THEIR PAINTED FACES
and flashing jewelry were missing. This was undoubtedly the result of a couple of months’ work. It is well known that they left the city in droves. The heavy hand of repression has since then been removed, and once more the soiled doves flutter their plumes on all the public promenades. Two years ago York street was one of the worst streets on the American Continent. It would be impossible to conceive of lower dens or more desperate denizens than those who haunted the darksome cellars and holes on that street. There were dozens of keepers of these places, but a man named McQuarry occupied a bad pre-eminence above them all. McQuarry was an addition to our population which was contributed from rural parts. He had sold a farm and in some way or other lost the money in the city and started a store on York street. This store rapidly became a mere illicit drinking place and very soon was the resort of bad characters of both sexes. The state that the street had drifted into began to attract the notice of the newspapers, and the police also paid some attention to the phenomena connected therewith. The result was that raids were made on the places and severe encounters took place between the roughs and the officers. In one case an officer was dangerously stabbed, and the knife-user had his head battered pretty badly with the officer’s club. Then the man with the phrase we have quoted above began to be heard from. You couldn’t cure these things by drastic remedies. Evil always did exist, etc. A judge on the bench at one of the trials spoke in severe terms of the conduct of the officers. The prisoner, however, received a pretty severe sentence. The police kept up the war unremittingly, and the result was that at last York street was cleansed from end to end. A few of the old habitues still prowl about, and one or two dives have ventured to blossom forth again into existence.
In McQuarry’s den it was the custom to hold a dance weekly, and these were perhaps
THE MOST DREADFUL FEATURES
of these wicked holes. A small fee was charged, but the proprietor depended more on the sale of bad liquor for his profits than on this admission. Many of the revelers had other business speculations in their eye, and woe be to the man wearing anything of value who did not keep all his senses about him, and even then he was not safe.
“Having paid my ten cents to a young man at the foot of the stairs,” says an eye-witness of one of these orgies, “I descended into a cellar whose rough stone walls had once been whitewashed, but which were now discolored with the slimy moisture which oozed therefrom. The place was not large, and the 12 or 15 couple who were on the floor did not have much room in which to turn. Two colored lads supplied the music, one playing a very wheezy concertina, and the other tooting a fife. The company was largely composed of bad women and thieves. Here and there, however, could be seen a man who ought to be respectable, and who usually was accounted among his fellow-men as such. They were on the spree, and one of them, a master plasterer, I was told had been around the place for a week. He was sitting on a stone which had been pulled out of the wall, with a loathsome-looking creature seated on his knee. Among the
SCORE OF WOMEN
in the place there is not one who has one redeeming look of womanhood left. They have not that one trait which leaves a woman last—the desire to look well. Their faces are swollen with the fiery liquids they have been pouring into themselves all night. The men for the most part are not nearly so repulsive. The few “suckers” who are in the room, are doing all the treating, and as they produce their money furtive glances are exchanged, and that man’s “roll” is spotted.
The company gets more riotous as the night proceeds and as the liquor begins to take hold. A fight starts in one corner of the room and all hands seem to join in. Pandemonium has broke loose.
“At once there rose so loud a yell