
In the course of her investigations, Archie interviews Mock Duck’s rival, Tom Lee, the leader of the On Leong Tong at his tobacco store on Mott Street. An elegant, elderly man also known as the “mayor of Chinatown,” Tom Lee is wearing “a nattily cut beige suit and waistcoat, gold watch fob, and a tie pin that shimmered with diamonds,” when Archie meets him.
Archie finally comes to Doyers Street, a short curving street, more like an alley, where the shootout at the Chinese theater occurred. “Mock Duck lived a few doors down and across the street from the theater, right on the curve, at No. 10. It was an unremarkable tenement, not unlike its unremarkable neighbors. To my surprise, there was nothing the slightest bit distinctive about it, nothing to indicate that it was home to one of the city’s most notorious highbinders. A flea-bitten mutt groomed itself on the strip of sidewalk outside, and a shingle painted with a camera and the words “Woo’s Photography” hung by the front door. From its windows, you could get a clear view of the theater, now barricaded.”
Mock Duck is Chinatown’s most feared gangster but, as Archie learns, he also has a softer side. He adores his six-year-old daughter, and when the authorities suddenly remove the girl from his home, Archie begins to wonder whether their actions could be tied to the mayor’s efforts to demolish Chinatown. She embarks on a quest for the truth that takes her from Mock Duck’s orbit, to the smoke-filled backrooms of City Hall, to the Tammany Hall headquarters on Fourteenth Street, and into the Catskill Mountains.
Archie comes to realize that as a city grows there’s always someone who pays the price for progress. Usually, those who can least afford it. But, she wonders if anyone can beat the odds, maybe it’s Mock Duck. Maybe, the gangster can save Chinatown from destruction and retain custody of his daughter.
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All quotes from No. 10 Doyers Street by Radha Vatsal.
