Staten Island Noir Page 10

  There's nothing you can do. It's too late. It all happens in slow motion. Your fist connects against the top of Baldy's nose. A loud crack echoes through the bathroom. Cartilage snaps. But that's not what concerns you. You hear bones break. From the neck. Just below the occipital. Baldy stares at you for a moment before his eyes roll back into his head. He lets out a short gasp and his body spasms, causing him to spin around and collapse face first against the countertop. Even before he strikes the surface you know he's already dead.

  His head hits the edge of the chrome sink at the exact spot that your fist connected. A loud gong is heard as the wash basin is shaken from its mooring and hops up into the air.

  Baldy collapses onto the metal floor and doesn't move. There's blood everywhere. Time grinds to a halt. You don't even hear the boat's engines anymore.

  You stare at yourself in the mirror. Calmly, but quickly, you straighten your clothes and smooth your hair. None of Baldy's blood is on you. You steady your breathing just as if you were in the ring. You compose yourself one final time and open the bathroom door. There's no one in the corridor outside.

  You slip out of the bathroom and quietly slide the janitor's cart back in front of the door. You make your way to the outside of the ship.

  The night air over the water has grown cold, but it feels good. The waves crash against the bow and the smell of salt hangs heavy in the air. You sit down on an orange metal bench and stare out at the far shore. The lights from the St. George Ferry Terminal are faintly visible in the distance.

  The boat lurches as it strikes a swell. Sweat beads on your brow. Nausea begins to overtake you. You try to clear your head, but it's not working. Your hands are shaking just like they did when you first started using the heavy bag. You clench them into fists and jam them into your pockets.

  The area is empty. At least you think it is. A drunk college kid stumbles over and slumps down on the bench near you.

  "Goddamn, it's cold out here!" he shouts, and then laughs at himself in amusement. He looks over at you. "You cold there, bro?"

  "I'm fine."

  "You don't look fine. You look sick. You know, I should be the one who's going to be sick." He begins to detail how many shots of Absolut he's had. You're not responding and he scratches his head, peering at you intently. He says you look familiar. Has he seen you before? Maybe on television? Are you some sort of actor? You shake your head. No, you answer, looking out over the water. The sky is now a gun-metal gray but the water remains ink black. Sorry to disappoint, you tell him, but he's mistaken.

  You're no one special.

  * * *

  It takes two days for the incident to hit the local paper. It's on the bottom of page eight next to an article about a dentist in Castleton Corners expanding his practice. The reporter explains how Baldy, a.k.a. Lloyd Peterson, blood alcohol level of 0.15, passed out on the Staten Island Ferry and broke his neck against the bathroom sink. It turns out that Lloyd had done two years in Altona Correctional Facility for aggravated assault. The funeral is on Tuesday.

  You're about to toss the paper into recycling when you spot an article about the boxing match you saw on television at the club. The fighter you thought was going to win did so. It turns out he's undefeated. The reporter is comparing him to another boxer, Louis Cartwright. They wonder if this fight will make Cartwright come out of retirement to defend his title. Apparently he lives in the paradisiacal neighborhood of Emerson Hill.

  You walk outside onto the porch and look up and then down the street. The birds are chirping. A slight breeze blows through your hair.

  It's nice. Real nice.

  But paradisiacal?

  ABATING A NUISANCE

  BY BRUCE DESILVA

  Tompkinsville

  The Suzanne, under the command of Captain Robert Beveridge, sailed from the Cuban port of Mataznas on April 20, 1858, bound for Liverpool with a rich cargo of sugar. Two days out, the captain died of yellow fever. The following night the disease took the cook and the cabin boy. The next day five seamen, too ill for duty, shivered in their sweat-drenched hammocks.

  The first mate steered the ship toward New York City and dropped anchor in the lower bay. Surviving crew members were loaded into a smaller boat named the Cinderella for a short sail against the tide to the northeastern tip of Staten Island. There they were stripped naked, and their clothes were burned. Then they were wrapped in thin blankets and carted into the New York Marine Hospital, more commonly known as the Quarantine.

  Soon, they would have company.

