Fourth Ward childhood life centered on church and Tammany Hall

Evidence

Never leaving it for longer than a day’s outing, he grew up in the narrow compass of a neighborhood whose life revolved around two institutions, St. James Roman Catholic Church and the Downtown Tammany Club, and in which, as one who worked there put it, morality was simple, “virtue was virtue, vice was vice,” and the views of the parents were the views of the children as to which was which. On summer evenings, the children would sit on the stoops of the tenements and talk until Father Kean rapped on the window of the St. James Parish House as a signal that it was time to go to bed. And they went—as their parents had gone when they were children and Father Kean’s predecessor, Father Farelly, had rapped for them. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 496