The Dock Areas
Since New York was a preeminent port and shipping terminal throughout the nineteenth century, the dock areas along the East River and up the west side on the Hudson River continued to be populated with seamen, laborers, and travelers. Ships stopping at the New York port brought approximately 22,000 crewmen to the city in 1835 and approximately 66,000 in 1860.[29] Catering to these seamen, other transients, and dock workers, prostitutes attached themselves to the many drinking and lodging establishments that were crowded into the vicinity of the docks. Two waterfront districts were especially well known for prostitution activity in the period 1830 to 1870—the Water and Cherry streets area, in the fourth and seventh wards, and Corlears Hook, a point of land at the east end of Grand Street, also in the seventh ward. The Battery, the riverfront park at the tip of Manhattan Island, was a favorite promenade of streetwalkers in the colonial period and remained popular until the mid-nineteenth century.
Even though known to be riotous and disorderly, the Water-Cherry streets area in the 1830s and 1840s still housed some of New York's wealthiest families, especially along Cherry Street, where a number of substantial mansions were found. By the mid-1840s, however, most of the well-to-do had moved to other wards, and their once-grand residences were converted to tenements and brothels inhabited by poorer citizens.[30] Dock area streets also were filled with saloons and their attached prostitution quarters, usually second-story rooms above the
saloons. In some saloons the basement was used for dancing, and these dance houses became famous for their raucous activity. Prostitution and drinking establishments on one street in this area were so numerous they were said to be "standing almost cheek by jowl—more than forty of them in a single half-mile stretch."[31] After mid-century, all commentators agreed that women practicing prostitution in the Water-Cherry streets area had sunk to the lowest depths of prostitution, becoming "living corpses."[32] Having made the final descent to Water Street, a prostitute "almost immediately ... falls a victim to the terrible scourge of these places. Disease of the most loathsome kind fastens itself upon her, and she literally rots to death."[33]
Prostitution at Corlears Hook, northeast of Water and Cherry streets, had a similar reputation for degradation. Long known as an area of prostitution, "the Hook" has been proposed as the origin of the slang term hooker .[34] The district known as the Hook was located mostly in Walnut Street, a seven-block-long thoroughfare. Like prostitutes of the other dock areas, the women of the Hook were described as "bloated with rum and rotten with disease," and they occupied themselves "chewing snuff, smoking tobacco, and eating opium, ... exposed to every description of brutality and victims of every kind of excess. "[35] Because of the clientele of seamen and dock workers, the area was known to be rough, and it retained a reputation for low prostitution and drinking throughout the century. Yet it is difficult to determine how much of the vice-ridden and "low" reputation earned by the Hook and Water-Cherry streets areas was a function of their poverty and squalor and how much was a function of vice and corruption. There is also some abstraction in contemporary descriptions of such places, as if they were less observed locations than comfortably isolated moral locuses for all the broad evils urban observers both feared and found fascinating. As would be the case in other parts of New York as the century progressed, often those areas that became centrally defined by their poverty also became famous as centers of vice.[36]