Captured in 1889 by Jacob Riis, the only known photograph of the notorious Short Tail Gang offers a rare and chilling window into New York City’s underworld. Pictured beneath the pier at the foot of Jackson Street near Corlears Hook, the gang members sit hunched on damp wooden planks, eating from tin cans. Their distinctive short-tailed jackets, practical yet defiant, gave the gang its name and served as a makeshift uniform in the harsh world of tenement life and street survival.
The Short Tail Gang, also known as the Short Tails for their distinctive short-tailed jacket coats, were an 1880s–1890s Irish gang located in the Corlear's Hook section of the Lower East Side, on Rivington Street in the vicinity of Mangin and Goerck Streets of Manhattan, in New York City. The Eastman Gang was also headquartered around Corlear’s Hook and may have had its beginnings as a breakaway gang of the Short Tail Gang.
The Short Tails, along with rival gangs the Daybreak Boys, the Patsy Conroy Gang, the Swamp Angels, and the Hook Gang, worked the New York City waterfront, plundering ships of their cargo on the East River. The Short Tail Gang was photographed in 1887, under a pier by noted photographer Jacob Riis, being one of the few 19th-century New York gangs to allow its members to be photographed. In fear of being identified and arrested by the law, usually individual police mug shots were the only criminal pictures known to exist.
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