An ‘Orgy of Brutality’: Police Against Immigrants in the East Village

This week, we continue our series of deep dives into the histories of storied addresses.

The bullet tore through John Muller’s chest just above his left clavicle, fracturing the bone into small splinters that lacerated surrounding flesh and vein. The lead ball lodged in his neck between the trachea and the esophagus. His right temple was swollen and abloom in blackened bruises. Police officers had bludgeoned him, witnesses said, just outside his home at 29 Avenue A. But it was the gunshot, the coroner testified, that killed John Muller on July 11, 1857.

Muller died in the basement of what is now 33 Avenue A between Second and Third Streets. Today, the plot houses Joyful Nail Salon flush with clients reclined on taupe leatherette pedicure chairs. A sign outside advertises color gel and manicures. Just above, public housig apartments have long since replaced the original 19th century tenement building. But to peel past that lacquered exterior is to reveal the plot’s history long since erased. A history of the East Village when it was German-speaking Kleindeutschland with tenement houses lining Avenue A; of a city in turmoil in the summer of 1857; of a riot in the 17th ward; of a clash between police and a largely immigrant community; of a man shot dead.

In life, Muller was described as a large man, barrel chested and broad. He had the frame of a blacksmith, the trade he’d find work in after his arrival in New York City on January 1, 1854 from Bremen Germany. The Times said that Muller worked at Mr. Sullivan’s blacksmith shop on Grand Street near Elizabeth and made 75 cents a day. Just two years after his arrival, Muller married Margaretta Wellenden in late August, 1856. Together, they moved to their tenement home on Avenue A and like most of their neighbors, lived among a vibrant community of their own German kin.

What was once the Mullers’ home stood in a municipal zone bounded by 14th Street on the north, on the east by Avenue B, on the south by Rivington, and on the west by the Bowery, spanning much of what is today the East Village and the Lower East Side. The neighborhood in Muller’s day was known as the 19th century’s third largest German-speaking urban area after Berlin and Vienna. The neighborhood flourished as a bustling center of ethnic immigrant life. At its center ran Avenue A, populated with goods and trade shops, churches, and more tenement houses.

On July 15, the New York Daily Times described the Germans of Avenue A in the 17th ward as  principally lower class. “The rag-pickers live in the neighborhood,” the Times sneered. “It is the German five Points. Most of what is tectonically dirty in a person and equivocal in morals, as far as this City is concerned may be found there.” The characterization sparked ire in the German community and the newspaper apologized in a correction in the next day’s edition. Avenue A, the newspaper said in its retraction, that what the paper had said about the German community was “wholly untrue.” “The rag pickers,” it went on, “whose lowly, but honest occupation is made the occasion of a fling in that paragraph do not reside in the seventeenth Ward: there is filth enough, of course, of where in the city is it clean? In a word, the citizens there are respectable and law-abiding.”

But on July 12th of 1857, the residents of Avenue A were anything but temperate and law-abiding. Just a week earlier, riots embroiled lower Manhattan in the infamous Five Points neighborhood, just south of the 17th ward. Originally a small-scale turf war between a principally Irish criminal street gang called The Dead Rabbits and the nativist, anti-Irish, anti-Catholic criminal gang of volunteer firemen called the Bowery Boys, the fight quickly escalated into an all-out brawl between both gangs and the Metropolitan police. Battling tenement house fires, hurled bricks, and gangster barricades, the Metropolitan police finally managed to quell the rioters after two full days of violence. Yet even after order was restored to the streets, tempers still flashed hot between the newly appointed Metropolitan police force and the communities it served. On Sunday, another riot broke out on Avenue A and Fourth Street between police officers and local residents. Jedidiah Hartt, the local station captain, said that two police officers had tried to close the local bier saloons and break-up a street fight between two drunkards when a mob “suddenly burst forth as with the fury of a tornado, threatening to sweep all that opposed it.”

The following day, the Times reported that local residents sparked the riot after police, who had unlawfully arrested an innocent man, violently attacked the protesters. In the following days, newspapers across the city ran ablaze with stories of violence in the 17th ward. Brickbats flew, pistols were shot and Allan Hay’s Candle Factory was ransacked in the melee. Some 200 policemen marched down Third Street. An assembly of Germans threatened to storm the station house armed with knives and pistols. The Eight and 71st regiments were called out and held in readiness at the Military Hall at 163 Bowery. And finally, Muller, caught in the fray while walking home from church with his wife his neighbors insisted, was shot, beaten outside of his home, and carried bruised and bloodied into his own basement to die.

The city launched a full inquest into the killing. Yet despite the city’s best efforts, the neighborhood’s temper remained inflamed. The local German-language paper, Die Staatz, reported that Margaretta, Muller’s widow, was five months pregnant when in her grief she miscarried. The news percolated throughout the ward and lent further fuel to the German discontent. Margaretta had to be pulled screaming from the inquisition meeting hall upon hearing details of her husband’s death. Her neighbors grew ever more incensed and held a raucous meeting in a bier-hall to organize their resistance to police action. Even Muller’s funeral became a spectacle of civil resistance, the Times reported on July 15,  as the thousands of attendees, most of them German immigrants, marched from the Muller home up the Bowery to the 17th ward stationhouse, coffin in tow. At the station, they unfurled a giant white banner inscribed Opfer der Metropolitan Police. a Victim of the Metropolitan Police.

