19. When Fashion Led to Riots
The viral fad of snatching straw hats off people’s heads and destroying them led to serious disturbances. In 1922, New York City erupted into a days-long Straw Hat Riot, which put that of Pittsburgh in 1910 to shame. It began in Manhattan’s Mulberry Bend, when some urchins decided to ignore the September 15th cutoff. They got a head start on their annual crime spree, and began to snatch and destroy straw hats on September 13th. The kids’ first target was some dockworkers, but the dockworkers did not see the humor in it, got ticked off, and fought back. Things escalated, and that night, widespread mayhem and crime engulfed Manhattan.
After they got beat down by the dockworkers, the kids regrouped in ever-larger and increasingly more violent gangs. Soon, mobs of out-of-control youth roamed the city, snatched hats off heads, attacked people en masse, and beat up any who resisted. NYC’s 1922 Straw Hat Riot went on for days. The initial mayhem on the night of September 13th grew so widespread and got so bad that it halted traffic on the Manhattan Bridge. Police reinforcement were rushed in to end the violence, but the relief was only temporary. The next night, the crime spree intensified when youth gangs, some of them armed with nail-studded clubs, returned to the streets of Manhattan.