How journalism, religious ambition, and urban life converged to shape one of nineteenth-century New York's most public moral dramas.In The Wickedest Man in New York, Robert E. Cray revisits one of the most arresting episodes in nineteenth-century Manhattan: the brief season when a Water Street dancehall became the unlikely stage for a public religious drama. In 1868, journalist Oliver Dyer published a sensational profile of John Allen, a dancehall propriet...