Much Ado About Adenoids

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Edmund Lawall must have felt cursed. He’d brought his family to New York in the late 1800s to carry on his father’s business as a pharmacist, but fate⁠⁠—or perhaps the city itself⁠⁠—seemed determined to drive him back out again. Lawall’s health had been in decline since their arrival, and his wife’s kidney disease had worsened, despite all of the tinctures and patent medicines available to his turn-of-the-century expertise. Not long after that, his business partner had been revealed as a crook, sending Lawall scrambling into bankruptcy court to convince the judge that his pharmacy had nothing to do with shady real estate dealings. Then, in the midst of the bankruptcy proceedings, an anonymous woman had staggered into Lawall’s drug store, collapsed on the floor, and died of unknown causes. Likely no one could have saved her, but it wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement of the pharmaceutical services available at the corner of Eighth Street and Avenue C.

None of that compared, however, to the morning of 27 June 1906, when a disheveled man in a medical coat burst through the narrow glass doors of the pharmacy, begging for protection. He was immediately followed by a young man with a revolver, and an angry crowd screaming in Yiddish. Lawall didn’t speak the language, but there was no mistaking the young man’s intent as he strode purposely forward and raised his gun to the doctor’s head.

It was a grim, but recognizable tableau: the young man’s stance and grip were confident, clearly marking him as a budding gangster. The behavior of the crowd, on the other hand, made no sense at all. Innocent bystanders tended to run away from gang violence, yet the pushcart vendors and housewives surrounding the apparent holdup were not frightened, or even appealing for mercy. They were shouting, quite insistently, for the doctor’s execution. And everything seemed to indicate they were going to get what they wanted.

In the weeks that followed, blame would be pointed in nearly every direction⁠⁠—because at that moment, unbeknownst to Lawall, similar scenes were playing out all over the neighborhood, with other doctors, teachers, reporters, and even utility workers being assaulted by hordes of people howling at them in Yiddish. By the time it was over, the incident would be measured as one of the largest riots ever in New York City, and the confrontation at Lawall’s Pharmacy would be mentioned only in passing, if at all. Another name, however, would be repeated over and over again: Adeline E. Simpson, the principal of Public School No. 110.

P.S. 110, ca. 1903

For the toughest school in the city, P.S. 110’s architecture was surprisingly beautiful. Its five stories of white stone crowded the narrow sidewalk and ascended sharply upward, cutting through the street-level grime like a shaft of light. Where gargoyles would have traditionally stood, the roofline instead featured dozens of intricately carved owls⁠⁠—an homage to Florence Nightingale, who was famously fond of her pet owl, Athena, and who was technically the school’s namesake even if no one ever called it by anything but its number. Like the rest of the Lower East Side, the building’s pristine craftsmanship would soon be draped in a thick layer of grey soot, but in 1906, just three years after opening, it still stood as a proud testament to the Board of Education’s mission to prepare every child in New York City for a bright future, regardless of their background.

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