The Prostitute's Workplace

Nineteenth-century New York neighborhoods contained a variety of institutions from which prostitutes plied their trade. No longer feeling bound by the secrecy that was required of their eighteenth-

century sisters, New York's nineteenth-century prostitutes also did not feel restricted to the same institutions primarily used by eighteenth-century prostitutes for marketing their profession: taverns and waterfront lodging houses. This diversification in commercial sex institutions was both a contributor to and result of prostitution's geographic and social expansion throughout the New York community.

Nineteenth-century prostitution institutions can be classified as either primary or secondary. The primary institutions, such as the brothel, the prostitution boarding house, and the assignation house, were established for the express purpose of marketing sex, and a male (or female) sought out one of these residences with that objective in mind. Although buying or selling sex might also be the primary motive of people attending other entertainment institutions, such as saloons, theaters, concert halls, and dance halls, these establishments ostensibly served other commercial functions, and prostitution was available as a secondary activity. Primary sexual institutions were residential in nature and were most often managed by female proprietors, while the secondary institutions featured leisure or entertainment and were predominantly operated by males.

The most common primary institution of prostitution was the brothel, also known as a parlor house, bawdy house, disorderly house, whore-house, bordello, bagnio, or seraglio.^[58] Structurally, the brothel was most often a row house (New York's architectural answer to limited, expensive land space), a narrow, several-storied residence linked to neighboring structures. The brothel usually had a parlor or living room for receiving and entertaining guests, with one to three floors of bedrooms above. In lower-class brothels the parlor or living room was a bar-reception room. Row houses served as brothels, prostitution boarding houses, rooming houses, assignation houses, and tenements, which allowed them to blend in with the houses of ordinary neighborhood citizens.

In its purest form, the parlor-house brothel was inhabited by from two to possibly twenty prostitutes who were managed by a madam in a communal or family-type arrangement. The madam and the prostitutes worked together as a "team," creating the house's ambience and reputation, though individual prostitutes might be well enough known to attract their own customers. Since the parlor house was both a workplace and residence, meals were provided, as was domestic service. The mad-

am functioned as household mistress, chief social hostess, and business manager. As business manager, she was responsible for paying all household bills. In some cases she may have been the recipient of all of the income of the house, granting each prostitute room, board, and a salary for her services. However, sources that elaborate on the financial practices of New York City brothels indicate that the madam seldom had total control over the receipts of the house, and prostitutes were not salaried; instead, they appear to have paid a weekly fee for room and board and then shared customer profits with the madam, or else they paid her a per-guest fee for each customer entertained.^[59] This individual payment of room and board was one characteristic that caused many parlor house brothels to be referred to as prostitution boarding houses, a blurring of two institutional types that were popular in this period.^[60]

The prostitution boarding house developed at the time that respectable boarding houses became popular in New York City. Just like individuals or families in respectable boarding houses, prostitutes rented separate rooms from the housekeeper but dined in common with the other resident prostitutes. Theoretically, the boarding house had less of a "team approach" than did the parlor house, since each prostitute was responsible for recruiting her own customers, but in practice, boarding prostitutes also serviced customers who knew of the existence of the boarding house but came without being recruited by a particular prostitute. A boarding house keeper, like a brothel madam, most likely charged the boarders a fee per customer and shared in the profits of liquor sales. Although a prostitution boarding house might not rent exclusively to prostitutes, in most cases a respectable woman would not wish to rent at such a house for fear of risking her good name. Many madams referred to their brothels as "boarding houses," and they also established their businesses along the same principles as respectable boarding houses, muddling the terminology but taking advantage of the camouflage of respectability for the illicit operations of the house. Many brothels outwardly appeared as ordinary boarding houses to neighbors and authorities, and they were listed in city directories along with their reputable counterparts. Consequently, the distinctions between reputable and disreputable boarding houses were completely lost to the casual observer, and the operational distinctions between parlor-house brothel and prostitution boarding house ultimately disappeared. The term parlor

house eventually came to designate an exclusive and finely furnished brothel, as opposed to a lower-class or more commonplace brothel.^[61]

