Extent of Prostitution in New York City, 1830-1870

There are no official censuses or registries of New York City prostitutes in the nineteenth century. Although several population censuses list some women as prostitutes, there are many reasons for concluding these figures are incomplete and incorrect. A woman was not likely to admit her profession to an official government representative, especially when she might practice another profession such as seamstress, milliner, or boardinghouse keeper that was a respectable--and legal--activity. At various times police officials were charged with keeping track of prostitutes and claimed to have records of all houses of prostitution and lists of names of public prostitutes.^[37] If these records were kept, however, they no longer are available. There are several semi-annual reports by chiefs of police giving total numbers of prostitutes in the city, but these reports probably enumerate only the more

well known of the occupation and omit occasional prostitutes. One suspects as well that police officials tended to underestimate prostitution in response to periodic public outcries about the extent of the vice, which encouraged the police to present themselves as keeping the problem under control. The only official survey of New York prostitution known to exist is that made by Sanger, which thus becomes the centerpiece for judging other figures.

Until 1830, prostitutes were not so much counted or studied as they were hidden away in the back streets of New York and other seaports and large urban centers. Legal pressure was applied to keep prostitutes and brothels obscure, contained in certain areas, and hence as invisible as possible. In New York the Common Council, courts, and groups like a short-lived Magdalen Society founded in 1812 periodically had to deal with issues involving prostitutes, but public references to prostitution were infrequent until the McDowall controversy of 1830-1831.^[38] From that time on, discussion of prostitution would become interwoven into the fabric of everyday life, and estimates of the numbers of women involved would become in part a basis for evaluating the extent of corruption and vice in the city.

McDowall's 1831 report stated that there were at least 10,000 prostitutes in the city, amounting to one-tenth of the females of all ages in the total city population of approximately 203,000. McDowall estimated that about 5,000 of the prostitutes were full-time public prostitutes. He claimed his figures were conservative, but respectable New Yorkers considered them outrageously high and convened a grand jury to produce an independent estimate. The jury reported that even after enumerating every suspicious female in the city as a member of the Sisterhood only 1,438 prostitutes--one in seventy female New Yorkers--could be identified. The Morning Courier and Enquirer editorialized that even the grand jury's much lower estimate was "excessive."^[39]

The discrepant estimates put forth by McDowall and the grand jury set the pattern for efforts at measuring the incidence of prostitution throughout the period: moral reformers, religious leaders, and politicians claimed the number of prostitutes was quite high, and scientific investigators and city officials consistently issued much lower figures. McDowall's estimate of 10,000 prostitutes, initially considered so outrageous, was nonetheless invoked frequently throughout the 1830s and into the 1840s, especially by politicians, ministers, reformers, and the

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5.
Police Office Notice, 1813. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, 
legal pressure was used to keep prostitutes confined to certain areas of New York City.
 This 1813 police warning to prostitutes and landlords in the area near the Hook illustrates 
this policy but indicates that the police were courteous enough to wait four months until 
May Day, New Yorkers' traditional moving day, before enforcing their threat. (Courtesy 
Museum of the City of New York)

popular press. Counterclaims that the majority of the owners of prostitution houses were pious, worthy, moral, respectable men also persisted. But by the mid-1840s, such discussion caused no outcry; the public had become much more aware of the existence of prostitution through the press, the work of reformers, and the frequent appearance of prostitutes on the public sidewalks, at shops and theaters, and in many neighborhood streets.^[40]

Although claims that New York had large numbers of prostitutes no longer surprised many citizens, New Yorkers still debated the figures. In 1847, Dr. Charles Smith wrote in his book on prostitution that the numbers of New York harlots had been "absurdly" inflated. Remarking that the truth was bad enough without any exaggeration, he presented as "accurate returns" the statistics in the official report of the Chief of Police for November 1846 through April 1847. This report lists the number of public prostitutes as 2,483, or one of every seventy-seven females in the city.^[41]

In 1858, Sanger, too, expressed doubt about McDowall's estimate, pointing out that in the nearly twenty years since McDowall's report, "vice has not decreased in New York, but has steadily increased, and yet the most diligent search can discover . . . only 7,860 public and private prostitutes," even broadly defined.^[42] Sanger based his estimate on a figure of 5,000 given by Chief of Police George W. Matsell in 1856, which he adjusted to reflect precinct-level police estimates, general population growth, the "floating prostitute population," and those prostitutes who were "effectively disguised." Sanger's conclusion was that New York had one prostitute for every forty-seven females in the population.^[43]

