No. 627
Crime, Eccentricity, and the Sporting Life in 19th Century America.
April 26, 2022

Pandemonium in a Tumult.

Raid on the Broadway concert saloons, New York.
April 26, 2022
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Tag: Vigilantes

Steam Powered Reformation.

8/14/2012

Whipped By Women

11/8/2011
Via Newspapers.comThis tale of strange goings-on in a seemingly unremarkable apartment was told in the “Western Mail,” March 10, 1927:An extraordinary story of queer happenings in an unoccupied Fulham (England) flat was told recently by a foreman and two workmen who have been decorating it (declares the "London Daily News").One of the men mentioned to the foreman some days ago that when working
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Strange Company - 6/10/2026
"As his son I am proud of hisefforts to succeed in life"Jefferson Randolph Smith IIIArtifact #93-2Jeff Smith collection(Click image to enlarge) oapy's son hires a legal firm to stop the defamation of his father's name. At age 30, Jefferson Randolph Smith III, Soapy and Mary's oldest son, was protecting his father's legacy and his mother's reputation from "libel" and scandal. He was also
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Soapy Smith's Soap Box - 10/13/2025
You can see it peeking out from the Harlem River Drive or through the chain-link fence of the Third Avenue Bridge: a five-story red brick building almost buried behind glass and steel apartment towers. The towers are newish luxury rental residences built on the Bronx side of the Harlem River. Shiny and modern, they bring […]
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Ephemeral New York - 6/8/2026
Youth With Executioner by Nuremberg native Albrecht Dürer … although it’s dated to 1493, which was during a period of several years when Dürer worked abroad. November 13 [1617]. Burnt alive here a miller of Manberna, who however was lately … Continue reading
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Executed Today - 11/13/2020
In 1830, Joseph Knapp conspired with his brother, John Francis Knapp, to hire a local criminal, Richard Crowninshield, to murder their great uncle, Captain Joseph White, in Salem, Massachusetts. They believed that if the captain died without a will, they stood to inherit a sizable fortune.Read the full story here: "A Most Extraordinary Case"
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Murder By Gaslight - 6/6/2026
As Mr. Moody for the Prosecution dramatically expounds on hatchets and grisly details, and a glimpse of two skulls in a leather case, Lizzie slumps over in her chair. Was it the heat or the ghastly descriptions?
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Lizzie Borden: Warps and Wefts - 6/7/2026
  [Editor’s note: Guest writer, Peter Dickson, lives in West Sussex, England and has been working with microfilm copies of The Duncan Campbell Papers from the State Library of NSW, Sydney, Australia. The following are some of his analyses of what he has discovered from reading these papers. Dickson has contributed many transcriptions to the Jamaica […]
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Early American Crime - 2/7/2019
Demi-Monde Excursion. | A Rattling Main.

Pandemonium in a Tumult.

Raid

If there is in New York one spot more infamous than another, that spot is the section of Broadway on the east aide, between Bleecker and Houston streets. Hell gapes widely here for all who may pass after 7 o'clock in the evening. From Bleecker to Spring street there are at least three hundred abandoned females employed in those dens of infamy known to the public as concert saloons. During the last twelve months, this evil has grown to almost gigantic proportions, yet nothing was done to abate it until the evening of the 22d inst., when sixty-eight concert saloon waiter girls were arrested, together with three or four of the managers and proprietors of the dens.

Illustrated Police News, February 1, 1872.