The third type of primary prostitution establishment—the assignation house—also eludes precise definition because of the variety of functions it served. Theoretically, an assignation house was not a prostitution house, but a bedroom establishment where illicit and adulterous lovers could meet for a tryst. Rooms could be rented for a short period—a few hours or overnight. The most important characteristic of an assignation house was secrecy, so that couples could be assured that their identities would never be known to others inside or outside the house. Many assignation houses, like upper-class parlor houses, were lavishly decorated, with special attention given to the furnishings in the bedroom quarters. The parlor was not a communal entertaining room but served as a private waiting room until an individual or couple could be taken to a bedroom.^[62] It was said that if prostitutes were allowed to patronize assignation houses, then the so-called respectable clientele would shun the establishments. This may have been true of some patrons, but on the whole New York's assignation houses appear to have been well-integrated into the commercial sex structure, and business did not suffer because of it. Streetwalkers frequently used assignation houses for their prostitution activities, and there are numerous examples of assignation houses having a few prostitutes as permanent residents to serve patrons who were seeking prostitution in an establishment less notorious than a regular brothel. Some men found that, when having an extended liaison with a prostitute or non-prostitute, an assignation house offered both private and convenient quarters for lodging the "kept woman," while other men rented assignation rooms on a long-term basis so that a private room would be immediately available for use whenever wanted.^[63]

Although assignation houses were in plentiful supply and were increasingly popular during the period from 1830 to 1870, one should note that alternative establishments were also utilized by prostitutes as the century progressed. In effect, an assignation house functioned as a very private hotel and was particularly convenient since the early Broadway hotels resisted prostitutes as patrons. After the Civil War, discreet prostitutes found the large hotels not so reluctant to take their business, and some of New York's more sophisticated prostitutes were able to use even the most fashionable Broadway hotels for servicing clients. James Mc-

Cabe noted in 1872 that "impure women of the 'higher,' that is the more successful class . . . abound at the hotels. The proprietor cannot turn them out unless they are notorious . . . for fear of getting himself into trouble."^[64] Bed houses and furnished rooming houses also became popular with some independent prostitutes who were attracted to the privacy gained by avoiding the boarding arrangements of the more common multiple-resident dwellings. The disadvantage of such an arrangement was that prostitutes had to worry about their own meals. At the bottom end of the scale, prostitutes worked out of tenement houses, often sharing crowded quarters with non-prostitute residents.^[65]

Although panel houses are sometimes mentioned as an additional form of residential sex institution, in reality they were a form of brothel or assignation house to promote thievery. One or more rooms of a brothel or a bed house might be furnished with a curtain, wall, or movable panel from which another prostitute or a partner-in-crime could gain entry into the locked bedroom. While the customer was occupied in bed, the intruder would steal from the client's pants pocket. The sex-for-money exchange had a new twist, but the institutional structure of the establishment remained the same.^[66]

In spite of the fact that New York's primary sex institutions were numerous, and their existence and locations were well known to many citizens, it was the public, undisguised presence of prostitutes in secondary sex institutions and public thoroughfares that made the profession so visible and seemingly pervasive throughout the urban social structure. Here prostitution moved openly in the public arena for all but the most naive or sheltered eye to see. Although some prostitutes remained discreet, for most prostitutes secondary sex institutions were public forums for sexual solicitation. Both male patrons and prostitutes attended the theater, the saloon, concert hall, or dancing hall expecting an evening of good entertainment but also an opportunity to buy or sell sex.

The theater was the most popular of New York's entertainment institutions, and its connection with commercial sex was unmistakable because of the designation of the third tier as the exclusive province of prostitutes and their male suitors or friends. Just as mid-century New York led the nation in other fields, it also led the nation in numbers of theaters, and these establishments catered to all classes of the population. Although theaters like the Bowery had greatest appeal to boisterous

masses such as the Bowery B'hoys, while the Park and Broadway theaters attracted a more refined clientele represented by Philip Hone and George Templeton Strong, all theaters had their prostitute population.^[67] According to mid-nineteenth-century physician Charles Smith, "a particular set habitually and constantly frequent the third tiers of the theaters. There may be two hundred in all who nearly every night are seen at the Park, Broadway, Bowery, Olympic and Chatham theatres." Smith also noted that the character of the "ladies" in the third tier varied with the house, just as did that of the regular audience. "The Park and Broadway are genteel and formal; the Olympic, bizarre and grotesque; and the Bowery and Chatham, sensual, bold and roystering."^[68] According to Smith there were three places a prostitute could appear in the theater—the third tier, the gallery (if thickly veiled), and the stage. The rest of the house was "considered sacred even by the third tier [who] won't allow one of their own to appear elsewhere if they know it."^[69] An incident reported by Madam Mary Berry about three prostitutes from her brothel indicates that Smith may have been right about a "common code of theater behavior." As Berry related the tale: "Hannah Blisset and lady Elizabeth stole out last night, and graced the Richmond Hill Theatre with their presence. They went in the first tier of boxes, got gloriously drunk, and were turned out. . .. English Ann was going to whip the pair."^[70]

