Island of Vice

by Richard Zacks

  The more she testified, the clearer became her motives. She had been double-crossed by her police protectors and now she was furious … furious enough to risk her life and livelihood to testify. During the previous year’s Lexow hearings, the police had begged her not to appear before the committee—“Officer Schick is not sleeping nights,” she was told; brothel keeper Jennie Moran pleaded with her not to disrupt business for them all—and the police had promised to go easy on her, but the day after the Lexow Committee had adjourned, the shakedowns began anew and were harsher than before. Besides Officer Schick demanding his usual $2.50 a week for granting her the privilege of streetwalking in the Fifteenth, he sometimes surprised her in the sleet and snow of January and threatened her: “I’m going to pound you” or “The Old Man [i.e., the captain] is right around the corner.” It was always about handing over more money.

  Then just recently, in May, she fell ill (she called it “rheumatism”) and couldn’t work for two weeks. When she returned to the streets, the cops immediately wanted money and she said she didn’t have it. She refused to pay them and they kept at her until they arrested her two weeks ago, on July 21. Plainclothes officer Schick hauled her to the precinct house and she said she was screaming that cops were shaking her down for one dollar a night; she said Captain Eakins stood in the doorway and heard all of it but did nothing. She threatened to go to the Parkhurst Society.

  When she said “Parkhurst,” Officer Schick and Officer Zimmerman got mad and told her if she didn’t start paying again, they’d “throw her down with the niggers” and she’d get “railroaded” to Blackwell’s Island. When released the next day, she nonetheless went to the Parkhurst offices. Agent Arthur “Angel” Dennett took her statement, carefully hid her, and now delivered her to police headquarters for the Eakins trial.

  Between Prosecutor Moss’s gentle guiding and defense lawyer Hess’s aggressive grilling, Gertie Long painted an extensive picture of the life of a streetwalker in the 1890s and of the crooked cops who profited from her. (Most of her testimony was too risqué for newspapers to publish.)

  Gertie Long started working each night around 7:30 p.m. and continued till midnight. She charged two, three, or five dollars, whatever she could hustle, her highest being $17 once; she averaged three or four customers a night, but some Saturday nights went with six or seven different men. She generally took her clients to “Daly’s Hotel,” which was not a licensed establishment but rather a bunch of rooms over a carpenter’s shop at 50 East 13th Street. The place charged one dollar for an hour and kicked back fifty cents to the prostitute. In that era before photo identification, the desk clerk required every man to sign a name into the ledger, and Gertie always made sure to whisper to him to add “and wife.” Many nights four different Mr. Smiths signed her in.

  She said she paid the “fly cops” (i.e., the plainclothes cops) varying amounts at various times: Zimmerman (“$2.50 a week”), O’Rourke ($5 a week), Durrigan, Gilmartin, Schick, and others.

  PROSECUTOR MOSS: What were those payments made for?

  GERTIE LONG: To let you alone on the street and to take the other girls that was in your way that didn’t pay.

  Gertie Long testified that not all of the fifty or so regular streetwalkers in the precinct had to pay to work. The “copper girls” such as Chicago Lil and Irish Lelia were exempt. What was a “copper girl”? Gertie Long at first answered a bit vaguely: “women that is in with officers.” She mentioned that Officer Jimmie Durrigan had one for six years and kept her even after he got married; Officer Zimmerman had Sadie Green. Roundsman Foody even had one.

  Gertie later clarified: “The [cops] have got their fling on these women.” The expression “have a fling with” means “to have the pleasure of, to sow wild oats with.” In case any confusion remained, lawyer Hess later asked whether “copper women” were “intimate with the policemen?” Yes, sir. “They have them girls that they can go to see.”

  Another perk for the women of these officers was that unlike the others they could leave the side streets and trawl prime Fifth Avenue for clients. Also, when the officers needed to make some token arrests to raise precinct statistics, they never chose their own women. Gertie, no longer in her prime, seemed to resent these girls’ privileges.

  She also recounted that she had been arrested about a dozen times; each time the aftermath involved some kind of payoff to someone. One arresting officer said she could avoid sleeping in the jail if she paid five dollars for bail, and he rounded up a saloon keeper to take her money and sign the papers. She also paid five dollars to “Blumenthal” twice. Another time, $15 got her thirty-day sentence on the Island terminated on day one.

