“I’m a good girl, judge, and it is all a terrible mistake,” she told Judge John O. Mott, a short, bearded, bespectacled sixty-six-year-old recent Republican appointee. The arresting officer, Reagan, testified he saw her talk to two strange men but admitted that he couldn’t overhear the conversations. She defended herself, saying she was trying to meet a friend and got lost; she said she lived in Brooklyn. Magistrate Mott, with his usual gruffness, judged her guilty and observed: “No respectable woman should be on the streets at night unaccompanied.” He decided to show some leniency, though: he offered her a choice: three days at the workhouse or at the House of Mercy. “For god’s sake, let me go home, Judge,” she wailed. “I’ve done nothing wrong. I only lost my way and had to ask someone.”
The following morning, before Lizzie departed for the workhouse, a lawyer hired by Lizzie’s outraged aunt and a former employer convinced the judge to reconsider. Mott kept the teary women waiting four hours while he tried other cases. (Her aunt, Mrs. Osterburg, was holding her six-week-old baby in the courtroom the whole time.) They testified on her behalf and came armed with a letter of good character from Lizzie’s doctor. Officer Reagan repeated his story but added the detail that she had cursed them out. Officer Oppenheimer, who had helped bring in her but had not testified at her first hearing, stated that he had seen her talking to an Italian earlier and he had confronted her. He said she had told him that the man would take her home or to a hotel but that the Italian had blurted out “Me no see her home” and walked off. Lizzie absolutely denied seeing Officer Oppenheimer earlier that night or having had any conversation with him.
Magistrate Mott believed the police officers. He lectured her that she should have asked directions from a policeman. He said it was confirmed that she was talking to a stranger in a hallway at 11:30 p.m. “for what purpose I don’t know and can only assume that she was walking out in the night and a street walker.” He reaffirmed the sentence of three days at the workhouse for disorderly conduct.
The following morning, Saturday, December 7, Lizzie Schauer, sobbing, was loaded with other convicted women, some of them drunks, vagrants, and streetwalkers, into a large barred police wagon. A matron slammed the door shut and padlocked it. The stench of sweat, liquor, and vomit from the veteran offenders filled the closed space. Two horses pulled the wagon about a mile over the asphalt and cobblestone streets to the East River pier at 26th Street; the driver waited, then guided the locked wagon onto the steamer Thomas Brennan. The ship handled the strong currents to reach Blackwell’s Island. The crew lowered a ramp and the driver rolled the police wagon to the courtyard of the workhouse. The door unlocked, the women stepped down, blinking at the bright sunlight. A matron grouped the dozen women in pairs and marched them to a changing room. There, she ordered them to strip naked. Each one was weighed, measured, and examined for identifying scars. They entered the bath house next door for the mandatory bath to remove vermin and slow the spread of disease; they dressed themselves in rough heavy blue-and-white-striped cotton dresses. Lizzie was locked up with a grizzled elderly drunk.
By that time, the press had uncovered Lizzie’s story and were championing her cause. INNOCENT LIZZIE SCHAUER ARRESTED AND RAILROADED TO PRISON—HER CRIME ASKING AN ADDRESS—IT WAS AFTER DARK WHEN MR. MOTT SAYS RESPECTABLE WOMEN CANNOT BE ABROAD ALONE (New York World).
Newspapers such as the Herald played it as a Victorian narrative of a pure maiden foully maligned and struggling to regain her good name. They charged that the reform police, wanting to shake Roosevelt’s hand, were so overzealous they were hauling off innocent girls who asked directions.
The Saturday that Lizzie arrived at the workhouse happened to be the same day that the Police Board, after six months’ probation, appointed Peter Conlin as chief of police, officially dropping “acting” from his title. On his first day in this job he had long coveted, he found himself besieged with complaints and editorials against the excessive powers of police.
The department and the district attorney’s office decided to fight back. They released records of two earlier incidents involving the supposedly pure maiden Lizzie Schauer. An assistant district attorney stated that Lizzie’s stepmother, also named Elizabeth, had filed charges in March against her for being “wayward and incorrigible” and in the complaint had accused Lizzie of “immorality” starting at age fifteen and of having a venereal disease; the stepmother in September had then accused Lizzie of cohabiting with her uncle, Henry Dittmeyer.