New Yorkers generally understood that the third tier was a meeting place for prostitutes and their clients. Prostitutes made arrangements to join their customers of long standing at the theater, but they also made new client contacts there, both in the third tier and at the nearby bar that serviced their gallery. Some men went up to the third tier without previous arrangements in order to look over the prospects, while others were taken by mutual friends to be introduced to a prostitute.^[71] A prostitute hoped to be escorted home by a customer at the end of the performance, or even better, to be taken out to dinner before going home. Sometimes suitors were impatient about waiting until the end of the evening. Prostitute Louisa Wilson met a man in the third tier of the Park who asked her to leave in the middle of the performance and accompany him to a house behind the theater, where he paid her a $2.50 retainer. They returned for the remainder of the performance and then left for her brothel.^[72]

[Full Size]

17.
Third Tier of the Park Theatre. This 1822 watercolor of the Park Theatre,
 which clearly shows the "ladies of the third tier," includes actual portraits of eighty-
four well-known New York figures. One of the patrons in the second tier was Jake 
LeRoy, who shocked New Yorkers by his highly visible relationship with prostitute 
Fanny White. (Courtesy of the New-York Historical Society, New York City)

Prostitute Mary Steen entertained a customer at her brothel on Chapel Street early one evening, and afterward he suggested they catch the performance at the Park Theatre. Steen said she and her "girls" were in the habit of going to the Bowery because they liked the manager there, so her escort consented and bought two tickets for the third tier of the Bowery. During the performance Steen slipped away to the bar, where her date shortly discovered her drinking with another man. She refused to return to her date, apparently because she was trying to line up a second commission for the evening. Later, the spurned escort spotted her in an adjoining box and was so enraged he attacked her with a pen knife, cutting up the sleeve of her dress.^[73] Such disruptive and rowdy behavior was not unusual in the third tiers of theaters and often triggered complaints from the rest of the house. There are several instances of prostitutes having men arrested for tearing their clothes or bonnets, and one third-tier frequenter had a man arrested for trying to kiss her.^[74] More often, however, arrests were made for prostitutes fighting with each other or being drunk and disorderly.^[75]

Another complaint from theater patrons was that the numerous prostitutes attending the theater "enter by the same door as the chaste."^[76] Contemporary George Foster lamented that prostitutes "come up the same steps and stairs as our wives, and into the same lobby."^[77] Although a separate stairway for prostitutes was incorporated into the building design of many nineteenth-century theaters in other cities, this feature was late in coming to some of New York's biggest theaters, which sometimes required remodeling to add a staircase on the outside of the building.^[78] Even though the third tier and, later, the special stair separated prostitutes from the general public, there was a limit to the isolation of prostitutes. When the manager of one of the city's dramatic establishments erected a partition to shut off the prostitutes from other patrons altogether, "he soon yielded to the dreadful necessity of the stage, and the protest of this class, and removed the partition."^[79]

Nineteenth-century newspapers and contemporary accounts note how frequently prostitutes attended the theater, but to credit this popularity primarily to the desire or need to solicit clients is to ignore the full dimensions of the prostitute's working life. With the prostitute's workplace and residence the same, the theater offered a way to "get out of the house." It was also a place where her presence was not legally questioned. Furthermore, the theater was one of the opportunities a

prostitute had for escape, for vicariously experiencing the lives of others. For those who were illiterate and did not have the alternative option of reading magazines and popular novels, the theater may have been especially important. Theater attendance was also a social occasion—a way to meet new people or old acquaintances in an environment not necessarily associated with sex. Many theaters opened the third tier one to two hours prior to the performance, which allowed prostitutes a longer time to socialize with fellow prostitutes and male friends—while increasing the bar revenues for the house. The early entry hour also was a way to avoid the complaints of respectable patrons who preferred not to mix with the unchaste.^[80]

Documents pertaining to the life of Helen Jewett repeatedly attest to the importance of the theater in the lives of Jewett and her fellow prostitutes. In the Jewett correspondence there are twenty-three letters in which some reference is made to the theater, usually in the context of meeting a client or lover at the Park Theatre, of which Jewett was a devoted patron. (See Appendix 2 for a full explanation of the Jewett correspondence.) One letter discussed a man's failure' to get Jewett together with one of his friends at the end of the previous night's performance. The intended acquaintance had hoped to "escort her home," but there was a misunderstanding. The same client/friend wrote two other letters mentioning the theater—one of which asked why Jewett left the playhouse without him the night before, without even saying goodbye. Jewett apparently had gone to the theater with the friend, had become perturbed, and left in a carriage with fellow prostitutes from other brothels.^[81]

