The little girls were especially useful. Gangs had them working as thieves in the daytime and then dressed them up and used them as prostitutes in the evening. “Most of the girls who sell fruit at the different offices are in the daily habit of practicing the most beastly and immoral things,” said one police captain.42
The world of prostitutes changed in the 1850s. In previous decades, whoredom was finding its place in the city, cooperating with the flash newspapers, aligning itself with the police and judges and expanding the market as far as it could go. The problem the prostitution business had in the 1840s was brothels in run-down neighborhoods that were not that attractive, a clientele that was too working-class, and not enough wealthy patrons. That all changed in the 1850s when madams, and everybody else, realized that New York’s population was growing rapidly and that more and more men visited the city on business or on vacation. The market of men was becoming enormous. The brothels thrived.
Many of them moved to what is now the Soho section of lower Manhattan, the area bounded by the Bowery, Canal, Laurens, and Houston. These were neighborhoods with few poor and working-class people, plenty of wealthy johns, and well-built, attractive apartment-style housing for larger and more comfortable brothels. “Not only did the felon and fancy female [prostitutes] hold forth in this district, but likewise the so-called sporting element, which was then made up of ‘shoulder hitters,’ dog fighters, gamblers, actors and politicians,” said the Police Gazette. This neighborhood was also right next door to Broadway, which was booming in the 1850s. Broadway’s entertainment district was getting enormous, and the spillover crowd from its theaters, nightclubs, and saloons created a surplus of business for the brothels.43
The hotel business was booming in the 1850s, and by the end of the decade New York had over forty hotels, most of them large and expensive. They were a natural oasis for sex. “Fallen women of the higher classes abound at the hotels,” wrote McCabe.44
The prostitutes of the 1850s seemed to look better and dress better, many observers said. They patrolled the hotel lobbies and theater balconies, as usual, but now could also be found loitering in the best restaurants, which were the most likely place to meet men with money. “Almost without exception, they seem in the faint light of the street to be dressed with elegance and taste, to be handsome in feature and form, and to have left in them something of womanly reserve and modesty,” wrote journalist Edward Crapsey.45
The houses of prostitution were run by madams but owned by the wealthy real estate developers, such as Amos Eno, who ran half a dozen. These men gave the whorehouses respectability, better health and sanitation conditions, and a better public image. The legal business invaded many brothels. Lawyers, detectives, and patrolmen arrived to ask questions about johns and obtain information in divorce cases. The madams and women were forthcoming, and in return, the police did not arrest anyone. It was a nice arrangement, and it lasted for decades.46
In the 1850s, sex of all types flourished. The first “model art shows” arrived and did a solid business. In these shows, partially or completely naked women took part in “shows” in front of a crowd of men. They were advertised as “art” to get around obscenity laws and not interrupted by police. Teenage boys sold photos of naked women at the doors to these theaters, and all over town, and police did not arrest any of them. Concert saloons opened. They were standard saloons with singers and dancers who put on a show while a dozen or so women sang along in the audience and solicited men while they did so. Brothels held large, elaborate costume and masquerade balls in an effort to attract more men in a more commercial way.
Guidebooks replaced the flash newspapers in the mid-1850s. These pamphlets were very detailed guides to the brothels of New York, with descriptions of acts of “service” the women performed, street addresses, and descriptions of the houses. The editors often editorialized about the luxuries of the brothel and, from time to time, criticized city policies on sex. The guidebooks also helped the madams solicit women as sex workers, reminding them in editorials that they were safe in the brothels but very unsafe in the violent streets of New York.47
Many complained about the expansion of the prostitution and sex trade, and police refusal to crack down on it, as the 1850s rolled on, but most just scoffed. “There are certain propensities and passions inherent in our nature which will have vent in one shape or another, despite all the combined legislative wisdom of communities,” wrote Whitman. “It has always been so, it is now so, and until some radical change takes place in frail human nature, it will always be so.”48
* * *
Why didn’t the police do something about the extension of the prostitution business, and all crimes? Some thought that the police needed better salaries in order to function efficiently and so the government could attract better people to the force. “We have no right to look for saintliness in blue uniforms and pewter badges when their wearers receive but $25 to $35 a week,” wrote one man.49
The first professional police were always criticized.50
In 1895, Jacob Cantor testified before a state senate hearing against the police. He cited their overly close ties to Tammany and said what many had said about the illicit relationship between the cops and politicians back in the 1840s and 1850s. The officers were guilty, Cantor said, of “arrest and brutal treatment of [Whig] voters, watchers and workers; open violations of the election laws, canvassing for Tammany Hall candidates, invasion of election booths, forcing of Tammany Hall posters upon [Whig] voters (and) denial to Republican voters and election district officers of their legal rights.”
