Walk another block north to 13th Street and an intersection doubly blessed, or cursed, with two famous deaths.

12.

With a chest full of money, James Murray was afraid to shack up with his fellow sailors in John Johnson's boarding house downtown on Front Street, so the landlord graciously offered his own room on a March night in 1824. This courtesy allowed Johnson, either alone or with a boarder named Jerry, to crush Murray's head with the blunt side of a hatchet. Jerry escaped upstate (and was never found) while Johnson was left to drag the body into Cuyler's Alley, a small street, now subsumed in the middle of the NYSE Stock Clearing Building downtown on Water Street. The body was discovered the same night and was quickly identified and traced back to Johnson, who confessed within days. His trial was a sensation, playing to packed crowds, and his execution, on April 2, 1824, on this spot, was reportedly witnessed by 50,000 people, a figure which, if accurate, means that over one-third of the entire city showed up to watch a landlord dangle.

"Big Jack" Zelig

Nearly a hundred years later, with the wide, empty fields replaced by cement and tenements, this intersection witnessed another execution, one without state sponsorship. On the evening of October 5, 1912, gang leader "Big Jack" Zelig, "the most feared man in New York," whom we met several blocks south at the Stuyvesant Casino was rubbed out on a Second Avenue streetcar as it passed this intersection.

The events that led up to his murder began back in the Casino. On the evening of October 4, 1912, Zelig was attending another ball and drinking wine with some cronies. A low-level pimp, Philip "Red Phil" Davidson, approached Zelig and tried to elbow in at the table. This was a huge breach of underworld etiquette, as Zelig was the premiere East Side mobster at the time, and Davidson was, in gangster terms, a nobody. Oblivious or uncaring, Davidson insisted on buying rounds and laid out some money. Zelig reluctantly threw it into the kitty.

The next day Zelig was playing cards at Segal's Cafe when Davidson entered and again began badgering the gangster. An altercation resulted and Zelig slapped Davidson, who left the café. He returned a few minutes later and again approached the boss. "Let's be friends," he said. Zelig, busy playing cards, replied laconically, "Why not?" The two shook hands. Davidson left the café.

A few hours later, Zelig boarded a streetcar heading uptown on Second Avenue. Stealthily, without being observed, Davidson got on a block or two later. He crept up to Zelig, placed a .38 revolver behind his left ear, and fired.

Captured shortly after, Davidson said that he killed Zelig because the boss had robbed him of $400. But Zelig had never met Davidson before the incident at the Stuyvesant Casino, and those who knew the pimp doubted he ever had $400 to steal. Perhaps the petty crook was merely sore over his treatment in the café. But the likeliest explanation lies in another case -the Becker Rosenthal murder.

Members of Zelig's gang - Harry "Gyp the Blood" Horowitz, Louis "Lefty Louis" Rosenberg, and Jacob "Whitey Lewis" Seidenschner - had been involved in this notorious murder case, and Zelig was due to testify at the trial, set to begin October 7 (two days after he was killed). Davidson, it is safe to assume, had been sent to keep Zelig from testify. Oddly, both the defense and the prosecution claimed the gang chief as a witnessed, so it wasn't clear who was doing a favor for whom.

Davidson pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and serve 12 years of a 20 years sentence in Sing Sing.

Detective Shoenfeld, prim moralist though he was, could not help but mourn a man he obviously respected. Immediately after the killing, he wrote: "Jack Zelig is as dead as a door nail. Men before him -like Kid Twist, Monk Eastman and others- were as pygmies to a giant. With the passing of Zelig, one of the most 'nerviest', strongest, and best men of his kind left us."