Most of the letters to and from Jewett's lover discussed the couple's hoping to see, or failing to see, one other on various evenings at the theater. While the letters were solicitations to meet together at the playhouse or at her brothel, the relationship was of long enough duration that attendance at the theater was a social outing for the couple as well as an attempt by Jewett to have the lover's company at the brothel afterward.^[82] In one letter Jewett indicated she went to the theater for two nights in a row hoping to see the lover; failing, she wrote with some irony and humor:

You will think I have degenerated sadly to go to the theatre two nights in succession, but to tell you the truth, the sole inducement in going last night

was the pleasure I anticipated from seeing you, in which you are aware I was disappointed.^[83]

On another occasion, Jewett wrote that she had failed to persuade a male acquaintance, to whom her lover wished to be introduced, to meet her at the theater that evening. Even though she was unable to arrange the introduction for her lover, she stated: "I wish you would drop in there tonight, as I am going quite early." Her reference to her early attendance at the theater is a further indication of the prostitutes' enjoyment of the theater's "third tier social hour."^[84]

Jewett also kept up with the Park's performance schedule and made an effort to attend those shows that promised to be special. In June of 1835 she wrote:

Tonight is Chapman's farewell benefit at the Park. I have an engagement to go with Clara, and if you get in town, and my letter in season, you will have arrived most opportunely, for then we may expect the pleasure of your company.^[85]

On another occasion she hoped ill health would not keep her away from a promising performance:

I am quite unwell this morning, and unable to go out. Wallack plays tonight in two of his best pieces, and I should very much like to go, and hope by evening to feel well enough. You know it will be Saturday night, and I do not ask you to promise, but may I expect you to bring me home?^[86]

Jewett also appeared to have some personal associations among theater personnel. She once wrote to her lover teasingly: "I had a little private chat with the manager of a certain theatre since you have been gone; which, however, I intend to explain and obtain entire absolution for."^[87] She also entertained another theatrical personage as a client and received letters from him discussing dramatic and literary affairs. In December 1835 "J. J. A. S." wrote:

I went last evening with my good lady and her daughter, to watch the performance of Reeve, but we were all much disappointed. . .. I hope you will pardon the shortness of this feeble attempt to assure you of my regard for you. It is not the want of friendly sentiment, but of time, as I am now busily engaged with Simpson, the manager, in bringing forward a drama, of which I am the humble author.^[88]

Many prostitutes were connected to actors and actresses, and the comment of Chapel Street madam Mary Steen that she liked the Bowery manager because he was a "clever fellow" may have indicated she knew him more than just by reputation.^[89]

The open toleration of prostitutes at New York's dramatic establishments left no doubts in the minds of many that theatrical institutions were immoral. Many parents were certain that unchaperoned attendance at the theater meant that a daughter would become a prostitute— or already had become one. Thus, if a girl were found in one of the city's playhouses, parents sometimes had her arrested and sent to the House of Refuge.^[90] One young man, who said he "accidentally" had gone into the third tier, discovered his sister there and had her taken to the police station.^[91] The Advocate of Moral Reform believed that theaters were responsible for corrupting not just young women but also New York's children. They reported that girls as young as ten and eleven were in the habit of attending the third tier of the Franklin Theatre "for purposes of prostitution," and young boys of similar ages were found there with them. The Advocate also reported that one officer had said that girls from as young as three to thirteen (italics mine) had been found in the third tier. Given such information, it is not surprising that some observers believed that the increasing immorality of the entire city could be traced to its dramatic establishments.^[92] As one editor wrote:

To the theatres of this city, above all other places, is the iniquity that abounds to be traced. . .. They are sinks of vice and pollution—houses of assignation and incipient prostitution—in four words, The Vestibules of Hell!^[93]

Whether it was the fact that prostitutes frequented the theater or a belief that the clientele and productions induced licentiousness in others, many people shunned the theater as an immoral establishment. One nineteenth-century scholar of the theater went so far as to estimate that seven-tenths of the population in mid-century America looked on attendance at the theater as a sin.^[94]

Public condemnation of the third tier ultimately led to a movement to have prostitutes banned from New York's theaters, but either the prostitute's presence was not deemed offensive enough or her patronage was found to be too financially important to allow such legislation to pass.^[95] Nevertheless, by the end of the 1850s the third tier as a place where prostitutes could solicit clients had begun to disappear. According

to William Sanger, "many of the managers of our best theatres have abolished the third tier . . . and if any improper woman visits them she must do so under the assumed garb of respectability and conduct herself accordingly."^[96] Even after the demise of the third tier in the period after the Civil War, New Yorkers commented on the continued importance of prostitutes' attendance at the theater. By this time, however, it appears prostitutes had come to prefer matinee performances to evening shows. One 1869 source noted that New York prostitutes "entirely support the theatre matinees," and another 1860s commentator pointed out that the attendance of prostitute patrons was important to theaters throughout the East: "In some instances in Eastern cities, in addition to free admissions, messengers have been sent to the haunts of vile women, to invite their attendance as the necessary attraction of a large and indispensable portion of the patrons of the stage."^[97] Whether "under the assumed garb of respectability" or not, the prostitute's attendance at the theater remained important to the American stage in the postwar era.