Cantor added that “a cloud of witnesses” agreed with him and had testified “that the police conducted themselves at the several polling places upon the principle that they were there not as guardians of the public peace to enforce law and order, but for the purpose of acting as agents for Tammany Hall in securing to the candidates of that organization by means fair or foul the largest possible majority.”51
Mayor Havemeyer, out of office after his first term, was back in City Hall again in 1848 as Tammany’s choice for mayor. The Hall preferred Barnburner Havemeyer over Hunker candidates. The former mayor won reelection, but most of the aldermanic posts went to the Democratic Hunkers. Near the end of his second term, Havemeyer recognized all of the complaints against the police, every single one of which he investigated, but stood firm in his belief that law enforcement was better than under the old system and that no system is perfect. “So fully are those benefits recognized by the whole community, that the complaints of the inefficiency of the police, which were formerly so incessant and universal, are now seldom if ever heard,” the mayor told the increasingly unhappy residents of New York.52
Havemeyer was one of the few Tammany mayors in the late 1840s. All of the factions in the Hall tried to work together to regain City Hall, the mayor’s office as well as the Common Council, in order to give themselves a permanent grip on city government and the lucrative New York patronage. All of that would coalesce shortly under the fabulous Fernando Wood, a former congressman and survivor of a notorious sex scandal who was idling in the political shadows in the late 1840s, trying to avoid trouble and make a fortune in city real estate.53
* * *
One of the main faults of New York’s City government in the 1850s was the continued failure to recognize the rapid growth of the city’s population and to develop a plan to accommodate the hundreds of thousands of new arrivals. The problem was not just that New York City was growing but that Brooklyn was experiencing a surge in growth, too, as were the surrounding cities of Jersey City and Newark, in New Jersey. From 1840 to 1870, New York’s population grew to nearly 900,000, a 300 percent jump. Brooklyn’s population in that same thirty-year period soared from 47,613 to 280,000, a 600 percent increase. Newark climbed from 17,000 to 71,000, a leap of more than 400 percent. Jersey City rose from 3,072 to 29,000, a 900 percent jump. Conversely, Philadelphia’s population only rose to 565,000, a 100 percent jump, and Baltimo
re from 102,000 to 212,000 a 100 percent increase. Boston’s residency went from 93,000 to 177,000, a doubling. Taken together, all of metropolitan New York saw an increase of more than 400 percent, a far bigger jump than any other metropolitan area in the world. Those numbers would not level off for decades as the city grew. As an example, in the next few years, from 1870 to 1890, New York’s population doubled again, and the size of cities around it, such as Brooklyn and Jersey City, grew by two and a half times. From 1880 to 1920, the United States’ population jumped from 50 million to just over 100 million people, but New York City’s percentage increase was still larger than the nation’s.54
“We cannot all live in cities, yet nearly all seem determined to do so,” wrote Horace Greeley of the Tribune.55
At the same time, New York’s imports and exports jumped from $94 million to $400 million and represented one-quarter of all American trade imports and exports. In 1852, a writer for Banker’s Magazine wrote that “it is fully conceded that New York is now the grand center of commercial and monetary movement in this country.”56
` Visitors to the city were dazzled by the unrelenting surge in population and the speed with which everything moved. “New York is certainly altogether the most bustling, cheerful, lifefull, restless city I have yet seen in the United States. Nothing and nobody seems to stand still for half a moment in New York,” wrote Lady Emmeline Stuart-Wortley, a British noblewoman who visited the city in 1850 with her thirteen-year-old daughter.57
