They annoyed as many men and women as they pleased, but nobody seemed capable of getting rid of them. They were, Whitman said, “tawdry, hateful, foul tongued and harsh-voiced harlots.” Reformer John Vose, as angry as Whitman, said that “our magnificent Broadway is rendered almost useless to our virtuous maidens by the courtesans who infest it.”
“One is so accustomed to the sight of these gaudily dressed butterflies that the streets look very strange without them,” wrote a Tribune reporter.20
There were so many strumpets, and they were so open about approaching men for sexual assignations, that New York composers, minstrel show musicians, and saloon band members wrote songs about them. One, “The Bowery Girls,” became one of the most popular songs in American history:
De Bowery Girls dey come out at night
Dey come out at night
Dey come out at night.
De Bowery girls dey come out at night,
And dance by de light ob da moon.
Most people know it by a later name given to it, “Buffalo Gals.”
The constables paid no attention to the laws against prostitution, and whores worked freely on the sidewalks and under the sheets. Any time that a constable did admonish a prostitute, it was merely to remind her, or her madam, that she still owed him payoff money.
Hookers could be found everywhere. The city had used landfill to create enormous new grounds just north of East Twelfth Street on which to build even more new docks. Other large landfills on the Lower East Side became homes for the workers who toiled on the docks all day. These workers then became clients for the whores who moved to the area or drifted in and out of it to meet men. The more successful the waterfront became, the more profitable it was for the prostitutes. Many lived alone in boardinghouses there.
All bemoaned the collapse of the city. Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville were two writers depressed by the city’s growth and the way it took shape. Poe, sailing in the harbor one day in the early 1840s, groused about the explosive expansion of New York, where he had just moved. “I could not look upon the magnificent cliffs and stately trees, which at every moment met my view, without a sigh for their inevitable doom—inevitable and swift. In twenty years, or thirty at farthest, we shall see here nothing more romantic than shipping, warehouses, and wharves,” he wrote gloomily. Of nearby Brooklyn, Poe added that “I know few towns which inspire me with so great disgust and contempt” and snarled that designing the homes that he saw in Brooklyn was like “cutting the throat of one’s grandfather.”21
Melville, the author of the classic sea tale Moby-Dick, shook his head negatively as he walked along the waterfront and encountered men and women who had lost the land under their feet to development and yearned now for the water’s edge. “Here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in. And there they stand—miles of them—leagues. Inlanders all, they come from lanes and alleys, streets and avenues—north, east, south and west. Yet here they all unite. Tell me, does the magnetic needles of the compasses of all those ships attract them hither?”22
These authors lamented, as did many, that not only was the city growing too rapidly, but the growth was not planned. In many cities in Europe and America, particular areas were set aside for specific purposes—shipping, factories, residences, theaters, sports fields, finance—but in New York that did not happen. The wild, unpredictable growth of the segments of the city, with stores right next to row houses, and sports fields stuck in the middle of neighborhoods, bordered by streets and tenements, caused more problems, especially for law enforcement, whose members were battling criminals all over the city, not just in one area. Prior to the Civil War, city leaders in New York complained, too, that there had been very few studies done on urban problems and few books published on the history of the city in America. Mayors and city planners had no blueprints to study and no footprints to follow.23
* * *
Illegal prostitution was on the waterfront and everywhere else, directly promoted by an odd assortment of new journals that plowed an unusual path into steamy sex and criminality—the “flash” newspapers.
The “sporting” or “flash” newspapers, such as the Whip and Satirist of New-York and Brooklyn, the Libertine, the Weekly Rake, and the Flash, printed long lists of brothels, and short reviews of them, for their readers, men about town who were referred to by all as “sporting men,” or pleasure seekers. These pages always included the address of the brothel, descriptions of its women and the services they provided, and, at times, what it cost to enjoy the feminine charms of the employees. The writers for these papers also wrote evaluations of the hookers they encountered on the street and in city parks. The movement of a prostitute from one brothel to another was reported. There were columns on prostitute balls held in brothels, notes on prostitutes’ fashions, and stories about seduction cases that landed in the city courts. The papers resembled today’s Fodor’s Guides for travelers. In Philadelphia, publishers produced guidebooks that devoted a page to each of the town’s brothels with illustrations and descriptions of the girls. The New York papers and the sex guides in them were not a dirty little secret, either; they were sold openly at newsstands. They had no authentic news but just focused on the illegal sex trade conducted in brothels, boardinghouses, and back alleys. They wallowed in the world of illegal sex that had developed in New York at that time. They were designed for the man-about-town looking for a little tawdry fun, featuring lurid gossip columns and stories with advice on what to do for sex and where to go for it. They were illustrated with bawdy sex cartoons and illustrations that shocked many.24
There was a substantial difference between the flash papers and the mainstream papers, even the scandal- and crime-laden penny press, when it came to sex and criminality. The mainstream and penny press wrote about crime connected to prostitution, but the flash papers heralded prostitution itself and urged their readers to frequent illegal brothels and use the illegal services of streetwalkers. They encouraged breaking the law by consorting with prostitutes. The penny papers did not do that. The flash papers were a part of the criminal enterprise, and they knew it and reveled in it. Prostitution in all forms was illegal, even if the police wrapped their hands around bribe money and looked the other way. That did not bother the editors of the flash papers. In fact, with an ink-stained wink, the Whip promised “to keep a watchful eye on all the brothels and their frail inmates.”25