No other secondary institutions appear to have had as wide an appeal to the prostitution population as did the theater, but various other entertainment establishments were popular with many of these women, whose presence in turn was a draw for male patrons. Taverns, groggeries, and saloons had long served as complementary establishments to the prostitution business. Eighteenth-century prostitutes entertained their customers in small rooms behind or above saloons, or they picked up clients in the vicinity of public taverns and took them to nearby lodging houses for sexual transactions. As prostitution spread throughout the city in the nineteenth century, however, new varieties of public leisure developed just as did new forms of residential prostitution. The traditional saloon continued to thrive along the waterfront and in such areas as the Five Points, but some proprietors added music and dancing to their businesses. German prostitution establishments introduced a variation of the saloon to mid-century New Yorkers. A German couple often ran the business together, the husband working as bartender and the wife as madam, with both overseeing the young women who served as waitresses and dancing partners in the barroom and as prostitutes in the bedrooms behind or above. Mid-century New York also witnessed the development of another form of drinking establishment, the concert saloon. Although a few concert saloons (or concert halls) existed in the 1850s, their great surge in popularity came after the Civil War when

more than three hundred such establishments existed in New York City. Furthermore, the concert saloon rose in popularity at the same time the New York theater was restricting prostitutes in its effort to become more respectable, thus filling a "leisure-entertainment recruiting" void for some women in the prostitution business as well as a general cultural void for New Yorkers who wanted cheap but lively entertainment.^[98]

Most concert saloons were located on major thoroughfares, in the basement or second floor of a building. The essential ingredients of the business were a bar, music, and "waiter girls." Some establishments also offered keno or billiards. Most concert halls had a stage for performances, and the music of the establishment was provided by one or more musicians who alone or with other entertainers might also provide the stage show. Waiter girls were a major attraction of the establishment and varied from the elegantly clothed, dignified woman with the "sister-like" demeanor employed at the Broadway and Fifth Avenue concert saloon to the "beastly, foul-mouthed, brutal wretch" who worked on Canal, Chatham, or Water streets.^[99] Cheap liquor was furnished at inflated prices, and the waitress got a percentage of the drinks she sold. Her prostitution business was a private negotiation, which she arranged at the concert saloon but practiced in quarters elsewhere, unless private alcoves were made available by the establishment. Police records indicate that as many as seventeen hundred women were employed as waiter girls in the post-Civil War years. Although at first considered improper entertainment for respectable women, by the latter part of the nineteenth century concert halls were attracting a non-prostitute clientele, especially young working women.^[100]

Another entertainment institution that was sometimes identified with the concert saloon was the dance hall. Dance halls were popular in New York as early as the 1840s, especially in areas like Water Street and the Five Points. According to one contemporary, dance halls differed from concert saloons in that "they are one grade lower both as regards the inmates and the visitors, and . . . dancing as well as drinking is carried on in them."^[101]

Another contemporary described one of the dancing houses of the Five Points as "a large dimly-lighted cavern" having an "intolerable stench of brandy, tobacco, and steaming carcasses." A fiddler, sitting on a barrel by the bar, played for a group of dancers while "around the sides of the room in bunks, or sitting upon wooden benches, the remainder

[Full Size]

18.
John Allen's Dance Hall. John Allen's was one of New York's most 
famous "secondary sex institutions," a place of public entertainment 
where prostitutes could recruit customers. (Courtesy American Antiquarian Society)

of the company wait[ed] impatiently their turn upon the floor—meanwhile drinking and telling obscene anecdotes, or singing fragments of ribald songs."^[102]

The most reputable of the nineteenth-century dance houses was Harry Hill's, which opened in the mid-1850s and was located on Houston Street near the Mulberry Street police station. Men paid twenty-five cents to enter, but women were allowed in free. All patrons were "required" to act with decorum, a house rule that the owner, a former pugilist, enforced for the thirty years his establishment was in business. Soliciting was an accepted part of dance halls, but at Harry Hill's it had to be done unobtrusively, and any illicit activities had to take place off the premises. Hill's had a large barroom as well as a dance hall, and patrons were treated to floor shows, one reason why some referred to his establishment as a concert hall. Harry Hill's closed in the late 1880s, the era when the concert hall was declining in popularity; his establishment had spanned the heyday of this form of entertainment. By the end of the century, former patrons of the concert saloon, including prostitutes,

turned to the cabaret as the latest form of public entertainment, which prostitutes regarded as the newest secondary sex institution.^[103]

One form of prostitution was centered not in buildings but outside them—the practice of streetwalking. The most well known of the soliciting techniques used by prostitutes, streetwalking was a very significant part of nineteenth-century New York's prostitution culture and, more than any other aspect of this culture, tested the limits of tolerance of New York citizens. Streetwalking became a major political issue.