The police and the two branches of her family started a brutal tug-of-war in the newspapers over Lizzie’s honor. The unspoken question: Was she virginal or not?
Peter Conlin—stinging from criticism over the Lizzie Schauer arrest—decided he would follow through on a suggestion made two months earlier by Commissioner Roosevelt. The chief would do the unthinkable: he would raid one of the most famous brothels in New York City, a place untouched by the police for thirty-five years. No one could say that respectable women lived there. He (and Roosevelt) would recapture the moral high ground.
Grove Street sits in a little oasis of elegant older buildings in the Greenwich Village section of the city. Number 39 Grove Street, a three-story brick building, is half secluded by two elm trees. Every day and night, elegant carriages rolled to a stop before the railed steps, and well-dressed men sauntered to ring the electric bell. The brothel—one of the most expensive in New York City—was an open secret. Owner Millicent Street strictly guarded access, and apparently paid for protection. No policeman had set foot inside for decades.
Not even when one of Vermont’s leading citizens, General William Wells, died of a heart attack in a room there three years before, during a visit to the city with his wife in April 1892, did scandal threaten the place. A family friend explained to the newspapers that the general had collapsed while walking and had been carried to the nearest house.
When some of the well-heeled neighbors complained, Mrs. Street calmly informed them that if she moved, she would erect a double tenement “and fill it with negroes at $5 a month.” The complaints died down.
Conlin had assigned acting inspector Brooks to infiltrate the house. He in turn had assigned two of his best undercover men. They staked out the building and one afternoon followed a pair of tipsy gentlemen back to their offices on Wall Street. With a few well-placed inquiries, they found the men’s names and employers. The two undercover cops then sought out the men at a nearby bar and posed as out-of-town businessmen—in “hat manufacture” and “real estate”—up from D.C., looking for a good time. They bought some drinks; they shared some “wine suppers” until after one long night the two Wall Street men invited them to go with them to 39 Grove Street.
As guests of these regular clients, the two officers—Kemp and McConnell—entered the elegant townhouse. Plush silk settees stood under European paintings. Gas jets cast a warm glow. They bought rounds of champagne served in cut crystal. The place was so pleasant and high-toned that it didn’t seem odd that the two men spent three evenings there without going upstairs with any of the beautiful young ladies. They gathered enough evidence of excise liquor violations to get a search warrant.
At 5 p.m. on Saturday, December 7, acting inspector Brooks pressed the buzzer at 39 Grove Street. A “colored maid” answered the door. He wedged his foot in before she could shut it. Brooks, with Kemp and McConnell and five uniformed officers, rushed inside. The maid screamed, another maid came rushing forward. She screamed. Various other females began screaming and for a while the police experienced an ongoing comic operetta with off-cue females hitting high pitches on various floors. Millicent Street, the fifty-seven-year-old proprietress, did not scream; she sat in a back parlor, deeply indignant at the intrusion.
No one escaped.
The police explored the house and rounded up Miss Street, her two servants (Martha Jones and Cassie Carter), eight extremely attractive well-dressed young ladies in their late teens or early twenties, and three men, who all happened to be bald. Roo
sevelt had given general instructions to haul in the men as well, and Inspector Brooks had followed orders.
The police loaded all fourteen, including regally lovely “Lillie Belmont” and sealskin clad “Cora Brown,” into a paddy wagon and trotted them over to Mercer Street station for the night. Inspector Brooks was “jubilant,” as were Conlin and Roosevelt, when informed.
The arrest record contained fourteen names but the police suspected most of them were fictitious. (Snooping reporters later discovered that one impressive, florid white-haired Englishman who gave his name as “Henry Harcourt” was a sixty-two-year-old physician visiting from London and staying at the Windsor Hotel.)
About half the prisoners made bail that night.
