The city papers contain numerous advertisements, which reveal to the initiated the locality of these houses. They are represented as “Rooms to let to quiet persons,” or “Rooms in a strictly private family, where boarders are not annoyed with
impertinent questions,” or “A handsome room to let, with board for the lady only,” or “Handsome apartments to gentlemen, by a widow lady living alone.” These advertisements are at once recognized by those in search of them. Families from the country frequently stumble across these places by accident. If the female members are young and handsome, they are received, and the mistake is not found out, perhaps, until it is too late.
Public houses of prostitution are bad enough, but houses of assignation are worse. The former are frequented only by the notoriously impure. The latter draw to them women who, while sinning, retain their positions in society. The more secret the place, the more dangerous it is. The secrecy is but an encouragement to sin. Were the chance of detection greater, women, at least, would hesitate longer before visiting them, but they know that they can frequent them habitually, without fear of discovery. Their outward appearance of respectability is a great assistance to the scoundrels who seek to entrap an innocent female within their walls. They form the worst feature of the Social Evil, and something should be done to suppress them.
III. THE STREET WALKERS.
Strangers visiting the city are struck with the number of women who are to be found on Broadway and the streets running parallel with it, without male escorts, after dark. They pass up and down the great thoroughfares at a rapid pace peculiar to them, glancing sharply at all the men they meet, and sometimes speaking to them in a low, quick undertone. One accustomed to the city can recognize them at a glance, and no man of common sense could fail to distinguish them from the respectable women who are forced to be out on the streets alone. They are known as Street Walkers, and constitute one of the lowest orders of prostitutes to be found in New York. They seem to be on the increase during the present winter; and in Broadway especially are more numerous and bolder than they
have been for several years. The best looking and the best dressed are seen on Broadway, and in parts of the Fifth and Fourth avenues. The others correspond to the localities they frequent. They are chiefly young girls, seventeen being the average age, but you will see children of twelve and thirteen among them. Very few promenade Broadway below Canal street. The neighborhoods of the hotels and places of amusement are the most frequented. Some of the girls are quite pretty and affect a modest deportment, but the majority are hideous and brazen. New faces are constantly appearing on Broadway, to take the places of those who have gone down into the depths.
Many of these girls have some regular employment, at which they work during the day. Their regular earnings are small, and they take this means of increasing them. The majority, however, depend upon their infamous trade for their support. There have been rare cases in which girls have been driven upon the streets by their parents, who either wish to rid themselves of the support of the girl, or profit by her earnings. We have known cases where the girls have voluntarily supported their parents by the wages of their shame. There were once two sisters, well known on Broadway, who devoted their earnings to paying off a heavy debt of their father, which he was unable to meet. Such instances, however, are very rare.
As a rule the girls seek the streets from mercenary motives. They begin their wretched lives in the society of the most depraved, and are not long in becoming criminals themselves. They are nearly all thieves, and a very large proportion of them are but the decoys of the most desperate male garroters and thieves. The majority of them are the confederates of panel thieves. They are coarse, ugly, and disgusting, and medical men who are called on to treat them professionally, state that as a class they are terribly diseased. A healthy Street Walker is almost a myth.
Were these women dependent for their custom upon the city people, who know them for what they are, they would starve. They know this, and they exert their arts principally upon
strangers. Strangers are more easily deceived, and, as a rule, have money to lose. Hundreds of strangers, coming to the city, follow them to their rooms, only to find themselves in the power of thieves, who compel them on pain of instant death to surrender all their valuables. The room taken by the decoy is vacated immediately after the robbery, the girl and her confederate disappear, and it is impossible to find them.