Skip to main content

Former "Mayor of James Street" and Gangster-turned-Undertaker, 'Roxie' Vanella's Funeral Chapel Sells For $7.8M

   


      If you end up down on Madison and Saint James, near the base of the Brooklyn Bridge, you've stepped into the area of the Lower East Side formerly known as the Fourth Ward. With Five Points just to its west, the Fourth Ward composed part of the East River shoreline and is generally folded in with the old Corlear's Hook neighborhood (also known as the "Hook", where once almost one hundred brothels were located and the term "hooker" was coined). This area of Lower Manhattan, around the time of Robert "Roxie" Vanella's birth in 1883, was largely occupied by ship-builders, dockyards, and the assorted tenement. The triangular block that Vanella's Funeral Chapel sits on also houses the former St. James School, noted as the only site of Alfred E. Smith's formal education (who was only ten years Vanella's senior), and neighbors the St. James Church, the second oldest Roman Catholic building in NYC and the home of the Ancient Order of the Hibernians. By the time Roxie was a teenager he had linked up with young local gangster Johnny Torrio, and started the James Street Gang. This group of largely teenagers were one of a number of prominent gangs on the Lower East Side at the time, engaging in everything from political extortion, to the looting of ships. A few years later, Vanella and Torrio parted ways, Torrio taking under his wing a young enforcer from Brooklyn named Al Capone, connecting him deeper to a life of crime in the streets of Corlear's Hook. After beating a murder charge in Montana, Vanella would eventually reconnect with Torrio in Chicago when Torrio is tapped to protect Big Jim Colosimo's prostitution business in the Levee District. (Later Torrio would also call upon his former associate Al Capone to come out and work for him, beginning Capone's career in Chicago.) After beating a number more murder charges including involvement in a shootout which left a Chicago Police Sergeant dead, Roxie Vanella seems to leave this life of crime behind and returns to NYC, opening up his Funeral Chapel at 29 Madison Street in 1918.
     This past November, the Vanella's Funeral Chapel property, which stretches to Saint James Pl behind it and contains over twenty residential units and 8,000sf of commercial space, was put on the market for $12.5 million. After a number of months, it closed for a little under $8 million, bought by Eric Pang at Metro City Acquisition LLC at the end of February. By the time I stopped by the building, the gold-leaf "V"'s on the doors had been almost entirely scraped off, and the sign which adorned its Madison Street face had been removed. We will wait and see what becomes of this building in the coming months.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Union of Orthodox Rabbis Building Bought and Emptied –– Artifacts Remain

      Wednesday afternoon, a childhood friend of mine –– whose family has been at their apartment on East Broadway since 1956 –– got in touch with me about what sounded like people clearing out the buildings next to his at 237 and 235 East Broadway (Sharis Adath Israel and the former home of the Union of Orthodox Rabbis respectively). When I arrived on the scene that same afternoon, the doors to 235 East Broadway were being shut and two Junklugger trucks were just pulling away from the curb, stacked with what looked like large amounts of furniture. East Broadway was littered with papers that had blown off the back of these trucks, and as I started to pick them up I saw that many of these documents represented records of the Union of Orthodox Rabbis, correspondence in Hebrew and Yiddish, newspaper clippings, pages from religious books, all of which dating back decades. I called Junkluggers and asked if they would be able to intercept any of these documents before they were inevitab
2 comments
Read more

NYCHA's "NextGen Neighborhood" Towers & the Fate of the "White House"

      In a previous post  I discussed the city's plan to demolish the LaGuardia Bathhouse building, one of the oldest public baths in NYC, an attempt in-part to save face in the wake of the recently unveiled plans to raise the East River Park. I anticipate similar news for the "White House", the former Rivington Street Public Baths, which sits squatly in the middle of the Baruch Houses, maybe a 15 minute walk from the LaGuardia Bathhouse building.        A short history: At 118 years old, the Baruch Bathhouse building is not only the oldest public bathhouse in the city, but also the first of its kind to be opened in New York. It's namesake, Dr. Simon Baruch, was an Eastern European Jew who moved to South Carolina in 1855 (at 15 years old) to live with, and work for, a wealthy German-Jewish family. After receiving his medical degree in 1862, Baruch served as a surgeon in the f*cking Confederate army (even treating soldiers for weeks after the defeat at Gettys
3 comments
Read more

Paper Bag Players Sign Disappears From 185 East Broadway

            After almost forty years, the simple block letter sign reading "Paper Bag Players" was taken out of the window at 185 East Broadway, almost a year after the building sold for 6.1 million dollars. Founded in 1958 (four years after the start of Joe Papp's "New York Shakespeare Festival", later Shakespeare in the Park, which first held productions at the nearby East River Amphitheater) the Paper Bag Players are a non-profit children's theater group which in many respects attempted to meld aspects of alternative theater with programming for children's education, arriving at 185 East Broadway around 1981. I called and spoke to somebody at Paper Bag Players a week ago and was told they had relocated uptown, having permanently left their space at 185 East Broadway after the building was sold.       I wish to speak briefly on the history of 185 East Broadway, but in doing so must include 183 and 187 East Broadway as well (to the right and left
2 comments
Read more