Many women chose streetwalking as their arena of prostitution because of its ready availability. For the casual prostitute wishing for a quick source of money, streetwalking was a way temporarily to enter the profession without the "commitment" associated with a house of prostitution. Some career prostitutes chose this method of solicitation because they wanted to operate as independents—neither sharing their profits with nor having to adhere to rules set by the madam of an establishment. Other women had no alternative but streetwalking because they had descended the professional ladder of brothel prostitution and were considered too old, sick, or slovenly to be accepted again as brothel inmates.^[104] Many very young girls, in fact child prostitutes, gradually eased into streetwalking as an extension of their peddling and huckstering activities and looked on their prostitution less as a new job than as another aspect of the street-world's exchange and barter of whatever commodity one had or could find.^[105]

When Sanger wrote that "prostitution no longer confines itself to secrecy and darkness, but boldly strides through our most thronged and elegant thoroughfares," he accurately described the transition of street-walking from the out-of-the-way streets of the eighteenth-century dock areas to the city's busiest thoroughfares and walkways—the Battery, the Bowery, and Broadway. Although the Battery had long been a resort of New York's streetwalkers, it gained new prominence in the antebellum period. The Battery was said to be "the favorite park of New Yorkers, and was indeed the handsomest."^[106] For prostitutes, it was a convenient and pleasant promenade where one could stroll looking for business. In the 1840s a plan was proposed for enlarging Battery Park through landfills, a plan many commercial groups opposed. Preferring to see the enlarged area used for commercial development, the Journal of Commerce noted that the city could ill afford to have a park where land was worth $150,000 an acre and there was so little to be had at any price.

"If land is wanted for solitary meditation, or for the concealment of villainy, it would be better to select a site where land is cheaper."^[107] By mid-century, however, the "villainy" of prostitution, as well as the respectable New York citizenry, had all but abandoned the area for other favorite walking places. The conversion of Castle Garden to an immigrant depot in the late 1850s, along with the use of poor landfill materials, helped bring on the decline of the Battery, causing it to become a virtual slum until it was reclaimed in 1869.^[108]

Next to Broadway, the Bowery was said to be "the most thoroughly characteristic" of New York streets. The street originated in Chatham Square, "the great promenade of the old time denizens of the Bowery." Once a respectable thoroughfare, "the Bowery commenced to lose caste" after the city began to extend up the island. A nineteenth-century citizen noted: "Decent people forsook it, and the poorer and more disreputable classes took possession. Finally, it became notorious, . . . known all over the country for its roughs . . . and its doubtful women."^[109] The street was filled with pawnshops, dance houses, lodging houses, concert saloons, and lower-class theaters. Although always a busy thoroughfare, at night and on Sundays the Bowery came especially alive with noise and throngs of people, including the Bowery streetwalkers whom George T. Strong described as "members of the whore-archy in [their] most slatternly deshabille ."^[110]

By far, the most famous New York thoroughfare was Broadway—New York's pride and her shame, celebrated as "the most wonderful street in the universe."^[111] Filled with elegant shops, "monster" hotels, and the latest in transportation vehicles, a look at Broadway was a "must" for all visitors to New York. Few contemporary sources discussed the city without mentioning the beautiful, elegantly dressed women who promenaded the famous thoroughfare in the afternoons—and few discussed Broadway without mentioning the "flashily dressed" females found there at night, "walking rapidly, with a peculiar gait, and glancing quickly but searchingly at every man they pass."^[112] As the heart of the city moved from the tip of Manhattan in the 1830s to the middle of the island in the postwar years, streetwalking shifted in location and intensity along Broadway just as did the centers of brothel prostitution. First concentrating in the area from Fulton to Prince Street, then from Canal to Bleecker, by the 1870s the prime areas for streetwalkers were from Grand to Fourteenth Street, and from Twenty-third to Thirtieth Street.^[113]

