Word: 108th
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...scarred and swarming tenements along Harlem's East 108th Street have changed little since Gambler Frank Costello was a boy. The towers of the Triborough Bridge now float in the sky just beyond their chimneys, and a snare-drum roll of traffic drifts up from the modern East River Drive. Negroes and Puerto Ricans choke the slums to west and north. But the old neighborhood is still Italian. Its sidewalk garbage cans (each with its cover chained to prevent theft), its great, voracious rats, its smells, its endless noise, are the same...
Then, as now, East 108th Street was a hard place to live. It was harder to leave. The palaces of Manhattan's power and wealth rose up only a few blocks to the south, but to the poor of Italian Harlem, they were as remote and incredible as the palaces of India. Frank Costello escaped to live in them by a process as devious and dangerous as an escape from Devil's Island. He became a rumrunner, a slot-machine king, a gambler and intimate of killers, a political fixer-and a man of riches and influence...
...Costello to a tower apartment on Central Park West began in Cosenza, Italy, where, in 1891, he was born Francesco Castiglia, sixth child of a debt-burdened farmer. He was brought to New York when he was four; his father opened a hole-in-the-wall grocery on East 108th Street, and he was exposed early.to the neighborhood heroes: the torpedoes who worked for Giro Terranova, red-handed boss of the Unione Siciliana in Harlem and The Bronx...
Manhattan's Union Theological Seminary will have a new president in July 1945. At the Seminary's 108th commencement last week it was announced that tall, able, energetic Dr. Henry Pitney Van Dusen, professor of systematic theology, will succeed Dr. Henry Sloane Coffin, who has been president for 19 years. Dr. Coffin will have reached 68, Union's retirement age, next June...
...108th combat ship launched by the Navy since its renaissance began...