Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [146]
In city after city, there were “red-light districts,” mostly immune from crackdowns. Prostitution was an extensive business. In 1866, it was said, there were 615 houses of prostitution in New York City, plus ninety-nine “houses of assignation, seventy-five concert saloons of bad repute, two thousand six hundred and ninety prostitutes, six hundred and twenty waiter girls of ... bad character, and one hundred and twenty-seven bar maids” who were “vile” in their habits and inclinations. Bishop Simpson, of the Methodist church, gave a fire-and-brimstone speech at Cooper Institute; he claimed, somewhat hysterically, that there were as many prostitutes as Methodists in the city. For him, one supposes, this was a reversal of the natural order. In any event, the police (said Bishop Simpson) did nothing to quell all this vice: “All the public houses of prostitution are known to the authorities”; but the authorities were doing next to nothing.73
In reality, the authorities in many cities were doing something, but not what the Bishop would have liked. They were actually regulating the “social evil,” despite the incongruity of regulating a business that was not supposed to exist. In New Orleans, for example, the Common Council set the boundaries of the red-light district by ordinance. No “public prostitute or woman notoriously abandoned to lewdness” was allowed to “occupy, inhabit, live or sleep in any house, room or closet” except within the district. The ordinance meticulously detailed where the district began and ended: “South side of Custom House street from Basin to Robertson street . . . ” and so on. Outside those boundaries, no one could lawfully rent space to such a woman; and it was illegal to “establish or carry on a house of prostitution or assignation” except in the zone. Of course, to carry on inside the district was just as illegal, but the Common Council ignored that troublesome fact.ay
The vice-district system had its darker side: police corruption, shake-downs, and payoffs. The police and the politicians could manipulate crackdowns so as to punish women, madams, and houses that were behind in their payments, or did not pay enough, or who backed the wrong political horse. Toleration was also riddled with class bias. The more genteel figures of the sporting life had much more immunity than the poor women of the streets. Streetwalkers were treated like vermin. But the police winked at the fashionable houses. The New Orleans ordinance plainly revealed a class distinction. Prostitutes were not to stand on the sidewalk near where they worked, or lurk about alleyways, or “accost, call or stop any person passing by,” or “stroll about the city streets indecently attired.” In general, they were not to behave in public in such a way as “to occasion scandal, or disturb and offend the peace and good morals of the people.” These rules obviously bore down heavily on streetwalkers, and left the fancier houses untouched.
The poorer women fared the worst, but all prostitutes suffered from social stigma. “Revolving door” arrests of prostitutes were common in the last part of the century. Paraded through the streets or riding in patrol wagons, prostitutes were jeered, beaten, harassed by onlookers. They were herded into filthy, degrading lockups to wait for trial in the morning. In court, the prostitute was either released or fined; if she could not pay the fine, she went to the workhouse, or to a home for fallen women. Sooner or later, the woman was back on the streets; one prostitute in St. Louis, arrested in 1882, had already been arrested 103 times.
The situation was worse during cleanup campaigns. In New York City, between 1894 and 1898, the “fly squad,” a plainclothes police unit, swept through the vice district, arresting women who solicited for prostitution. The amazing Clara Foltz, California’s first woman