ll. Second, during the drafting of the Civil War there was a lot of chaos and many fatal riots against the rich because they were able to buy there way out of the war, including the protest of the Conscription Act. Differences in the beliefs of these people led to a segregated community and the creation of gangs had begun.The first neighborhood gangs were formed by the massive amount of children (often referred to as sea urchins) that became homeless after the Civil War. The Dutch Heinrichs led the 19th Street Gang and it was known as one of the most infamous cliques around. They commanded tribute from factory owners and merchants, they broke into houses and they abused and robbed strangers. The gang’s leader – Dutch Heinricks – was incarcerated after attacking a police Captain. Thereafter came the Gophers, who were targeted for arrest after the slaying of a man named William Lennon in a bar at 45th Street and 11th Avenue, and the Dead Rabbits who lived in the filthy tenements west of 7th Avenue in the 20’s and 30’s.By the 1900’s, 36th Street to 59th Street west of 9th Avenue became an area of dirty tenements and factories forming a depressing and dark neighborhood that carried out the nature of slum life. The murder rate (often committed by gang members) in this section of the city continuously multiplied. The practices of the local criminal and the Westies gang in the middle of the 1900’s became so brutal. “One gang man tossed the heads of victims into the railway cut between 10th and 11th Avenues” (http://hellskitchen.net/resource/history/brendle/crime.htm). The Westies were involved in loansharking, labor racketeering, robbery, narcotics and murder with purported ties to the Gambino crime organization. Evidently this hard neighborhood developed an underworld type of atmosphere filled with murder and acquired a suitable nickname, “Hell’s Kitchen.”One ...