Working the streets exposed prostitutes to a number of dangers— mugging, rape, and other abuses, as well as disease and physical decline. Whatever the reality of the streets' deleterious effects on these women, one nineteenth-century observer expressed a common belief when he noted: "A healthy Street Walker is almost a myth."^[114] Another risk faced by the streetwalking trade was harassment and possible arrest by police, since streetwalking was the least tolerated of the various forms of soliciting. Streetwalking prostitutes were subject to arrest if they stopped to talk to male pedestrians, and police enforced this rule much more aggressively on a major street like Broadway than on the less traversed side streets.^[115] Sometimes a difficulty with the law occurred because of the streetwalker's unfortunate choice of patron; several streetwalkers were arrested for propositioning justices. Justice Hopson said he was on his way to court when Anne Miller stopped him at the corner of Water Street and, as she stated, "made the mistake of soliciting directions." He had her arrested, questioned what she did for a living, and sent her to the penitentiary for six months.^[116] Catherine Cochran detained Justice Lowndes on Pearl Street one December evening and "made certain delicate but immoral overtures." Lowndes had Cochran brought in to the station house but released her after she promised to behave herself. Six days later she was arrested again by the watch for annoying a man in the street, and this time Lowndes sent her to Bellevue as a vagrant.^[117] A few months later, Justice Bloodgood said he was taking a "sentimental stroll" through the Five Points when a woman stopped him and asked "if it wasn't time to go to bed." He had the watch lock her in jail until the next morning, when she went before Justice Lowndes and complained that she had "accidentally run against a stout gentleman" who was "so ungallant that he wouldn't listen to her apology but roughly and gruffly sent her in." Lowndes reprimanded her severely and let her go.^[118] Since "evidence" was seldom necessary to arrest a suspected prostitute, it is unlikely the justices were in questionable neighborhoods for entrapment purposes. These occurrences were probably unfortunate accidents for the prostitutes as well as examples of how prostitutes approached pedestrians, but it is also possible that the justices were out strolling for voyeuristic reasons, observing and experiencing up close the underworld of illicit sex.^[119]

By the 1850s pressure from citizens and politicians caused officials to take, on occasion, a more aggressive approach to the problem of

streetwalking. The practice had become too obvious and too intrusive, characteristics that challenged the community's usual attitude of quiet toleration of the profession. Articles in the press decried

the shame of our city, . . . the open and indecent parade permitted of miserable women of the lowest sort in Broadway at all hours from nightfall until far past midnight. . .. Has not this abomination been borne about as long as society can safely bear it? Is not this . . . a favorable time to attempt to purge Broadway of this, its greatest disgrace?^[120]

The perceived boldness of streetwalkers was partly a function of the sheer numbers of prostitutes who were found on the major thoroughfares, but as distressing as their numbers was the nature of the women walking the streets. The streetwalkers of the 1850s were women who overwhelmingly represented the disinherited and undesirable of New York. The majority of them were drawn from the immigrant and poor classes, those who were hardest hit by the economic stresses of the decade. Also, the practice increasingly included children, or young girls who were described by George Strong as "hideous troop[s] of ragged girls, from twelve years old down, brutalized already almost beyond redemption by premature vice, . . . with whore [written] on their depraved faces."^[121] With the increasing presence of children added to the immigrants and the poor in the ranks of prostitution, the rhetoric of reform shifted away from the immorality of illicit sex to what really bothered respectable citizens most: the specter of social disorder, a threat they believed was created more by unacceptable appearances than by sexual immorality itself. Discussing Mayor Wood's reform program, Strong wrote:

What the Mayor seeks to abolish or abate is not the terrible evil of prostitution (for the great notorious "ladies' boarding houses" of Leonard and Mercer Streets are left in peace), but simply the scandal and offence of the peripatetic whore-archy. ^[122]

Nevertheless, Strong agreed with the Mayor's reform intent—for prostitution's "conspicuousness and publicity are disgraceful and mischievous and inexpressibly bad."^[123] William Sanger, writing a few years later, confirmed that the general attitude among contemporaries supported Wood: "Being a prostitute is acknowledged by all as a degradation; while a vagrancy commitment . . . is a positive disgrace."^[124] As with

prostitution establishments, where the distinctions noted by contemporaries between the elegant and the poor establishments seemingly reflected New Yorkers' fear of and fascination with new or strange aspects of urban living as much as they did actual differences in the types of houses, the streetwalker or vagrant also became a moral locus or symbol of urban chaos and social disorder. Not only was the streetwalker often poor and foreign, but she also walked through the streets unchaperoned, an act which further challenged patriarchal notions of proper social order.

The presence at mid-century of so many child prostitutes represented a different kind of threat to society, one that involved a failure of the family, the institutional backbone of American society. In response to this threat, interest groups coalesced to become advocates and protectors of this segment of the population. While Chief of Police Matsell and Mayor Wood attacked prostitution in the streets, organizations like the Children's Aid Society and the Association for the Improvement of the Condition of the Poor attacked its perceived source, the poor man's home. Yet all of the moralistic rhetoric and public statements condemning streetwalkers and the improper homes of child prostitutes obscured the fact that streetwalking was a quick source of income, often the best option a female had for supporting, or helping to support, herself and her family.

