The urban life in early nineteenth-century Istanbul provided choices and alternatives that enabled urban poor, including some janissaries, to develop new relationships and a sense of solidarity among themselves. Indeed, they retaliated against the injustices inflicted upon them by the middle class or namely the people of virtue (ehl-i ?rz). In this period, the so-called people of virtue came to believe that janissaries were bandits whose activities put their life, honor, and property in danger. Some of them were anxious about being associated with janissaries. For example, those who lived in Sultan Mehmed, Süleymaniye, Sultan Bayaz?d and Ayasofya neighborhoods in Old Istanbul saw a variety of janissary symbols on their doors when they got up in one of the mornings of 1809. According to Cabi, the chronicler of the time, one of them said to his neighbor: “Brother, we did not know that we are fellows of 31st Battalion.” In addition to growing such dissatisfaction with janissaries, he stated that the janissaries divided the city district-by-district, even house-by-house. Not only did they mark Muslim house doors, but also those of Armenians and Jews. Even, they marked the church and the Patriarchate’s doors. These people were afraid to remove the janissary marks, ranging from a Kaaba at Mecca to a fish, depending on the battalion. A rumor circulated around the same neighborhoods that in reprisal, if any of them dared to erase these marks, the janissaries hung a horn on their doors in the following morning. This paper examines such public anxieties in early nineteenth-century Istanbul neighborhoods from a micro perspective of everyday life. By providing examples deriving from primary sources, including chroniclers, local court records and other significant archival sources, it aims at showing dynamics of urban Istanbul and in particular that neighborhoods were not close entities; rather, they were open to change and were clear representatives of living societies of the time.