The following morning, Sunday, Magistrate Simms presided at the Jefferson Market Courthouse, that orange castle-like Victorian confection with a conical tower overlooking Sixth Avenue. The judge—after listening to testimony from the two undercover officers about prior evenings—set bail for Miss Street at $1,000 for maintaining a disorderly house and $200 for excise violations. He set bail at $200 for each of the maids who had served the drinks.
The judge then asked what evidence the inspector had against the eight well-dressed young women and the three men. (He first required all the women to remove their veils; he told the shiny-domed men to stop hiding their faces with their hats.) Inspector Brooks replied that he had no evidence of disorderly conduct.
Magistrate Simms was about to release them all when he decided that he would keep the two youngest under the new law that allowed judges to commit women over age fifteen who were found in a brothel to a religious home of their denomination.
The pair of nineteen-year-olds selected, “Elsie Eskin” and “May Daly,” began to weep.
Lawyer “Manny” Friend of Friend & House pleaded with the judge that Elsie Eskin was a seamstress, sent by Mrs. Josephine Sanford of 210 West 54th Street to deliver some garments. Elsie, described as a “decided blond” (apparently, as opposed to a “bottle blond”) with cascades of yellow hair under her hat, fainted suddenly with a loud thud to the floor. Her head hit the step up to the witness box, breaking her glasses; blood oozed from a cut on her face. Attendants clustered around her; she was eventually revived.
The judge decided to investigate further while they waited for an ambulance to take her to Bellevue.
Plainclothes detective McConnell testified that during the raid he had found Elsie in a waiting room by herself wearing street clothes and a winter coat; he said he had informed her that “the house was pulled.” She replied to him that if he touched her, she would scream. McConnell told the judge he thought she was “fooling.”
Miss Eskin explained to the court she was a lady’s maid who had fallen very ill and needed an operation. (Her lawyer handed over a doctor’s statement.) She now supported herself sewing for a Mrs. Sanford. She had arrived at 39 Grove ten minutes earlier and had never been there before. She fainted again.
The judge released her but he refused to release May Daly, who didn’t look nineteen years old. The newspapers described her as “pretty and graceful” with “large brown eyes.” Lawyer House said she came from a respectable family in Hoboken and was trimming a hat in the basement at the request of Cora Brown. When informed that she couldn’t leave with the others, May threw a fit, weeping and shaking and screaming; the police called for another ambulance, this time from New York Hospital.
The three men and seven women left. Miss Street and the two servants made bail and left. Elsie Eskin had already left. The court attendants carried May Daly out to the ambulance. Yet another possibly innocent girl was in custody in Roosevelt’s New York.
The key witness in the tug-of-war over Lizzie Schauer’s innocence and purity was her Brooklyn physician, Dr. Jonathan T. Deyo, who had tested her virginity twice: during an earlier court case and again for an adoption recommendation.
The doctor and several relatives and friends told the newspapers as much as they knew of her life story. Lizzie’s mother had died when she was two. Her alcoholic father had remarried a much younger woman, who happened to be both a devout Catholic and a binge drinker. She had demanded strict obedience. She beat Lizzie often; she once tied her to the bedpost, once drunkenly slashed at her with a knife, leaving a large triangular scar on her hand. The stepmother convinced her husband to make the child quit school at age thirteen to work.
Lizzie had worked as a live-in servant for several families in Brooklyn; she worked eighteen months for a Mrs. Evans, who called her a good pure girl. Two years ago, Lizzie’s stepmother convinced Catholic Church officials that Lizzie was promiscuous and had her committed to the Sisters of Mercy. The Sisters, however, found her behavior exemplary and released her after three months.
Her most recent employer was Mrs. Joseph Rapp. “I can stake my life on Lizzie Schauer’s character,” Mrs. Rapp told a reporter. “Like other girls of her age she was fond of company but she seemed to care most for girl friends.”
This past March, while Lizzie was still working for Mrs. Rapp, Lizzie’s stepmother, with Lizzie’s father’s approval, had gone to the police and accused the girl of having sex with her boyfriend/fiancé, and stated that Lizzie was a “common streetwalker” with “a loathsome disease.” Since the stepmother told authorities that her stepdaughter was not sixteen (i.e., still a minor), the official charge against Lizzie was that she was “wayward and incorrigible.”
