T H E S I N S O F N E W Y O R K
As "Exposed" by the Police Gazette
By: Edward Van Emery
P A R T I I
THE RICHARD K. FOX GAZETTE (1876)
Chapter 8
Denizens and Depravities of the Deadly Dives
A Tour of the Five Points, the River Dens, and the Bowery
When It Was The Bowery
THE REVEREND De WITT TALMAGE, IS ADVISED TO PERUSE THE
NEW GAZETTE SERIES DEALING WITH THE DEADLY DIVES OF NEW YORK.
Shortly after the Reverend De Witt Talmage, this was in the late Seventies
came over from his tabernacle in Brooklyn to "flash a dark lantern on the
slums of New York," the Gazette did more than derisively intimate that the
good pastor from over the river was a little late in his exploring and
exploiting, and what was more, had not looked where he really should have
for his sermon material. For his better enlightenment he was advised to
peruse the new Gazette series dealing with the Deadly Dives of New York. The
promise held out was that it would afford a real insight into the underworld
of the city as it had been and as it was now. Furthermore, the series would
endeavor, as it went along, to bring out for his benefit some of the things
that had been and were being done to bring about an improvement in social
and moral conditions. And, Talmage had better confine his researches to the
sanctimonious frauds of his own realm rather than waste his time among the
lowly. The clerical investigator was advised to drop into the Academy of
Music after midnight on the occasion of one of the ultra balls sponsored by
the more or less socially elect. Take the Arion, Old Guard, Charity,
Liederkranz and, in particular, the French ball of the Circle Francais de
l'Harmonie!__
Long before the hour of one, when the programme would be at its height, the
Academy was packed, Gilson's supper-room was overrun, the boxes were filled,
the amphitheatre was entirely occupied, sleighing parties had come in from
Central Park, the theatres had sent their quotas, and the smart young men in
dog collars and an elaborate condition of friz as to hair were lending their
social instincts to the general gayety. Delegations from Philadelphia and
other provincial places added their scintillations to the general
brilliancy. There was one noticeable improvement. Instead of having in the
supper hall long tables at which men and women sit and fight for food, Mr.
Gilson set the room with little tables at which parties were served decently
if not in order.
For all the lively doings, it is a more decorous affair than a few years
back, when it was not unusual to see a lady dressed as a page, passed down,
head foremost, from one box to another, just for the sake of the gallants
who had requested a loan of her for the pleasure of treating her to a glass
of wine. But, if it is imagined that the stationing of officers all over the
hall has prevented the dancing of the can-can, then little is known of ways
and means. Necessity is the maternal parent of invention, although it has
never been definitely ascertained who Invention's Pa is. No birth or
marriage statistics throw any light upon the subject, and the matter is
shrouded in the same gloom which envelopes the query as to why Miss Fortune
should have a child. To return to ball and the can-can. For the benefit of
the bluecoats who say "can't-can't"__a bogus dance is started in one corner
of the dancing floor. While the guardians of law and order have their
attentions here engaged there has been elsewhere a pink-toed and lace-edged
petticoat quadrille that would have evoked approval of the eye-glassed
loungers of the Mabille in Paris.
Do not think that we do not award the palm of virtue to the hop in Wallhalla
Hall on Orchard Street. Certainly we do. On one hand we have champagne and
can-can, on the other, beer and beauty. Nor do we see at Wallhalla these
disgusting new society dances, the "Racquet," the "Wave," and the
"Telephone."
The Reverend Talmage would have found not a few of his pewholders taking
part in the "cutting-up and mad capering" of the new dances. And by way of
emphasizing the laxities of the churchgoer and in contrast to its pictures
of the Bowery and the water-front thoroughfares in all their shocking
sinfulness we are also made aware through the Gazette series of how certain
pillars of the magnificent temples of religion degraded the existence of
their employees. And this information came by means of dramatic examples
like the following:
There is no place so admirable for a rendezvous as certain of our
department stores along Sixth Avenue and Grand Street. Come with me (invites
Paul Prowler) to any one of these bazaars. Let us depict a little play,
which will illustrate:
Scene: A Sixth Avenue or Grand Street department store.
Time: The present (1880, in this instance).
Dramatis Personae: Handsome married woman. Handsome man (no matter about
his marriage, i.e., not in this play).
She: But really you ought not to come here so often accidentally. You
know I have to come here to shop.
He: Certainly I do; that is why I come here.
She: But people will notice.
He: Never fear that; they are too busy with themselves, and beside, we
are so eminently proper.
She: Why, of course, we are__what should we be?