  By August 16, forty-one barks, brigs, sloops, and schooners lay at anchor in the lower bay, all of them banned from putting in at the Port of New York. Their colors had been struck and replaced with the flag that inspired more terror than the Jolly Roger ever had.

  The Yellow Jack.

  From the library on the second floor of his fine house atop Staten Island's Fort Hill, Dr. Frederick Hollick studied the harbor through his spyglass. He counted thirty-four ships at anchor beyond the four piers that jutted from the grounds of the Quarantine. Each vessel had arrived packed stern to bow with riffraff from Ireland and Germany, all of them exposed to—or already deathly ill with—typhus, cholera, and smallpox. The forty-one yellow fever ships, the ones that frightened the good doctor the most, were too far out for him to see, but he knew they were there. He'd read all about it in the New York City newspapers.

  Dr. Hollick panned his glass across the rolling thirty-acre grounds of the Quarantine: St. Nicholas Hospital, a huge, hotel-like redbrick structure where the disease-carrying first-class passengers were housed. The old, ramshackle Smallpox Hospital. The two-story Female Hospital. The squat brick dormitories for the boatmen who ferried passengers from infected ships. The eight wooden typhus shanties that were home both to diseased steerage passengers and to the stevedores who had the filthy job of unloading contaminated cargo. The wooden offices, stables, barns, coal houses, storerooms, and outhouses. The three fine doctors' residences. The vegetable gardens. And the cemeteries where one out of every six persons who entered the Quarantine would spend eternity.

  When the state of New York first located the Quarantine here in 1799, it seemed to make sense, Dr. Hollick had to admit. The island was lightly populated by farmers and clam diggers, most of them living miles away along the island's south shore. But then a landing for the ferry from Manhattan was built beside the hospital. And well-off city dwellers seeking a few days in the countryside began to arrive. And hotels to serve them were constructed near the landing. And the villages of Tompkinsville, Castleton Corners, Clifton, Stapleton, New Brighton, and South Beach just grew and grew. There was industry here now: breweries, brickmakers, the Dejon Paper Company, New York Dying and Printing, and Crabtree & Wilkinson—makers of brightly colored head scarves that the servant girls favored.

  Now more than 20,000 people lived on the island, most within a morning's walk of the Quarantine. In Tompkinsville, where the good doctor resided, wood-frame houses, general stores, tobacconists, saloons, and hotels stood directly across the road from the six-foot brick wall surrounding the pestilent hospital grounds.

  And every year, people of Staten Island fell ill.

  The worst was 1848, when one hundred and fifty islanders contracted yellow fever, and thirty of them perished. The rest of the populace fled in terror. That summer and fall, vegetables rotted in untended gardens. Unpicked fruit dried to husks in apple and pear orchards. Hotels and stores stood empty, and grass grew in the streets.

  Every year since then, there'd been smaller outbreaks of smallpox, cholera, and yellow fever; and this year, the situation was becoming grave. Something had to be done. Dr. Hollick put down his spyglass, sat behind his desk, took up pen and paper, and began to write.

  * * *

  Three days later, the local worthies who had received Dr. Hollick's written invitations filed into his drawing room and settled into his upholstered, Empire-style furniture:

  John C. Thompson, the general store o
wner known as Honest John—not so much for his business practices as for his rants against political corruption.

  Ray Tompkins, whose family owned much of the empty land south of the Quarantine, and whose ancestors had given Tompkinsville its name.

  Thomas Burns, the leader of Neptune Fire Engine Company Number 9, and owner of Nautilus Hall, a hotel and saloon located directly across from the Quarantine's main gate.

  Henry B. Metcalf, the county judge.

  And Dr. Westervelt, Hollick's neighbor from the foot of Fort Hill.

  Two latecomers, Attorney William Henry Atherton and real estate agent John Simonson, had to settle for hard-backed chairs dragged in from the dining room.

  All sat in grim silence, waiting for Dr. Hollick to start the proceedings.

  He began by reading the roll of the summer's yellow fever victims.