The end result of the 1850s legal and reform campaigns against streetwalkers was the issuance of municipal directives providing a more cautious method of arresting and pressing charges against adult prostitutes. Even so, most of the women found their fate still dependent on the whim of the officer on duty. Most of those arrested continued to be sent for a short while to prison, the revolving door of prostitution. For child prostitutes, a different approach was tried. In the past, young girl prostitutes had been sent to the House of Refuge where, through the strict regimen and rigid discipline of the Refuge or indentured positions, the girls, it was hoped, were taught respectable habits—a remedial approach that met with modest success. In contrast, the Children's Aid Society trained working-class girls in the domestic arts, because such skills were believed to offer these girls an alternative to prostitution and to create, in the long run, a new kind of working-class woman. By the 1860s, the large anti-streetwalking campaigns of the 1850s were a thing of the past, but streetwalkers, both adults and children, continued to

throng the city's thoroughfares, seeking a readily available source of income.^[125]

Although streetwalking was the most common form of soliciting by prostitutes, some found other creative ways to attract clients. In the early decades of the nineteenth century when New York was a "walking city," streetwalking on the city's thoroughfares was an adequate way to be exposed to potential clients. With the rise of each new form of public transportation, however, prostitutes extended their solicitation efforts. They not only congregated at depots of ferries, ships, and omnibuses to seek out disembarking passengers, but they also rode the routes to allow greater time for establishing "rapport." Some observers complained that prostitutes had overrun the night lines of steamers traveling from New York to cities like Albany and Boston and consequently had become a great nuisance to respectable travelers.^[126]

New York's prostitutes also utilized literary forms of solicitation. Some corresponded with prospective and established clients, using both mail and messenger services. Helen Jewett wrote to men who had visited her previously, requesting that they return, and she wrote to new acquaintances encouraging them to call sometime.^[127] Soliciting through correspondence gave Jewett greater control over her time and her calendar. She scheduled visits for particular nights and hours, thus avoiding the surprise of spontaneous visits and the embarrassment and difficulty of having two or more well-liked clients show up at the same time.^[128]

In addition to private correspondence, the personal columns of the daily newspapers became popular in the postwar period for arranging both introductions and assignations between illicit lovers. Even more offensive to some newspaper readers than these printed messages between lovers was prostitutes' use of the personals column to announce to the public their moves from one brothel to another. For example:

Miss Gertie Davis, formerly of Lexington Avenue, will be pleased to see her friends at 106 Clinton Place.^[129]

Another form of literary solicitation popular in this period was the brothel directory, several of which were published from the 1830s through the 1870s, each giving locations of the most reputable brothels as well as descriptions of the establishments, their madams, and the house prostitutes.^[130] Though the establishments and neighborhoods

[Full Size]

19.
Gentlemen's Directory. This 1870 brothel guidebook assisted patrons 
in locating and evaluating the city's "temples of love." (Courtesy of the New-
York Historical Society, New York City)

described in brothel directories were usually the more appealing and elegant places of prostitution, such as the places George T. Strong called "the great, notorious 'ladies' boarding houses' of Leonard and Mercer Streets," newspapers and reform tracts repeatedly reminded New Yorkers there were also "dens of filth and debauchery" located at the Hook, in Water Street, or at the Five Points. Both sorts of descriptions were of real places, establishments that actually existed within more broadly defined geographic divisions of prostitution. Yet one sees within the descriptions of what actually was, visions of what must be—the moral prototypes of what New Yorkers feared was threatening the social fiber of the city. Both the tempting licentious palaces of sumptuous luxury and the retributive pestilent dens of debauchery were generalizations within a moralistic framework that helped residents deal with what seemed worrisome in their changing society.

In spite of New Yorkers' attempts at a geographic and institutional ordering of prostitution and related evils, the women to whom George

T. Strong referred as the "peripatetic whore-archy" or the "noctivagous strumpetocracy" were not readily "ordered."^[131] As Sanger noted, they were boldly striding through the most "thronged and elegant thoroughfares, and there, in the broad light of the sun, . . . jost[ling] the pure, the virtuous, and the good."^[132] Some citizens may have been alarmed by the public specter of prostitution, but there was another aspect of prostitutes' existence in the city that reflected a different relationship with New Yorkers. Censuses and tax records demonstrated that prostitutes also were quietly living in the next block, down the street, or in an adjacent room—fellow New York citizens and neighbors who were coping with daily living in the nation's largest urban metropolis.