  This past winter the cops had frequently hassled her. Officer Zimmerman cornered her one night and dragged her into the shadows by Denning’s Dry Goods store. (He was a big strong “Hebrew” officer who sometimes forced his way into neighborhood brothels for “flings.”) “I was always afraid of him,” Gertie admitted. “How much coin ya got?” he snapped. And though she had $70, she told him $5 and he said, “Five dollars aint in it.” So she took off her diamond ring and told him to hold it. She said she’d meet him the next night, give him another five dollars, and then he’d give the ring back. In the courtroom she showed off the ring, bought from a Mrs. Friedman, in 1887.

  Gertie Long said the unwritten rule was that it was not okay to solicit customers if you saw the captain. She said Captain Eakins personally cleared out 13th Street about twice a month. The streetwalkers would scurry to another block until some scout reported him gone. She admitted she never knew anyone who paid money directly to Eakins. “I am not against the captain but against those men that took the money from me, those hounds.”

  Defense lawyer Hess tried to trip her up on details.

  Gertie Long repeatedly held her own in exchanges with Hess.

  She called testifying the “first dirty thing I have ever done” despite twenty years of streetwalking. She said she always wanted to quit the business but the cops kept taking her savings. She estimated she had shelled out about $8,000 to the police over the years. “How are you going to be respectable when you give those fellows the money you make?”

  She vowed she would never take any hush money from the cops. “I meant to come down here, if they would hang me, [to speak] against those hounds.” Lawyer Hess, a bit ominously, asked her if she would wait to confer with him after the session ended. She agreed. Was it to offer her money? Was it to give her a warning or to allow someone time to come to 300 Mulberry to follow her?

  Gertie Long never testified again; she does not appear again in the indexes of the New York Times, New York Tribune, or New York Evening Post. Police officers Schick, Zimmerman, and Durrigan appear in print as police officers for many years in the future.

  The Sunday saloon crackdown only grew tighter for the poor. The private clubs—on the advice of their attorneys—decided to ignore it. The issue was polarizing the city, with temperance, women’s rights, and church groups staunchly supporting Roosevelt; and Tammany Hall, immigrants, and thousands of men opposing.

  More than 20,000 members of the Catholic Total Abstinence Union converged on the city for its annual convention, selling out Carnegie Hall on Wednesday, August 7. Archbishop Corrigan and other high-ranking religious officials shared the dais with the mayor and dozens of officials including Roosevelt.

  The bland meeting took a sudden turn when one-armed state senator T. C. O’Sullivan (Democrat) had the nerve to enter the lion’s den and criticize the city’s Sunday crackdown. He complained about the Puritans’ gloomy Sunday in New York, which he claimed discriminated against the poor. He was hissed. He analyzed the law and the police’s rigid enforcement. He was hissed. He painted a scene of poor men now buying bottles of hard liquor and “on Sunday in the presence of youth and innocence, the home becomes the scene of a debauchery darker by far with iniquity than the disorder which before flourished at the saloon or in the streets, within reach of the law.”
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br />   Throughout the speech Roosevelt grimaced in anger and bobbed his head, restless to respond.

  The catcalls and hisses grew so loud near the end of the speech that the archbishop called for a song to restore calm. All rose to sing “While We Are Marching for Temperance” to the tune of “Marching Through Georgia.”

  Roosevelt was introduced next. With his staccato gestures, he delivered the pithiest points of his stump speech. He said he would rather fail enforcing the laws than succeed by ignoring them; he praised the Catholic Church for its work for temperance and for decent observation of the Sabbath. “Never in the memory of any man have the saloons been closed as we have closed them.”

  He painted a rosy future for dry Sundays in New York. “I hope to see the time when a man shall be ashamed to take any enjoyment on Sunday which shall rob those who should be dearest to him and are dependent on him of the money he has earned during the week, when a man will be ashamed to take a selfish enjoyment and not to find some kind of pleasure which he can share with his wife and child.”

  The 7,000 people in the hall erupted in cheers that lasted five full minutes.

