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.