Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [386]
ON THE TOWN
The spread of piety proved no barrier to a simultaneous expansion of prostitution throughout the city, but especially in working-class districts. Before the war, fee-for-service sex had been largely restricted to the old Holy Ground (just behind St. Paul’s Chapel) and to a few blocks near the East River docks. Here streetwalkers and brothel strumpets made carnal connection with visitors, sailors, shipyard workers, and (according to various complainants) “idle Negroes,” “dissolute persons,” and “droves of youth.” Outside these clearly defined waterfront districts, commercial sex in the early republican city—certainly by European standards—had a decidedly low profile.
In the 1820s, however, the sex trade boomed. Heightened demand came from the surging influx of single young male immigrants, sailors on shore leave, out-of-town businessmen, and the growing numbers of proletarianized journeymen who, facing an uncertain future, postponed marriage until their late twenties.
Heightened supply came from a pool of female migrants, deserted and widowed wives, and the expanding ranks of the working poor. When “respectable” employment garnered women one or two dollars a week and even low-end whoring fetched twenty to thirty dollars, some turned to part-time prostitution to supplement abysmal wages. Others abandoned miserable jobs as servants or seamstresses only when lashed by hard times—“going on the town” temporarily until conditions improved. (Some estimates suggest that perhaps 5 to 10 percent of all women between the ages of fifteen and thirty prostituted themselves at some point, with the figure rising above 10 percent during depressions.) Still others actively embraced the trade on a full-time basis. It paid well, allowed (indeed required) the purchase of fancy clothes, and offered entree into fashionable worlds from which their poverty-scarred mothers were forever barred. Allfemale brothels, moreover, offered a heady freedom from surveillance by male employers and from subjection to parental authority (or abuse).
The number of brothels in the city rose rapidly in the 1820s. By decade’s end there were probably more than two hundred. Though the docks remained a haven for the coarsest bawdy houses, the riverfronts lost their monopoly on the business. Brothels thrived almost everywhere, their form varying with the local clientele. Elegant and expensive “parlor houses”—so called for their genteel furnishings and fashionably dressed residents—could be found just west of Broadway, a short walk from imposing elite homes, the big hotels, and the theatrical district by City Hall Park. Here native- or New England-born women held sway, many of them well spoken and well educated, some of them accomplished musicians. Parlor house girls could fetch fifty to a hundred dollars a week, working only afternoons and early evenings.
At Corlear’s Hook, adjacent to the shipyards, coal dumps, and ironworks, droves of streetwalkers brazenly solicited industrial workers, sailors, and Brooklyn ferry commuters. So notorious was the Hook’s reputation as a site for prostitution that (according to one theory) the local sex workers were nicknamed “Hookers,” generating a new moniker for the entire trade.
It was the Five Points, however, that emerged as the summit of public sexuality. Prostitutes walked the streets day and night and worked out of saloons and “houses of bad fame” strewn along Anthony Street and the Bowery. Whoring here was famous for its interracial character. African-American New Yorkers, barred from all but service trades, assumed a significant role in the illicit economy. Some of their establishments catered exclusively to other blacks, but numerous Points saloons and brothels accommodated a mixed clientele with a mixed staff. Some haunts featured miscegenational sex; Cow Bay Alley’s black-and-tan cabarets attracted venturesome young gentlemen from the proper west side to what municipal authorities in 1830 called the “hovels of negroes.”
Some madams did extremely well. Maria Williamson, who by 1820 was already