  Commissioner Parker rushed over and shook his hand, as did the bishops. Women climbed onto their seats and “howled” with praise. “Never in my life did I receive such an ovation,” TR enthused in a letter to Lodge.

  Although Roosevelt repeatedly tried to declare victory in the Sunday shutdown, several newspapers, notably the World on Monday, August 12, claimed any New Yorker and most tourists could easily find a drink at about three-quarters of the city’s 8,000 saloons on Sundays. “Individual members of the police force in every precinct admitted that the Roosevelt experiment had failed.” The newspaper claimed the city was “as wet as before Commissioner Roosevelt snapped his teeth.” It said bar owners manned side doors, scrutinized for regulars, and did a quiet thriving business. The Washington Post chimed in with a similar story, quoting “Copper Jim,” a New York policeman. “The saloons and the hotels, raked in more long green and shoved more red liquor across their bars last Sunday than any day except Patrick’s in the year.”

  Roosevelt decided to find out for himself.

  He cut short his weekend escape and returned on Sunday, August 18, from Sagamore Hill, taking the ferry from Long Island City to 34th Street and arriving at 10 a.m. Roundsman Michael Tierney was waiting for him and had a closed carriage with a top-hatted driver ready. Inside sat Jacob Riis, who as a “personal friend” had agreed to write up the tour “at Roosevelt’s request” for the New York Evening Sun.

  The trio embarked on a whirlwind inspection. Beyond whirlwind. They would spend seven and a half of the next nine hours inside the vehicle, traveling from as far north as 71st Street to the southern tip of the Battery and zigzagging three times east and west, driving by 728 saloons.

  Roosevelt and his companions first headed north along First Avenue past the slaughterhouses where butchers were sawing carcasses to deliver fresh meat for Monday. Riis, who relayed Roosevelt’s opinions in his Evening Sun article, noted that butchers were supposed to be brawny men and “proverbial beer drinkers” but the saloons there were shut tight. Instead, the three observers “everywhere encountered a contented good humored crowd.” Riis said when Roosevelt was recognized, he received mostly “respectful and admiring glances” with some occasional good-natured kidding.

  They drove to Louis Gobhardt’s saloon at 999 First Avenue and Roundsman Tierney thought the woman and child on the nearby stoop might be lookouts. Before the carriage reached the end of the block, they saw men entering a side door. TR dispatched a message to the precinct to send an officer.

  Roosevelt came armed with the names of three saloons in the brewery district he wanted to check: Smith’s at 69th Street and Second Avenue, Rooney’s at 70th Street and Second Avenue, and another at 71st Street and Third Avenue. All three seemed a little suspicious, with crowds nearby, and TR had extra officers sent to walk there.

  The carriage stopped at the 21st Precinct house at East 35th Street. As the sergeant “prattled” on about the effectiveness of the men, Roosevelt noticed the captain’s Sunday saloon report on the desk. It stated: “From personal observation, together with the reports of the patrolmen on various posts and from the men I have detailed in citizen’s clothes I find the law was uniformly enforced and well-observed.” The report was dated Monday, August 19. The current time was Sunday, August 18, 11:55 a.m. Roosevelt took the “premature” update and didn’t smile while the sergeant pointed out the blank lines remaining to note violations.

  During the tour, TR exited the carriage to visit eleven station houses, got out to try the doors of three saloons, and ate lunch at Mike Lyons.

  Roosevelt especially sought out several saloons that had promised to fight the shutdown: Murphy’s on 23rd Street and First Avenue and another Murphy’s on 20th Street and Second Avenue. The first Murphy’s, its doors wide open, gave out free ice water. The second was shut tight. Tompkins Square, ringed by saloons, was crowded “with mothers and their babes … men sat and smoked on benches.”

  The Roosevelt carriage rolled on south into Devery’s old 11th Precinct, where Polish and Russian names abounded, where overcrowding would create the most thirst. “Small beer saloons fairly teem among the tenements,” noted Riis. He and TR—neither shy of hyperbole—found that the poor people “seemed never so happy or content as on the one midsummer day in their experience when the saloons were closed.”

