By FDNY Captain (ret.) Frank Leto
Thirty-eight years in the FDNY taught me that every old tenement in New York can tell thousands of stories. So one afternoon, I walked a few blocks from where I’d spent the last 20 years of my career and came to the spot where 222 Chrystie St. once stood, hoping the place might tell me the story of what happened just before midnight on July 29, 1907.
The fire started in the grocery on the ground floor of the six-story tenement. More than 100 people were asleep inside, almost all Italian immigrants. Flames climbed fast, turning the stairways into chimneys and driving families onto the fire escapes. Some jumped into the courtyard below, choosing the fall over the heat behind them.
FDNY companies made desperate rescues, but by the time the fire was under control, 25 people were dead and nearly 30 injured. Neighbors reported an explosion, the grocer vanished, and police detained a burned man wandering near the scene. It became one of the worst residential fires in the city’s history, and in a neighborhood already shaken by Black Hand threats, it was never seen as an accident. The Black Hand was not a single gang but rather a loose network of extortionists who preyed on Italian immigrants with threats, bombs and letters marked with daggers.
In the years after the fire, as 222 Chrystie St. was repaired and families returned, the building slipped into that world. It even earned an infamous nickname — “The Three Deuces.” Rumors spread that Black Hand collectors operated out of its hallways, using fear to keep neighbors silent. The Three Deuces became known as a place where threats were delivered, money was collected and trouble moved quietly through the back stairways.
Eight years after the tragic fire, another tragedy strikes the same block, this one more personal, although I did not understand how until very recently.
Early on the morning of Sept. 8, 1915, a gunman slipped into the Three Deuces as if he belonged there. He walked the length of its narrow hallway, stepped out into the rear yard, and crossed to the fence that separated the building from the back of 203 Forsyth St. Inside the small grocery on the other side, a few men were finishing a late card game. The gunman carried a ladder, propped it against the boards, climbed high enough to see through a small cutout, and fired both barrels into the room before disappearing the same way he had come.
The man who was murdered that night was my great-grandfather. I recently learned his name was Giuseppe Leto. He was 33, playing cards in that grocery when the shot tore through the window. It was another time, a century ago, but it wasn’t some distant world. It was New York, the same city my family has walked for generations, and this time, the story that unfolded there belonged to us.
Giuseppe came from Sicily, like so many who arrived with little more than a name and a hope for something better. The police called what happened to him an ambush. When they searched his body, they found a letter written in Italian and marked with a dagger, the kind of Black Hand threat, quiet but unmistakable. He had folded it neatly and kept it with him so that if anything ever happened, the reason would not disappear with him.
When I walked around the corner to Forsyth Street, I stood there and let the present fade away. The street began to shift around me. Modern storefronts blurred, the traffic softened, and beneath it all, I could feel the older street pushing through, the weight of stories the pavement had held for more than a century. I could almost see the tenements leaning close together, laundry strung between the fire escapes, the smell of coal and bread drifting out of open windows. And I could picture Giuseppe stepping into the morning light, heading toward the tailor shop where he worked, carrying the quiet confidence of a man trying to stitch a life together far from home.
No one in my family ever spoke of Giuseppe. His name faded long before I was born, lost to time and, I suspect, to shame. The story of an immigrant killed in an after-hours card game wasn’t one people wanted to tell. By the time I learned about him, there was no one left who could fill in the spaces between the lines. What I found wasn’t a biography; it was an absence. And somehow that emptiness said more about him than any family story ever could.
I imagine the days after his death — the confusion, the fear, the reluctance to speak to police. My great-grandmother left alone with small children in a neighborhood that whispered but didn’t help. I can picture her shutting the door against questions, pretending not to know what happened, doing what so many immigrants did, surviving by silence. Maybe she thought keeping quiet would protect her family. Maybe she was right. But the silence became its own inheritance. It lasted generations.
When I finally found Giuseppe’s name, I didn’t feel discovery as much as recognition. It was as if the city had been holding it for me, waiting for the moment I was ready to understand what had been lost.
The details in the old article were simple and brutal: the grocery store, the early morning card game, the hole in the fence, the blast that ended everything. But beneath all of that, something else kept pulling at me. I kept thinking about the letter found in his pocket, written in Italian and marked with a dagger. It was a warning, not a comfort, yet the thought of him folding it carefully and carrying it with him stayed with me. That single folded letter revealed the weight he lived with, the risk he accepted quietly as he tried to build a life for his family.
When I walk Forsyth Street now, I think about how easily a life disappears. A man can live, work, love and be gone in an instant, leaving behind only a line in a police ledger and a silence that outlives him. Yet I’ve come to see silence differently. It isn’t always emptiness. Sometimes it is a form of care, a way of protecting what words can’t repair. My family didn’t tell Giuseppe’s story, but in their own way they carried it forward. The proof is that I went looking.
There is a kind of conversation that happens across generations, even when no one is speaking. I feel it when I stand near old brick or see the worn steps of a tenement. I think about the men who built the city, the ones who laid tracks and carried stone and then vanished into its machinery. Their names fill ledgers, not monuments. But the city remembers in other ways, in the curve of a street, the rhythm of a neighborhood, the small persistence of family names that refuse to disappear.
I sometimes wonder what kind of man Giuseppe was before that morning. What he looked like when he laughed, what kind of father or husband he tried to be. The newspaper made him sound like a cautionary tale, but I think of him as a man who never got to finish his story. Someone who wanted what most people want: steady work, a safe home, a little room to breathe. I don’t know if he was afraid that morning. I hope he wasn’t.
When I stood near the spot where it happened, I could see him there, unaware of the history he was about to leave behind. I imagined the block as it must have been in 1915, lit by the dim glow of gas lamps, men walking to work with folded newspapers tucked under their arms, women sweeping their stoops before the day began. The past felt so close that I could sense him threading his way through it, thoughts still shaped in the language he grew up with, the ache of missing home balanced against the pride of surviving another day in New York. The city has seen more lives than it can count, but it still leaves room for the ones it almost forgot, stories like ours waiting to be found again.
Standing there, I started to think about the stories that must be held by each building around me. A half-block away, on Chrystie Street, 25 people died in a matter of minutes. They were immigrants trying to start over, only to have that dream taken from them. I paused and prayed for their souls.
The city forgets these stories, but the street does not. The ground still feels sacred, as if it remembers each life that passed through it.
What I did not expect was that the same building would hold another story, one that belonged to my own family. Those stories were never meant to connect, but somehow they did.
Giuseppe Leto’s story ended on Forsyth Street, but something of him carried forward through the silence, through the generations, through all the ordinary days that built the distance between us. My father was named Joseph, and years later my brother named his son the same. None of them knew the story. The name had simply stayed, passed quietly from one generation to the next, as if it refused to be forgotten. I did not set out to find him, but somehow I did. And maybe that is enough, that more than a century later, someone with his name still walks these streets and says it out loud. Giuseppe Leto.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Frank Leto is a retired FDNY captain who spent many years in the department’s Counseling Service Unit. He continues to support responders and communities after disasters and is a member of the IAFF Disaster Response Team. Leto writes to honor the people who shaped him and the moments that stayed with him.
