Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [927]
The slumming party soon made its way to a Cherry Street dance hall filled with sailors and laborers where a nineteen-year-old girl’s greeting to Parkhurst was “Hey, whiskers, going to ball me off?” Nothing daunted, Parkhurst and company pressed on. During the rest of the evening, and over several succeeding nights, the trio took in a five-cent Park Row lodging house, a whiskey saloon, an opium den in Chinatown, a stale beer dive in the Italian section, and other horrors. Always Parkhurst pressed bravely ahead, demanding to be shown “something worse.” They stopped in at a dance hall. “Coarseness was everywhere. The girls sat upon the laps of men, and in no way rejected any advance, no matter how vile it was.”
On to Nigger Johnson’s colored dance house, where white girls waltzed with blacks and black girls cavorted lasciviously with whites (accompanied by piano, harp, violin, and piccolo). In a Tenderloin house, five girls stripped and did a “dance of nature.” (At one point, Gardner later testified, the girls played leapfrog. “Did you join in this leapfrog business?” he was asked. “Yes,” he answered, “I was the frog.” This gave rise to a popular concert hall ditty, borrowing from a current song hit, that went: “Dr. Parkhurst on the floor / Playing leapfrog with a whore / Ta-ra-ra-Boom-de-ay / Ta-rara-Boom-de-ay.”)
“Show me something worse,” Parkhurst commanded. Finally the minister had his circuits completely blown at Scotch Ann’s Golden Rule Pleasure Club on West 3rd. Descending to the basement, they found it subdivided by partitions into cubicles, each furnished with a table and two chairs, in one of which sat a boy with a painted face, a high falsetto, and the airs of a young girl. At this the good doctor turned on his heel and fled at top speed, gasping: “Why, I wouldn’t stay in that house for all the money in the world.”
On March 13, 1892, Parkhurst ascended his pulpit and described to a jammed church the nature of life in the “disgusting depths of this Tammany-debauched town”—“rotten with a rottenness that is unspeakable and indescribable.” In addition to his own evidence he now waved affidavits gathered by Gardner’s private detectives attesting to the fact that at least 254 Manhattan saloons and thirty brothels had been doing business on the previous Lord’s Day.
At first, many ministers, papers, and politicians professed greater dismay at the impropriety of Parkhurst’s expedition than at his findings. But soon a grand jury indicted two brothel keepers and summoned Police Board members on the carpet. Though it concluded the officials were merely incompetent rather than legally culpable, the police were sufficiently alarmed to promote the highly regarded Chief Inspector Thomas F. Byrnes to superintendent. Promising a crackdown on vice, Byrnes soon shifted police captains around and began closing saloons on Sundays. Paresis Hall was forced to close.
Pressing ahead, Parkhurst called a mass meeting in May 1892 and organized the City Vigilance League, modeled on the Manchester City Vigilance League. Its goal—the “perfection of municipal government”—was to be achieved by establishing a massive grass-roots surveillance operation. In each Assembly district a vigilance group would monitor its neighborhood for violations of sanitary, excise, or morals regulations.
Parkhurst was neither bigot nor fundamentalist—a believer in evolution, he favored a liberal interpretation of the Bible—and he strove to make the Vigilance League a collective effort of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews who