Amanuensis: A person employed to write what another dictates or to copy what has been written by another.
I continue my project to transcribe family letters, journals, newspaper articles, audiotapes, and other historical artifacts. Not only do the documents contain genealogical information, the words breathe life into kin - some I never met - others I see a time in their life before I knew them.
Sale of 1122 North Eighth to Selig Feinstein and Max Wieselman
Article from Jun 28, 1895 St. Louis Globe-Democrat (St. Louis, Missouri)
PASSING OF A CRIME CENTER.
The "Eighth Street Yard" to Be Made the Home of Peace.
Warfare and Wassail No Longer Prevail in the Place that Made the Third District Notorious -- "Little Jerusalem" Will Absorb It.
"Ichabod" is written in dull, dead letters all over the "Eighth Street Yards," and their somber hues have spread over all the Third Police District, enveloping it in a haze of gloom. Silence and somnolence reign in the place of rum, ruin and riot, and the queen of Castle. Thunder, the Liliuokalani of North St. Louis, has been deposed. The vigilant guardian of the public peace now walks his beat in solitude, and hears not the sound of the growler as it moveth in the alley, and starts no more at the ripping sound of the knife as It plows its way through Ethiopian cuticle. The echo of the bulldog revolver has died away; the pickaninnies and their progenitors have gone hence. The Eighth Street Yards are deserted, and Capt. Peter Joyce and his vigilantes mourn because of their desolation and refuse to be comforted. Has not the "Bloody Third" become the abode of peace? There is nothing left but to mourn.
The Eighth Street Yards, the scene of more bloodshed and crime than any other spot in St. Louis, have been notorious for a quarter of a century. They are located at 1116-1122 North Eighth street, extending back to the alley which runs through the square from Carr to Biddle street. The houses facing on Eighth street are located 10 feet above the level of the street, and are reached by means of winding steps. Between the street and the alley, bounded on the north and south by tenement houses, is a clear area about 40 feet square which has been soaked with human blood ten times over. The houses are all brick structures, scarcely fit for habitation by human beings, yet within their dingy walls for more than a score of years negro roustabouts and other offscourings of the race have met for revel and battle. Years ago the place became notorious, and did much toward winning for the district the sobriquet of the "Bloody Third." The yards are only half a square from the police station. Immediately at the north, in the alley between Seventh and Eighth and Biddle and O'Fallon streets, is the equally notorious "Wild-Cat Chute," while just east of the station, between Sixth and Seventh, Wash and Carr streets, is "Clabber Alley,' whose euphonious title has long: been familiar to the crime-reading public. This trio of rallying places for the infamous made life in the "Bloody Third" a hideous nightmare for many, and Capt. Peter Joyce, a graduate of West Point, a veteran of the civil war and a fighter of the redman, found it impossible to subdue their inmates, not being allowed the use of cavalry and cannon in his crusade against crime.
But what the police failed to do a peaceful transaction has accomplished, and the Eighth Street Yards have gone "glimmering through the gleam of things that were." The houses have been sold to Max Wissellman and S. Feinstein, of 1108 North Eighth street, and they will be remodeled and refurnished and rented to Jewish families. The work of reconstruction has already commenced, and a boys' school is temporarily in operation in one of the rooms adjoining Castle Thunder. The "yards" will soon be an addition to "Little Jerusalem."
The passing of the Eighth Street Yards recalls many tales which have long since become incorporated in the unwritten history of the place. The gleam of the razor, the echo of the revolver, the rattle of the patrol wagon, the shouts of hate and derision and the vigorous thump of the policeman's club all come back as plain as yesterday. In the background along with others who come. trooping at memory's call, is the herculean frame of "Big-Lip Lou," King of the Eighth Street Yards. Years ago he took up his abode in Castle Thunder, and his prowess in attempting to extend the power of his razor and his big right arm into the confines of Wild-Cat Chute and Clabber alley won for him the title of king. Lou was one of the biggest roustabouts that ever "run the river." His word was law to his scores of black subjects, and many a charge he led against the denizens of the two settlements which aspired to be more bloody than his own. For months and years he reigned with absolute tyranny, but dissensions finally arose in the midst of his bailiwick, and he went down before the hand of one of his own subjects.
There, too, is "Beggie," the Bacchanalian Queen, whose dynasty perished with her. Beggie had two sons, both well-to-do, but she foreswore their love protection for that of John Barleycorn, and many a night she spent in his company in Castle Thunder, where she finally died amid the turbulency of her surroundings. The negroes regarded her with admiration, and the power which she wielded over them was second only to that of a cannibal queen.
Capt. Joyce regards with apprehension the decline his domain, and Patrolmen Simcox, Knollhoff, Mader, and Taylor sigh disconsolately as they muse upon the fall of the empire which each of them invaded many times, and oft with results more than once deadly and disastrous. Patrolman Mader, now of the Fifth District, once went into the yards to arrest a negro, and was shot in the groin. The negro attempted to escape amid the confusion, but a bullet from the officer's revolver killed him instantly, and the policeman, who had gone in single-handed, was glad to escape with his life. Patrolman Simcox, they say, is more melancholy than all the others, and often twangs his club viciously on the sidewalk at the dead of night, as though all joy had been taken out of the police business and there were no further use of living. In the meantime the desk sergeant at the station smiles, the turnkey is happy, and at police headquarters there is a general feeling of relief.
Notes:
1) The article spells my ancestor's partner's name as Max Wisselman, but I know it is Max Wieselman, with whom he filed a patent in 1898. I was unaware he was a partner in the real estate purchase as well.
2) It appears the Jewish School at 1122 North Eighth in the 1909 Sanborn Maps was created in 1895, when my second great grandfather purchased the building, so it is likely my great grandfather attended the school.
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