Here’s a photo from Jacob Riis’s 1890 classic “How the Other Half Lives,” “an early publication… documenting squalid living conditions in New York City slums in the 1880s.” It shows “Bandit’s Roost, at 59½ Mulberry Street (Mulberry Bend), was the most crime-ridden, dangerous part of all New York City.”
Those guys are clearly total bad-asses.
How the Other Half Lives is in the public domain; you can download the full book, listen to a free audio edition at Librivox, and choose from among several editions in print.
(via Kadrey)