  "Mr. Kramer, who was employed by the Quarantine to burn infected bedding, took sick at his residence in mid-July and died soon thereafter. A few days hence, his wife succumbed. The German tailor and his son, who lived at the end of Minthorn, just one hundred feet from the Kramers, were the next to contract the disease. By the grace of God, they have recovered. Mrs. Neil, wife of one of the hospital's stevedores, was not so blessed. She died at home at the end of July. Then Mrs. Halladay, who owned the house occupied by Mrs. Neil, fell ill and died. Her boy also sickened, but he has recovered. In the first week of August, Mr. Young and his daughter came down with the fever, as did Mrs. Finnerty, who lives on the same block. They appear to be recovering, but their neighbor, Mrs. Holland, has perished. Mrs. Cross and her servant fell ill two weeks ago, and both died last week. Mrs. Quinn, who lives between Townsend's Dock and the gas works, took sick last week, and I do not expect her to survive."

  When Dr. Hollick was finished, Dr. Westervelt added more bad news: "Mr. Block, who lives at the corner of Jersey Street and Richmond Terrace, died of the fever this morning, and his widow has taken to her bed with it."

  "I hadn't heard that," Dr. Hollick said.

  "It is an outrage," Thompson sputtered. "The Quarantine does little to confine the disease within its walls. Some of its nurses and orderlies are permitted to reside in the village of Stapleton. They pass by my door every day, spreading disease among us as they go to and from work. Others who live and work on the grounds venture out to trade, mainly in establishments that deal in spirituous liquors."

  "Of late, patients are also roaming free," Simonson, the real estate agent, said. "Under cover of darkness, they scale the walls and wander aimlessly through the town, horrifying the good people of Tompkinsville with their indecency and filth. And stevedores in the Quarantine's employ loot cargo from infected ships and peddle it on our streets."

  "And now that the cemeteries on the grounds have filled," Attorney Atherton added, "the dead cart rolls out of the gates at twilight two or three times a week, spreading disease as it makes its way to the new cemetery north of town. Three nights past, the cart broke down; a corpse lay in the road for nearly an hour before a relief cart was brought out."

  Dr. Hollick knew this was not how yellow fever was spread. The disease lurked in the miasma that drifted from open hospital windows and rose from the holds of infected ships. Winds swept the foul air through the town, putting everyone at peril. That was why, even in the heat of summer, the doctor kept his windows closed. But this was not the time, he decided, for a science lesson.

  "This is all terribly bad for business," Burns broke in. "The guests in my hotel can look out and see right into the windows of the hospital wards. At night, they hear the cries of suffering. It is no wonder that so few of my patrons book a return visit."

  "The very existence of the Quarantine is injurious to property values," said Tompkins, who stood to make a fortune from his holdings if the Quarantine could be made to magically disappear. "It has created a prejudice against the entire island."

  Burns and Tompkins could always be counted on to bring any discussion around to money. That wasn't Dr. Hollick's main concern, but he held his tongue. He'd take his allies where he could find them.

  "So, my friends," he said. "What are we prepared to do about it?"

  "Perhaps we might make another appeal to the state legislature," Judge Metcalf suggested.

  "Not this time, Henry," Dr. Hollick replied. "We've petitioned Albany for more than a decade, but our pleas for relief have gone unheeded. The time for action has come."

  With that, Judge Metcalf rose to leave. "Perhaps it would be best if I remain ignorant of your intentions," he said. "I fear you may all be appearing before me before the month is out."

  * * *

  A few days later, under cover of darkness, a wagon rolled up Fort Hill toward Dr. Hollick's residence. It drew to a stop beside his fence, and its contents were hastily unloaded. The following evening, the same wagon trundled through Dr. Westervelt's gate and continued to the rear of his holdings, which abutted the northern boundary of the Quarantine. There, its cargo was stacked against the hospital's six-foot-high brick wall.

  * * *

  Shortly after eight p.m. on the evening of September 1, a red signal lantern was hung from the branch of a tree on Fort Hill. Thirty of the area's leading citizens, four of them carrying muskets and two with pistols in their belts, gathered in its glow to hear Dr. Hollick read three resolutions from the Board of Heath of Castleton, the largest town in the area. As some of those present surmised, the good doctor had composed the words himself. He had secured the board's official blessing that very afternoon.

