Pier Six brawl

[George Thompson]

Listening to the MYMets game on the radio last night, I was reminded of a phrase I used to hear from my father.  One of the broadcasters remarked at his surprise at hearing Bob Murphy, the former broadcaster who had just died, describe a fight on the field as a "Pier Six brawl".  The present broadcaster had not heard the expression, and supposed it was a relict of Murphy's time in the Marines.  (Murphy was nearly 80 and had grown up in I think Kansas & Oklahoma, where I believe they do not have piers.  Brawls, yes, but not piers.)  I don't listen to the Mets often enough to know the broadcasters by their voices; both are more or less young, and at least one is a NYer.

My father used to use the term, and the variant "a real Pier Sixer", with reference to prizefights, mostly.  As I recall, he thought it referred to a Pier Six on the Brooklyn waterfront, which he would have known in the 1910s and 1920s.  However, the earliest appearance I find in Proquest's NYTimes/LATimes/ChicagoTrib/WashPost is from the LATimes, February 25, 1933, with reference to a prizefight:  "It was a fine old Pier Six brawl. . . ."  (Searching "Pier Six brawl"; I also searched just "Pier Six" and found a number of earlier stories but doubt that any contained a variant of this phrase.  The ones I checked, the ones that seemed most likely, didn't.)

GAT

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998.