This is damn interesting.

Edmund Lowell must have felt cursed.

He'd brought his family to New York in the late 1800s to carry on his father's business as a pharmacist.

But fate, or perhaps the city itself, seemed determined to drive him back out again.

La Wall's health had been in decline since their arrival, and his wife's kidney disease had worsened,

despite all of the tinctures and patent medicines available to his turn-of-the-century expertise.

Not long after that, his business partner had been revealed as a crook, sending La Wall scrambling

into bankruptcy court to convince the judge that his pharmacy had nothing to do with shady real estate

dealings. Then, in the midst of the bankruptcy proceedings, an anonymous woman had staggered into

La Wall's drugstore, collapsed on the floor, and died of unknown causes.

Likely no one could have saved her, but it wasn't exactly a ringing endorsement of the

pharmaceutical services available at the corner of 8th Street and Avenue C.

None of that compared, however, to the morning of the 27th of June 1906, when a dishevelled

man in a medical coat burst through the narrow glass doors of the 27th of June 1906 when a disheveled man in a medical coat burst through

the narrow glass doors of the pharmacy begging for protection. He was immediately followed

by a young man with a revolver and an angry crowd screaming in Yiddish. The wall didn't speak

the language, but there was no mistaking the young man's intent as he strode purposely

forward and raised his

gun to the doctor's head. It was a grim but recognizable tableau. The young man's stance and

grip were confident, clearly marking him as a budding gangster. The behavior of the crowd,

on the other hand, made no sense at all. Innocent bystanders tended to run away from gang violence.

Yet the pushcart vendors and housewives surrounding the apparent holdup

...