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Canal Street, running parallel to the Erie Canal, was known as the “wickedest street in America,” with a reputation for vice and debauchery unmatched in America. Across the oceans, in the waterfront saloons of far-flung ports of call, when Buffalo came up in conversation, the question was always the same: “Is it true what they say about Canal Street?” Even the good citizens of Buffalo who brimmed with civic pride took to calling Canal Street “the Infected District.”

There were ninety-three saloons on Canal Street alone, serving their rotgut liquor, and 60 percent of the buildings housed brothels. A certain social pecking order defined the prostitutes: Women working Canal Street regarded themselves as upmarket “ladies of the evening,” a cut above those who walked the towpath alongside the Erie Canal—these ladies were deemed to be “dirty whores.” Buffalo’s prostitutes wore Mother Hubbard dresses—which, with their long sleeves and high neck, covered as much skin as possible—with nothing underneath. The garment had once symbolized girlish innocence; now a woman wearing a Mother Hubbard dress on Canal Street was immediately identified as a hooker.

Life was cheap on Buffalo’s waterfront. It was so dangerous that no cop dared patrol it alone; police went out in squads of three—one up front and two covering his back. Street brawls were constant. Great Lakes sailors spoiling for a fight were hostile to the “canawlers” who plied the Erie Canal, and vice versa. One sea captain compared Canal Street to the violent mining towns of the Wild West, only worse.

“Bring out your dead,” came the call each morning as death carts went up and down the waterfront collecting the departed. Bodies would be loaded onto the wheelbarrows and lugged to Buffalo police headquarters, where the remains would be thrown down a chute, worn smooth from constant use.

The Erie County Jail, run by Sheriff Grover Cleveland, was reputed to be one of the harshest jails in America. Years later, when the writer Jack London was eighteen years old, down and out, and passing through Buffalo, he was jailed for vagrancy. The thirty days he served in the Erie County Jail left London a lifetime of painful memories.

On his first day in jail, young Jack London found his bunk alive with bedbugs, hundreds of them, so brazen that they were swarming over his cell in broad daylight. Dinner that night was a hunk of bread and soup—hot water and a “lonely drop of grease” floating on the surface. London, rather than eat the bread, chewed it into the consistency of putty and used it to cork the crevices between the bricks where the bedbugs teemed. He worked at it for several hours and would not quit until he’d plugged every cranny. He asked a guard how he could go about arranging for a lawyer; the guard burst out laughing. A decade before he found fame as the author of The Call of the Wild, Jack London saw things in that jail that he called “unbelievable and monstrous.”

Vice found new expressions in Buffalo: The Only Theater at Canal and Commerce Streets was infamous for its exhibition of orgiastic sex. Prostitutes sat on the laps of the sailors who filled the concert hall every Sunday, and in full view of everyone, lifted their Mother Hubbards to expose a “bare posterior,” and the men pumped away.

Crime was seasonal and was generally rooted in desperation rather than passion. Murder rates peaked in December, when the Erie Canal froze over and men were out of work; they were at their lowest in July, when everyone was busy and money flowed.

Disease was omnipresent. Cholera was the scourge of the age, and periodic epidemics of it hit Buffalo like the outbreak of a war. The first symptom appeared as diarrhea; it was followed within one to four hours by complete physical collapse. In the most severe cases, the patient would be dead by the end of the day. Cholera could afflict anyone, even the daughter of a former United States president. Mary Abigail Fillmore died of it at age twenty-two during the epidemic