(5) EXCURSION BOATS AND PARKS
In addition to the places already mentioned, the prostitute and her exploiter take advantage of other opportunities to ply their trade. The excursion boats between New York and Albany, Bridgeport, New Haven, Providence, Block Island, etc., are often used for a rendezvous. Occurrences of a highly suspicious character are abundant:
August 25, 1912, three couples left the boat bound for New Haven because they could not secure rooms: this, in spite of the fact that it was a day trip. On an excursion boat bound for Montauk Point on July 28, 1912, two young couples occupied staterooms 19 and 21. The girls appeared to be about eighteen years of age. Two girls, apparently seventeen years of age, rented stateroom No. 11, where they remained all day and were visited by four different men. When the boat returned to New York the girls went ashore and boarded a car on East 23rd Street. One pretty little girl on this excursion was accompanied by a woman who appeared to be her mother. The girl became friendly and offered to make a “date” with the investigator. She lives on DeKalb Avenue in Brooklyn. There were two others, living in Harlem, evidently working girls, who were also willing to make “dates.”
It is indeed a matter of common knowledge that professional prostitutes make a practice of soliciting on excursion boats for immoral purposes. The women make regular trips and have a business understanding with porters and waiters, who aid in securing customers. On July 20, 1912, as the boat for New Haven was about to leave the dock, two prostitutes who solicit in a café on West 44th Street[104] came aboard. A street walker who solicits on Broadway and has a home in the Bronx took the trip to New Haven on August 25, 1912. Six prostitutes were soliciting young men on the trip to Block Island on August 11, 1912, one of them formerly an inmate in a house of prostitution in West 47th Street.[105] Her companion solicits on Broadway. These girls said they had rooms in a Block Island hotel,[106] where they invited the men to meet them.
Some of the waiters and porters on these boats act as solicitors for prostitutes. A colored porter[107] on a boat running to Block Island, August 11, 1912, said there were many couples on board having immoral relations. He offered to introduce two men to two girls. On August 8, 1912, a colored porter on a boat for Providence, Rhode Island, told a man that a “wise young girl” occupied stateroom No. 68, and that she would receive men. Robert,[108] a waiter on one of them, declared that immoral conditions were most flagrant on the Sunday trips. He described in detail the actions of couples in the staterooms when he served them drinks.
Amusement parks are similarly abused. Seven such parks in the vicinity of New York City were visited during the summer of 1912, and vicious conditions were found to exist to a greater or less extent in all of them. In the drinking places prostitutes sit on the stage in short skirts and sing and dance for the entertainment of men and boys drinking at the tables. The girls are paid very low salaries, and therefore depend upon making extra money from prostitution. The waiters aid in securing customers and receive commissions from the girls on the stage for this service. In some concert halls the girls have signs which they use to indicate the time they are free to leave the stage or the price they require. If they succeed in persuading a man to buy wine in the balcony of the hall, they receive a commission on the sale. In the winter time some of these prostitutes join burlesque shows or continue to carry on their immoral business otherwise in the city.
An investigator visited a concert hall connected with an amusement park on Long Island, July 23, 1912. There were eighteen girls seated on the stage in short skirts, the majority of them intoxicated; in their wild efforts to entertain the crowd of men and boys they exposed their persons. Twenty-five girls sing and dance in a concert hall at another popular amusement park. They are divided into two shifts, each shift working a stated number of hours during the afternoon and night. One of the singers was recognized by a man who had seen her in a house of prostitution in a city in Pennsylvania; one of her companions solicits for immoral purposes on Broadway. Many of these concert halls and similar places are connected with the hotels to which the entertainers take their customers. A very notorious hotel of this character[109] adjoins a disreputable concert hall in an amusement park on Staten Island.
The conditions in dance halls in connection with certain amusement parks are similar to those described under the heading “Public Dance Halls.” Here young and thoughtless working girls and boys often yield themselves to the degrading influence of liquor and suggestive dancing; and here also are found the prostitutes and their pimps.
In reference to public parks, it may be stated that the police force is entirely inadequate to their proper surveillance. Shocking occurrences by the score are reported in Central and other parks by different investigators under the date of July 15, August 5, July 20, July 12, etc. Not infrequently boys and girls of sixteen and seventeen are involved in these affairs,—and cases implicating still younger children are reported. The benches in certain sections of Central Park, between 10 P. M. and 1 A. M., presented a most demoralizing spectacle to the observation of every one who walked through the Park during the months of July and August.[110]