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.

The IRA in NYC: April, 1922

About a year ago, I blogged about the forgotten wars of NYC, literal battles that have been fought on the streets of this city but that few, if anyone, remember.

The most memorable wars that have come to the five boroughs were separated by roughly 200 years -- the American Revolutionary War and the September 11, 2001/War on Terror. But other wars, like a pre-Revolutionary slave war or the 19th century Chinatown Tong Wars, have been mostly lost to history -- they were ugly, shameful, utterly lacking in the nobility of fighting for freedom and democracy. These wars weren't against a foreign enemy or terrorist group -- they were citizens fighting other citizens over money and turf.

But 100 years ago this month, another battle came to NYC and it had nothing to do with Americans or New Yorkers at all -- it was the continuation of a fight that had originated in Ireland as part of the rebellion against British rule there. Calling what happened "a battle" is really inaccurate -- it was a hit, a failed hit as it turned out, but nonetheless was part of a larger war raging between the Irish Republican Army and the British Empire ("The Troubles") that lasted in various forms until 1998. 

You must read this fascinating story about what happened on a lovely Spring night on the Upper West Side when an Irishmen out for a smoke nearly got, well, smoked himself. Although this incident involved the IRA and its fight with the British, it was actually due to the victim in this case being an informer, an IRA member who gave secret info to their Imperial oppressors, and was hiding out in NYC -- until he got caught. 

It's a fascinating story, a story about how the wars of the Old World always come to the New World -- and how NYC seems to be right in the middle of them.