The boys on this makeshift ice rink in 1911 seem totally insouciant despite being a short walk from the saloon of ruthless Mafia boss Dominick Giambrone. The rink was near Stolle’s Hall, where Johnny fatefully danced with a woman who wasn’t Frankie. The neighborhood was home to anarchists; mule wranglers; burlap bag menders; “a professional rat-catcher, who lived alone with a pair of weasels”; pickpockets; “‘Spider’ Myers, King of the Daggers”; Oscar Berger, “champion goose-driver of St. Louis,” who led his birds to Biddle Market with a series of eerie whistles after walking them through “pitch and sand, to put an extra sole on their foot”; and an old gent who often stood in the alley near Carr, stirring grape juice with a broom handle to make “California wine.” One health inspector called this area “the plague spot of America,” though one senses that his real disgust lay in the fact that these people were poor and immigrants. His descriptions to the press of consumptives, trash heaps, and “urchins” are challenged by this image, not a trash heap in sight and a scrum of happy boys on skates, the flush on their cheeks obvious even in black-and-white.