The flash press did have one important influence on the mainstream sheets, though. It legitimized stories about cases of seduction. In 1842 the Herald, as an example, pressured by the flash papers, carried a lengthy and well-placed story of the seduction trial of Reverend William Van Zandt, charged with molesting an underage girl who was one of his religious students and took private Bible lessons from him at his home. The Herald and other penny sheets began to carry numerous stories about paternity suits.26
The flash papers were sold throughout New York City and in nearby suburbs. Writers in towns outside New York contributed columns on sin in their communities. This helped boost sales in the suburbs and increased the scope of sin stories in New York. Many suburbs banned the papers as obscene. An Albany newspaper covering a story about a fine levied against one paper wrote that “a man who will consent to pander to the vicious appetites of the low-minded and vulgar disseminating the blistering obscenity and filth which these papers teem with, and which poison the minds of hundreds of the young and virtuous, is far more guilty than the midnight thief or the highway robber.”27
The first such paper, the Flash, was started in the early summer of 1841 by a vagabond writer from New England, William Snelling. His mother died when he was six, and his father was an alcoholic. He somehow got himself into West Point, but quit soon after he arrived to venture o
ff into the badlands in the Dakotas. He returned, wrote a book castigating all poets, and then moved to New York. He wandered through the Five Points neighborhood on most nights, drinking heavily, and read flash-type British newspapers there. He decided that New York should have a newspaper just like that. The population was there, the bars and brothels were there, the whores were there, and the people he met said they would read it. He teamed up with George Wilkes, a legitimate writer, and they made journalism history, the tawdry kind.28
Wilkes, twenty-four, a tall, well-dressed man with a long neck and thick head of hair, was an alcoholic and midnight marauder who had spent years drifting in and out of the shadowy life that the Flash covered—bars, brothels, music halls, and cafés. He knew the nether side of New York better than anyone else in the publishing business.
Wilkes and the other Flash editors were pummeled by the penny press and six-cent press. “He has been a common loafer in groggeries and brothels, and actually spit in the face of a decent, hard-working woman in the public street, who was defrauded out of some money either by him or the person who fed him,” wailed Mike Walsh of the Subterranean, who called the Flash “beastly, fraudulent, disgusting and obscene.”29
The high-water mark of the sleazy flash papers came in 1842. There were four of them in town that summer, the Rake, the Flash, the Libertine, and the Whip. They had high circulations, and men grabbed copies as soon as they saw them sitting in high stacks on the counters at newsstands or on the boards set up on top of wooden boxes by street vendors. The papers, at six cents a copy, sold briskly. Their editors claimed they sold between four thousand and twelve thousand copies per week, figures high enough to rival some mainstream dailies. They were very profitable because they earned money in illicit ways in addition to circulation and advertising. They charged brothels fees to name them in their columns, and more money came in from readers, who paid a fee to be mentioned in their gossip columns in order to promote themselves. Still more revenue streamed into flash offices from people, usually married men caught with prostitutes, who paid them bribes to keep their names out of the pages of the paper. These men were usually named by initials that could identify them to many of their friends, relatives, and business associates—and their wives. The papers also threatened to send the names of men they identified in their columns to marshals for criminal prosecution, hoping they would pay them not to do so. The men did.30 They often paid off their partners to keep quiet, too, adding a whole new wrinkle to the ever-growing crime wave.
The philosophy of the flash papers was simple: Men had the right to find sexual satisfaction wherever they could, whether or not their wives or girlfriends provided them with it. “Man is endowed by nature with passions that must be gratified,” wrote the editor of the Whip and Satirist, “and no blame can be attached to him, who for that purpose occasionally sees a woman of pleasure.”31
There were references to gay life in the publications, too, such as blind items (that is, mentioning no names) about half-dressed men dancing in clubs or on street corners, or discreet mentions of the nicknames of well-known gay prostitutes and where they had set up shop.32
A businessman who was said to have run a liquor business as a front for a house of gay prostitution was continually hounded by the Whip and Satirist, whose writers charged that he was using young neighborhood boys as male prostitutes. The Flash complained of gay predators, which its writers referred to as “man monsters.” The paper said that “they are continually parading our streets of an evening watching for their prey, and hundreds of young boys, yes, sir, boys as young as twelve to eighteen, are victims of their foul and disgusting deeds.” The papers had fun with oddball stories, too, like that of a man who fled the bedroom of a prostitute whose glass eye fell out during sex.33
In the early 1840s, the “flash men” started to appear in the streets and brothels. They were defined by an 1859 New York slang dictionary as men with no visible means of support or with a low income who dressed very stylishly and sported gaudy jewelry. One dictionary said that language in the sex world was the “language of thieves.” Others simply defined them as rogues.34
The “sporting men” of New York, and all the readers of the “flash” papers, straight or gay, eager for the sex touted in the flash papers, often wound up victims of crime that night, robbed, beaten up, or knifed in sleazy neighborhoods where constables were nowhere to be found. When men were named in the flash papers as participants in hetero- and homosexuality, as providers or clients, they ended up in trouble.
