The Epic of New York City

by Edward Robb Ellis

  In Chinatown, northeast of what is now Foley Square, they watched a game of fan-tan and then padded into the murky room of a nearby building, where they found a Chinese man, his Caucasian wife, and their eight-year-old son smoking opium. Next came a visit to the Negro district around Sullivan and West Houston Streets, called Coontown. Then Frenchtown on the southern fringe of Washington Square in Greenwich Village. Entire blocks consisted of houses of prostitution—of all kinds. Worst of all, to the sensitive Parkhurst, was a four-story brick house on West Third Street, called the Golden Rule Pleasure Club. There they were greeted by “Scotch Ann,” who bade them enter the basement. This was partitioned into small dens, each containing a table and a couple of chairs.

  As Gardner described it: “In each room sat a youth, whose face was painted, eyebrows blackened, and whose airs were those of a young girl. Each person talked in a high falsetto voice, and called the others by women’s names.” Puzzled, the minister turned to the detective and whispered a question. Gardner explained. For the first and only time Parkhurst was frightened. Running outdoors, he panted in horror, “Why, I wouldn’t stay in that house for all the money in the world!”

  The evening of March 11, the last time he ventured into New York’s underworld, Parkhurst went with Gardner and Erving to a posh bawdyhouse at 31-33 East Twenty-seventh Street, just three blocks from Parkhurst’s own church. They were welcomed by the madam, Mrs. Hattie Adams, who called eight young women into the parlor. Having recovered from his revulsion of the previous night, the minister hoped to see the very worst. Gardner paid five of the girls three dollars apiece to put on a dance. A broken-down musician, called the Professor, sat at a piano in the parlor, but the girls refused to perform until he was blindfolded. This done, they shucked off the Mother Hubbard gowns they wore, leaving themselves completely naked, and romped around the room while the Professor banged out a lively jig. They frolicked through a cancan, they danced with Erving, and finally they played leapfrog, with Gardner acting as the frog. Throughout this revelry the minister sat in a corner sipping beer and watching with a blank face. Hattie became suspicious of him, but Gardner assured her that he was a “gay boy from the West.” The madam decided that maybe he was a pickpocket on vacation and tried pulling his whiskers, only to be rebuffed so sternly that she let it go at that.

  Anti-Parkhurst newspapers later claimed that he had played the role of frog for the leapfrogging naked whores, but this was not the case. So celebrated did this episode become that delighted habitués of the Tenderloin district sang, “Dr. Parkhurst on the floor/Playing leapfrog with a whore/Ta-ra-ra-ra-boom-de-ay/Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay!”

  From Hattie Adams’ place the three men went to another brothel, on West Fourth Street, run by Marie Andrea. There they witnessed a “French circus.” Gardner later said that this sickened him, but the minister “sat in a corner with his feet curled under his chair and blandly smiled.” The detective also reported that “after their performance, the girls bowed like ballet dancers.” After the three men got out of the place, Gardner asked Parkhurst what he thought of the spectacle they had just seen. “Think of it?” the minister cried. “It was the most brutal, the most horrible exhibition that I ever saw in my life!”

  Never again did Parkhurst enter a brothel, den, dive, saloon, or any other place of low repute. He now had all the evidence he sought. In addition to his eyewitness tours, 4 other detectives hired by Gardner had visited 254 saloons. All told, the Reverend Dr. Parkhurst spent about $500 in this campaign.

  He let it be known that on Sunday, March 13, he would deliver another sermon about corruption in the city. An hour before he began to speak, his house of worship was jammed, some people even sitting on the steps leading to the pulpit. On the lectern the minister placed a Bible, a hymnbook, and a stack of documents prepared with the help of Gardner and Erving. Launching into his indictment, Parkhurst said that at first he had not considered it part of his ministerial duties “to go into the slums and help catch the rascals, especially as the police are paid nearly five million dollars a year for doing it themselves.” However, when he had realized that no one else would expose this vice, he had gone “down into the disgusting depths of this Tammany-debauched town.”

