Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [910]
As a financial proposition, however, the Garden was a disaster. Elites alone couldn’t support the lavishly equipped complex, which seated five thousand (twelve thousand at special events) and cost $240,000 a year to maintain. Stanford White tried fashioning some large-scale popular entertainments—re-creations of Shakespeare’s House and the Globe Theatre—and the management brought in P. T. Barnum’s and John Ringling’s circuses. Madison Square Garden thus became an institution that oscillated, from night to night, between patrician and plebeian entertainments.
SATAN’S CIRCUS
North and west of Madison Square lay the sin-drenched Tenderloin—or Satan’s Circus, as the clergy were fond of calling it. It started at Sixth and 23rd, where since 1879 Bryant’s Opera House, one of the last minstrel venues in the city, had been leased by Adam Bial and John Koster for their Koster and Bial’s Music Hall. A glorified concert saloon, where patrons in balcony boxes or at ground-floor tables could drink and watch Lillian McTwobucks do a Bowery version of the cancan or listen to barrelhouse baritones, Koster and Bial’s was rather tame, though the Times called it “lurid.” A few blocks north things were considerably lustier.
The notorious Haymarket, on Sixth just south of 30th, had a veneer of outward decency. It forbade its wealthy clientele from close-up dancing with prostitutes and expelled working-class girls who turned out for an evening’s fun if they displayed their ankles. At the same time, it thoughtfully provided curtained galleries behind which discreet sex could be practiced. Visiting firemen or men-about-town could also repair to the Haymarket’s balcony level, where cubicles featured sex exhibitions or “circuses.”
Elite bordellos too had ensconced themselves in the Tenderloin, having pursued their respectable clients northward, like camp followers in the train of an army. As fashionable theaters had now banned third-tier operations, prostitutes met their patrons at the doors of the Metropolitan Opera House or Wallack’s or Daly’s and escorted them to nearby establishments, like the almost solid row of whorehouses on West 29th Street.
An evening of high culture was hardly a prerequisite for commercial sex, however. Elevated railroads put the area within easy reach of distant patrons. The same el that brought respectable women to shop at genteel department stores by day brought respectable men by night to shop for women. “Ladies’ Mile” took on a different meaning at night, as Sixth Avenue between 14th and 34th streets became a brightly lit whore’s promenade. A block farther west, patrols of black prostitutes gave the strip of Seventh Avenue between 23rd and 40th streets the name of “African Broadway.”
Gambling resorts too settled here in the 1880s and 1890s. Of New York’s hundreds of faro banks and policy shops, most of the first-class houses were Tenderloin operations. John Daly, the city’s kingpin gambler, had been drawn to New York from Troy by the success of John Morrissey, and his famous house at 39 West zgth, open since 1878, paid a rumored one hundred thousand dollars in annual protection. The era’s rising star was Richard A. Canfield, who had started as a poker-room operator in Providence, traveled to Monte Carlo and European spas to learn how aristocrats gambled,