Law & Disorder

by Bruce Chadwick

  And why should constables go after hookers? In 1826, one constable evicted a hooker from a theater where she was trying to solicit business. A crowd gathered outside the theater and hooted and jeered at the constable for doing his job.43

  The ladies of the evening had some solid claims. In 1843, a hooker shoved by one of her clients on the steps of the Astor Hotel drew a sharp knife from the pocket of her dress and stabbed him in the chest. Another prostitute fired a revolver at a drunken man in the parlor of her brothel when he tried to attack her. In 1841, one prostitute, Mary Ann Rogers, was sent to prison for beating up another prostitute on a street corner.44

  More likely than not, the jury would agree with whores that they had been assaulted or maligned. In one case, a hooker went to bed with a sixty-five-year-old married man and another prostitute. She then emerged from the bedroom and yelled down from the top of the stairs that she had been sexually assaulted and the other woman was her eyewitness. The two whores provided a vivid description of the assault, and the man had a weak answer. The jury listened carefully. The woman had sued the married man for $10,000. The all-male jury agreed with her and ruled in her favor. Her award? Six cents and a loud guffaw from the jurors.45

  * * *

  Constables told judges and city officials that the force was not large enough to oversee the whores and robbers in a large city like New York. They also said that burglars and killers could disappear quickly into bad neighborhoods, where they were protected by the people who lived there. Those people did not like the police. In 1836, the editor of the Journal of Commerce wrote that “the people are not sufficiently in the habit of respecting the laws and obeying those appointed to enforce them.”46

  There were two criminal levels for streetwalkers, whether or not they were connected to constables. Almost all of the women charged with working for a madam in a high-end house of ill repute were let go, but most of the streetwalkers and teenage slum hookers were imprisoned. Incarceration was a regular part of their job, and many had spent months in jail (the usual sentence was sixty days). One woman was sent to jail eighteen times over the years that she worked the streets. Reformers visited hookers in the Tombs and other jails every Sunday to try to dissuade them from a life between the sheets. They were disturbed by the appearance of the prostitutes they met. The women were “worn out by drunkenness and dissipation,” wrote one of the reformers, who commented on how young many of the hookers were and that they seemed much older because of their condition. The reformers noted in their reports, too, that the prostitutes who were in jail for the first time learned all they could about sex from the prostitutes they met there who had been incarcerated numerous times. Imprisonment turned out to be not a punishment but a “college” in which to learn how to be a better hooker and make more money through sex.47

  The whores also told reformers that they lived in a caste system in which some were considered the upper crust of their profession and others the cellar dwellers. “The women who usually frequent the theater may be said to be of the second class of courtesan, in as much as they are looked down upon by the first rate women [hookers] who ride about in the carriage of rich protectors. Then the theatre-women think themselves degraded by comparison with those who do the excessively swellish on the pavé. The dashing Cyprian who treads the pavement of Broadway by day, scorns an alliance, in thought or name, with those who do the same thing at night; and the well dressed evening street-harlot looks even with pitiable contempt upon the ragged, low-life creatures who wander the street for the same purpose as herself,” wrote the editor of the Whip in 1842.48

  Many reform leaders concluded that the streetwalkers were condemned to a life of crime by the nature of their work and their isolation from mainstream society. “They had no home but a precarious one—that which the continued commission of crime procured. They had no character and could procure no service. They had no money but that which vice and theft had secured to them, and when they reformed, their means of living were gone. They were discountenanced, reviled and shunned by the chaste. Their courage was gone, and they had no friends whose timely interposition could rescue them,” reformer McDowall wrote.49

  On one visit a reformer noted that just about every hooker she spoke to, or prayed with, said that the only reason she had turned to prostitution was “bad company” and that she would never have sex for money again—once the reformer managed to get her out of jail.50

  The varied Water Street neighborhoods near the docks had been filled with large mansions of successful shipowners and merchants until the early 1840s, but then the wealthy fled as the neighborhood was populated by thieves and hookers. The elegant homes were soon turned into brothels. It was said to be “one of the most riotous and disorderly localities in the city. The whole of these two blocks is … entirely occupied as houses of prostitution of the most degrading and infamous character,” lamented one uptown resident.51

  The police just nodded knowingly at complaints from New Yorkers about such houses of ill repute. One cop said that “as long as houses were not located in any neighborhood where they disturbed the peace I think it would be better for them to remain there than to be removed to a place where they would disturb the public.”52

  City residents were fed up with the prostitutes, the corrupt constables who refused to arrest the hookers, institutions that failed to rehabilitate the street urchins, and the city that would not shut down their illicit industry and stop all of the crime the hookers brought about. In 1843, a group of angry grand jurors wrote in an official report that “the conduct of female prostitutes promenading some of our principal streets in this city, especially Broadway, is not only reprehensible, but is an open violation of public decency. The gaudy and immodest manner in which they dress—the vulgar, obscene and profane conversation constantly made use of in a loud and impudent manner—the[ir] shameless and bold manner … the personal insults offered by them to our wives, sisters and daughters, call most earnestly for the strong arm of the law.” In 1841, another grand jury had urged the city’s hundreds of junk shops to stop buying things from urchins who walked in with sacks full of sheets of metal, small appliances, and old clothes that they stole from someone. All of these items could be purchased inside the stores or at the various sidewalk sales that were held regularly.53

  In addition to the overt streetwalkers, New York was filled with hundreds of “saloon girls” and “dance hall girls.” These were young women who worked as feminine attractions to draw men into the establishments and keep them there, eating and drinking, for as long as possible. The saloon girls worked at dirty, grimy, dark basement drinking holes in the Bowery or seedy second-story bars on Broadway. All of the bars had a run-down, beat-up look to them. They featured third-rate bands or off-key pianists who played all night long. The house girls lounged at the bar or at wooden tables, and one would approach every man who walked in and ask him to buy her a drink or dance with her. The girls were paid a percentage of money from the drinks (usually one-third) but no salary. It was to their advantage to get their “date” as drunk as possible to make money. Whatever else they did—robbery, prostitution—was their business. They were “abandoned wretches who were ready for any deed of violence or crime. They care for nothing but money and will rob or kill for it.… [The men] are drugged, robbed, murdered and then the harbor police may find their lifeless forms floating in the river at daybreak,” the proprietor of one saloon told the New York World.

  Many of the women were not good-looking, either. “They are beastly foul-mouthed, brutal wretches. Very many of them are half dead with consumption or disease,” said one man.54

  The dance hall girls were prettier, because they did not come from the city itself. Dance hall impresarios, always looking for new young girls to lure men onto the dance floor and into spending money, ran complex recruiting campaigns in the suburbs to dragoon young and innocent girls to their establishments, promising them hefty salaries, commissions, and good living conditions. Once there, man
y were drugged or threatened in order to get them to remain and dance the nights away with any lovesick mark who stumbled in from the street.55

  The upper tier of the dance halls contained far more reputable establishments, such as Harry Hill’s, where no girls were on staff and business was legitimate—sort of. Hill’s dance hall was near the intersection of Houston and Mulberry Streets. You entered through a lobby and then moved to a large, high-ceilinged open room with a small orchestra playing well-known tunes. It was anchored by a huge, dark wood bar where drinks in small glasses were pushed hard in order for Harry to make money. The middle-aged Hill, said to be one of the richest men in New York, was a “short, thick-set man, with a self-possessed, resolute air, and a face indicative of his calling.… Sharp and decided in his manner, [he] exerts himself to maintain order among the guests,” according to a historian of the 1840s.56

  The men who danced the night away with the attractive girls at the dance halls, or “dives,” as the rowdier ones were called, were from all walks of life—judges, lawyers, journalists, store clerks, soldiers, and doctors. As they danced, they were carefully watched by a well-dressed group of thieves, muggers, con artists, pickpockets, and burglars. They engaged the men who came to dance in conversations, bought them drinks, and took them home when they became drunk. Actually, they didn’t take them home; they took them to some nearby darkened alley where they beat and robbed them, stabbing and sometimes killing those who resisted. Back at the dance hall, a disinterested Harry Hill paid no attention to where the ruffians or the hookers went.57

  The girls there, not employed by Hill, were hookers, admitted free through a special entrance. They mingled with the guests, dancing with as many as they could in order to meet marks and lure them to their brothel or boardinghouse, wallet in hand. The band played on. The dance halls, Hill’s and others, were emporiums for misbehavior.

  “The dives of New York are the hot-beds of its crime.… Vice germinates, grows, buds and yields its bitter fruit [there]. Every stage of crime is reflected in a true picture of these holes of viciousness,” wrote NYPD captain George Walling.58

  * * *

  Drifting through lower Broadway and the nearby Bowery were two odd collections of distinctly different men, different from their peers in New York, different from other men in America, and different from any other group of men in history—the “sporting man” or “dandy,” and the “Bowery B’hoy” (boy). In their unusual dress, style of walking and talking, and clock-defying nightlife, the two brash, sassy classes could be compared to punk rockers of the twenty-first century.

  The sporting man was of any religious or geographic group, young, usually working class, who enjoyed dressing ostentatiously outside of his job. He had fine suits and shoes and was easy to spot because he had a large shiny watch fob dangling from his vest, a diamond stickpin in his shirt or tie or jacket, a smart-looking hat. Sometimes sporting a cane with a gold or brass head, he swaggered through town, easily recognized by all. The dandies were generally aged sixteen to thirty-five and spent a lot of money. They hung out in saloons and theaters; they gossiped with each other on street corners or in the doorway of shops.

  They were part of a large mass of young men that lived and partied in the city. “The city at all times contains a large number of strangers, whose evenings are at their own disposal, of young men engaged in trade, who live in boarding houses and hotels, who have plenty of money and no domestic ties.… These form a solid phalanx of play-going people,” wrote a visitor to Manhattan in 1838.59

  The sporting man, a glass of beer in his hand and a smile on his face, was a regular fixture at prizefights, casinos, and the racetrack, betting heavily on some tired boxer or some slow horse, ecstatic at victory and demoralized at defeat. These young men made a lot of illegal bets, gambled recklessly, engaged in lawbreaking at illegal fights, and harassed constables. They spent the evening in the alleys of sin, drinking heavily, dancing with loose women, and finishing the day at a house of ill repute, where they lounged not only with bawdy women but with other sporting men in an 1830s fraternity. They were a rare breed with no ambition other than the next girl or next drink, and yet were seen as unique by all. They drifted in and out of a life of sin and crime.

  The dandies loved Broadway; it was a second home to them. So did everyone else, especially visitors. “Splendid Broadway, as the avenue is called … runs through the whole city. This noble street may vie with any I ever saw, for its length and breadth, its handsome shops, neat awnings, excellent trottoir, and well-dressed pedestrians.… Were it not so very far from all the old-world things which cling about the heart of an European, I should say that I never saw a city more desirable as a residence,” wrote the English-born Frances Trollope in 1832.60

  Not everybody loved the well-dressed dandies who inhabited the fabled boulevard at night. “Dandies must be exactly the reverse of all the rest of mankind,” George Foster wrote, “and as common people see so many beautiful and wonderful and melancholy things as they go through this world that their admiration or their sympathy is constantly in a state of excitement, it of course becomes a necessity of existence with the Dandy that he should admire nothing and sympathize with nothing.… A genuine dandy need not have a heart.”61

  Foster admired the street itself, though. “Broadway well deserves its reputation as the centre of fashion and republican aristocracy,” he wrote. “The shops are more numerous, more extensive, and filled with more expensive and rarer assortments of goods than those of any other street in America; and this superiority is so unquestionable, that all other cities involuntarily accept the cue from the dealers in Broadway.” He added that for those who wished to be fashionable, “to be out of Broadway is to be in a vulgar and barbarous state of existence.” James McCabe wrote simply, “The most wonderful street in the universe is Broadway.”62

  Broadway was also jammed with basement-level oyster bars, street shops, and cart vendors selling all kinds of food. “Oyster cellars abound; and immense quantities of these luxuries are likewise vended from small waggons in the streets; at which locomotive shops, the pedestrian may be supplied with biscuits, pepper, and ginger beer; in short, for a few pence the carter or mechanic has a whet which might satisfy even a gourmand,” said James Boardman in 1833.63

  The other characters that inhabited the lower section of the city, made famous by playwrights and novelists and, a hundred years later, in black-and-white movies filmed in New York, was the Bowery B’hoy and, to a lesser extent, his lover, the Bowery G’hal. The Bowery B’hoy, a denizen of the night in the Bowery neighborhoods who rarely drifted out of them, was well known for his slang conversations and odd physical appearance and dress. He had his hair cut close at the rear of his head and large curly locks at the front, smeared with an 1840s version of hair gel. He paraded through life, bold as brass, amused all with loud conversation filled with obscure local slang phrases, and spent much of his time with the Bowery G’hal, who was very much like him. The B’hoy wore black jackets and trousers but favored bright red shirts with a cravat tied about the neck and a diamond stickpin. His black hat was firmly tilted on the side of his head. He walked about with a brazen gait, usually holding his coat under his arm. He loved to argue with people and engage in fistfights.

  The G’hal dazzled all with loud, bright-colored clothes. She usually sported a pretty bonnet and twirled her parasol around in her tiny hands. She walked the streets of the neighborhood from early morning until midnight. Her skirts went to her ankles and showed off her stockings and colorful shoes. The Bowery B’hoy and his G’hal, always the most raucous couple in New York, frequently engaged in premarital sex, sometimes public sex, that angered the stodgy, conservative moral reformers of the era. Especially criticized were the men who slipped into alleys and masturbated, seen by many, and then returned to their group of friends on the sidewalks. They hung out, as teens do today, in favorite bars, where they drank to excess and purchased illegal lottery tickets; they taunted constables
and often consorted with criminals and streetwalkers. The Bowery people, with their odd look, loved to promenade up and down the Bowery, and sometimes Broadway, late at night, greeting their admirers and showing off new bright red handkerchiefs, wild-colored jackets, and high-top shoes. The others promenading at night, strutting with an exaggerated gait, who came and went from their mansions, saw them as genuine New York attractions—walking, talking postcards from Sin City.64

  George Foster saw the good in the Bowery youth but knew that others did not. “The worst feature in the character of the B’hoy is his dissipation—his worst enemy the grog shop, the three cent cellar [gambling], or the liquor grocery on the corner,…” he wrote. “A good strong ‘muss’ [fight] is the only safety-valve through which [the B’hoys] can escape their immense exuberance of animal spirit.”65

  The entire Bowery, about a mile long, was cluttered with pawnshops, stores that sold cheap goods, and stores that always had some FOR SALE sign in the window, each more desperate for business than the last (“Selling at ruinous prices,” bragged many). Newspapers did studies of the prices in the Bowery compared to Broadway and other business districts in town and discovered that the Bowery merchants were right; prices there were some of the lowest in the city. You could buy a woman’s dress or man’s suit there for much less than in the better shops on Broadway and have money left over to buy additional clothing. It was not just the clothing stores, either. City dwellers could buy just about anything cheaper in the Bowery, and in the daytime they crowded stores to take advantage of the low prices.66

  Shooting galleries filled the neighborhood, too. “Only five cents a shot!” shouted their countermen as every type of fellow lined up to shoot at large targets, such as lions that roared when hit with a bullet and musicians who raised a trumpet and played a tune when struck in the right place. Prizes were boxes of cheap candy and stuffed animals that the sharpshooters gave to their appreciative, smiling dates.