opium and frank “chick” tricker
One hundred years ago today … The news broke that Frank "Chick" Tricker, longtime New York gangster based in Chinatown, was planning to use his wealth to set up a treatment center for people who use drugs.
The Sun and Herald explains his reasoning: “[D]rug users who enter the ordinary sort of sanitariums [sic] were set adrift in much too short a time.” As a result, Tricker says, “they hit the hop harder than ever.”
The Sun and Herald, 19 October 1920, p. 26. Chronicling America.
Tricker was interviewed for the article from his “bachelor apartment at 63 Bayard Street, on the [western] edge of Chinatown,” in a building that had been built five years earlier, and still stands. It is right down the street from the legendary 70 Bayard building we featured in our September 11 post.
On the same day, the NYC police were at the other, eastern, end of Chinatown, using heavy-handed tactics for the heavy-handed aim of preventing drugs from being distributed.
The Daily News, 20 October 1920, p. 22. Chronicling America.
Note: We previously reported on opiates in 1920 NYC in our March 31 post about a drug bust and on Chinatown in our February 19 post about the Lunar New Year.
As for Tricker, he had made a name for himself as a high-ranking member of the Eastman Gang and a survivor of Chinatown’s “Tong Wars” (Asbury, 298-303).
The Daily News, 20 October 1920, p. 11. Chronicling America.
There are many addresses associated with Tricker. One of them, 12 Pell Street, was the site of the Pelham Café, where Tricker hung out in the early years of the 1900s The site has its own writeup at Infamous New York, which describes its early days and its most famous employee:
On any given night, the bar played host to a packed crowd of millionaires and murders, pickpockets and tourists, all on account of The Professor on the piano and a seventeen year old singing waiter named Izzy Baline, who would one day be known as Irving Berlin.
The address itself was recently featured in Bowery Boogie’s “Getting By” series of posts about lower Manhattan business owners navigating the COVID-19 crisis.
References/Further Reading:
Asbury, Herbert. Gangs of New York. 1927. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1998.
WRITTEN BY JONATHAN GOLDMAN, OCTOBER 19, 2020.
TAGS: Chinatown, opium, heroin, drugs, gangsters, drug treatment, harm reduction, rehabilitation, sanatorium, Irving Berlin