  Roosevelt saw the clearing of Mulberry Bend with the buildings leveled to make room for a park; he saw an Italian selling watermelon and gelato. The group swung down through Chinatown and Roosevelt ordered the driver to stop in front of Mike Callahan’s saloon. He alighted and tried the door, put his ear to the wall, and walked around to ensure that Mike was not doing business. He was quite pleased.

  Roosevelt viewed the hundreds of closed Sunday saloons as an “unconditional surrender” by the saloon keepers and reveled in seeing “the raising of their blinds everywhere in token of submission.”

  In conclusion, Riis stated that peering out the window, they found 684 of the 728 saloons “shut tight,” 41 open to “possibly doing business,” and saw men enter only three drinking joints during the entire trip; they observed only one drunk and saw no one carrying liquor through the streets.

  “The stories printed by some of the newspapers about the general failure of the police to close the saloons on Sunday have been comically untrue,” TR later commented. He ate dinner at 689 Madison that Sunday night with Edith and Riis and burly roundsman Tierney. They relished what they had seen. Roosevelt had been very privately leaning toward supporting some kind of limited Sunday saloon opening, maybe four hours a day, but he changed his mind. “I have now begun to think that we ought not to have the saloons open on Sunday,” Roosevelt confided in a letter to Lodge, “and that all we need … is to alter certain of its provisions so as to make it easier to enforce.” He was considering lobbying the legislature to require saloon curtains to be drawn open on Sundays.

  The Liquor Dealers’ Association concocted a devious new strategy to fight Roosevelt; they would exercise their legal right to demand a jury trial for each of the hundreds of pending excise cases, shifting them out of the Court of Special Sessions.

  At the new venue, a grand jury would have to be convened to review each case and opt whether to indict, a jury would have to be empaneled, the case would be tried, and then Recorder John Goff—elected in the 1894 reform tidal wave to replace Tammany’s Smyth—would have to pass sentence on the convicted. The process was hugely time-consuming, and usually reserved for serious crimes such as murder. “Cleopatra’s needle will have crumbled and the bones of the violators will be dust before they could all be heard,” sniped the New York World, with undisguised admiration. The backlog totaled 7,000 excise cases.

  Recorder Goff called this flood-of-cases strategy an attempt to undermine the legal system and, with his usual flinty contrariness, vowed to fight back. He said
he would open his courtroom Monday, August 19, from 9:30 a.m. to midnight and do so every day as long as needed.

  Goff, with a jury conviction already in hand, sentenced Dennis Mullins, owner of four saloons who had refused to pay excise fines for his bartenders, to thirty days in the Tombs city prison and a $250 fine—and if he didn’t pay it, he would have to spend three months in a state penitentiary such as Sing Sing. That was an opening shot, like a loud warning before a blast. Judge William Travers Jerome, whose court was the one being bypassed, still had some cases in the pipeline, and he and his two fellow judges intended to inflict harsh sentences.

  The judges were clearly ready to slam down the gavel. “As soon as we begin to send a few of these recalcitrant saloon keepers to jail,” gushed an assistant district attorney, “the accumulation of excise cases will rapidly cease.”

  Later on Monday, two liquor dealers—with Mullins’s harsh sentence fresh in their minds—stood before Recorder Goff, waived their right to a jury trial, and pled guilty, meekly vowing never to break the excise law again. Goff, enjoying their contrition, fined them only $30 each. The lawyer for the Liquor Dealers’ Association, Frederick B. House, also contrite, informed Recorder Goff there was no conspiracy to inundate his court calendar but that 90 percent of his members faced bankruptcy and were desperately trying to avoid fines. (Mortgage records indicated that the previous week marked the biggest weekly borrowing by saloons—$434,941 by 277 saloons from breweries—ever recorded.)

  Lawyer House approached Judge Jerome and Recorder Goff about a deal. It was a game of chicken and the judges had shown they were ready to send liquor men to prison even if they had to keep their courtrooms working triple overtime. Fred House offered that the liquor men would stop demanding jury trials, that they would plead guilty, hoping for lower fines, and would promise to cease selling liquor on Sundays after September 1, 1895. The association represented about half the saloon owners in the city; they also expected the police to crack down on the nonmembers. The judges refused to specify the fine amount (“dignity of the court”) but promised to inflict much harsher fines and prison terms after the deadline. The police agreed to crack down and follow up on any leads provided.