Law & Disorder

by Bruce Chadwick

  Strong went to Columbia College, then just walking distance from his home, when he was fourteen and graduated with honors when he was eighteen, always jotting down things in his journal. He was a great lover of books and collected hundreds of them for his library. Strong often waited in wind and rain at the docks for the arrival of ships from Europe carrying a shipment of new books that he had ordered. Soon after he became a lawyer, he joined a firm started by famed Canadian attorney Marshall Bidwell (it later became Strong and Bidwell), where he met all of the top legal people in the city and state and most of the politicians. He met even more when he was named a college trustee in 1853. Coming from a wealthy family, the successful young lawyer found easy entry to New York high society and its endless rounds of parties and balls. He did not find a woman to suit him until the late 1840s, when he began to court Eleanor Ruggles, whom he married.

  He was a hopeless eccentric, constantly mixing together amateur medicinal treatments for his many ailments. He suffered from migraine headaches and to cure them used his own odd concoction of cayenne pepper and cream of tartar. Strong drank catnip tea when he had a cold. He was intrigued with any new medicine that came out and might become part of his own doctor’s cabinet.

  But Strong was even more intrigued by the wild life of the city, inheriting a love of the streets and rivers from his uncle, one of New York’s most famous firemen. He was more entranced by the thugs and thieves than he was by the debutantes and men in perfect-fitting and superbly cut black dress suits. He rode through town in his carriage with his head always sweeping left and right and ears always open, taking in the sights and noises of the community—and the people. If there was a riot or a fire, Strong got there immediately to write about it. He sat in on court cases, passed hundreds of evenings at the theater, and spent days walking through parks and listening to firebrand speakers. He read many newspapers, in addition to his books, and had a comment on just about everything. He was, like Hone, a man of the people who lived in a castle. His world was not just the chime of a large clock in the study of his spacious and well-appointed home but the sounds of the street, the street gang howls, the firebells, the police whistles, the roars of the angry crowd. And, too, he walked through a lawless city that spun into disorder every day.

  His writing was bold, descriptive, intuitive, beautiful, and, in a word, unique. He did not see rain as everyone else saw it. To him, it was “raining all day long like a collection of inverted Jets d’eau—the atmosphere penetrated by columns of descending water half an inch in diameter.… A very pleasant aquatic excursion it was.” He did not merely watch fires consume houses and entire blocks but walked through the streets amid the hot blazes and recorded everything he saw. In the Great Fire of 1845, he wrote that he “came back to the scene of action, and seeing that all of Broad Street on both sides from about No. 20 down was one grand, solid substantial flame, most glorious and terrible to look at.”30

  CHAPTER NINE

  Prostitution, Gambling, and Drinking: The Backbone of the Crime Surge and Downfall of the Police

  The dives of New York are the hot-beds of its crime.… Vice germinates, grows, buds and yields its bitter fruit [there]. Every stage of crime is reflected in a true picture of these holes of viciousness.

  —Captain George Walling, NYPD

  George Templeton Strong walked through a city of sin. No matter what street, avenue, or alley he traveled on or through, or what tavern or store or theater or ferryboat he visited, somebody somewhere nearby was breaking the law. New York had become the Wild East.

  No matter where he went, he always found himself face-to-face with the three biggest reasons for the soaring crime rate in his beloved New York—gambling, drinking, and sex.

  * * *

  There was more legal gambling in New York in the 1840s and 1850s than at any other time in American history until the establishment of legal gambling in Las Vegas a hundred years later. The heart of the gambling district in New York was Vesey Street, Barclay Street, and Park Row downtown. Hundreds of small storefront gambling emporiums could be found nearby. The dozen or so big houses on those streets were elegantly designed, with expensive rugs, imported satin- and velvet-covered furniture, numerous bars, and small orchestras that played music for visitors over the din of the tables. Sometimes stars from music halls and the theater would entertain patrons. Liveried servants were everywhere. Floor-to-ceiling mirrors filled some rooms, and the walls of others were covered with expensive pieces of art by fabled painters. Dinner was served in large, elegant dining halls. Each diner had gold and silver plates and exquisitely cut crystal.

