Captain Rose’s House, Later Kit Burn’s Sportsman’s Hall

On my way to an informal gathering of water-bloggers on Saturday, I passed by Captain Joseph Rose’s House at 273 Water Street in Lower Manhattan.  I wanted to stop by because one scene in my next novel, The Shantyman, is set in the building.  The scene takes place long after the Rose family had decamped, when the building was Kit Burn’s notorious Sportman’s Hall, better known as simply the “Rat Pit.”

Captain Rose had the house built in 1773. It is said to be the third oldest surviving building in Manhattan.  (The oldest is apparently St. Paul’s Chapel, not far away at 209 Broadway, between Fulton and Vesey Streets. The second oldest is the Morris-Jumel Mansion in Washington Heights.)  Captain Rose was a successful importer of Honduran mahogany. In those days, the East River ran directly behind his house on the aptly named, Water Street. Captain Rose kept his brig, Industry,  just out his back door, at a pier that he shared with his neighbor and fellow ship owner, William Laight.

By the 1840s, Water Street and nearby South and Cherry Streets were the heart of New York’s “Sailortown.”  The streets were lined with boarding houses, bars, brothels and gambling dens.  In 1863, Christopher Keyburn, better known as Kit Burns, bought the property at 273 Water Street and opened his Sportman’s Hall.  While still in his teens, in the late 1840s, Burns had become a leader of the “Dead Rabbits” gang in the nearby Five Points neighborhood.  His Water Street Sportman’s Hall was equal parts saloon, gambling hall, dance hall and brothel.  It quickly became known for illegal bare-knuckle boxing prize fights as well as dog-fights and rat-baiting.  Rat baiting involved turning terriers loose on trapped rats. The spectators would bet on which dog killed the most rats. Burn’s establishment was often just referred to as the “Rat Pit” as the ground floor featured the largest rat pit in the city. It was an octagonal, dirt-floored pit enclosed by three-foot-high wooden walls, approximately 17 feet long and nine feet wide, into which 50 rats would be released at a time.  Burn’s Sportsman Hall was shut down by the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) in 1870. Burn died of pneumonia not long after.  Twelve years after it was shut down, J.W. Buel described the establishment in his book, Mysteries and miseries of America’s great cities:

We can view the house which for so long was known as ” Kit Burns’ Sportsmen’s Hall,” located at No. 273 Water street. This place was once an eating cancer on the body municipal, and within its crime begrimed walls have been enacted so many villainies, that the world has wondered why the wrath of vengeance did not consume it. But with all its festering and mephitic odors and criminalities, together with its votaries of Jezebel and Nana Sahib, the proprietor prospered and waxed rich. His rat and dog pits were known far and wide, and nowhere could the molochs and thugs find such delectable divertisement as Burns’ pits afforded.

The building was used for various purposes, including as as warehouse, after the Sportsman Hall was shut down. It survived a fire in 1904 and another in 1974, which gutted the building. another fire gutted the building. In 1976 it was seized for back taxes and sat empty for twenty years. In 1997, a developer bought the space from the city for $1 and then spent over a million dollars converting the building into four luxury condominiums.   The building was damaged again in the flooding during Superstorm Sandy in 2012.   From all appearances most of the repairs have been completed since.  Sadly, its neighbor just down the block, the Bridge Cafe, which was one of, if not, the oldest bar in New York City, has not reopened.

Rat baiting seems to be an artifact of a much more brutal time. Nevertheless, it appears to be an informal sort of activity to this day.  These days, it is mostly an outdoor pastime in the night-time back alleys of New York, not so far from Water Street.  I wonder what Kit Burns would have thought of it.

In Manhattan Alleys, Dogs on Rat Hunts Find Bags of Fun