IV. THE CONCERT SALOONS.
There are about seventy-five or eighty concert saloons in New York, employing abandoned women as waitresses. The flashiest of these are located on Broadway, there being nearly twenty of these infamous places on the great thoroughfare between Spring and Fourth streets. During the day they are closed, but one of the most prominent sets out before its doors a large frame containing twenty or thirty exquisite card photographs, and bearing these words, “Portraits of the young ladies employed in this saloon.” It is needless to say that the pictures are taken at random from the stock of some photograph dealer, and have no connection whatever with the hags employed in the saloon. The Bowery, Chatham street, and some of the streets leading from Broadway, contain the greater number of these concert saloons. The majority are located in the basements of the buildings, but one or two of the Broadway establishments use second story rooms. These places may be recognized by their numerous gaudy transparencies and lamps, and by the discordant strains of music which float up into the street from them. The Broadway saloons are owned by a few scoundrels, many of them being conducted by the same proprietor. A writer in the New York World was recently favored with the following truthful description of these places by one of the best known proprietors:
“A concert saloon is a gin-mill on an improved plan—that’s all, my friend. I don’t pay the girls any wages. They get a percentage on the drinks they sell. Some saloon-keepers pays their girls regular wages and a small percentage besides, but it don’t work. The girls wont work unless they have to. Now, my girls gets a third of whatever they sell. The consequence is, they sell twice as much as they would if they was on wages. You never can get people to work faithfully for you unless they
can make money by it. The liquor is cheap, and I don’t mind telling you its d---d nasty, then we charge double prices for it. Now, I charge twenty cents for drinks that a regular gin-mill would sell for ten. Then there are a lot of drinks that the girls takes themselves, which we charges fifty cents for. They don’t cost us more than four or five, but after a girl has said what she’ll take, and a man has ordered it, he can’t go back on the price. Then hardly any man stops at less than two or three drinks here, when he would take only one at a bar. The lights are the same as they would be anywheres else, and the music don’t cost much. Then there’s other ways to make in this business. But you don’t want to know all about the speculations. There’s keno, for instance. The keno business is attached to lots of saloons. You see the girls manages to get young fellows that come here—like those hounds yonder—pretty full, and then they says: ‘Why don’t you try your luck in the next room, and go shares with me?’ So the fool he bites at once, and goes in for keno. Of course luck goes against him, for he’s too drunk to play—O, the game’s a square one—and he finally comes back for another drink. The girls then takes care that he doesn’t go away till he’s too drunk to remember where he lost his money. Even if he goes away sober, he seldom splits. I’ll give the fellows that much credit. Bad as they are, they seldom splits.”
The concert saloons derive their names from the fact that a low order of music is provided by the proprietor as a cover to the real character of the place. It may be an old cracked piano, with a single, half-drunken performer, or a couple or more musicians who cannot by any possible means draw melody from their wheezy instruments.
Persons entering these places assume a considerable risk. They voluntarily place themselves in the midst of a number of abandoned wretches, who are ready for any deed of violence or crime. They care for nothing but money, and will rob or kill for it. Respectable people have no business in such places. They are very apt to have their pockets picked, and are in danger of violence. Many men, who leave their happy homes
in the morning, visit these places, for amusement or through curiosity, at night. They are drugged, robbed, murdered, and then the harbor police may find their lifeless forms floating in the river at daybreak.