  The gambling emporiums referred to their gamblers as “distinguished patrons,” but the penny press referred to them as “despicable characters.” The Herald wrote that “many of these common gamblers, compared with whom the skulking pickpocket is respectable, mingle with the leaders of fashion in this city. They saunter along Broadway in the mornings, drive out on the avenue in the afternoon, lounge at the opera in the evening and cheat at Park Row and Barclay Street until five o’clock in the morning.” The Sun charged that the presence of gambling casinos in the better sections of town was ruining the neighborhoods.1

  Part of the casino problem was that hundreds of them were illegal and rarely monitored by the police. They were professionally run, and the faro tables, dice pits, and roulette stations were packed with customers. In January of 1852, a Captain Taylor and six of his men burst into an illegal casino and found a large operation. They arrested the manager and thirteen workers.2

  Thousands of men and women were addicted to gambling and involved in many of the crimes associated with it, such as brawls, knife attacks, robberies, and theft. They would do anything to get money to toss onto a faro table. “The robber who stabs at a victim to get at his pocket—the incendiary who fires a city in the hope of spoils—is not more the slave of the lust for gold than that gray-haired sinner, or that bright-eyed nervous youth, who stands leaning over the faro-table, watching every card as if the destiny of his immortal soul hung—and so perhaps it does—upon the issue,” wrote journalist George Foster.3

  The police were deeply involved in gambling. Everybody knew that visitors just had to give a policeman a dollar and he would direct you to all of the gambling houses in the city, some illegal, some at the ends of snaking, narrow alleys that no one would be able to find without the expert help of the police, so eager to accept illegal money to aid the gamblers.

  Critics of the faro tables and card games said they might be legal but were the foundation of lawbreaking. “Gambling is the synthesis of crime,” wrote Foster, “and includes within itself the spirit of fraud, theft, robbery, and murder. The professed gambler is the most enormous pest ever engendered by a monstrous society.”4

  Gambling was prosperous in New York City. The gambling houses employed about three thousand workers, making the industry one of the largest in the city. Individual casino employees, particularly those who worked with teams in faro games, could earn twenty or thirty times as much money as the average city worker. Gambling exploded in New York in the mid-1830s because of the city’s population jump and because of the fading popularity of gambling in the Southwest and the Northwest and on riverboats. Decades of cheating by fast-talking, suave gamblers had soured the public on pulling up a chair to play poker, and so the gamblers, and their games, moved to the growing metropolises. A new game, faro, appeared, and patrons thought that it was fair and that their chances of success were good. In faro, gamblers bet on cards from a deck imprinted on a green tablecloth, and then a dealer drew cards from a mechanized “boot” that could not be fixed (it was). Faro became a raging success prior to the Civil War.5

  A lion of the gambling industry was “policy,” or lotteries (in some ways the “numbers game” popular in the early twentieth century). The lottery started in America in the 1700s as a way to raise money for town governments and individuals who needed fast revenue to buy land or repair a barn. By the 1830s, lotteri
es had become wildly popular in all cities, particularly New York because of its population. In the 1850s, more than three thousand people worked in the lottery business, which was, like casino gambling, legal. The small lottery parlors, usually with two or three workers, sold sets of numbers to bettors for a lottery that was run twice each day to provide maximum betting opportunities. The buyers of lottery tickets were not the rich but working-class people and the poor. Those residents, people who lived in working-class neighborhoods and slums, would remain the base of the lottery system through the 1930s.The managers of the system designed it so that by the early 1840s numbers could be purchased for only three cents a ticket, making it a popular gambling game for many. The lotteries in New York alone took in close to $50 million a year in today’s money. Lottery helped promote crime, as hundreds of people robbed someone, or a store, to get money to buy enormous sheets of lottery numbers or followed lottery winners home and robbed them.6

  Horse racing, with small grandstands for seating at tracks and an amateurish ticket betting system, was starting to grow as a part of gambling in the 1840s but would not blossom until the 1860s, when wealthy horse lovers would build tracks at Saratoga, Pimlico, and Monmouth Park. After the Civil War, pari-mutuel betting became popular, and gamblers developed a huge off-track betting business in parlors set up in hotels. Some horse races were fixed.