  Parkhurst picked up the documents from the lectern. These were sworn affidavits of what he had seen, affidavits from the detectives hired by Gardner, and a list of thirty houses of prostitution within the Nineteenth Precinct, where his church was located. “For four weeks,” he cried, “you have been wincing under the sting of a general indictment and have been calling for particulars! This morning I have given you particulars—two hundred and eighty-four of them. Now, what are you going to do with them?”

  His second sermon shocked the city even more than his first. Many citizens were horrified at the conditions he described. Others felt that the minister had been guilty of impropriety in crawling through the sewers of the underworld. He was accused of seeking personal publicity. Politicians pretended to worry that his findings might affect decent people. Some men of social and financial standing feared that reform would hurt business. The Sun declared that Dr. Parkhurst’s usefulness as a minister had come to an end since he had instigated and paid for obscene performances. And Anthony Comstock felt jealous. Comstock headed the Society for the Suppression of Vice, which competed with Parkhurst’s Society for the Prevention of Crime.

  Parkhurst and his organization demanded that District Attorney Nicoll and the courts close the places he had visited. No action was taken. Since most police justices were creatures of Tammany Hall, they declined to issue warrants for the arrests Parkhurst wanted. Crime Society agents testified about disorderly housekeepers near the Essex Market court; but when they left the courtroom, they were attacked by a mob, and the police refused to protect them.

  The next grand jury that convened was headed by an upright businessman, named Henry M. Taber. Under his influence the jurors summoned Parkhurst, gave him a friendly hearing, welcomed his affidavits, handed down indictments against two whorehouse madams, and questioned the city’s four police commissioners, as well as a few police inspectors and captains. Nearly 90 percent of all police appointments, transfers, and promotions had been recommended by leaders of Tammany Hall; this explains why the men appearing before the jury showed very poor memories.

  The grand jury declared: “(The police) are either incompetent to do what is frequently done by private individuals with imperfect facilities for such work, or else there exist reasons and motives for such inaction which are illegal and corrupt. The general efficiency of the Department is so great that it is our belief that the latter suggestion is the explanation of the peculiar inactivity.”

  Parkhurst hammered away, in sermon after sermon, about the unholy alliance between Tammany and the underworld. He received a flood of solid tips in letters from people afraid to sign their names. At last the Chamber of Commerce began to worry about the city’s reputation; early in 1894 it asked the state legislature to investigate the city’s police department. The legislature was controlled by Republican Boss Platt, who welcomed this opportunity to embarrass Democratic Boss Croker and the city’s Democratic machine.

  Clarence Lexow, a Republican state senator, was named chairman of a committee to conduct the probe. Committee members began by coming to New York and visiting Dr. Parkhurst, the acknowledged leader of the anti-vice forces. Now worldly enough to recognize the partisan composition and purposes of the legislative committee, he declined to give his full cooperation. Because he had been the first to raise his voice in public, committee members had to placate him. They let him name their counsel, John W. Goff, a brilliant lawyer, who at this time was above political influence.

  Thus, in 1894, began the famous Lexow investigation of crime and corruption in America’s greatest city. It became a national sensation. Never before had New York police been exposed so thoroughly. The committee’s findings ran to nearly 6,000 pages in 5 thick books. The World gave massive publicity to this probe, w
hich deeply impressed twelve-year-old Fiorello LaGuardia. When LaGuardia was three years of age, his family moved to the West, and his father was now an army bandmaster near Prescott in Arizona Territory. Whenever young LaGuardia rode into Prescott, he bought copies of the New York World at a drugstore. Much later he wrote:

  When I got home with the Sunday World, I would carefully read every word of the World’s fight against the corrupt Tammany machine in New York. That was the period of the lurid disclosures made by the Lexow investigation of corruption in the Police Department that extended throughout the political structure of the city. The papers then were filled with stories of startling crookedness on the part of the police and the politicians in New York. Unlike boys who grew up in the city and who heard from childhood about such things as graft and corruption, the amazing disclosures hit me like a shock. I could not understand how the people of the greatest city in the country could put up with the vice and crime that existed there. A resentment against Tammany was created in me at that time which I admit is to this day almost an obsession. . . .*

