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 Ancien...