Here’s where NYC’s gory, blood-splattered past is hiding in plain sight

Leave the gun-take the calamari

THEN
Shortly after opening in 1972, Umberto’s Clam House became one of the most famous restaurants in New York-—but not because of their scungilli. The Little Italy destination is where notorious mobster “Crazy Joe” Gallo was gunned down on his 43rd birthday. After a night on the town, Gallo and his family were relaxing at a table in the back when four gunmen burst in with revolvers and lit up the place.

NOW
Decades later, Umberto’s moved up the block, and the site of the murder is now home to a different Italian spot, Da Gennaro.

Bleeding like a stuck pig

THEN
A bit of friendly advice: Never tell your fiancée that “only a pig” would marry her. It seems simple enough, but in 1895 Domenico Cataldo learned this lesson the hard way. After one too many fights, his betrothed, Maria Barbella, had had enough, so she walked up behind him and slit his throat with a razor. Cataldo staggered out of Mancuso’s Saloon in the East Village and made it to the corner before collapsing and bleeding to death in front of passersby.

NOW
The intersection lays claim to two drinkeries (Percy’s Tavern and the Spotted Owl Tavern) as well as Ink Spot Tattoo and CafféBene.

Pictured: Barbarella, right

A killer hangover

THEN
After an evening of free-flowing drinks at Murray Hill barroom Mansion House in 1891, three men stumbled onto Park Avenue. James Doyle went one direction; William Hobbs and an unknown stranger went the other. After they separated, Doyle saw the two men engage in a fierce discussion down the street over racing jockeys, but the argument came to an abrupt end when the stranger thrust the point of his umbrella through Hobbs’s eye, piercing his brain. At the hospital Hobbs was told to sleep it off, but he would never wake again.

NOW
The intersection’s four corners are occupied by bank chains.

Don’t go to bed angry

THEN
In 1865, Chinatown’s Columbus Park, nestled in the infamous Five Points, was an area you’d definitely wanted to avoid. Take this incident: At a boardinghouse just across Mulberry Street from the park, Peter McGeraty and Michael Healy got into a heated argument. As onlookers separated the pair, Healy screamed that he would kill McGeraty, and a few hours later he made good on that threat. Awakened by screams, the keepers of the house rushed into McGeraty’s room to find him hacked to death with an ax, his blood-covered killer standing beside him.

NOW
The green space is a bright spot where neighbors gather and children play.

Deadly dumplings

THEN
Welcome to the onetime most dangerous place in the country. During the early 1900s, the curve on Doyers Street in Chinatown was known as the “Bloody Angle,” thanks to the huge amount of hits the Tong gangs made there. Hatchets were a particularly popular murder weapon; no wonder the thoroughfare birthed the term hatchet man.

NOW
Every weekend, throngs of people hit the street, usually for two reasons: a) to stand outside of Nom Wah Tea Parlor to wait for a seat at the popular dim sum eatery; or b) to Instagram the cool urban backdrop.

Pictured: 13 Doyers Street, circa 1900

A real hothead

THEN
On September 27, 1902, diners at the Empire Garden Cafe complained about a putrid smell coming from the furnace. Authorities quickly found the source of the stench: the charred remains of a human head belonging to rich Long Island resident James “Captain Jim” Craft, as well as the rest of his body, which had been hacked apart by a cleaver. Thomas Tobin, a waiter hoping to rob Craft, had been seen going into the basement with his body; police found Tobin with blood still on his clothes and arrested him for the killing.

NOW
Just off Broadway on 29th Street, this location has been demolished to make way for a new build.

Lightning strikes twice

THEN
The Park Central Hotel was the site of two of the most notorious mob hits in history. First, in 1928, Arnold Rothstein—the man responsible for fixing the 1919 World Series who was portrayed by Michael Stuhlbarg on Boardwalk Empire—was shot over a gambling debt in one of the hotel’s suites. Twenty-nine years later, Albert Anastasia, a founder of the organized crime collective, dubbed Murder Inc. by the press, was relaxing in a barber’s chair when two masked men ambushed him and opened fire, thus killing one of the most feared mobsters of all time.