  The Lexow committee consisted of 7 members—5 of them Republicans; 1 an independent Democrat; and 1 a Tammany Democrat. They held their first meeting on March 9, 1894, in a third-floor room of the Tweed-built County Courthouse at 52 Chambers Street. The city had a population of not quite 2,000,000. The 4,000-man police force was run by a 4-man board of police commissioners. When it became apparent that the committee’s counsel meant business, whorehouse keepers left town in droves, many heading for Chicago. A covert offer of $300,000 was made to counsel Goff to drop the probe, but he spurned this bribe. In 74 sessions the Lexow committee heard 678 witnesses and took 10,576 pages of testimony before its final meeting on December 29, 1894. Of these pages, 9,500 were about corruption in the police department.

  In the middle of January, 1895, the Lexow committee issued a report. Although all worldly New Yorkers were generally aware of the situation, the report spelled it out in detail. Police bribery was so common that when a vaudeville actor wanted to impersonate a cop, he simply held one hand behind his back with the palm upturned. The report showed that woven into a web of corruption were policemen, judges, prostitutes, dope addicts, saloonkeepers, abortionists, robbers, gamblers, swindlers, bawdyhouse proprietors, politicians—and businessmen. In fact, M. R. Werner wrote that “the outstanding development of the Croker period in Tammany Hall was the beginning of an alliance between Tammany Hall and large corporate enterprise.” Boss Croker became so frightened that he temporarily resigned his Tammany leadership and left for Europe, announcing that he needed a complete rest because he was ill.

  Corruption began at the bottom, worked its way to the top, and then descended to the bottom again. Any ambitious young man who wanted to become a policeman had to pay a $300 bribe just to be appointed to the force. Police Commissioner James J. Martin admitted under questioning that 85 percent of his appointments to the police ranks were made on the recommendations of Tammany leaders and that in 5 years he had promoted only 2 men on merit alone. It cost a patrolman $2,500 to be promoted to sergeant. A captaincy was worth $10,000 to $15,000 in bribe money, although a captain’s official salary was only $2,750 a year. To be elevated from captain to inspector cost from $12,000 to $20,000. The Lexow committee said that this promotion racket alone came to about $7,000,000 a year—a modest estimate, in its opinion.

  Any policeman who paid for promotion expected to get his money back. A case in point was Alexander Williams, known as Clubber Williams because he said that there was more law at the end of a police club than in any courtroom. He was a sadistic brute who enjoyed beating up people. As a police captain, he was transferred from a not too lucrative downtown precinct to the Nineteenth Precinct, which embraced an area roughly bounded by Fourteenth to Forty-second streets and Fifth and Seventh avenues, now the city’s garment district. This section was so wide-open and vicious and depraved that some people called it Satan’s Circus. But Clubber Williams gave it another nickname. Upon taking over his new post, he drawled, “I’ve had nothing but chuck steaks for a long time, and now I’m going to get me a little of the tenderloin.” The area became the Tenderloin.

  Imposing tribute on every kind of illegal activity, Williams grew wealthy on graft and ultimately was promoted to police inspector. Ordered to appear before the Lexow committee, he admitted that he had been charged with clubbing more people than any other man on the force, that he had several big bank accounts, and that besides his home in the city, he owned a mansion in Connecticut and kept a yacht.

  Saloons were supposed to close at 1 A.M. on weekdays and to remain closed all day Sunday. However, thousands of saloonkeepers paid the police $20 a month to stay open after the deadline and all day Sunday. Uniformed cops openly accepted free drinks in these places. The many houses of prostitution in the city paid from $35 to $50 a month to the police for protection. Madams also bought tickets to Tammany parties and picnics. Charles Priem, who ran a brothel at 28 Bayard Street, told the committee that in 6 years he had given the police $4,300 in regular payments, an “initiation fee” of $500 every time a new captain took over the precinct, and an annual Christmas gift of $100 to whichever man happened to be captain at the holiday season. One madam said that she had paid the police $150 a month for 10 years.