He: Friends instead of mere acquaintances.
She: But consider how we met__how impudent and horrid you were to follow
me from here and offer to carry my bundles.
He: Never mind that now. It's ancient history. But let us go and have
some lunch. You know you didn't come in here to buy anything.
She: I came in to look at that cloak, the $150. one. I'll dream of it to-night.
He: What's the trouble? Price too steep?
She: It would swamp my husband's business if I bought that.
He: Why not let me present it to you?
She: Heavens! You take my breath away. And why should you?
He: Simply because it pleases me. Here, miss. [He beckons the
sales-lady.] You have this lady's address. Send that cloak to it. Give me a
receipt for the money. [Throws down the filthy lucre.]
She: But my husband__he will wonder!
He: No, he won't. If he does, tell him it's really inexplicable how they
get up these imitations. Then say, "Now here's a cloak I only gave $38.
for. It's every bit as good as one I saw marked $150." Then he'll think what
a provident, prudent wife he has. But come, I have the receipt, let's take
the little lunch.
She: [Sotto voce.] But am I prudent?
Well, anyway, the modern gold-digger would say that this imaginary Talmage
parishioner, knew how to "pick a live one." It was the poor saleslady who
figured in the above scene who did not get the breaks. See what this poor
white slave was up against from the hard-hearted owner of the store. (White
slave carried a different meaning than in later years. And yet, there was
not such a vast difference in the human bondage.) Here is what we learn
about the young lady who had smilingly taken the order for that $150. coat.
But as a matter of fact the young lady is not happy. She is acting a
part. She smiles because she will be fined if she does not. She is neatly
dressed because she will be discharged if she is not. How she manages to
dress so well God only knows, for her salary is but five dollars a week, the
average of her weekly fines is fifty cents, and she has to contribute to the
support of a mother.
But that is simply neither here nor there. We simply wish to consider
facts, and what I want to insist upon is that the large firms in this city,
whose towering stores [then five or six stories at most] are stocked with
the richest fabrics of the earth, and all a-glitter with the ingenious
baubles of the boulevards, are guilty of serfdom in the treatment of these
girls just as much as the Czar of All the Russias was. The shop girls are
the white slaves of the metropolis, and although they are not bought and
sold in a market-place as are those Caucasian girls who are brought to the
Constantinople shambles, they are just as much in bondage.
For what is the condition of our white slaves? The average salary is
$3.50. and board is nowhere less than $4. The consequence is she has to keep
house in order to take care of her mother. I cannot give the bill of fare at
the tenement of the young lady who made the sale of the $150. coat. It
consists, undoubtedly, if bought from the money earned in the store, of but
a single dish.
Stew, at the utmost.
And then Reverend Talmage and the Gazette readers are told:
THE FIVE POINTS
"The wickedest house on the wickedest street that ever existed in New York,
yes, and in all the country and possibly all the world, was the building
known as the Old Brewery on the street known as "Cutthroat Lane." Cross
(later, and even in this day, known as Park) Street was the actual name of
"Cutthroat Lane," amid 59 was the number on the building known as the Old
Brewery. The house and the street and several of the surrounding
thoroughfares, which are now taken up in part by fine municipal properties,
made up the section known as the Five Points.
The dismal and repulsive alleys that made up this cluster of slums and whose
ways were often ankle-deep in mud, are lined with crumbling tenements which
have in many cases begun to sag out of shape, the foundations having sunk
into what was originally a swamp land. It is a low-roofed darksome place
that leads apparently into the infernal regions. Into these old rookeries
had swarmed Negroes who had escaped the bonds of slavery, also the scum of
early immigration from Great Britain and with a preponderance of Irish, but
with nearly all nationalities represented and intermingled. Thieving,
beggary and prostitution provided their vile existence, and the drunkenness
and the attractions of the lowest of groggeries their sole escape in the way
of what they deem pleasure. The music that filters from these cheap dance
dives is generally the blatant strains of a wheezy accordion. The noises
that emanate from the houses are usually drunken cries and the odors the
foulest of stenches. Here is vice at its lowest ebb, a crawling and fetid
vice, a vice of rags and filth. The place was the terror of every officer,
for it was all but worth one's life to go into the houses single-handed.
In one survey of the Five Points, around 1850, which was made under police
protection, the following conditions were reported in just one block: During
five hours on the Sabbath two of the drinking dens were visited by 450 men,
445 women and 68 girls. Out of 916 adults in this one block 605 could
neither read nor write; of 614 children, only nine went to school. Most of
them carried too much vermin to be admitted to the public schools. Along
this same block there were twenty of the vilest grog shops and dance halls
and no less than thirty-three underground lodging houses, where most of them
had bunks filled with decayed rags or canvas bags filled with rotten straw
for beds. In the Old Brewery the tenants numbered over one thousand.
