Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [387]
One of the most enterprising de facto whoremasters was John R. Livingston, brother of Chancellor (and steamboat financier) Robert Livingston. By 1828 he controlled at least five brothels near Paradise Square and a score more elsewhere in the city, with a tenant roster that included some of the best-known madams in New York. His involvement was well known, and when irate neighbors complained, he simply reshuffled the offending women to another of his buildings. Tobacco entrepreneur George Lorillard and Matthew Davis, a founder of Tammany Hall, were also among the ranks of patrician sex profiteers.
Theater owners, including John Jacob Astor (who had purchased the Park back in 1806), encouraged erotic third tiers as drawing cards, providing special entrances from which the femmes dupave could reach the upper house. There assignations were struck and rendezvous arranged at nearby brothels (in the 1820s there were bordellos within easy walking distance of every major theater). Nor were hoteliers (Astor again chief among them) overly chagrined when whorehouses set up shop near their lobbies. The tourist-boosting potential of brothels was one of many reasons they were seldom bothered by the police, nor their landlords punished. Besides, prostitutes who did not solicit openly on the streets violated no law, and few men in positions of power were in any hurry to criminalize their activities. Police did occasionally raid low-life brothels, notorious for robbing patrons, but the arrested women were usually booked on charges of vagrancy or disorderly conduct.
If the sex trades flourished with the not-so-covert acquiescence of the town’s male elite, genteel women upheld strict social sanctions against its female participants, no matter how much money they accumulated. Eliza Bowen Jumel, daughter of a Providence, Rhode Island, prostitute and herself a professional of some standing in her youth, had married French-born wine merchant Stephen Jumel, who in 1810 gave her the old Roger Morris mansion above Harlem. For all her wealth, she was barred from Knickerbocker society. Even after 1826, when she returned from a decade in France, where she’d won social acceptance, she was unable to crack the wall of disapproval and lived in splendid manorial isolation at 160th Street. (She did, however, manage a shortlived marriage in 1833 with the equally notorious Aaron Burr, who had returned to New York eight years after the duel with Hamilton and resumed the practice of law.)
“LET’S LIQUOR”
The eruption of commercial sex was accompanied by a surge in commercial drink—again, a phenomenon that suffused New York society but flourished particularly in the laboring quarters. Drinking was a long-established component of male working-class life. On the job, frequent drams fortified tiring workers: shipyard bosses would pass a pail of brandy, then suggest raising another timber. In hot weather, iced beer helped make steamy workshops bearable. Swigging was a preindustrial work habit, to which laborers clung all the more stubbornly in the face of drives for effciency and punctuality launched by employers. Alcohol also lubricated rites of civic and communal solidarity—from militia musters to elections—and bouts of social drinking fueled unofficial holidays, such as boisterous wakes. The first words two just-met strangers might likely utter were “Let’s liquor.”
What changed in this era was the nature and availability of that liquor. After the Revolution, declining West Indian sugar imports, along with duties on rum and molasses, forced importers and distillers to hike prices. Western whiskey filled the breach, as farmers, using improved still technology, sent ever greater