Lizzie and her aunt, Mrs. Osterburg, and Mrs. Rapp had attended the hearing in March at Monroe Street Courthouse in Brooklyn; the judge, weighing the favorable testimony of these character witnesses, offered to allow the women to take Lizzie to a reputable doctor to be physically examined for signs of promiscuity or venereal disease.
Dr. Jonathan T. Deyo of 9th Street, Brooklyn, inspected her. “The Justice on reading [my report] immediately discharged the young lady from custody … saying it was a most convincing vindication of her character and most fully disproved all the charges made against her.”
Dr. Deyo chose not to reveal the “substance” of his report to the newspapers, but clearly he had found Lizzie to be a disease-free virgin.
In the 1890s, doctors routinely performed virginity tests to reveal the moral character of a young woman, although medical science had long judged the test not to be foolproof. “In all of medicine there is nothing more difficult to determine than virginity,” Dr. Nicolas Venette cautioned in his oft-reprinted medical treatise. And Dr. Venette compared interpreting the telltale signs of vaginal penetration to “tracking the course of a ship on the sea, an eagle in the air or a snake on a rock.”
Love manuals abounded with tricks that women might use to mimic virginity after its loss, including powders such as alum.
All that notwithstanding, Justice Tighe accepted Dr. Deyo’s report and freed Lizzie in the spring. Then, on September 15, 1895—around the time of Roosevelt’s victory over the liquor dealers—her stepmother brought new charges against her. Lizzie had traveled into Manhattan to spend the night with her other aunt, Rose Metzger Dittmeyer, at 16 East 1st Street.
Her stepmother suspected the worst and made accusations to the police that the Dittmeyers were encouraging Lizzie’s immoral conduct, her uncle possibly participating; the authorities brought a charge of “abduction of a minor” against Mr. Dittmeyer. The stepmother and two police officers had shown up at 10 a.m. and arrested him; Lizzie was sent to the House of Detention to be kept as a witness at Dittmeyer’s trial. For two weeks, she refused to testify against him, calling it all lies. During an interrogation, she stated she was eighteen years old; a birth certificate was found and thus the “abduction of a minor” charge was dropped, and she was released.
Dr. Deyo had recently had another opportunity to probe Lizzie. Three weeks earlier, he had examined her “character” again, to determine whether to write a letter of recommendation to Lizzie’s paternal aunt, who had offered to let her come live with her in Germany. He wrote the letter.
But now, during the newspaper frenzy over the arrest of a supposedly innocent girl, Stephen J. O’Hare, the assistant district attorney who had handled the abduction case, leaked to the press that during her incarceration back in September Lizzie had confessed to him and to Judge Cowing she was of “unchaste character” starting at age fifteen. Lizzie denied ever admitting that and said the A.D.A. was confusing her stepmother’s words with her own. Judge Cowing, when contacted, did not recall any such confession by Lizzie. The tug-of-war continued: cunning vamp or long-suffering virgin?
On Monday morning, December 9, Lizzie boarded the barred police wagon at 7:30 a.m. for the steamer trip back to Manhattan. She had served two days of her sentence but a supreme court judge had granted her lawyer a writ of habeus corpus and scheduled a morning hearing to review Magistrate Mott’s decision. She waited at the Tombs prison, a massive, vaguely Egyptian-looking building, under the care of the so-called “Tombs Angel” Mrs. Foster, a society woman who for years made it her special cause to shepherd girls through prison and the courts. (Her most recent protégée was Maria Barberi, a pudgy Italian seamstress who had slit bootblack Dominic Cataldo’s throat after he had repeatedly refused to fulfill his promise to marry her.)
Lizzie sat with Mrs. Foster at 10 a.m. in the packed courtroom of the supreme court as they waited for the arrival of Judge Charles Andrews. Lizzie’s father, Casper, and her stepmother squeezed in on a bench nearby and began talking in loud voices.
“Her stepmother denounced her as a brazen streetwalker and told those about her that the girl was bad,” according to the New York Herald. “The father left his daughter not a shred of reputation.”
Island of Vice Page 24