The law? The law looked the other way. Few inhabitants of any of the gay brothels were ever arrested, and when they were, police magistrates let them go with nothing more than a warning (there were rumors, never proven, that some of the constables involved in supervising the neighborhoods were gay).35
The prostitution business, straight or gay, flourished, thanks to the flash papers. In late 1842, the Whip and Satirist editor wrote that the number of prostitutes was increasing rapidly in the city. “Very true,” snapped the editor in his column. “So are thieves and burglars and the whole population.”36
The woes of the flash papers continued. They were criticized relentlessly by the legitimate papers. “Their purpose … is to promote vice and crime—to point out the facilities for immoral practices, which are afforded in large cities—to propagate slanders—to blast character—to debate intelligence—corrupt the heart—and fill the paths to perdition!” wrote the editor of the Philadelphia Journal. A writer for the Gazette Extraordinary said that “the city is disgraced at home and abroad. The ribaldry and beastliness to which it gives utterance … calls forth the rebuke and reproach of sister communications, and all because our [New York] police are too imbecilic or too cowardly, or too wanton, to do its duty.”37
The editors of the sex papers constantly fought with each other; important men in town who frequented brothels lambasted them; wives threw their papers out when they discovered them. The district attorney’s office investigated them early and tried to find a way to put them out of business. Individuals who felt smeared by the flash papers filed numerous suits, chiefly libel, and sometimes succeeded. Snelling, the co-editor of the Flash with Wilkes, spent a month in jail on libel charges in 1842, and the other editors spent much time in court defending themselves.
Many New Yorkers considered the attacks on the flash editors hypocritical. Lydia Child sat in on one obscenity hearing and smirked at the city’s lawyers. “While I was there they brought in the editors of the Flash, the Libertine, and the Weekly Rake. My very soul loathes such polluted publications; yet a sense of justice … made me refractory.… They dared to publish what nine-tenths of all around them lived unreproved. Why should they be imprisoned while [others] flourished in the full tide of editorial success, circulating a paper as immoral, and perhaps more dangerous, because its indecency is slightly veiled? Why should the Weekly Rake be shut up, when daily rakes walk Broadway in fine broadcloth and silk velvet?”38
By the summer of 1843, armed with many editions of the papers and testimonials from dozens of complainers, the district attorney’s office decided that the flash papers went too far and that they were obscene. The lawyers for the varied editors of the flash papers argued that they were protected under freedom of the press, but the juries, tired of their campaigns to support illegal sex in the brothels and on street corners, disagreed. By the fall of 1843, the flash papers that had debuted just two years earlier were all out of business, and they never returned.
* * *
Police magistrates saw sex cases as trivial, just part of the hooker landscape. Many were dismissed outright. Others were tossed after pleas from prominent madams who ran well-known whorehouses. Many district attorneys gave up on prosecutions of hookers and madams because of the high cost of trials and the low percentage of convictions. Magistrates and constables saw prostitutes as just one more group of entrepreneurs making money and left them alone.39
In addition to the “victimless” crime of
soliciting, using, and paying prostitutes, violent crimes were committed against the women themselves. They were sometimes beaten, raped, or killed. Many were raped on orders of pimps and madams to make them submissive, to keep them in line, and to force them to work harder in the brothel. New York City’s prostitution corps sustained dozens of brutal rapes in the 1830s and 1840s, some reported to the courts and most not.40 Vicious crimes against prostitutes were not new. They had been attacked periodically since before the Revolution. In 1751, twenty-two hookers were arrested in raids on several houses of prostitution. Four were publicly whipped and ordered to leave the city. Groups of locals had prevented firemen from putting out a fire that destroyed a house of prostitution in 1761. In 1791, a mob destroyed several houses of prostitution that were built near each other, ending their trade for a few weeks.
A spirited Board of Aldermen report in 1812 warned the public that prostitutes were “alarming symptoms of the destruction of youth.” But, as always, the problem caused by prostitutes ranked well behind those caused by unlimited drinking and unrestricted gambling. In the 1820s and 1830s, records showed that less than 2 percent of prisoners in New York’s city jails or state prisons were behind bars for prostitution.41
The harlots all paraded into court to contest any criminal transgression against them and, often with lawyers, insisted on time-consuming trials. The beatings of hookers by angry clients climbed as the years went by, and each time a girl was hurt she went to court. Numerous prostitutes stood before judges with bumps and bruises to prove assault. They cursed and screamed and, in general, hopelessly tied up the court calendar and, every day, added to the list of crimes committed in Gotham (Helen Jewett herself had taken abusive clients to court in 1833 and 1835).42
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