How The Rangers Lived Back In The 1920s

This one is really hard to believe – the Original Rangers were living side by side with The Mob.

I kid you not, and here's the story as told by Blueshirt legend Frank Boucher in his autobiography "When The Rangers Were Young."

After arriving in New York for their first season (1926-27, the Blueshirts were booked into the Forrest Hotel on West 49th Street, half a block from the Garden. The Forrest was owned by the biggest bootlegger in New York State, William (Big Bill) Dwyer – The East's version of Chicago's Al Capone.

By no coincidence Dwyer owned the other New York NHL team, the Americans who also bedded at the Forrest along with Dwyer's mobsters. The gangsters behaved like gentlemen around the hotel and – as Boucher put it in his book – "were attractive, well-dressed men with wide-brimmed hats  and gleaming shoes."

Among them were renowned mobsters Legs Diamond and Dutch Schultz. 

"They often stopped to admire my wife Ag and our baby Earl when she wheeled the carriage through the lobby," Boucher recalled in his memoirs. "They were always friendly to Ag and me. Thanks to Earl we were certainly known to every wide-brimmed hat in the hotel."

P.S. Frank, Ag and baby Earl eventually moved to Brooklyn.