Island of Vice

by Richard Zacks

  He said the board had infuriated several powerful newspapers by ending the practice of handing out a fat advertising job for publishing election polling places and instead had put it out to the lowest bidder, saving the city $42,000. He dismissed Judge Rufus B. Cowing’s speech to a grand jury describing an increase in crime, and pointed to a spike in arrests for homicide, burglary, and robbery for eight months of 1895 over the same period in 1894.

  He blamed judges for causing crimes through excessive leniency, citing several notorious thieves with mug shots in the Rogues’ Gallery who had recently received only two- or three-month prison terms.

  He complained that after a policeman used an eleven-year-old boy to help get evidence against a “scoundrel” saloon keeper selling liquor to minors, Magistrate Flammer, “incredible as it may seem,” reprimanded the police for using “child spies.” TR indignantly pointed out that the youngster had a long arrest record, that selling liquor to ten-year-olds was heinous, and that the police used this sort of tactic only about once every six months.

  Taking a new tack, he touted the Sunday saloon crackdown as honoring the legislature’s goal of giving all workingmen—including bartenders—an “opportunity to rest and innocently enjoy” themselves on the Sabbath.

  He took a direct jab at Platt without naming him. “In closing I wish to say one word as a Republican to the Republicans in control of affairs at Albany. I earnestly hope they will not permit any action to be taken in the interest of the lawbreakers and the spoilsmen and against the interest of decent men … For weeks, every corrupt politician, every tool of the law-breaking liquor seller, every friend of the semi criminal classes, every man, rich and poor, who leads a vicious life, has been announcing with glee that the present Legislators under one pretext or another would get rid of the Police Board.” Roosevelt warned that politicians voting them out would have to deal with the wrath of “plain law-abiding citizens of the state.”

  The commissioner achieved a righteous rhythm by the end. The Sun reported the ministers bathed him in applause and peppered his speech with cries of “Good, good,” and “Amen.”

  The influential ministers’ group passed two resolutions, one supporting the Police Board in its “just warfare against crime,” especially illegal drinking, and the other imploring the legislature not to pass any law removing the “faithful” commissioners.

  Roosevelt had previously aimed the brunt of his attacks at Tammany or Sunday saloons or the New York World, against vice lords or crooks; he had now thrown down the gauntlet to his own party, to more newspapers, even to judges.

  The night of his speech, in a mood of utter hang-it-all defiance, Roosevelt—despite the slushy snow—decided to take a midnight tour with Jacob Riis. His faithful guide was going to help him assess the problem of vagrants and bums on the streets. Complaints about boozy panhandlers had been flooding into headquarters, and in the great metropolis, the ragged men and children seemed an eyesore and an embarrassment. A frequent theme of that judgmental era called for separating the unfortunate worthy poor from the shirkers and freeloaders.

  Bundled up for warmth and disguise, Riis and Roosevelt wandered in the desolate southwestern regions of Manhattan island. A light snow mixed with rain fell; they visited a couple of precinct houses and then ventured not far from the deserted Cortlandt Street piers where travelers caught the steam ferry to the Pennsylvania Railroad Depot (Penn Station), then still located in Jersey City, New Jersey. (The station, larger than Grand Central, generated enormous daytime traffic of travelers heading west to St. Louis and Chicago and south to Washington.) At two in the morning, they saw a few tramps huddled in doorways, some sleepy watchmen guarding warehouses, and an occasional cop risking frostbite to walk his beat.

  A cold damp wind gusted off the North River. The duo walked under the Elevated Railroad on Greenwich Street and headed toward the dim green globe lights of the Church Street station house and then up the steps. They entered and a grim-looking sergeant glanced down at them.

  Riis knew the place all too well. A quarter century earlier, he had spent one of the worst nights of his life there. As an impoverished young immigrant, he had come in out of a freezing rain and soon found himself fighting with the drunks in the basement, and then later, in the pitch dark, someone had stolen his last valuable possession, a small gold locket, from around his neck. When Riis had complained loudly, the police threw him out, and during the struggle, a doorkeeper had picked up Riis’s adopted stray dog and had bashed the animal’s brains out.