For a full score of the sixty years that this structure stood, the
debasements within its confines were so utterly repugnant as to make any
unvarnished relation of its putridity seem nothing less than the play of an
unsound and exaggerated imagination. It had been erected as a brewing plant
by a party named Coulter some fifteen years after the Declaration of
Independence by these United States and was not demolished until our
republic was ten years away from the internal throes of the Civil War. In
1837, when the one-time brewery had been converted for dwelling purposes, it
had already reached an advanced age of dilapidation through a period of
disuse and neglect.
Originally it had been only three stories in height, but one of the floors
which had been high-ceiled to make room for the large brew vats had been
made over into two floors and the attic beneath the peaked roof had been
divided into another floor, so that in its days as a residence it was known
as a five-story building. Including the cellar, which had been divided into
small compartments, and those above ground there were close to one hundred
rooms in all and to which windows gave to but few; fresh air or sunlight was
denied to most of the occupants. Nothing had been done to improve its
outward appearance with its transformation into a place of habitation. Its
frame shell had been originally painted yellow but the rigors of time and
weather now left only an unhealthy discoloration.
When the building was razed in December, 1852, to make way for the mission
house sponsored by the Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, the
wreckers carried out human bones by the sacks-full. The removal of the Old
Brewery had been an achievement of twelve years of labor by the religious
society, which had been the means of bringing to the Five Points the able
and earnest reverend and humanitarian, Lewis Morris Pease, who with his
equally sincere and godly wife, founded the Five Points House of Industry,
an institution that had much to do with the reclaiming of the Five Points
from its depths of sin and squalor. The Peases, for all their religious
training, seemed to appreciate where education and employment could be even
more efficacious than prayer in this work of regeneration. The Five Points
Mission, which was also established nearby by the Methodist society, went in
more for the industry of religion than the necessity of self-supporting
occupation. Still the Mission reclaimed its quota of lost souls.
Referring to its own columns the Gazette cited how in 1847, in just one
month's issue of four numbers, its department headed "Police items" recorded
no less than fourteen notes that had to do with crime and misdemeanor within
the confines of the Five Points. As these were taken from the station-house
blotter and so had to do only with the wrongdoing that came to the attention
of the police, the whole made up only a small percentage of the crime
committed in that wretched district. By way of realistic illustration the
Gazette reprinted a few samples:
RECORDED POLICE ITEMS IN THE GAZETTE OF CRIME COMMITTED IN THE
WRETCHED DISTRICT OF THE FIVE POINTS.
DEATH AND DESTITUTION: The Coroner was called on Sunday to hold an inquest
in the Old Brewery on the body of a female about forty years of age, named
Mary Vieta, who was found lying dead in her room. It seems, from the
evidence, that the deceased was a woman of intemperate habits, and whose
husband a Portuguese, who is now on Blackwell's Island, had been in the
habit of begging about the streets, exhibiting, for the purpose of exciting
sympathy, a sickly child, of apparently only a few months old, but whose
growth had in reality been prevented by sheer starvation! the por thing
being nearly as many years old as it seemed months! A few days ago the woman
became deranged, apparently laboring under delirium tremens, and while in
this state became so violent that some of the dwellers in this vast
charnel-house of wretchedness and misery actually nailed up the door of her
apartment and left her to perish! Upon opening the room yesterday morning,
Mary was found dead and cold, with her child in the agonies of dissolution,
upon her bloated bosom! Her ill-used offspring is probably by this time
beyond the reach of human charity. Verdict upon the mother: death from
delirium tremens.
ATTEMPT TO VIOLATE: Sunday afternoon a fellow named Mulligan was arrested on
the Five Points for drunken and disorderly conduct. No sooner was Mulligan
locked up, than two men, named James Campbell and Arthur Rogers, entered the
basement of Mulligan, and made a desperate attempt to violate Mulligan's
wife, Catherine. The offenders were taken to the Tombs by officer Rafferty
and a detachment, and detained to answer.
HIGHWAY ROBBERY: Officers Connolly and Riley, of the Sixth Ward, arrested on
Saturday two black fellows called Sam Rice and George Morgan, on a charge of
knocking down Abraham Hummer, of Lebanon Township, Hunterdon County, New
Jersey, while passing along Orange Street, Five Points, on Friday night,
dragging him into an alley-way, and while there robbing him of eight
dollars, and his coat and boots. The coat and boots were found on the person
of one of the prisoners. Justice Osborn committed them both for trial.
