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By Root 8009 0

demographics. In 1855 Dr. William Sanger, chief resident physician at Blackwell’s Island Hospital, carried out a statistical survey with the aid of the police. He estimated the total number of prostitutes as 7,860. Of these 38 percent were country girls (most of whom worked in brothels), while 35 percent were Irish and 12 percent German (most of whom plied the streets). These numbers included children. Not only was pedophilia a popular gentleman’s vice, but the likelihood of contracting disease and producing pregnancy was thought to be lessened by intercourse with prepubescent girls. Conveniently, the age of menarche was approximately fifteen, the age of consent but ten.

Dr. Sanger administered a questionnaire to two thousand prostitutes, asking survey participants why they had entered the trade. Many cited “destitution,” which had usually resulted from being seduced, abandoned, widowed, orphaned, or otherwise deprived of male support. But a sizable percentage cited “inclination”; they preferred prostitution to a father’s or husband’s drunken abuse, a mother’s nagging, the monotony of a rural existence, or the miserably paid life of a seamstress or servant. Where the latter might make two or three dollars a week, an elite courtesan could pull in ten to fifty dollars for a single trick. As the city’s highest-paid women workers, they were able to avail themselves of fancy clothes and urban entertainments. Prostitution had innumerable drawbacks—syphilis and gonorrhea not the least of them—but it afforded poor women their best chance for autonomy.

The demand for commercial sex, like its supply, had broadened dramatically since the 1820s. New York was inundated with transient males: country storekeepers, gentleman travelers, and suburban ferry commuters. Roughly sixty thousand ship crewmen (oystermen, steamboat deckhands, sailors from whalers and naval vessels, canal boatmen) passed through town each year by the late 1850s. Thousands of single male immigrants settled here, and hundreds of thousands more paused in the city on their way west.

Workingmen seeking sex could find it in Kleindeutschland basement bars, Five Points interracial brothels, and the waterfront area of Corlear’s Hook, where halfexposed women sat on stoops of tenements and former mansions along Walnut, Water, Pearl, and Cherry streets, beckoning nautical males and men from the nearby shipyards, coal dumps, sawmills, and ironworks.

A prominent new venue was the “concert saloon,” a hybrid entertainment place that combined music, drink, and sex. The concert saloon had emerged in the depressed 1840s when taverns drummed up business by converting back rooms or cellars into small concert halls, which put on specialty acts to encourage drinking. By the 1850s many old theaters or three- or four-story brownstones were being rigged up with a long bar and a curtainless stage at the rear. The entertainment was a pastiche of French vaudeville, Italian opera, German beer garden, and English theater. When vocalists sang, the audience, waiters, and “waiter girls” (frequently full- or part-time prostitutes) joined in the chorus. Between acts, performers sat in the audience and solicited customers for prostitution in private rooms upstairs.

In SoHo, at the top of the commercial sex chain, second-class brothels for clerks and “the higher class of mechanics” could be found near the district’s lower end. Farther north lay the rows of patrician and middle-class establishments, which were, the Tribune noted, “frequently visited by gentlemen of the best standing,” a category including “aldermen, judges, lawyers, assemblymen, state officers, country merchants, and others.” From Saturday night through the Lord’s Day and on into Monday morning, SoHo’s streets were filled with expensive carriages. The sidewalks were lined as well, with young men who had strolled over from Broadway, all camped out in front of their favorite brothels waiting their turn. Editor Walt Whitman contended that nineteen of every twenty males—including “the best classes of Men” in Brooklyn and New York—visited