Exile on Bridge Street Read Online Free PDF Page B

eyes. Carts and drays and sidewalks traversed by groups of whisking dresses grubby and browned along the hems. Men clopping along in work boots and leaning forward toward their destinations with old-country hats of various styles and the worn wool suits that hug the lifting of hard labor day in, day out. A filled-to-capacity, four-car trolley clanks through the middle of the cobblestones between the street that is walled in by masonry and brick buildings on the one side, the other is the sullied and grimy façade of the Fifth Avenue Court—this neighborhood’s Parthenon satellite of Anglo-American law shadowing Lovett here.
    Released, today it is his twenty-second birthday, though there will be no celebrations. Looking out over the South Brooklyn streets, the cruelty in his eyes hidden within a gentle face and protruding ears. His body is slight and not tall; he gives everything he has to prove to men larger than him what great things loom inside, as Bill Lovett does not have it in him to follow others. And so, there is that great cruelty in his eyes betraying the innocent features. The lips red as if painted. The cheeks blushed by the cool air and the wing-like fawn ears all giving him the appearance of a young angel. The Italian laborers of Red Hook who fear not only his temper, but the violent men loyal to him, call Lovett “Pulcinella,” a clown-like figure of their own lore. Standing among the courthouse pillars, it’s only been a few days since he and Non Connors and others shot and killed three Italians and a pier house manager on Imlay Street at the foot of the New York Dock Company’s headquarters. The news quickly traveling through the Italian Red Hook and Gowanus neighborhoods that Il Maschio—Frankie Yale’s Black Hand connection on the docks—was gunned down by Lovett and The White Hand. The Irish clown of the Red Hook docks, Pulcinella, whose cherubic appearance betrays the depraved man inside, had laid down his law in the neighborhoods in which the Italian lives in great numbers.
    But to see his eyes is to know him. And to know him is to know it better to be away from him. He is a grandson of the exiled. His family’s past smothered in the shame of a horrendous starvation and a grueling journey never recounted. Left only to the imagination of storytellers like those that told me, who tells you now.
    Shoeless and emaciated, his grandparents landed in Brooklyn in 1848 from their native County Kerry and took to begging for scraps. His grandmother six months with child, face gaunt and pale. Weakened and choleric, her motions were slow and mouth stuck in an open position, eyes staring forward and unresponsive, stomach bulbous and half-covered by a fraying sack dress. Catholic, they could not find steady work in New York. One week after arriving, the police pushed them off the vacant lot where they slept without roof or cover. The local newspapers wrote that, “An extensive colony of Irish people who had settled on the vacant lots . . . which . . . from the number of pigs and dogs there, is known as ‘Young Dublin.’” The same article described the area as a “pigdem” and wrote that the police had “rooted” them out.
    Along with thousands of other newly landed Irish, Lovett’s grandparents dug a hole in a foothill on a piece of land called Jackson Hollow just south of the Navy Yard. The police left them there since ownership of the property was in litigative dispute between the heirs of Samuel Jackson. Soon there was a baby, the eldest sister of Bill Lovett’s unborn father. The baby breaking in a shallow, rain-puddled cranny on a night untamed dogs roamed Jackson Hollow, sniffing new mother’s blood in the air. And so, they blocked off the entrance of their scalpeen home with long sticks and branches taken from trees that once grew all over Brooklyn. They stole a chicken from a child by beating him with their fists and running