JUVENILE DEPRAVITY: An interesting white girl, Ellen Amelia Walker, who
about a week ago left home and took up her abode with some of the most
depraved colored men and women at No. 51 Anthony Street, Five Points, was
restored to her friends.
A TOUGH CASE: An English sailor, named Owens, while strolling about in
search of the lions on Saturday night, stumbled upon a house of notoriously
bad repute, kept by James Green, at No. 156 Anthony Street, Five Points. He
became fascinated by the charms of a frail syren named Ellen Murphy, who had
lodgings at the above address. After an hour or two spent in very agreeable
intercourse M'lle Ellen expressed a wish for a slight draught, just the
merest dust in the world of something or other to increase the joyous
hilarity of the occasion, and Jack, nothing loth, also expressed willingness
to splice the main brace, when, on feeling for his wallet, what was his
consternation to find he had not a shot in his locker. He immediately bore
away for the police office and entered a complaint and Ellen was placed
under arrest and a portion of the money was recovered. The amount of which
this land pirate had robbed him was $45, mostly in gold; and as Ellen could
give no reasonable account of how she became possessed of the pieces found
upon her she was locked up for trial. Owens was also placed in limbo as a
witness.
SUPPOSED MURDER: Officers Munson and Kelly, of the Sixth Ward, on Saturday
night arrested a black fellow named James Hunter on a charge of striking his
wife a violent blow on the head with a billet of wood and inflicting a wound
which will in all probability cause her death. This outrage was done up
Murderer's Alley, Orange Street, Five Points. The woman was conveyed to the
hospital in a dying condition. Justice Osborn committed the accused to the
Tombs to wait the result.
SHOCKING JUVENILE PROSTITUTION: Information was laid before Justice Drinker
of shocking juvenile prostitution pursued at a den in 18 Anthony Street,
Five Points. It appears that no less than a dozen girls from ten to sixteen
years, who pretend to sell candies, fruit, peanuts, etc., have been sent out
by the woman in charge of the resort at No. 18 Anthony Street, named Jane
White, alias Horn, alias Cook. Officer Stewart, with the assistance of some
policemen, took into custody all found in the house.
FEMALE HIGHWAY ROBBERS: Two black women by the names of Mary Fermon and
Emeline Freeman were arrested last night by Officer Gardiner on a charge of
knocking down a white woman called Margaret O'Neill, in Cow Bay, on the Five
Points, and stealing from her person a shawl and bonnet, and were just
making good their escape when caught by the above officer. Justice Drinker
committed them both for trial.
So it is readily believable that the terrors and degeneracy's of the Five
Points were an actuality; that violence and murders and orgies were an
hourly occurrence; that each street was a congestion of beggars, thieves and
murderers, of harlots and degenerates; and that miscegenation and incest
were only too common; that the sloth and the frenzy of drink was all that
took them out of the horror of being what they were.
An old Gazette story that has to do with the Five Points, and that has often
been transferred to other localities, is one that could easily have been
true. It tells of an unkempt urchin running up to a policeman and beseeching
him to make all haste up Cross Street, as two men were engaged there in a
fierce fight.
"Oh, to the devil with them," was the answer, "they're always fighting up in
that alley."
"But, please," faltered the boy, "my father is in the fight."
So the officer followed after the boy and came upon two men who were
manhandling each other with much vigor. They gave no heed to the demand that
they must keep the peace and the policeman drew his club and with a smart
rap over each bellicose head knocked the two unconscious.
"There you are, boy," said the obliging officer. "Which is your father?" And
the boy whimpered: "That's what they were fighting about."
Conditions equally intolerable, but no worse, since such a thing was not
quite possible, existed in unsavory rivalry to the Five Points along the
water-front and continued to maintain for more than a quarter of a century
after the Old Brewery had been demolished. The area running parallel with
the lower Eqast River was the worst hotbed of crime. Let us ramble along
Water Street and its immediate vicinity with the Gazette reporter.
A RAMBLE ALONG WATER STREET AND IT'S IMMEDIATE VICINITY
WITH THE GAZETTE REPORTER.