  Most gamblers who were brought to court by police were immediately released by the magistrates, who, it was said, had close relationships with the police in charge of rounding up gamblers. These police would take them to friendly judges for a bribe. The police were called “steers” or “ropers” because of the way in which they used the legal system to guide their gamblers to the “right” magistrates. Grand juries that did get cases involving criminality by gamblers often dismissed them. One grand jury released a group of men charged with running illegal parlors that sold lottery tickets. Many men on that grand jury had lottery tickets with them, all purchased at those same lottery parlors.7

  One gambling house on Mott Street, just a block from police headquarters, was reportedly populated by hundreds of the very policemen who were paid to monitor its activities.

  * * *

  The bloody slaying of hooker Helen Jewett in the spring of 1836 did not end prostitution in New York City; it energized it. Five years after Helen was butchered with an ax, anywhere from three thousand (city number) to six thousand (reformer Ezra Stiles Ely’s number) to ten thousand (reformer John McDowall’s number) prostitutes worked in a community of whorehouses, on street corners, and even in the balconies of exquisite theaters, where they thought nothing of propositioning men in front of their wives. Numerous prostitutes saved room money by servicing clients in their business offices. Many staked out territories such as particular saloons or docks. One enterprising fifteen-year-old girl became the prize hooker for men who worked on a particular coal barge.8

  Prostitution was very profitable. Women who worked in high-end brothels in midtown New York west of Broadway, or in expensive “parlor houses” such as the one on Thomas Street where Jewett died, could clear, after fees to madams and room and board, close to $50 a week, or some $300,000 a year in today’s money. Even dirty street urchin girls could earn 50 cents for quickie masturbations, or more than $100 a trick in today’s money. A girl who relieved three men a day—not uncommon—could earn the equivalent of $100,000 a year.

  The work was not easy for hookers, though, no matter the era in which they worked. One study done in the early years of the twentieth century showed that a woman in a slum whorehouse coupled with 19 men a day for a week and on one day slept with 28. Two other hookers in that house had sex with between 120 and 150 men a week, and one day one of them had sex with 49 men. Some young girls would have sex with 15 to 20 men in a three-hour period. Many of the girls were twelve and thirteen and traveled the streets with a young sister, holding hands to ward off the chilly air and sometimes exchanging shoes because one pair was cut up and cold.9

  A whore’s career was usually short-lived. Women who began selling their bodies at age twenty often stopped when they turned thirty just because their looks started to fade. Men who had known them for years tired of them. Younger hookers stole their business. The biggest reason for leaving “the game” was that many women wanted to become “normal,” to marry and have a family, and could not do that while living in a house of ill repute.

  Madams’ careers never ended, though, and were often prosperous. The high-class madams kept beautiful brothels. Johns entered the home through a lobby and went to a large living room, where they met the women of the house, chose one, and sat back to listen to a woman play a piano. (“There is, however, no feeling nor expression in what she sings,” said one visitor. “All is cold as ice.”)10 Madams of some of the more luxurious houses earned $1 million a year, in today’s money, and paid no income tax, either. Some, such as Maria Williamson, owned half a dozen houses of prostitution.11 Others, like “Princess” Julia Brown, legendary for playing the piano at her brothel, were frequent guests at parties and receptions hosted by the finest families in town. Brown paid for pews at different churches in the city, had season tickets to two different theaters, and contributed heavily to local Bible societies.12

