Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [761]
By 1872 there were roughly eighty of these concert saloons in New York City, many of them with names—Cremorne, Strand, and Buckingham Palace—that evoked the London scene. They featured traditional entertainment turns drawn from French vaudeville, Italian opera, and German beer gardens—and a novel form of audience participation, encouraged by the legally mandated absence of curtains. Patrons sang along with the chorus, singers sat at tables between acts or danced with customers, and “waiter-girls” with low bodices, short skirts, and high tasseled red boots took orders for drinks at the tables. They often sold sex as well, and waiter-girls, many of whom had been camp followers during the war, might accompany a guest to one of the upstairs rooms or arrange an assignation in a nearby brothel.
Concert saloons appealed to males of all classes but tended to be segregated by social rank. Some fast young gentlemen liked to go slumming, dropping in at workingclass haunts like Billy McGlory’s Armory Hall on Hester Street, a thrilling but potentially dangerous experience. At McGlory’s, parties of uptown visitors could sit in a special balcony above the dance floor and gaze in fascination at brawls between gangsters and thugs, but they might also be robbed on leaving.
Most gentlemen, therefore, stuck to concert saloons like the Gaiety, on Broadway near Houston, which advertised its audience as “respectable, though by no means stilted in manners,” or the Louvre, on Broadway and 23rd, a marble-columned establishment with an ornate mirrored bar, where rich men could more safely meet beautiful demimondaines or waiter-girls. But the most popular spot—famous throughout the country—was Harry Hill’s, on Houston just east of Broadway.
Hill, born in Epsom, England, had been working there as a jockey and horse trainer when in 1850 a visiting American turfman invited him to manage a model horse farm in Astoria. Hill did so for two years, then moved to Manhattan and opened his own sporting house. After the war Hill’s place drew “judges, lawyers, merchants, members of Congress and the State Legislature, doctors and other professional men” who liked to mingle with pugilists, politicians, and the racetrack crowd and to dance and drink with fast women (not all of them professionals). Harry’s prominent patrons were reassured by the proprietor’s tight surveillance—a prominent sign warned that “no one violating decency, will be permitted to remain in the room”—and his provision of a private room in which to sober up, lest they be waylaid by thugs outdoors.
It was getting ever harder to “violate decency,” however, as the continuing relaxation of standards helped expand the commercial sex industry rapidly. After the Civil War, brothels traipsed north along with the department stores and theaters, pursuing their upwardly mobile clientele and fleeing a SoHo now overrun with factories and warehouses. Scores of whorehouses remained behind on Crosby, Howard, and Grand to service the arriving working class, but others overleaped the Rialto to the area above Madison Square, where a raft of new hotel construction was in progress. By the early 1870s the Fifth Avenue Hotel, which had once been a venturesome frontier outpost, found competitors springing up north of it along Broadway and Fifth Avenue. Visiting congressmen, military officers, coal mine operators, and railroad magnates could take their pick among the Hoffman House on 24th Street, the Brunswick (favorite of the horsey set) on 26th, the Victoria at 27th, the Gilsey House at 29th, the Grand at 31st, and—just opposite Vanderbilt’s Grand Central Depot on 42nd Street—the Grand Union Hotel.
Anywhere that hotels went, the whores were sure to follow. On West 25th Street, the so-called Seven Sisters opened seven adjacent brothels in a residential