With tensions still taut, the city’s inquest brought a bitter dispute. The German community on one side sought to prove the riot was an act of police brutality and sought justice for what they saw as wanton violence and oppression from the newly established Metropolitan force. On the other, the Metropolitan police argued that not only were their officers blameless in Muller’s death, but that Muller himself might have been a ringleader in the violence.

Captain Hartt testified that he ordered his men not to use their pistols and that he saw a man he later recognized as Muller, “taking a very active part in the matter” and “throw[ing] a brick or stone with great violence towards the officers.” Edmund S. Lockwood, the ward’s police sergeant not only corroborated Hartt’s testimony but added that he believed that had there been any police violence, it was provoked and justified.

Others claimed that Muller’s own kin shot him, that German rioters firing muskets from the rooftops had caused his death. Two 17th ward police officers, John Thomas and Robert Degrushe, both swore they saw shots fired from the second floor of a building on the southeast corner of Fourth Street and Avenue A. After they heard the shots, both witnesses reported seeing “a tall man with a stout chest,” believed to be Muller, crying out and falling into the throng of the crowd.

Coroners discredited the idea that Muller was shot from a window as the bullet had traveled in an upward direction from his chest to the base of his neck. Yet rumors persisted when the size of  Muller’s wound was compared with different bullet sizes. As The Saratogian reported on July 23, “it appears that the fatal bullet taken from Muller’s body was several sizes larger than could be used in the police pistols. The only reasonable solution is, that he was shot by a musket in the hands of some careless ‘Dead Rabbit.’”

The Germans countered the arguments with witness evidence of their own—each describing a very different scene of police brutality. Valentine Lutz, a resident of 52 Avenue A testified that the police attacked the crowd and “raised their clubs and cried out, ‘Clear the way,’ rushed on the crowd and beat them. The people ran away as fast as possible. Some of the horses were loosed and people had to take shelter wherever they could get it. Shots were fired, many came from the police; they fired high and low, and in all directions.”

Others swore they saw police shoot Muller. After watching police fire three rounds of shot into the crowd, another resident of Avenue A, August Goltz said, “I saw no stones thrown that day. I saw nothing thrown. I saw no resistance made to the officers.” When the coroner asked Goltz if he was sure the shot that killed Muller came from an officer, Goltz replied “Yes sir; the police were all together when Muller was shot.”

The inquest pressed on until the coroner begged the jury for a decision. All the while, witnesses from lieutenants, officers, and officials alike testified about German drunkenness and Muller’s guilt. The Germans countered, testifying about shootings and beatings; police chasing a family until the husband fell under policemen’s bats, an older gentleman clobbered by officers as he crossed the street, and more about Muller, bleeding from his gunshot wound, bludgeoned on the sidewalk outside of his home at 29 Avenue A.

At the close of the trial, neither party gave any ground. As The New York Tribune lamented on July 22, “One thing is evident, and that is, that there has been wholesale perjury somewhere. No doubt the Germans have been mistaken in some things, from their imperfect knowledge of the language; but their sight and hearing, of course, could not be so affected.”

In the end, jurors reached no consensus in the inquest. John Muller was laid to rest in Calvary Cemetery, several rioters were charged and sentenced, and the police were largely exonerated.  Yet the distrust sewn in the ward wasn’t so easily resolved. Newspapers the city over described scenes of lingering discontent: small bonfires lit along Avenue A and local boys throwing stones at police officers. A general unsettled quiet blanketed the neighborhood. As for the residents of 29 Avenue A, Margaretta could no longer stand to live in her apartment and moved a few blocks north to stay with her sister. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported that over the course of the summer, the neighborhood raised nearly $500 for Margaretta.

Otherwise life along Avenue A eventually returned to normal as the German-immigrant community continued to thrive and enliven the streets of the East Village and the Lower East Side for most of the rest of the 19th century. Yet the relationship between the ward and its police force remained tenuous at best. Riots and accusations of police aggression punctuated life in the ward over the following decades. On January 13, 1874, some 1,200 members of the neighborhood’s German workingmen’s association were among some 7,000 unemployed demonstrators in Tompkins Square Park who demanded lower food prices and an end to rent-gouging. Samuel Gompers, the founding father of the modern American labor movement, described his experience in the ensuing clash with police as “an orgy of brutality” as “mounted police charged the crowd on Eighth Street, riding them down and attacking men, women, and children without discrimination.” At the time, it was the largest riot ever in New York City.

The city, however, did not address ward’s housing concerns for nearly another 60 years. 29 Avenue A was among 24 squalid tenement buildings along Third Street and a section of the avenue slated for demolition. In their stead, the New York City Housing Authority built what could be considered the nation’s first experiment in public housing. 122 apartments with modern conveniences, safe living conditions, and affordable rents. The tenement house once home to John Muller and countless other tenants was thus demolished to become one of the First Houses, a model of public housing in New York City.

And today, in the same plot where John Muller’s body law slain in the basement, the Joyful Nail Salon now advertises a pedicure deal on the front window. Music warbles from the radio, a Christmas ballad or a soppy love tune, and women sit perched with their hands splayed on rubber mats as their nails are shaped, filed, and shined. A century and a half since, the building on Avenue A is settled and quiet. Nothing now hints at the plot’s once violent moment. Nothing, except perhaps a woman getting her nails painted in the forefront of the salon. The paint she’s chosen is called birthday cake. The color, a shellacked brown-red like long dried blood.