  The Evening Sun reporter now led Roosevelt down the cellar steps. “It was unchanged,” observed Riis.“Three men lay stretched at full length on the dirty planks, two of them young lads from the country.”

  And Riis recounted to the president of the board his horror story, how he had gone into a rage, throwing paving stones at the building before being roughly escorted to the New Jersey ferry boat stop. “Did they do that to you,” Roosevelt asked, indignantly.

  At the next day’s board meeting, Roosevelt recommended that the commissioners explore closing the police lodging houses. He was convinced that many of the professional beggars and lazy vagrants harassing citizens were spending their nights in police basements. “The system encourages pauperism,” he said. “It has no redeeming features.” The board directed Chief Conlin to prepare a quick memorandum on the topic.

  The idea of closing the police lodging houses was not new, but no police board over the past three decades had succeeded in shutting them down. The public perceived the basement rooms as the place of last resort for the city’s neediest.

  New York City in the 1890s had a shelter problem.

  On any given night that winter of 1895/1896, in the great chaotic city about 20,000 poor people with no permanent home—from newsboys to widows—scrambled to find a place to sleep. Since the police rarely enforced the law against begging—only 340 arrests were made citywide in 1894—many of the destitute panhandled for coins. Revelers complained about encountering armies of beggars at night, especially in the Bowery. The Sun reported a New Jersey man was aggressively accosted seven times, not far from Roosevelt’s route, while walking a handful of blocks from the Sun office to the Cortlandt Street ferry.

  The leading private charity—the Charity Organization Society (C.O.S.), an umbrella group representing 500 Protestant churches and smaller charities and 1,000 of the wealthiest donor families—strongly discouraged giving directly to beggars. “On a cold night in a comfortable home, one is reluctant to turn such an applicant away,” conceded Reverend Lyman Abbott, “but to give him money or clothing is to do him a wrong because it adds one more impulse to his vagrant and lazy propensities.”

  Charities stressed work as the cure-all for poverty.

  Speech after speech from the pulpit and lectern complained about the influx of out-of-state or upstate “skulkers, loafers, outcasts and criminals” who came to New York City to hustle up loose change, guzzle beer, and sleep outdoors by summer or in the cheap lodging houses, missions, or police basements by winter. “The metropolis … attracts them in swarms … with the vague idea that they can get along here if anywhere.”

  To prevent the beggars from receiving multiple handouts, the C.O.S. compiled a dossier on recipients. A visit to any of its offices entailed answering dozens of questions like “Did you receive a coat last winter?” “Why do you not still have it?” “How long have you been drinking?” Critics sniped that the C.O.S. should be called “Society for Suppression of Benevolence.”

  The president of the organization wrote a letter to the mayor just after Christmas requesting a crackdown on the granting of peddlers’ licenses to cripples. “We are satisfied,” stated Robert DeForest, “from numerous investigations … that such persons are vagrants, that the goods which they display are commercially worthless, and that their deformities are exposed to the public gaze simply to excite sympathy, and as a means of begging.”

  Catholic charities tended to ask fewer questions; Ta
mmany ward heelers doling out cash asked only one question: Can I count on your vote?

  Last-minute opportunities for overnight shelter for the poor ran from the relative “high end” of twenty-five-cent-a-night flophouses like Callahan’s Progress Hotel on Chatham Square with shoulder-high partitions separating the beds to ten-cent-a-night open dormitories with canvas hammocks. The destitute could also nurse a two-cent cup of tea and a roll at an all-night restaurant, or sprawl on the floor in the back rooms of bars.

  Recently, twenty-four-year-old novelist Stephen Crane had spent a night at a seven-cent lodging house and recorded it in a third-person narrative in “An Experiment in Misery.” In the vestibule of the building, he received his first impression. “There suddenly came to his nostrils strange and unspeakable odors that assailed him like malignant diseases with wings. They seemed to be from human bodies closely packed in dens; the exhalations from a hundred pairs of reeking lips; the fumes from a thousand bygone debauches; the expression of a thousand present miseries.”