Almost within the shadows of the forest of mast and rigging that rise to the
sky, almost within reach of the bowsprits that extend across South Street,
we find ourselves in the midst of the lowest of dives and the most squalid
of places that ever answered to the name of home. We are on Water Street
and along both sides of the way for a comparatively short distance there are
close to one hundred drinking and dancing places that also serve as
boarding-houses for sailors. If this were a segregated infamy it would be
bad enough. But side by side with these terrible dens, almost a part of
them, in fact, are dwellings in which unfortunate children are being born
and raised. Heaven knows how. Cherry Street is on a par with Water.
Many of the houses here and the population, as well, subsist for one purpose
alone, and that is to prey upon unwary Jack ashore. Over there is the
unhealthy resort where Gallus Mag, one of the fiercest strumpets that ever
existed, holds forth. Just around the corner is the pest-hole presided over
by the "Queen of Cherry Street." The latter owes her sovereignty to the fact
that she can drink more whiskey than any two men or any six women (this
statement looks like discrimination) without showing it, while the Gallus
one traces her cognomen to the fact that she supports her skirts with the
aid of suspenders. She is an expert at biting off the ear of an opponent in
a rough-and-tumble fight and has quite a collection of these trophies
preserved in alcohol in a bottle which she keeps behind the bar.
Most of these places are nothing less than crimps where sailors are drugged
and not only robbed, but shanghaied while still insensible. For years these
desperadoes from Water Street have fastened on seamen as quickly as they
left their ships and then through a system of advanced wages and exorbitant
charges and "drinks for the house" have placed their dupes in debt. Once
this fleecing was accomplished they were hustled on board some outbound ship
while still intoxicated. Captains often had no other resource when it came
time to make up their crews but to deal with these landsharks. Over one
thousand girls between twelve and eighteen years of age were found in these
places.
From ouT of this row of old gable-roofed houses, which were once the homes
of fashionable New York in the days of the quiet Dutch burghers, now comes
the twanging of cheap fiddles and of cracked pianos. Within we find
ourselves in the company of a hard and polluted citizenry. The floors are
covered with sand to make easy footing for the dancers. The places are illy
lighted by swinging kerosene lamps or fluttering gas-jets. Cheap pictures of
pugilists are usually the only adornment on the musty walls. Drunkenness and
foul language is the least of the vices carried on in these houses of
entertainment, and the rat and cockpits do not provide the most unwholesome
of the entertainment.
And the vices practiced here are carried right into the houses used for
living purposes. Rotten floors, oozing walls, crazy stairways, broken
windows, sickening stenches, vermin everywhere; flickering tallow candles or
musty kerosene lamps lend the only lighting. Paint, fresh air, water, are
undesired luxuries. Hydrants are in the yards which are filled with decaying
refuse and the halls are choked with rubbage. Even the cellars are
populated, cellars whose ceilings are sometimes only six inches above the
walk and whose gloors give and splash under your feet. Women and men and
children sleep indiscriminately.
One welfare investigator tells of finding one room divided up by an
imaginary line for the accommodations of two families. One of the families
admitted that there was overcrowding, but that things would not be so bad if
the family in the other corner did not keep boarders.
Mother Glump's five-cent lodging-house on Cherry Street, which was merely
one of a number, offered no other sleeping accommodations than mattresses
tossed on the floor and all in the same room. There were nbo restrictions as
to sex, but Mother Glump never allowed more than three occupants to the same
mattress at one time. Her lodgers came in drunk and so soon as one staggered
out another staggered in.
Let us hurry away from these altogether degrading surroundings. A too
intimate survey means a peep into such places as Gotham Court, a Cherry
Street tenement that almost rivaled the Old Brewery in the degradations it
housed, one of the main city sewers seeped into its area and during the
cholera epidemic of the Seventies the deaths were so numerous the city had
good cause to be horrified; it is a known fact that infants were gnawed to
death here by rats.
The one dance hall that stood out as sumptuous in comparison to its rookery
rivals, and that was only rivaled by the Kit Burns resort for unmitigated
corruption, was that presided over by John Allen. In 1868 his fine brick
building stood out like a palace over the other mean dens along Water
Street. Allen is said to have been a student in the Union Theological
Seminary and was educated for a sacred calling. He had blood relations in
the ministry and Bibles and religious papers were often conspicuous through
his establishment. The female inmates were uniformed in scarlet and
bright-colored dresses, and red-topped boots with ankle bells were part of
their uniform.
In 1868 Allen's, Burns' and other of the Water Street places of ill-fame
gained much newspaper space when an invasion by religious fanatics was
supposed to have brought about a wholesale conversion of the district, so
that even Allen's was turned into a place of prayer. Investigations by the
New York Times and the New York World exploded most of these stories and the
section continued a moral and physical pestilence for quite a few years
after.
