#251 McGurk's Suicide Hall: The Bowery's Most Notorious Dive

The Bowery Boys: New York City History

Tom Meyers

Places & Travel, History, Documentary, Society & Culture

4.7 • 3.9K Ratings

🗓️ 18 January 2018

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The old saloons and dance halls of the Bowery are familiar to anyone with a love of New York City history, their debauched and surly reputations appealing in a prurient way, a reminder of a time of great abandon. The Bowery bars and lounges of today often try to emulate the past in demeanor and decor. (Although nobody was drinking expensive bespoke cocktails back in the day.) But the dance hall at 295 Bowery, the loathsome establishment owned by John McGurk, was not a place to admire. It was the worst of the worst, a dive where criminal activity thrived alongside bawdy can-can dancers and endless pours of putrid booze. In early March of 1899, a woman named Bess Levery climbed to one of the top floors of McGurk's -- floors given over to illegal behavior -- and killed herself by drinking carbolic acid. Within a week, two more women had ventured to McGurk's, attempting the same dire deed. By the end of 1899, the dance hall had received a truly grim reputation, and its proprietor, capitalizing on its reputation, began calling his joint McGurk's Suicide Hall. What happened to the Bowery, once the location of fashionable homes and theaters, that such a despicable place could thrive -- mere blocks from police headquarters? This is the history of a truly dark place and the forces of reform that managed to finally shut it down. FEATURING: Theodore Roosevelt, Jacob Riis, Charles Parkhurst and some disreputable fellows by the names of Eat Em Up McManus and Short Change Charley. This episode is sponsored by TNT’s new limited series The Alienist. https://thealienist.com/ Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/boweryboys

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	This episode of The Bowery Boys is brought to you by TNT's new limited series, The Alienist,
0:06.1	when a series of gruesome murders grips New York in 1896. Dr. Lazlo Chrysler and his team
0:13.7	must investigate, analyze, and capture the killer. The Alienist premiering January 22, 2018, on TNT.
0:23.7	The Bowery Boys episode 251, McGurks Suicide Hall, The Bowery's most notorious dive.
0:31.0	Hey, it's The Bowery Boys. Hey!
0:33.9	Support for The Bowery Boys is provided by our listeners. Join us for as little as a dollar a
0:39.4	month by visiting patreon.com slash Bowery Boys.
0:46.4	Hi there, welcome to The Bowery Boys. This is Greg Young.
0:49.0	And this is Tom Myers. And today we're flipping through the dusty old newspapers back to the 1890s.
0:57.5	But we're not going to the gay 90s or the the gilded age of tycoons and industrialists,
1:04.0	but rather to a darker and cedar side of New York in the 1890s to a world of vice and
1:12.0	violence that existed inside the dive bars and dance halls of the Bowery.
1:18.7	Our destination is the gruesomely named McGurks Suicide Hall. Tom, let me read you a clip
1:26.0	from the New York Herald from March 1899.
1:31.2	McGurks is the resort of the better dead, as in the better off dead. Suicide Hall, the Bowery
1:39.0	calls it now, for the reason that occasionally a young girl comes out from the ill-lighted and
1:44.3	gloomy dance hall reeling under the effects of self-administered poison. Often she takes her
1:51.8	carbolic acid on the sidewalk in front of the place. In any event, those who seek to end mortal
1:58.3	ills at McGurks are lugged to the corner of Bowery in First Street, there to await the coming of
2:04.0	the ambulance. Under the shadow of the elevated road, three young girls, world weary and not yet
2:11.5	out of their teens, were taken last week to await the coming of the vehicle with a surgeon in
2:16.8	charge. In one case, a dead wagon would have answered as well. The other two victims are lying in
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Tom Meyers, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Tom Meyers and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.