  The clerk led Crane into a crowded room full of cots; a gas jet flickered a small orange flame. He glimpsed dozens of sleeping men—some still as tomb statues, others gasping heavily “like stabbed fish.”

  Crane stuffed his hat and shoes in a locker by his head and stretched out. In the dim light, the narrow lockers seemed to him gravestones and the sleepers the restless dead. Some contorted in nightmares; some shrieked, some wailed. But at dawn, he was amazed by the muscular fitness of many of the unclothed men who only after they added layers of shabby garments once again looked downtrodden.

  For those without even seven cents, without any money, there were still options: a city shelter—recently built on the Bellevue Hospital pier at 26th Street—and various religious missions. The Charity Organization Society, that arm of the wealthiest Protestant families, completed the Wayfarers’ Lodge and Wood Yard in 1893, and supported its worthy endeavor by selling lodging tickets to private individuals and businessmen, who then gave them to beggars; they entitled the recipient to a bath, two adequate meals, and a bed in exchange for three hours’ labor chopping and sawing firewood.

  But for someone seeking charity with absolutely no strings attached, the police lodging houses, mostly precinct-house basements, offered a wooden plank, no food, no bath, no clothes, nothing but a slab of wood in a crowded room. Making the bed meant turning the plank.

  “Yet hundreds of men and women, every winter’s night fight like tigers for the bare privilege of being allowed to sleep upon a hard board, or even to be granted the luxury of having a roof over their head,” wrote Mrs. Helen Campbell. She and Josephine Shaw Lowell, arguably two of the city’s most influential charity executives, contended that anyone who applied to the police for lodging was in effect admitting to being a vagrant (“no means of support”) and should be sent to the city’s workhouse on Blackwell’s Island.

  The anti-vagrant laws were so vague (“without employment,” “not giving a good account of himself,” etc.) that the police could arrest thousands of men and women a day, if they so chose. (The mostly Irish Catholic Tammany force mostly chose not to.) One magistrate observed that the city would have to build 100 more workhouses before he could begin sentencing all the vagrants.

  During the month of January a year earlier, the police had given free lodging to about 310 homeless men and women each night, compared to about 11,250 people who paid during the same period to stay in cheap licensed overnight accommodations. All told in 1895, the police provided 65,556 “lodging nights.”

  At the board meeting, Roosevelt said he was galled by this “unwise philanthropy.” He told the story of a woman on the East Side who was attacked and robbed by two beggars. “The professional beggars and vagrants should be gotten rid of.”

  The following week, on January 28, with temperatures hovering at freezing, Chief Conlin delivered his report. From his years as a captain, he clearly despised the comingling of beggars and “reserve” officers in the precinct house.

  He informed the board that he considered 98 percent of the lodgers sleeping in the eighteen precinct houses to be “lazy, dissipated, filthy, vermin-covered, disease-breeding and disease-scattering scum.” He contended the police were coddling a “small army of beggars” who annoyed and threatened citizens.

  He cited repeated recommendations by the Board of Police Surgeons to close the rooms down, since the “huddling like cattle of a large number of drunken, dirty and oftentimes diseased wretches, contaminates the air breathed by patrolmen in the same building.”

  Chief Conlin regarded the basement planks as an unsuitable option for a respectable person out of work and out of money; he also recommended assigning four plainclothes detectives to wander the city to round up professional beggars and vagrants.

  Roosevelt lofted a resolution to close the lodging houses in two weeks, on February 15; the police sergeants would then give tickets to the homeless to take to the Wayfarers’ Lodge and Wood Yard (28th Street on the far West Side near the docks) or give them directions to the new shelter and barge run by the city’s Department of Charities and Prisons (East River pier at 26th Street).

  Commissioner Parker raised the only opposition; it was sometimes hard to tell whether Parker opposed something merely to be contrary or whether he truly believed the punctilios or fine points of every law must be honored. Often, he seemed a prisoner of punctilios, the very opposite of Roosevelt’s riding roughshod forward. Parker cited Section 258 of the New York City code that required the police to offer housing to the indigent. He was swayed only when the others convinced him that the law did not specify exactly where the beds must be and that police would be sending the indigent to these other buildings. Parker cautioned, though, that if Wayfarers’ Lodge or the City Charity Department’s Bellevue Pier facilities closed or were overwhelmed, the police must be willing to reopen the basement rooms. The resolution passed.