"It was not prayers," says the Gazette, "that finally wiped out sin along
the water-front. Education, years of hard work and tolerance were the
corrective. The Seaman's Exchange, which was established in 1872, did much
to provide relief through its conveniences in the way of savings banks and
reading rooms. Bethels and homes for seamen provided clean and attractive
quarters, and sanitary precautions were introduced against scurvy, one of
the worst afflictions of the sailor man."
JERRY McAULEY
And it was a man who had been born a thief, so the Gazette sagely pointed
out, "who became a modern jean Valjean in the saving of his own kind." It
was a pretty low kind from which Jerry McAuley had sprung. His father had
been a counterfeiter. He had been of the Catholic faith, if any. In his
youth, Jerry McAuley had been a prize fighter in the Water Street dens and
he had thieved on the river by night. He had committed enough crime, in his
own words, to deserve prison a half-hundred times. Before his twentieth
birthday he was sentenced to prison for a fifteen-year stretch. And in 1872,
the same year The Seaman's Exchange came into existence, Jerry McAuley
founded his Water Street Mission. Here none were so low that they sought in
vain for a helping hand, even though it was a meal or a dodging without
salvation that was sought.
While in prison he learned to read. One day before his release in the fifth
year of his term he suddenly found himself praying and some vision came to
him that caused him to cry out: "Oh! praise God!". A guard came rushing to
his cell to inquire what all the noise was about. "I've found Christ," said
McAuley. "I'll report you," threatened the guard. And he took Jerry's
number.
McAuley was pardoned after seven years and six months in jail. Once he was
free he soon fell into more or less evil ways again. One of his occupations
was the purchasing of smuggled goods with counterfeit money. During one of
the transactions, and while in a very intoxicated condition, he fell
overboard. The water sobered him, but he only reached shore after a mighty
struggle. As he fainted away from exhaustion on the dock, he declares a
voice came to him saying:
"Jerry, you have been saved for the last time."
He struggled valiantly to stay honest and then when he was on the verge of
starvation a missionary took the coat from his own back and pawned it so
that Jerry might eat. McAuley says he was so touched by the naturalness of
this deed that he vowed to himself he would die first before he would sink
back into a life of sin.
This was the story of Jerry McAuley, which the Gazette recounted in its
report of his death, as it had been heard to fall from his own lips many
times. It is said that none doubted the details who had it from his own
lips. And it seems few, if any, doubted the sincerity of the man and the
work to which he had consecrated his remaining years. He was only forty-five
when he died from a severe hemorrhage of the lungs. "It's all right," he
said, pointing upward. He had done a lot of good in his way. The Sunday
following his passing, the Broadway Tabernacle was crowded with unkempt and
expensively dressed, shoulder to shoulder. And some of the most prominent of
the clergy of the day paid homage to his memory and led in the singing, with
tender pathos, Jerry McAuley's favorite chorus:
We, too, must come to the river-side,
One by one, one by one;
We're nearer to its brink each eventide,
One by one, one by one.
THE BOWERY WHEN IT WAS THE BOWERY
Though it may not be easy of belief at this day, the Gazette in no way
exaggerated when it described the Bowery as an artery that was originally
designed to be the main thoroughfare of the great city; even in Civil War
days it was rated the second principal street. Bowery Path (Bowery Road)
came into existence in the days of Governor Stuyvesant, being cut through in
1652 from Chatham Square to Sunfish Creek, a stream that diverged from where
is now Fourth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street to the foot of East
Twenty-fifth street. According to the map of 1804, it was known as Bowery
Lane up as far as Bullock (now Broome) Street, and above that it was known
as the Road to Boston. In 1832, thirteen years before the Gazette printed
its initial number, the first street-car line started running up the Bowery.
It began as a street of pleasure resorts as early as 1732 when James Sperry,
a Swiss florist, purchased a part of the Bayard Farm, which was in the
vicinity of Astor Place, and opened his Botanical Gardens in 1752. In 1803
it was renamed Vauxhall Gardens and a theatre was added to the dance hall
and picnic park; it was for years the most popular resort in all the city.
In 1826 Bull's Head Tavern, which had been built in 1756 and was for years
the last hostelry in the city on the highroad to Boston, became the site of
the Bowery Theatre. This structure (still in existence at this writing) was
the most famous theatre for quite a few years. It was the first theatre to
be illuminated with gas and the greatest actors of the day trod its boards.
