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From the Pig Town Boys to the Green Avenue Stompers: A 1954 map of New York City street gangs [1]
['Ruben Bolling']
Date: 2025-02-02
In his Washington Post newsletter "How to Read This Chart," Philip Bump presents a map of New York City street gangs from a 1954 article in The New York Daily News.
Here are two images from this week's free-to-read newsletter, if you want to read it, for free. s2.washingtonpost.com/camp-rw/?tra… — Philip Bump (@pbump.com) 2025-02-01T15:08:01.121Z
Some of the names of the gangs sound like they're right out the movie The Warriors, as Bump says: Pig Town Boys; Jokers; Dapper Midgets; Local Vikings; Golden Guineas; Chaplains; Huns Tims; Green Avenue Stompers, etc.
You can get a full view of the map at this link, and the accompanying June 15, 1954 article titled "Spring Sparks Teen Gang Wars" at this link.
I'm sure the menace of these gangs was quite real, but the gang names and descriptions sound archaically quaint and fanciful today. The Daily News article introduces its readers to the street slang used by these teens: a "rumble" for a fight, a "piece" for a gun, "rep" for reputation.
Some groups of teens resented being called "gangs" by the police.
"'We haven't had a fight for 2 1/2 months,' one member of the group called the Jolly Gents in East Harlem said. 'We ain't no gang. We just hang around the block here, or go the park and play stickball.' 'But one of these guys from the Yorkville Dukes tore the shirt of one of our guys. What are you going to do? We can't let them get away with that. We fought them with our fists.'"
And the article describes the way gang members hide their weapons and "pieces" so that the police can't find them, often enlisting girls, whom the cops apparently won't search, to carry them.
The Gowanus Stoppers found baby-carriages — occupied by babies! — were a safe, unsuspected place hiding place. Several gurgling infants lay atop knives and bottles of gasoline while cops searched gang members.
It was only a year later, in 1955, that the creative team of Arthur Laurents, Jerome Robbins, Leonard Bernstein, and Stephen Sondheim formed to create "West Side Story" after a couple of years of germination, and it's easy to imagine that this article and the map planted some of the seeds for that project.
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