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Paradise Alley Until September 2001, three summer days in 1863 were the most frightening in the history of New York City. From Monday, July 13, through Wednesday, July 17, mobs held much of Manhattan. The rioters were working class, overwhelmingly Irish Catholic and filled with smoldering resentments -- at the Yankee Protestants who exploited and demeaned them, at the squalor in which they were forced to live, at inflationary prices and lockouts and strikebreaking. But the final spark was provided by the new National Conscription Act, which made virtually all able-bodied men eligible for the draft but allowed the well-to-do to escape service in the Union Army by paying a $ 300 fee. As many of the Irish saw it, poor white workingmen like themselves were being forced to fight for the freedom of blacks, who would then come north and take their jobs. They burned federal property and attacked Republican newspaper offices, looted stores and wrecked private homes, killed policemen and soldiers who tried to stop them and beat or butchered any African-American men, women or children who happened to cross their path.
A puzzled foreign visitor asked a bystander why blacks were the special targets of their anger. ''Oh, sir, '' the man replied, ''they hate them here'' because ''they are the innocent cause of all these troubles. '' The New York draft riots remain the worst civil disturbance in American history: according to the historian Adrian Cook, 119 people are known to have been killed, mostly rioters or onlookers who got too close when federal troops, brought back from the battlefield to restore order, started shooting. Those three chaotic days provide the backdrop for Kevin Baker's extraordinary new novel, ''Paradise Alley. '' Baker is simultaneously a richly imaginative fiction writer steeped in historical fact and a meticulous historian who cheerfully alters actual events whenever it serves the intricate, many-sided stories he likes to spin. As the chief historical researcher for Harold Evans, Baker ferreted out a lot of the quirky details that helped fill Evans's best-selling ''American Century'' with so many unexpected pleasures. ''In the News, '' Baker's column in American Heritage magazine, offer readers a bimonthly dose of historical context for current events, shrewdly distinguishing those items for which the past really is prologue from those for which knowledge of history isn't much help. In his 1999 novel, ''Dreamland, '' he managed both to paint a wholly plausible portrait of immigrant New York around 1910 and to tell a gritty, exuberant tale that blended historic personages (including Sigmund Freud) and a large fictional cast, with two great conflagrations: the blaze that destroyed the Dreamland Amusement Park at Coney Island and the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, which helped to catalyze the American labor movement. The result was irresistible.
''Paradise Alley'' is just as successful -- and no less ambitious. In ''Dreamland, '' the immigrant protagonists were Jewish and eastern European.
In ''Paradise Alley, '' they are Roman Catholic and Irish. But the misery of their surroundings remains the same: they live in the notorious Fourth Ward, where feral pigs snuffle through gutters heaped with filth, a single spigot serves three blocks and people live more densely packed -- 290, 000 to the square mile -- than in any other neighborhood on earth. They battle against the same odds, too, and struggle with the same vexing riddle: when does an immigrant become an American? Like a skilled ringmaster, Baker sets seven major characters in motion on the morning of July 13. Most of them occupy derelict houses along the short, fetid block off Cherry Street that gives the book its title. The mob is still just background noise then. ''Something both more and less, '' a member of Baker's cast notes, ''than the daily going to work, the bawdy, boisterous awakening of the City that she liked to listen to every morning from her doorstep before joining it herself. '' But as the story sweeps along -- Baker is a master of momentum -- the distant thunder grows closer and closer until its roar drowns out everything else, a lethal threat to all the people he has made us care about.
Ruth Dove is an Irish-born ragpicker: married to a runaway slave from South Carolina named Billy Dove, she lives in fear of her former lover, Johnny Dolan -- Dangerous Johnny Dolan -- a sometime bare-knuckle boxer whom the horrors of the potato famine have turned into a murderous sociopath. As the book begins, Ruth learns that after a 14 -year forced exile she helped arrange, he has returned to New York bent on revenge. Deirdre Dolan O'Kane, the killer's older sister, is as different from him as she can possibly make herself: a proud, pious ex-domestic, intent on working her way out of poverty, she wants her family to ''live like Americans, '' and has transformed her husband, Tom, from a member of a notorious riverfront gang called the Break O'Day Boys into a sober and reliable wage earner. Now she is frightened that by talking him into volunteering to serve in the celebrated Irish Brigade, the Fighting 69 th, she has sent him to his death. Maddy Boyle is a teenage prostitute, kept by the book's only important Protestant character, a self-confessed hack named Herbert Willis Robinson.
He works for Horace Greeley's New York Tribune and is a keen observer of everything except himself; his reluctance to take his mistress into his home in the guarded sanctuary of Gramercy Park leaves her vulnerable to the mob as it roars into Paradise Alley in search of victims. Without ever slowing his novel's pace or letting us lose sight of any of his characters, the author takes the reader on a careering, kaleidoscopic tour of their world. The timorous might think twice before embarking. Baker's itinerary encompasses ravaged Ireland and the carnage at Fredericksburg, as well as New York's lower depths.
He takes his readers to a bull-baiting pit, walks them past slaughterhouses and through a Manhattan sewer filled with scuttling rats. And we visit places most New Yorkers know nothing about: Seneca Village, the black squatters's element that stood in the center of what is now Central Park till 19 th-century gentrification moved uptown and wiped it out; a waterfront dive where, for a nickel, thirsty patrons are welcome to as much rotgut whiskey as they can suck through a rubber hose in 30 seconds; and a Bowery saloon that displays on its bar a jar of pickled ears, bitten off misbehaving customers by the female proprietor. Baker's story is so rich in color and drama that here and there some readers may find their credulity strained. But a random check of several of the sources he obligingly provides shows that while he has often changed names and altered locations to suit the story, many of those scenes that seem least plausible turn out to be the most faithful to the recorded facts: a canny black man did deflect a murderous mob by putting on an impromptu minstrel show; when rioters shouting ''Burn the niggers' nest!' 's et fire to the Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue, a block north of where the Public Library now stands, it really was a heroic Irish boy who emerged from nowhere to lead the 237 terrified children who lived there to safety in a precinct house; and a family's hairsbreadth escape over the rooftops of burning houses that at first seems to have been snipped from an old-fashioned Saturday afternoon serial turns out to have happened almost precisely as Baker describes it. As a convincing portrayal of how things were in our city that terrible summer and as a compelling fictional vision of how things might have been, as well, ''Paradise Alley'' is twice a triumph.
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