  Roosevelt’s midwinter timing was probably not ideal, but the reformers were in a rush.

  The New York Times reported that the Platt forces expected to legislate out the Roosevelt Police Board by June 1, at the latest. They would pass a bill that in the name of claiming to ease the transition to a Greater Consolidated New York City would create a new interim Police Board.

  Roosevelt knew his time was short. The board unfurled a pile of innovations.

  They voted to test out a revolutionary idea: cops on bicycles. For months Roosevelt teased the idea’s originator, Commissioner Andrews, but the board eventually relented and agreed to a tiny experiment: a four-man bicycle squad. Their main job was to reel in speeding cyclists, or “scorchers.” The bike squad, with eye-catching yellow leggings and blue nautical caps, had to wear long heavy police coats, since they were debuting in the middle of winter.

  The four bike officers—all cycling champs—chased after drunk drivers as well, guided traffic to the right of the road, and protected female cyclists, even the ones in bloomers, from insults. “Skeptical” Roosevelt was later deeply impressed when sprint champ Henry Neggesmith caught up to a drunk speeder, fought off the man’s whip, hoisted himself onto the wagon, and subdued the lout. Roosevelt savored the detail that Neggesmith, a big powerful German, “jounced” up and down on the prone drunk for the trip to the precinct house. Novelist Stephen Crane, however, later complained that it used to be more amusing to watch “fat policemen on foot trying to stop a spurt.” The “scorcher” usually won, Crane wrote, and the crowd enjoyed the show because “a majority of the policemen … could swear most graphically in from two to five languages.”

  The reform board also rolled out pistol practice for the entire force. Commissioner Andrews later recalled the impetus came from an incident when three police officers tried to kill a mad dog and “shot a passerby in the leg.”

  Back then, officers had to pay for their own guns, and an inspection revealed that more than half the men carried cheap unreliable handguns of varying calibers, despite a mandate from seven years earlier to carry
.38 caliber revolvers. The men rarely cleaned their weapons or handled them properly. “Chances are you could tackle ten policemen before you would find one with his gun loaded,” said acting sergeant William E. Petty. Most were rotten marksmen, as was soon revealed.

  The Police Board authorized Sergeant Petty to set up a pistol range in the Eighth Regiment Armory at 94th Street and Park Avenue. Petty, a national revolver champion, demonstrated proper technique to the board, putting four of five pistol shots into a one-inch square from ten yards away.

  The first policemen to arrive confirmed the board’s worst fears and gave the New York World fodder. “Policeman O’donnell raised his pistol and fired. Bang! The target’s purity was unsullied.” O’donnell went on to fire fourteen more shots. “How did I score?” asked O’donnell. “You didn’t,” replied Petty. Up stepped an officer named Sheehan next. Sheehan, using his own gun, scored a 2 out of possible 75. Petty explained about safely pointing the gun to the ground, about closing one eye for aiming, about justified shooting situations. “A trained marksman can disable a man where the bumbler might kill,” he said. Petty also gave tips on using a pistol as a club.

  Sergeants rotated patrolmen precinct by precinct through the 12 noon to 4 p.m. class over the months of the New Year. The range became quite popular; officers showed up off duty. More than 130,000 shots would be fired there in 1896. Men who scored 65 out of 75 formed teams of sharpshooters, an “incalculable value to the force,” according to Chief Conlin. Some historians credit this pistol training as leading to the founding of the nation’s first police academy.

  Perhaps the most controversial reform was the one least visible to the general public. Commissioner Parker, after spending the fall analyzing the problem and auditioning men, rolled out a completely revamped plainclothes detective squad. Not only did he rejuggle the forty-man headquarters staff, but he decided to bring back “ward detectives,” those plainclothes precinct detectives who had served as errand boys for the corrupt captains of the Tammany era.