  Besides this direct graft, the police had a hand in subsidiary graft connected with prostitution—the sale to whorehouses of beer, liquor, cigars, cigarettes, food, medical service, and so forth. Some high police officials and Tammany politicians had direct financial interests in bawdyhouses, and the cop on the beat was told to protect the establishments especially favored by city officials, judges, and millionaires.

  Steamship owners paid police to guard their vessels from the time they arrived in port until they were unloaded. Pushcart peddlers paid cops three dollars a week to stand in the streets beside their carts. Sailmakers on South Street paid police for permission to hang out canvas banners proclaiming their trade. Bootblacks had to give a free shine to any cop demanding service. Whenever Charles Delmonico of the famous Delmonico’s Restaurant staged a banquet, he asked his precinct house to assign a cop to duty at his entrance, and he paid the policemen five dollars an evening. Arthur Brisbane, then writing for the New York World, commented, “Another batch of the city’s businessmen proved that they were just about as worthy of freedom as a Kaffir at the Cape.”

  George Appo, the son of a white mother and a Chinese father, told the Lexow committee that the city had 10,000 opium dens. One was located on West Forty-Second Street near Seventh Avenue. High police officials divided New York into districts so that they could be sure of getting their take from the city’s 1,000 policy slip establishments; each paid from $15 to $35 a month to operate. Bailing out prostitutes was a valuable Tammany concession, and the police often shared in the proceeds of robberies committed by whores.

  Perhaps the most damning evidence turned up by the Lexow committee was the fact that police did not consider themselves servants of the people, but their masters. Insolent, arrogant, and vicious, they produced a reign of terror as cruel as that of Cossacks during Old World pogroms. A man who had been robbed was beaten up by the policemen to whom he turned for help. A clergyman was thrown out of a precinct house where he had protested about streetwalkers. Some cops threatened to arrest any woman they found alone on the streets at night unless she gave them money. One patrolman clubbed sixteen people, including a fifteen-year-old girl, whom he bashed in the mouth with his fist while she was strolling on Broadway with her father. The Lexow committee said:

  The poor, ignorant foreigner residing on the great east side of the city has been especially subjected to a brutal and infamous rule by the police, in conjunction with the administration of the local inferior courts, so that it is beyond a doubt that innocent people who have refused to yield to criminal extortion, have been clubbed and harassed and confined in jail, and the extremes of oppression have been applied to them in the separation of parent and child,
the blasting of reputation and consignment of innocent persons to a convict’s cell. . . .

  As the probe continued, the police department was deluged with cops applying for retirement. Croker wasn’t the only one who pleaded illness; a long line of politicians and high police officials also took to “sickbeds.” After Police Commissioner John McClave had been asked why his appointments and promotions had been followed by big deposits in his bank account, his spirits wilted, he resigned, and his lawyer thought that he might go insane. For the first time in the history of New York a police captain was sent to jail; he admitted accepting a basketful of peaches and another of pears from a commission merchant during a jury trial. And Police Superintendent Thomas F. Byrnes, seated in the witness chair, needed nearly 4 hours to account for the $350,000 he had amassed in real estate and securities.

  As a result of the Lexow investigation, about seventy indictments were lodged against police officers, among them two former commissioners, three inspectors, one former inspector, twenty captains, and two former captains. Some were convicted, but higher courts reversed many of these verdicts. Several men were restored to duty on the force. Although this disappointed reformers, they hailed the Reverend Dr. Charles Parkhurst for starting the exposé. It was suggested that an arch be erected in his honor in Madison Square Park, that his birthday be made a national holiday, and that New York be renamed Parkhurst.