Seven years later, 1833, the Bowery Amphitheatre came into existence and
later became the Stadt Theatre, a famous German playhouse. In 1864 it was
enlarged by taking in the German Volks Garten and with a seating capacity of
3,500 it became the largest theatre in all the land, and it was here that
Lohengrin and Tannhauser and other famous operas were first sung in America.
Even when the German beer gardens were at their height and the amber fluid
flowed so freely that a four-horse dray from the brewery was pressed on a
busy day to supply the thirsty, even years before this, a corrupting flow of
mixed nationalities was seeping in and changing the pleasant complexion of
the Bowery. Around these "gartens," where the songs of the Fatherland were
blended into lusty harmony by family parties who found carefree happiness in
eating, drinking, flirting and the playing of cards and dominoes, the belles
of the Bowery and the Bowery B'hoys and young would-be sports in long black
frock coats had begun to crowd in with their own social and political club
centers and dance halls and saloons. Gradually the wine stube and the kaffee
haus, where the patron could nibble his kuchen and sip his coffee until long
after midnight, were being crowded out.
Some old landmarks, such as Doc. Oliffe's drugstore, and the jewelry-store
of A.C. Benedict, where there was a clock that had been ticking continuously
for well beyond a hundred years, the hat-stores of McCann and of Callahan,
stuck it out even as the Bowery changed from a way of inviting recreation to
one of rowdy recklessness and finally to such a drab and colorless street
and one of such evil associations that, when it finally became the trading
artery it now is, there was a strong attempt made to change its name.
But of the Bowery of which Harry Connor sang in Hoyt's play, "A Trip to Chinatown"___
The Bowery! The Bowery!
They say such things and they do such things;
The Bowery! The Bowery!
I'll never go there any more.
Starting from Chatham Square (Paul Prowler is taking this stroll in 1879) it
almost seems as though every other building is occupied by a saloon or a
cheap beer dive or free-and-easy.
Some room has been given over to the several theatres and the few
respectable business concerns, but otherwise it is a place of cheap
lodging-houses, oysters saloons, dime museums, pawn-shops, cheap
clothing-stores, lottery-shops, shooting-galleries, and the like. The way to
most of these places, even the lowest of the dens, is lighted by various
colored devices in the form of transparencies. The museums have a frontage
that is made up of gaudily painted figures on canvas which are supposed to
represent the attractions within.
Let us invest a dime and peer inside one of these museums. They are nearly
all the same. Giants, dwarfs, fat ladies, living skeletons, tattooed men.
The midget is always "the smallest man in the world, weighs only ten
pounds," and so on. There is the "expansionist," who can inflate his chest
until he breaks a strap that has been bound about him; the Turtle Boy, who
has nothing much in the way of legs; the Champion Egg-eater and the
Dog-faced Boy, whose bark has a Celtic ring. Snake charmers, glass and fire
eaters, sword swallowers. The Transparent Man, who looks as though his wife
might have no trouble seeing through him; the Human Pin-cushion, who allows
you to stick needles and pins into him; the Human Anvil, who permits large
stones to be broken on his chest; and the Claw-hammer Man, who drives tacks
with his thumb and would be a handy person to have around the house. Most of
them have small theatres as an adjunct where lurid dramas are enacted by
third-rate ranting Thespians. Many of these museums, as well as some of the
larger saloons, conduct walking matches between women.
Abandoned, frowsy females accost on every side as you make your way up from
Chatham Square. And should they entice you within, certain of the resorts
will fleece you in various ways; beware of the "umbrella trick." The
umbrella stick is so charged with electricity you cannot loose your hold.
While you are thus caught your watch and other valuables will disappear.
Sporting men, crooks, gamblers, sailors, out-of-towners with a streak of
degenerate curiosity, tramps, bar flies, bootblacks, newsboys, saunter along
or in and out of the vile groggeries or places of diversion. The elevated
railroad, which had started to rumble overhead only a few months ago, adds a
dreadful racket to the pandemonium of noises.
It must have been a pretty low-down Bowery that Prowler visited, less than
one hundred years after General George Washington, in 1785, followed along
this very way with his patriots on the heels of the evacuating British
troops. Several flashy saloons flourished for years after, which was shortly
before Steve Brodie's place came into existence and well before Chuck
Connors had even been heard about. Brodie got away with the claim, in 1886,
that he had successfully made the jump from the Brooklyn Bridge, a feat for
which he was lauded by the Gazette. Later the Gazette insisted that Steve
never "took a chance," but that the Fox champion did and made it. Maybe he
did, but no one remembers the name of the Fox champion today, while the name
of Brodie still lives. Connors, after his fame as Mayor of Chinatown was on
the wane, resided in his declining days in one of the flats next to the
Gazette Building, and his landlord, who was Richard K. Fox, never had his
agents go to the bother of trying to collect the rent.