That was no secret, and yet, when city fathers started to plan the development of the remainder of Manhattan Island, in studies that started in 1807 and became more intense in 1811, they ignored the pleas for parks, tree-shaded streets, waterfront esplanades, height limits on buildings, leisure areas, band shells, outdoor amphitheaters, and forested walkways and, instead, decided that the entire island would one day be a city just for residences, stores, and warehouses, clogged and congested from one river to the other, the perfect landscape for crime.58
No one profited more in that 1850s era than the owners of the city’s burgeoning stores, some of the largest in the nation. “Most extraordinary dimensions,” sighed Scottish journalist William Chambers on an 1853 visit. The size and number of stores raised the eyebrows of another British visitor, Edward Watkin. “Great length of ‘cassimeres and woolens goods stores,’ here, few hundred yards of ‘straw bonnet stores,’ and there a whole street devoted to ‘leather stores.’… It seemed as if almost every kind of supply had its chief quarter in the city.… Quite startling to a stranger accustomed to more quiet waters.”59
New York women flocked to these stores and emerged as the best-dressed ladies on earth. British author William Thackeray, who had traveled the world, wrote that “Solomon in all his glory, or the Queen of Sheba when she came to visit him in state, was not arrayed so magnificently as these New York damsels.”60
In the corridors of New York’s high society in the early part of the decade, though, there was a great deal of nervous energy being expanded in every direction. The clubby relationships were at an all-time high for tensions. Men continually tried to impress each other with their wealth, and women with their ostentatious style of living. Many began to loathe some of society’s pushy members. George Templeton Strong, a very visible member of that club, was angry at many of them, especially the Stevenses of Bleecker Street. “There’s a painful sense of arduous exertion that I feel whenever I meet them. They are always in a state of effort, like the statue of an athlete with every muscle in the anatomy straining and turgid, gasping to maintain or to establish the exalted social and intellectual position of the family and all its members, that unparalleled brute Master Austin included.”61
Strong was irritated by many of the wealthy women he knew, too. A friend of his, David Graham, became very ill, and the diarist was angry at Graham’s wife’s behavior in the crisis. “A handsome, negligent, extravagant, heartless harridan of a wife has aggravated the case sadly. She has the bad blood of the female Hyslops in her veins, has spent her husband’s property, run him into debt and left him in his suffering in the arms of hirelings.”62
Strong, and many others, complained that the pace of life in New York was becoming too fast in the 1850s. “In the morning hours, when the New York business population … pours out into the main artery, Broadway, and descends hurriedly downtown, nothing in the world could stop or divert the torrent. Even if Sebastopol had been in their way, those men would have run over it at one rush,” wrote Adam de Gurowski.63
* * *
The ineptitude of the new police was apparent to all in the spring of 1849, when the feud between two prominent actors and their followers came to a head at the Astor Place Opera House. William Macready, British, and Edwin Forrest, American, two temperamental performers, had been rivals for fame and attention in England and America for years. Both were working at competing theaters in the same play, Macbeth. Macready starred in the production at the Astor Place Opera House and Forrest headlined in the play at a Brooklyn stage. Philip Hone, an ardent theatergoer, wrote in his diary that Forrest was “a vulgar, arrogant loafer, with a pack of kindred rowdies at his heels.” Forrest’s supporters crammed the opera house and when Macready first took the stage pelted him with missiles, programs, books, rotten eggs, and a few large chairs hurled down from the balcony. They screamed and yelled at him and then turned on the patrons, driving them from the theater. It was “a mob,” wrote Hone, who predicted that a riot would soon follow, if not on the next day, sometime that week.