Three police reports in the 1860s put forth much lower estimates, reporting as few as 2,100 prostitutes and no more than 2,700, working at approximately 600 brothels. The highest of these figures, the count of 2,700 in 1866, identifies one of every 136 females, or less than one percent of the female population, as prostitutes.^[44] Eight years earlier, Sanger had actually interviewed almost that many known prostitutes, when New York City's population was 100,000 less, suggesting that the police calculations must have been on the low side. Just how low they were is illustrated by arrest reports between 1866 and 1870, when prostitution arrests numbered around 6,000 annually; the official police estimate of 2,700 prostitutes in the city could be accurate only if each prostitute had been arrested an average of twice each year, which was certainly not the

case.^[45] In 1872 police estimates were even less reliable; the 1,223 prostitutes said to be in New York that year amount to only three-fifths of the number of prostitutes interviewed by Sanger fifteen years earlier, despite population growth of almost 50 percent during that period.^[46]

The police statistics did not go unchallenged. In keeping with the spirit of McDowall, two Protestant ministers declared to their congregations that prostitution's numbers were much greater than reports stated. In 1866, Methodist Bishop Matthew Simpson announced that there were 11,000 to 12,000 prostitutes in New York City, a population equal to the number of members of the Methodist Church. Five years later, the Reverend Dr. Henry W. Bellows estimated the number of "fallen" women had increased to 20,000, which amounted to one of every twenty-four females in the city (table 1).^[47]

Understandably, police estimates of the prostitution population from 1830 to 1870 were extremely low, while ministers, reformers, and public commentators tended to give exaggerated estimates. As has been noted, Sanger used the most thorough method of determining the number of

prostitutes in New York City at any one time, though the accuracy of his study can still be questioned. One approach to assessing the accuracy and limitations of Sanger's figures is to check some of them against other data suggesting the prevalence of prostitution in the mid-1850s.

Two wards of the city, the eighth and fifth, were home to a number of noted brothels, though Sanger's study did not identify them as the leading wards in prostitute population. Separated by Canal Street, the two wards covered neighborhoods west of lower Broadway that included several streets where prostitution houses were concentrated. New Yorkers repeatedly commented on the fact that prostitutes, as well as brothels and assignation houses, were dispersed throughout all wards of the city, in both the best and worst neighborhoods, but wards five and eight were recognized as having a significant prostitution population (table 2).^[48]

Using newspapers, brothel guidebooks, and city records, it is possible to locate approximately 53 percent of the prostitutes said to be in ward eight by the police inspectors' survey and more than 25 percent of those said to be in ward five. A few more brothel keepers in these neighborhoods can be identified by city directories, newspapers, and other sources. Using the 1855 census, the average number of residents of prostitution houses in these wards can be calculated, providing a basis for estimating the number of prostitutes likely to live in additional houses known through other records. By this method, one can estimate a brothel-based prostitute population that accounts for 83 percent of the number Sanger found in ward eight and 52 percent of the number he found in ward five (table 3).^[49]

Thus, over a century later, a high percentage of individual prostitutes—a population group not easily located in sources—can still be identified, leading to the assumption that Sanger's figures, particularly for the brothel-based rather than part-time prostitute population, are not significantly above the actual numbers of prostitutes in the mid-1850s. Indeed, given the difficulties of tracing prostitutes, especially the street and part-time practitioners, Sanger's figures more likely may be underestimates. The most conservative estimates of the 1830s and 1840s indicated that prostitutes represented from 1.3 percent to 1.4 percent of the female population, while Sanger estimated that they represented 2.1 percent (see table 1). If we accept the Sanger percentage as roughly accurate and calculate that percentage of the female population from 1830 through 1870 in rapidly growing New York, we obtain the following estimate of the number of prostitutes for those years:

It is likely, however, that the proportion of prostitutes in the female population was not constant but was in fact increasing, especially after 1850. A recent study of German prostitutes has noted that "prostitution probably reaches its heights in a country during the second wave of industrialization when heavy industry excludes women from participation in the labor force." Only later in the industrialization process, with the growth of a tertiary clerical and service sector, are women able to find opportunities for employment; at this later stage, prostitution declines.^[50] Ruth Rosen, in her study of American prostitution, suggests that this same pattern prevailed in the United States in the nineteenth century, with the peak of women's engagement in prostitution taking place between 18S0 and 1900 and beginning to decline in the early twentieth century.^[51] As applied to New York City, this rather mechanical correlation of prostitution to other job possibilities suggests that Sanger's 2.1 percent rate might well be taken as a rather conservative basis for estimating the number of prostitutes in the years after 1850.

The discussion above has compared the number of prostitutes to the number of females of all ages in New York; intuitively, of course, we would suspect that—and in fact, as will be seen below, we are able to confirm that—the vast majority of prostitutes were women in their teenage and young adult years, roughly between the ages of 15 and 30. If we consider that approximately 2 percent of all women in New York were probably prostitutes in the mid-nineteenth century, we might assume that the rate was considerably higher, perhaps 5 to 6 percent, in the age groups most active in the prostitution trade.^[52] In the next chapter, we examine statistical data that will help us develop a composite demographic portrait of prostitutes in New York, but first it is important to focus on the women involved as individuals—working women with motivations, relationships, aspirations, and experiences that help us understand their story in its many human dimensions.