Chinatown, at the time of Prowler's visits, had been in existence for more
than forty years, so we are informed. It was during the Forties that the
Chinese junk, Key-Ying, made the port of New York after a long sail and
became an object of such curiosity that great crowds paid admission to look
through this strange boat and get a close view of its odd yellow-skinned
crew. One day, during a big harbor fire, the ship was burned to the water's
edge and some of its inmates drifted to Mott Street and formed the nucleus
of the settlement, and the Mongolian population spread to Pell and adjacent
streets and then through the city with their laundries. "Smoking of opium
and their dens thus became a new peril."
Not many years after Richard K. Fox, out of part of his Gazette profits,
built a row of model flats far uptown and also over in Brooklyn, which were
even equipped with bathtubs. And then his Gazette, in calling attention to
the need of better housing conditions, had something to say in extenuation
of the unbelievably wretched conditions that were to be found among the
population of the wayfares that had outlet or that ran close to the Bowery
when the series around which this article has been built was running in the
pages of the pale pink periodical.
SISTER IRENE
Until 1869 there was no foundling society in New York, nor even in the
entire United States. Infanticide was common and new-born infants were often
found under areaways or in ash barrels, sometimes floating along the docks.
Then, in October, a woman whose heart belonged to the angels, and whose name
is no more known than that she was called Sister Irene, had a most beautiful
thought. Inside of the open doorway to 17 West 12th Street, she placed
beneath a little gleaming light a curious tiny basket that had been softly
lined. Late in the night and in the midst of a pouring rain a frightened
woman found her way to the door with a bundle nestling under her arm.
Tearfully and with one long, lingering kiss she placed the bundle into the
cot and then hurried away. There was a sharp little wail and the inside door
opened and a woman with a calm and gentle face reached out and the bundle
was in her arms. Within a month forty-five babies had been left in the care
of Sister Irene. Until then foundling mites were taken to the almshouse on
Blackwell's Island where they were bottle-fed by aged paupers.
THE CASE OF LITTLE MARY ELLEN
And then, after citing some further statistics, the Gazette touched off its
moralizing editorial with the story of Mary Ellen.
Late in 1874, in a wretched East Side tenement a woman was found in the last
stages of consumption by Mrs. Wheeler, a beloved social worker. She knew she
was near the end and requested that Mrs. Wheeler should not concern herself
over her last hours. But, if Mrs. Wheeler wanted to bring peace to her last
hours she could do so by coming to the relief of a little girl who lived
next door and who was being mistreated. She said:
"The little one's stepmother beats her, and I cannot die in peace while
little Mary Ellen is being abused."
So Mrs. Wheeler took up the child's case with the Police Station, only to be
informed by the captain that legally there was nothing that could be done
unless positive evidence of assault was produced. The law held that parental
authority was paramount and it was dangerous to interfere in this authority
of the parent over the child. And the child could only be brought in under a
legal order from the court. Mrs. Wheeler, not knowing where to turn, finally
appealed to Henry Bergh, who consulted with Elbridge T. Gerry, counsel for a
benevolent society which Mr. Bergh had sponsored some years previous. As
Messrs. Bergh and Gerry agreed to assume all responsibilities, consent was
gained to permit a test case.
A warrant was issued and the child was rushed into court and when the case
was called Gerry announced that he was ready with his client. He had Mary
Ellen rolled up in a blanket which he unrolled as he stood her on a table. A
cry of indignation and pity went up through the room. There stood a child of
six in rags insufficient to cover her starved and beaten little body, which
was a mass of livid bruises and filth and vermin. A thousand witnesses could
not have spoken more forcibly in the child's behalf.
No delay was lost in placing Mary Ellen in the custody of the Society of
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, of which Mr. Bergh was the president, and
Mr. Gerry the legal advisor.
You see, while there was a Society of Prevention of Cruelty to Animals,
there was no Society of Prevention of Cruelty to Children until the plight
of little Mary Ellen was brought vividly to the public attention.
---------------------------
This completes the total transcribing of the "Sins of New York", divided
into two parts, with a total of 17 Chapters.
Sins of New York
As "Exposed" by the Police Gazette
By Edward Van Every
Publisher: Frederick A. Stokes Company--New York
Copyright: 1930 3 Printings October 15, October 23 and October 30.
Prepared and Transcribed by Miriam Medina
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