The Forgotten Wars of NYC

New York City has, on occassion, been a literal battlefield.

Much of the Revolutionary War was fought here, and you can find remnants of it around the five boroughs if you know where to look. More than 200 years later, the 9/11 attacks on NYC (and DC) began the two-decade "war on terror" that we live with to this day. Those two very different wars in NYC, at two hugely different times, are etched clearly into history for a clear reason -- the first was a great victory by a scrappy collection of colonies against its Imperial masters, the second an attack against a global superpower, challenging its dominance.

In both cases, the battlefield of NYC represented the heroic spirit and power of the whole country. 

But there were other wars fought in the city that are largely forgotten today. These wars also tell the American story but in a dark way. And they are battles that roil the city and country to this day -- race relations and immigration. 

In 1741, more than 30 years before the first shots of the Revolutionary War, a series of fires broke out around NYC. Still a British colony, the city was suffering economically, and slaves and poor whites were hit especially hard. These fires led the white citizens to believe that the slaves were behind them, as part of a conspiracy to violently riot and overturn the city's power structure, stealing all of the white people's property and wealth in the process. Paranoia reigned. The result was that 200 hundred slaves (and a few whites) were rounded up, arrested, put on trial, and then burned at the stake (a few were also deported to Canada and the West Indies). Known today at the New York Conspiracy of 1741, it was an ugly race war, based on lies and conspiracy, that exacerbated the racial divisions for centuries to come.

Then, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, are the Tong Wars. Rival Chinese immigrant gangs, or Tongs, fought viscious and bloody battles in the streets and alleys of Chinatown, jockeying for dominance in the neighborhood and city's criminal underground of opium dens, prostitution, and gambling. Some of the fights involved meat cleavers, hatchets, and torture, and implicated not only gang members but also crooked cops and politicians. There were Tong Wars in other American cities (most notably in San Francisco) but the history of the Tong Wars in NYC is especially fascinating -- and you can read more about it here.  

Some wars are remembered because they make us feel heroic but these forgotten wars of NYC need to be remembered as well -- to tell us where we came from and where we are today.