The women known outside of the city as “pretty waiter girls,” are simply a collection of poor wretches who have gone down almost to the end of their fatal career. They may retain faint vestiges of their former beauty, but that is all. They are beastly, foul-mouthed, brutal wretches. Very many of them are half dead with consumption and disease. They are in every respect disgusting. Yet young and old men, strangers and citizens, come here to talk with them and spend their money on them. Says the writer we have quoted, after describing a characteristic scene in one of these places:
“The only noticeable thing about this exhibition of beastliness is the utter unconcern of the other occupants of the room. They are accustomed to it. One wonders, too, at the attraction this has for strangers. There is really nothing in the people, the place, or the onlookers worthy of a decent man’s curiosity. The girls are, without exception, the nastiest, most besotted drabs that ever walked the streets. They haven’t even the pride that clings to certain of their sisters who are in prison. The whole assemblage, with the exception of such stragglers as myself, who have a motive in studying it, is a mess of the meanest human rubbish that a great city exudes. In the company there is a large preponderance of the cub of seventeen and eighteen. Some of these boys are the sons of merchants and lawyers, and are ‘seeing life.’ If they were told to go into their kitchens at home and talk with the cook and the chambermaid, they would consider themselves insulted. Yet they come here and talk with other Irish girls every whit as ignorant and unattractive as the servants at home—only the latter are virtuous and these are infamous. Thus does one touch of vileness make the whole world kin.”
V. THE DANCE HOUSES.
The dance houses differ from the concert saloons in this respect, that they are one grade lower both as regards the inmates and the visitors, and that dancing as well as drinking is carried on in them. They are owned chiefly by men, though there are some which are the property of and are managed by women. They are located in the worst quarters of the city, generally in the streets near the East and North rivers, in order to be easy of access to the sailors.
The buildings are greatly out of repair, and have a rickety, dirty appearance. The main entrance leads to a long, narrow hall, the floor of which is well sanded. The walls are ornamented with flashy prints, and the ceiling with colored tissue paper cut in various fantastic shapes. There is a bar at the farther end of the room, which is well stocked with the meanest liquors, and chairs and benches are scattered about.
From five to a dozen women, so bloated and horrible to look upon, that a decent man shudders with disgust as he beholds them, are lounging about the room. They have reached the last step in the downward career of fallen women, and will never leave this place until they are carried from it to their graves, which are not far distant. They are miserably clad, and are nearly always half crazy with liquor. They are cursed and kicked about by the brutal owner of the place, and suffer still greater violence, at times, in the drunken brawls for which these houses are famous. Their sleeping rooms are above. They are sought by sailors and by the lowest and most degraded of the city population. They are the slaves of their masters. They have no money of their own. He claims a part of their infamous earnings, and demands the rest for board and clothes. Few have the courage to fly from these hells, and if they make the attempt, they are forced back by the proprietor, who is frequently aided in this unholy act by the law of the land. They cannot go into the streets naked, and he claims the clothes on
their backs as his property. If they leave the premises with these clothes on, he charges them with theft.
Let no one suppose that these women entered upon this grade of their wretched life voluntarily. Many were drugged and forced into it, but the majority are lost women who have come regularly down the ladder to this depth. You can find in these hells women who, but a few years ago, were ornaments of society. No woman who enters upon a life of shame can hope to avoid coming to these places in the end. As sure as she takes the first step in sin, she will take this last one also, struggle against it as she may. This is the last depth. It has but one bright ray in all its darkness—it does not last over a few months, for death soon ends it. But, O, the horrors of such a death! No human being who has not looked on such a death-bed can imagine the horrible form in which the Great Destroyer comes. There is no hope. The poor wretch passes from untold misery in this life to the doom which awaits those who die in their sins.
The keepers of these wretched places use every art to entice young and innocent women into their dens, where they are ruined by force. The police frequently rescue women from them who have been enticed into them or carried there by force. Emigrant girls, who have strolled from the depot at Castle Garden into the lower part of the city, are decoyed into these places by being promised employment. Men and women are sent into the country districts to ensnare young girls to these city hells. Advertisements for employment are answered by these wretches, and every art is exhausted in the effort to draw pure women within the walls of the dance house. Let such a woman once cross the threshold, and she will be drugged or forced to submit to her ruin. This accomplished, she will not be allowed to leave the place until she has lost all hope of giving up the life into which she has been driven.
The Missionaries’ are constant visitors to these dens. They go with hope that they may succeed in rescuing some poor creature from her terrible life. As a rule, they meet with the vilest abuse, and are driven away with curses, but sometimes
they are successful. During the present winter they have succeeded in effecting a change for the better in one of the most notorious women in Water street.
