80 St. Mark's Place, a building in the heart of the East Village, held an old speakeasy during Prohibition owned by gangster Walter Scheib. Now it will house the new Museum of the American Gangster.
"People would come down the subway stairs into the front business, which I think was a butcher shop, go out into the alley, into the back door and into a whole other world where there was good jazz and Canadian whiskey," says Lorcan Otway, the museum's co-founder.Otway's family bought the building from Scheib 46 years ago and opened a theater there, but recently Otway was inspired to create the museum.
Visitors will see, among other exhibits a replica of a Thompson machine gun, the so-called "Tommy gun" seen in all the old gangster films, as well as old newspaper articles about gangsters like Al Capone and Jack "Legs" Diamond and a Prohibition-era beer cooler, where all the illegal beer was stored.
Otway's father made a discovery inside the building.
"The first year that we owned the building, my father discovered two locked safes, called Walter Scheib and said he was too curious to own a building with locked safes and too cautious to open them without them," says Otway. "And they opened the safes and in the second safe they found $2 million in gold currency, which part of the experience of coming to the museum is that there is a living mystery around that money."
Otway says Scheib took the paper, which was worth nothing in the United States, and managed to make money selling it in Eastern Europe.
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