CRIME: Piety in Hell’s Kitchen

Bums in Manhattan’s dreary, beery Hell’s Kitchen seldom visited the Community Mission. The Mission — two big, bare-walled rooms on the street floors of two houses on West 40th Street — offered the thinnest of soup and sermons. But scores of Hell’s Kitchen kids found it a charming place. Every afternoon they were invited inside to play. There were always comic books in the hymnal box; nobody objected if small fry yelled in the gospel hall or rolled empty garbage cans along the front sidewalk.

The neighborhood was a little hazy about the Mission’s exact creed. Most of the people along the street were Irish or Polish Roman Catholics, and they took no interest in its services. But they often heard the organ wheezing away and saw clergymen piously coming & going—there was Father Raymond Norman, and Father Lyman Appleby, and Archbishop William F. Tyarks, a bony and ancient cleric. They all belonged to something called the American Catholic Orthodox Church. Everybody knew they Were not Roman Catholics—Mrs. Fitzgerald, who lived in a flat over the Mission, reported that they ate baloney last Ash Wednesday. But nobody minded that.

Cokes and Ice Cream. The sexton, Tom Ryan, had a good name in the neighborhood. He had a cherubic, middle-aged face—”like a bottle baby,” said Mrs. Mary McLoughlin down the street. And if the Mission showed little interest in the souls of bums, Father Norman was a friend to the neighbors. He gave the kids cokes and ice cream, and took them for rides in his big black automobile. At Christmas he invited 60 of them to dinner, gave them firemen’s helmets and cowboy hats. If anybody needed coal, money or clothes for their children, jovial Father Norman was glad to provide them. After ten years the neighborhood came to feel that the Mission—whatever its religion—was a solid institution.

But last week the neighbors learned differently. Detectives clapped the “clergy” of the Community Mission ‘into jail, and with them a lay brother named William J. Hager. The “Archbishop,” it developed, was known in ruder circles as “Dutch Willy.” Father Appleby had been convicted of rape in 1927. Father Norman was known to the police as Raymond J.

Hirsch, alias The Professor. Even Tom Ryan, the cherub-faced sexton, had another name—George Lanoway. He had been arrested 19 times, had gone to Sing Sing for a five-year stretch in 1930.

Punchboard Padres. An indictment charging an arm-long list of felonies accused the fake clergy of collecting money under false pretenses. In ten years of canvassing Manhattan for a non-existent shelter, nursery, and boys’ camp, said the District Attorney, they had collected more than half a million dollars.

According to the Mission’s letterheads (though not in fact), the Mission had a staff of doctors and nurses, listed an honorary committee which included (without their knowledge or consent) Jack Dempsey, Mrs. Oliver Harriman, Ralph W. Budd and other big names. Sometimes, in lighter vein, the missioners got money for their charities by selling punchboards —all of them well rigged against the player.

Despite the shattering completeness of the charges, the Mission’s “clergy” indignantly pleaded not guilty. Nor was the arrest popular in Hell’s Kitchen. Last week the children along West 40th Street poked glumly among the refuse in a vacant lot across from the Mission and talked about the wonders of Father Norman’s Christmas party. Most of the adults, too, felt dimly aggrieved. Said Thomas Phillips, a merchant seaman: “If this guy Norman stole, he stole from the rich to give to the poor—sort of a Robin Hood, you might say. He loaned me $50 once. We’re all for him around here.”