NOW
The midtown hotel, just a few blocks south of Central Park, remains a popular destination for visitors.

Pictured: Police removing the body of Anastasia in 1957

More fun than a barrel of corpses 

THEN
When detectives peeked inside an abandoned barrel on 11th Street in 1903, they were shocked by what they found: the body of Benedetto Madonia. “Barrel murders”—that is, murder victims discovered in barrels throughout the city—became a gruesome Mafia trend and calling card in the early 20th century, and Madonia was one of the first. Markings on the container led police to a café on Elizabeth Street, the scene of the murder.

NOW
What’s the Nolita locale these days? Aesop Nolita, where none of the products are used to conceal dead bodies.

Jack the Ripper hits the Big Apple?

THEN
The world was still addicted to all things Jack the Ripper when Carrie Brown, a well-known sexagenarian sex worker fond of quoting Shakespeare, was murdered in 1891 in a hotel room. The tabloids quickly made the connection and wondered if the famed killer had fled London to New York City, putting enormous pressure on the NYPD to solve the case. The police swiftly pinned the crime on Ameer Ben Ali, an Algerian man staying across the hall, despite minimal evidence. But after 11 years his conviction was overturned, and Ali was released. The murder has never been solved.

NOW
The intersection of the old hotel is near a playground a block away from FDR Drive.

Pictured: Illustration, 1888

Stranger than fiction

THEN
As you stroll through this beautiful waterside green space, it’s hard to believe you’re at the scene of a stabbing that involved the king of the Beats. It was here, in 1944, that Lucien Carr dumped the body of David Kammerer, a man who had once been Carr’s Boy Scout leader. (The murder weapon was, appropriately, a Boy Scout knife.) In a panic Carr sought the aid of Jack Kerouac. The On the Road author even helped dispose of the weapon, and the events surrounding the killing influenced William S. Burroughs and Kerouac’s joint novel, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks.

NOW
The bar in which Carr and Kerouac were drinking before the incident was on 114th Street and Broadway; the intersection today houses Columbia University dorms, bookstores and other campus buildings.

A solemn anniversary gone wrong

THEN
In the summer of 1870, the respected investor and philanthropist Benjamin Nathan was writing at his desk when he was attacked from behind with a blunt object. The particularly nauseating murder scene (Nathan’s head was entirely caved in, and the walls were splattered with blood) was discovered by his sons on a Saturday morning. The family had intended to visit the synagogue to mourn on the one-year anniversary of Benjamin’s mother’s death, but instead they lost their father.

NOW

Lava Shawarma NYC off Madison Square Park is the most recent business at the scene of the old crime.

The Cali cartel comes to Queens

THEN
The murder of journalists was a common occurrence in the Cali cartel’s rise to dominance, but in 1992 its bloody wrath was felt far from Colombia. Manuel de Dios Unanue, the crusading former editor of El Diario La Prensa, had been known for taking a strong stance against corruption and drug gangs. De Dios was sitting at the end of the bar at Meson Asturias in Elmhurst when a hooded gunman shot him twice in the head, a grisly act dramatized in the latest season of Narcos on Netflix.

NOW
These days the spot is home to Mexican restaurant Juquila.

Use every tool in the box

THEN
One morning in 1856, a tailor’s clerk arrived at work to discover a horrific scene. The entire Tribeca shop was plastered with the blood, gore and remains of Bartholomew Burke, a porter. The killer had used a number of different weapons on the victim; he was stabbed with pruning shears, smashed in the head with a hammer and nearly decapitated with a short sword.

NOW
The whole thing went down inside what is now an exhibition showroom.

Blasts in Borough Park

THEN
Next time you walk under the D train as it rumbles through Borough Park, know that it’s the scene of a brutal 1962 encounter that left two NYPD officers dead. After catching two men holding up the Boro Park Tobacco Company, officers engaged in a fierce shoot-out. The gunmen escaped, but they were caught after an intensive manhunt. One of the perpetrators, Jerry Rosenberg, would become one of the country’s most famous prison-house lawyers.

NOW
It’s the site of Olympic Glass and Metal Inc.

Pictured: Rosenberg at Eastern Correctional Facility in Napanoch, NY, in 1982