Leaving the Germans of the first district, the reader’s attention will now be asked to the brothels of the fourth police district. Here the principal part of the women are of Irish parentage; some few are natives of the United States. The greater part of the visitors are sailors. When a succession of storms which have driven homeward-bound vessels off the coast is followed by a fair wind, so as to allow them to enter the harbor in large numbers, these houses are crowded, and for a few days, or while the sailors’ wages last, a very extensive business is carried on. The bar-room, as in the case of the German houses, is the reception-room, and here may be seen at almost any hour of the day a number of weather-beaten sailors, verifying the truth of the old proverb, which says they resemble two distinct animals in earning and spending their money. It matters not who it may be, but any one who enters the room is almost sure to be asked to take a drink immediately, and if he remains, in less than five minutes somebody else will ask him to take another. A sailor with cash in his pocket has a decided antipathy to drinking alone, and generally invites every one in the room, male and female, to partake with him. By such a course he very soon gets intoxicated, when the girl whom he has honored with his special attention convoys him to bed, and leaves him there to sleep himself sober.
In these houses less neatness is observable than in those just noticed, but they have entirely a different class of customers. A German, in the midst of his pleasures, likes to see every thing neat and orderly about him; a sailor is not particular, so that his pleasures are unobstructed. A curious observer, also, does not meet with the same civility: if he comes to spend money he is welcome; if not, the landlord does not care about his company. Considerable card-playing is practiced; not what may be termed gambling, but for amusement, the stakes being seldom more than intoxicating drinks for the players. There is less noisy rowdyism than might be expected, since the men who generally cause such disturbances lack the courage to impose upon a crowd of hard-fisted sailors, who are always able and willing to take their own part, and resent any interference. Still, occasional quarrels occur among the visitors themselves, frequently resulting in a pitched battle. The landlord is then called for, and his knowledge of his customers enables him speedily to discover the aggressor, who always happens to be the man that has the least money, and he is forthwith pushed into the street without any ceremony, as a kind of peace-offering to the rest of the company.
The landlord is a character in his way. He is a man who has been to sea himself, for no one else would be deemed fit to keep a house where sailors resort, and is usually a large, powerful man. By the freemasonry of the craft, and by freely joining his visitors whenever they ask him to drink, and occasionally treating them in return, he is sure of their custom until their wages are all spent and they are obliged to go to sea again.
The women in these houses use liquor very freely, but they are not permitted to get drunk in the daytime. If the landlord observes any symptom of intoxication he gives them water, instead of gin, the next time they are asked to drink, as he knows very well his prospects for business would be injured unless the girls were kept sufficiently sober to be on the watch for contingencies, or, as he phrases it, “to look out for chances.”
In some of these houses it is the rule that all the money received by the girls is to be given to the landlord, who provides them with clothing and necessaries, but in others a fixed rate of board—six or eight dollars a week—is paid, and the women retain the surplus. In either case it is a very profitable business, particularly where many girls are kept. In one house that we visited, in the fourth district, the keeper informed us that his expenses amounted to about one hundred and fifty dollars weekly, and of course some estimate can be made from this as to the amount of business he transacted.
The dancing-saloons in this neighborhood are not conducted on the platonic principles of the Germans. They are, in fact, so many accessories to prostitution, and many scenes there witnessed will not permit description. The women residing in the house are there, dressed in the most tawdry finery they can command, many of them assuming the bloomer costume. The band consists of a violin, a banjo, and a tambourine, and whatever is wanting in musical ability is adequately supplied by vigorous execution. The bar is very liberally patronized, and before midnight drunkenness is the rule and sobriety the exception.
Passing now to the fourth grade of this vice, we find prostitution in a most repulsive form; the women themselves diseased and dirty, the houses redolent of bad rum. The prostitutes are the refuse of the other classes who have fallen through the successive gradations on account of disease and drunkenness, or they are some of those children of iniquity who, born in scenes of vice and squalid misery, know nothing of a virtuous or happy course of life. Destiny seems from their birth to have intended them for vagrants, and has planted them so low in the moral scale that they can scarcely hope to rise.
It would be useless to attempt a specification of the localities of these houses; any one who has been through the purlieus of New York City must have observed some of them, and it will be quite sufficient to glance at a few of their peculiarities. They are generally kept by an old prostitute, who gathers around her some of the most debased of her class, takes a cheap basement wherever she can obtain possession of one suited to her purpose, erects a small bar furnished with three or four bottles of the commonest liquor she can procure, partitions off one or two small hovels of bed-rooms, and forthwith begins housekeeping. Her arrangements are about as extensive as her preparations. She seldom professes to board the girls, generally making a charge for every visitor they entertain, and giving them the privilege of cooking any thing they want. These dens are largely patronized by the vilest of the male sex; the petty thieves who hang around the public markets, stealing from the wagons, or who haunt the doors of grocery stores and abstract whatever they can reach; as they find them convenient places of concealment, and can frequently dispose of their booty by means of the women. Another class of visitors consists of the lowest order of rowdies, who assume a free license to perpetrate any mischief they please, because there is no one to interfere with them. A fatal case of this nature, which occurred but a few months since, will be fresh in the recollection of all citizens.
It is dangerous for a stranger to enter a place of this description, for if he does not get his pocket picked by the one, he will most probably be assaulted by the other class of visitors. Upon such establishments the police are compelled to keep a watchful eye, and although they have no power to enter them except some actual necessity calls for their services, yet they frequently induce a neighbor to make a complaint against the keepers for maintaining a disorderly house, and then, duly armed with a warrant, they enter, and arrest every one found on the premises. The finale of such an experiment at housekeeping as this is very frequently a commitment for vagrancy to Blackwell’s Island. The character of the place will be a sufficient proof that syphilis abounds there, and its dangers must be added to those already enumerated.
The divisions thus made are presumed to be accurate as far as the distinctive characters of the various grades are concerned, but the lines of demarkation are of course arbitrary. Any attempt to classify so large a social evil must, from its very nature, be incomplete, and in this case farther experience or a more extended inquiry would very probably warrant an alteration in the arrangement. But there is another class of whom a few words must be said, namely, those truly wretched beings, the outcasts of the outcasts. In many cases destitute of home or shelter, diseased, starving, and afflicted with an insatiable thirst for ardent spirits, they present most ghastly and heart-rending spectacles, retaining scarcely any vestiges of humanity. These wretched beings can be found clustered round the bars of liquor-stores in low neighborhoods, begging for the price of a glass of gin. Much of their time is spent in the prisons on Blackwell’s Island, from which they are no sooner released than they return to their old haunts and habits. They can scarcely be called prostitutes, for their aspect is so disgustingly hideous that all feminine characteristics are blotted out, and thoroughly sensual and animalized must he be who could accept their favors. They are, in every sense of the word, outcasts; compelled, for the short time they may be in the city—and this is seldom more than a few days at once—to eke out a wretched existence by stealing or begging; frequently so miserable that they gladly hail the day on which they are returned to prison. They present subjects for mournful consideration, and the reflection that they are experiencing the degradation to which every prostitute in the city is rapidly tending, should be a powerful argument in favor of any remedial measures which can be devised to ameliorate the condition of the frail women of New York, and prevent them from falling so far below humanity.