  Sometimes the life of the hooker-turned-housewife was reversed. Many working-class housewives in the pre–Civil War era moonlighted as hookers to earn extra money that they thought was needed to run their homes, buy groceries, and keep their children clothed. Some of their husbands urged them to do so. Hundreds of them bought provocative dresses, walked the streets, procured johns, and took them to rented rooms in boardinghouses for sex. Some women from other states moved to New York temporarily, usually in the summer, and rented rooms where they turned tricks for a month or two before going back home.13

  Ironically, hotel owners, even the managers of the most elegant establishments in the city, did not mind having brothels nearby or prostitutes walking their streets. It was good for business. Many out-of-town businessmen staying at the hotels sought prostitutes, and hotel employees provided them. The prostitutes were happy, and the hotel treasurer was happy. The police did not mind whorehouses near them, either. In the pre–Civil War era, four brothels were located on Greene Street, directly behind an early police precinct house.14

  The police were part of the street hooker’s life. She would pay police, possibly with money from her madam or pimp, to act as an escort to meet men recently arrived in New York and staying at hotels. The constable would meet men in the lobby and ask them where they wanted to go. They would talk about “fun,” and the officer would take them to the Battery, or some other park, and introduce them to hookers he worked with. The officer would go with the john to the door of the hooker’s boardinghouse and then leave the two alone, with a wad of bills in his pocket.

  The constables also did a marvelous job of looking the other way when hookers and wild parties were involved. Whenever a watchman passed an illicit party at a brothel or boardinghouse, he would not stop to arrest the hookers or the gamblers running the illegal games that he found inside the loud rooms. Instead, he would merely rap on the door sharply with his wooden nightstick, as a reminder to keep the noise down, and move on down the street, blissfully ignorant.15

  The parties in 1850 were bigger and louder and filled with more hookers and dandies than in 1840, and the saloons and theaters were more crowded than ever. The entire city was bigger and more boisterous than ten years earlier. Broadway was a complete madhouse of people and traffic by 1850. “The crowd … pours along its turbid tide of life with a sullen roar and rushing, like the sound of the surf trampling upon the rocky beach. Before the theaters … the omnibuses are drawn up in solid phalanx, and at the place where the popular entertainment of the night is given, a row of carriages extends for a quarter of a mile either way,” wrote journalist George Foster as he walked the streets of the city in 1850.16

  People were constantly killed by the erratically driven omnibus
es. In February of 1842 a ten-year-old boy was hit by one. The bus knocked his body to the ground and then the wheel ran over him, killing him instantly, to the horror of those on the bus.17

  Lurking near each omnibus stop were the prostitutes, trying to solicit business. Prostitution was illegal in New York State, and had been for generations. Nothing stopped the world’s oldest profession, though. During the Revolution, a mysterious fire wiped out a large section of New York City, including the area where most of the brothels were then housed. That did not set back the prostitution industry at all. Temporary houses, many with large, wide canvas ship’s sails used as roofs, were constructed on Broad Street and opened for business rather quickly. They were “cheap and convenient lodgings for the frail sisterhood, who plied their trade most briskly in the vicinity of the shipping and the [British] barracks,” chuckled New Yorker William Duer.18

  Brit John Watt was enraged by the very public hookers in town during that era. New York was, he said, “the worst school for youth of any of his majesty’s dominions, ignorance, vanity, dress and dissipation being the reigning characteristics of their insipid lives.”19

  The “whoreocracy,” as many jokingly called it, prevailed after the city began its rapid population boom in the 1820s, and by the early 1840s New York was the prostitution capital of the United States. “New York is the Gomorrah of the New World,” said Norwegian visitor Ole Raeder. The strumpets strolled Broadway in early afternoon or worked in packs of five or six and hung out in front of heavily populated restaurants or expensive hotels. Many had arrangements with hotels to use rooms frequently in order to get discounted quarters or, better yet, an hourly room rate.