He was right. Three nights later, Macready was persuaded to return to the theater to continue his performances. Sailors from a nearby British ship, America, arrived carrying large placards that announced that if there was trouble they could get guns. Again, hundreds of “Forresters” jammed the theater, and again, when Macready appeared, they threw anything they could find at him. Officer George Walling was one of the police who, fearing disorder, positioned themselves in the balcony, their eyes constantly scanning the theater for trouble. He tried to halt the riot when it started but was beaten down to the ground by a group of angry troublemakers and watched hopelessly as a man threw a chair that nearly hit Macready onstage. The barrage of chairs and missiles increased as Walling struggled to get up. Other police arrested a number of rioters inside the crowded theater and maintained order, barely, but it was a very different story outside in the streets that surrounded the playhouse. There, hundreds of rioters attacked the theater, tossing paving stones that had earlier been torn up by work crews fixing a sewer line. The paving blocks and smaller stones destroyed windows and doors. Thousands of shards of sharp glass flew through the night air, striking area residents. “The stones came from the mob in volleys.… All was terror and confusion,” said Walling, who had moved outside with six other cops. “The audience was positively terror stricken.”
The hapless police, half of them unarmed, had their hands full inside the theater, where they were joined by the mayor and other city officials. Fearful of trouble, the mayor had asked the state militia, the 7th Regiment (there were city militias and private militias in the area, too), to be present at the performance, and they were, in full force, ready for action. Two units of the militia, totaling three hundred men, accompanied by sixty cavalrymen, blocked off several streets and then surrounded the mob that had grown to several thousand people. Some militiamen escorted straggling theatergoers around the mob to safety. There was much shouting, jeering, and cheering and finally, on the mayor’s instructions, a loudly shouted order to disperse by the head of the militia. The crowd did not move, and the militiamen, on foot and horseback, opened fire with their rifles, at first deliberately aiming over the heads of the people in the crowd to scare them. Many of the bullets hit the walls of buildings and ricocheted into the crowd, though, wounding a dozen or more. This caused the crowd to rebel, not disperse. “The scene was now one of the wildest excitements and the fury of the mob became uncontrollable,” said Walling.
The
police and militia feared that the unhappy mob would overrun them, and the militia leader then ordered his men to fire directly into the crowd. “There was a flash, a deafening roar, and then were heard the cries of the wounded and the groans of the dying. The effect of the volley was awful,” said Walling. “Scores lay upon the ground, writhing with pain. Terror stricken, the cowardly rioters rushed from the scene, trampling upon the prostrate forms of those who had fallen.”64
There was more firing.
“Three or four volleys were discharged and about 20 people were killed and a large number wounded,” wrote Hone, who was there at the theater and had walked outside to see what was going on. “It is to be lamented that among those killed were several innocent persons, as is always the case in such affairs. A large proportion of the mob being lookers-on, who, putting no faith in the declaration of the magistrates that the fatal order was about to be given, refused to retire and shared the fate of the rioters.”65
Many in the theater, and in the neighborhood, feared that clash. George Templeton Strong stood on a nearby corner with his father-in-law and a judge and watched as the militia prepared for a confrontation. “Everything looked much in earnest—guns loaded and matches lighted—everything ready to sweep the streets with grape at a minute’s notice, and the police and troops very well disposed to do it whenever they should be told. The mob were in a bitter, bad humor, but a good deal frightened,” he wrote in his diary.66
City officials blamed the riot on the spontaneous anger of the crowd, but others were not so sure. Walling, who had been in the middle of it, said, “My experience has satisfied me that the concerted actions of a mob have rarely anything spontaneous about them. In many cases. the so-called ‘uprising’ has much premeditation in its composition.” The cop added that throughout the day people had been trying to set up disputes between native-born New Yorkers and immigrants, and thousands of handbills urging a demonstration at the opera house had been handed out.67
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