  Resolved: that the whole Quarantine establishment, located as it is in the midst of a dense population, has become a nuisance of the most odious character, bringing death and desolation to the very doors of Castleton and Southfield.

  Resolved: that it is a nuisance too intolerable to be borne by the citizens of these towns any longer.

  Resolved: that this board recommends the citizens of this county protect themselves by abating this abominable nuisance without delay.

  The men let loose with three huzzahs. Then they gathered up the goods that the wagon had dropped off three days before: ten boxes of wooden matches, twenty-five bundles of straw, and twenty quart bottles of camphene.

  With Thompson and Tompkins in the lead, the group proceeded down the hill. Dr. Hollick, however, withdrew to his home to observe the evening's festivities from his library window. Arson, he told himself, was a job best left to younger men.

  At the foot of the hill, the men crossed a dirt road and approached the gate to Dr. Westervelt's property. Normally it was locked, but on this evening it had been left open. The men walked across an unmowed hayfield to the north wall of the Quarantine, set down their loads, and hefted what had been left there for them: four wooden beams, each affixed with handles.

  The men grunted as they swung the battering rams against the brick. In minutes, they reduced an eight-foot section of wall to rubble.

  In Manhattan, five miles across the harbor, the shops were bedecked with placards and ribbons celebrating the completion of the Ocean Telegraph, over two thousand miles of cable that connected New York with London. A torchlight fireman's parade marched through the city. Fireworks bloomed in the night sky.

  The men in Staten Island gathered up the matches, straw, and camphene, and streamed through the gap they had made.

  They came first to the wooden typhus shanties, assembled before one of them, and hesitated—as if suddenly realizing the enormity of what they were about to do. Then Thompson raised a bottle of camphene over his head and smashed it against the side of the building. Tompkins struck a match and tossed it.

  Whoosh! The men heard the rush of oxygen as the front of the shanty exploded in flames. Inside, someone shouted: "What in God's name was that?"

  Red tongues leaped up the dry shiplap siding and licked the tar-paper roof. Oily black smoke billowed into the overhanging oaks. Inside the shanty, the patients began to scream.

  A nearby sentry sounded the alarm. Stevedores race
d out of their dormitories. Thompson and the rest of the townsmen stood by and watched them run into the burning shanty and stagger out with invalids in their arms. The stevedores laid the patients in the grass and covered them with blankets. Then they grabbed more blankets from a nearby storeroom and tried to beat out the fire.

  As smoke and embers spiraled into the night sky, Dr. Daniel H. Bissell, the hospital superintendent, dashed from his residence with a musket in his hands. At the burning shanty, he confronted Thompson and ordered him and his men to leave the premises.

  "We shall not do so," Thompson replied. "It is our duty to help put out this fire."

  "This shanty is lost," Bissell said. "Help us pull it down, and perhaps we can prevent the flames from spreading to the others."

  Instead, Thompson and Tompkins led the men to the adjoining shanties. They streamed inside, dragged out straw mattresses, set them ablaze, and tossed them back in. Bissell confronted Thompson again, brandishing his musket. Thompson wrenched it from his hands and clubbed him in the head with it.

  Bissell fell. In the flickering firelight, his blood looked black as it leaked onto the grass. He clutched at his wound and moaned.

  The townsmen took up a chant: "Kill him! Kill him!"

  They might well have done so if Tompkins had not intervened. "We are not murderers, my friends," he said. "But we shall complete the job we have come to do."

  While the shanties burned, the townsmen roamed across the grounds, setting fire to the coal houses, barns, and stables. Panicked carriage horses burst out and galloped off into the night. The men torched the ramshackle smallpox hospital and broke into one of the physicians' residences to loot the liquor cabinets. Then they tossed camphene bottles through the windows and tossed in matches.

  A few minutes later, Michael McCabe, a Quarantine watchman, discovered several men stuffing bundles of straw in the doorways and stairwells of St. Nicholas Hospital. He ordered them to stop. They ignored him and set the straw on fire. The building's patients, most of them ambulatory, streamed out of the doorways in their nightclothes.