All around the town1934

The author of the New York Times best-seller The Gangs of New York returns with a second volume of tales from Gotham’s underworld. In this wonderfully colorful and surprising history, Herbert Asbury expands his purview beyond the Five Corners to the entire city of New York. From Lord Cornbury, a loonily corrupt, cross-dressing British governor of colonial days, to the Broadway pickpocket who built herself a mansion in Hoboken, where she set herself up as European royalty, to prohibitionist Carry Nation’s first visit to a scornful city of saloons (and her memorable confrontation with the drunken John L. Sullivan), All Around the Town brings to vivid life a memorable range of characters, grifters, murderers, and madmen. Rediscovering a fascinating array of lost corners in the history of the...