Five Points

by Tyler Anbinder

  The evidence reveals that many of these charges were not so farfetched. The New York District Attorney’s indictment records reveal that for the blocks radiating from the Five Points intersection, nearly every building did house a brothel. Bordellos operated in thirty-three of the thirty-five dwellings on Anthony Street between Centre and the Five Points intersection at some point during the 1840s and ’50s. Brothel proprietors were likewise prosecuted in twelve of the fifteen houses on Cross Street between the Five Points intersection and Mulberry, and in thirteen of the seventeen residences on Orange Street from the Five Points intersection to Leonard Street. In other sections of the neighborhood, prostitution was far less pervasive. In the same two decades, there were only two prosecutions for commercial sex in the eighty or so houses on Mulberry below Bayard, only two indictments for the sixty buildings on Bayard from the Bowery to Orange Street, and none on Mott below Bayard.13

  Evidence also confirms the Post’s charge that young teenagers sometimes worked in Five Points brothels. In 1834, one charitable organization recorded the case of fifteen-year-old streetwalker Catharine Wood, who picked up customers on thoroughfares such as the Bowery and took them to Five Points houses of assignation (bordellos where women could bring men without prior arrangement). In 1849, police supposedly found an eleven-year-old girl working as a prostitute in Bridget Mangin’s brothel. Some of the cases of young prostitutes also involved family members of different generations working together, as Foster had described. County Tipperary native Bridget McCarty prostituted both her fourteen-year-old niece and a fourteen-year-old boarder at her homes at 57 Mott Street and 76 Mulberry. Henry Hoffman prostituted his own daughter in his Sixth Ward bawdy house. Fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Dayton worked as a streetwalker, bringing customers back to the family bordello on Orange Street, where her mother also sometimes consorted with customers. By 1855, Mangin’s two daughters (age unknown) prostituted themselves at their mother’s brothel, then located above Crown’s Grocery at 150 Worth Street. Such cases were undoubtedly not the norm. A survey taken just before the Civil War found that the majority of prostitutes ranged in age from seventeen to twenty-two, and it seems unlikely that many mother-daughter teams could have worked in the neighborhood’s brothels. Nonetheless, the seemingly outlandish charges made by the press concerning such practices at Five Points “disorderly houses” were not entirely figments of their over-active imaginations.14

  Worth Street (formerly Anthony) looking west from the Five Points intersection toward Centre Street, c. 1868. The appearance of the block had not changed much since the 1840s and 1850s, when virtually every building on the block housed a bordello. In the house at the corner on the left, Crown’s Grocery operated on the ground floor for many years, while Bridget Mangin ran the brothel upstairs. Collection of the New-York Historical Society.

  Children did not often work as prostitutes in brothels, but they did more frequently live in bordellos run by their parents. “I found that the children lived in the brothels, and that as soon as the school was out the children returned to their residence,” reported an alarmed minister in the 1840s. In fact, a survey on the eve of the Civil War found that nearly half of New York prostitutes had children. Even more disturbing were the cases in which young children were put to work in such places. At 37 Baxter Street, Thomas Laughlin posted his seven-year-old stepdaughter Elizabeth upstairs late into the night to collect the prostitutes’ pay (or perhaps his cut if it was a house of assignation) while he minded the bar below. He became furious one evening in 1855 when she fell asleep and, in her words, “I did not watch the girls . . . that go out for company.” Having previously been struck in the head with a bottle by Laughlin, little Elizabeth feared a similar punishment and ran away to the House of Industry.15

  The charge that Five Points brothel keepers forced young women into prostitution against their will is also borne out by contemporary evidence. The Times reported in 1859 the case of a woman who took a position to live and work as a “tailoress” at 82 Centre Street. After she moved in, she was given nothing to sew but asked to have a drink with a man, clearly for prostitution. She fled, but her “employer” would not return her trunk unless she paid five dollars for room and board during her brief residence. Only with the assistance of the police did she retrieve her valuables. Similar cases were constantly reported in the city press.16

  The case of Mary O’Daniel illustrates the manner in which young women could be tricked or pushed into prostitution. The thirteen-year-old emigrated from County Waterford after the death of her father (her mother was evidently dead already). Arriving in New York in January 1851, she sought out her aunt, Bridget McCarty, a thirty-four-year-old widow living at 57 Mott Street with her six-year-old daughter. To her chagrin, Mary discovered that her aunt and cousin shared the one-room flat with three other “girls” who, according to Mary’s subsequent deposition, “had men come to see them, and . . . had sexual intercourse.” When one girl brought a man back to the studio apartment for sex, the others went outside until the couple had finished. Much to Mary’s relief, her aunt asked the other girls to leave about a month after her arrival. But McCarty then asked her niece “to go to bed with” a man, telling Mary “she would have a good life of it, and fine clothes, and plenty of money.” After what one might imagine were days or weeks of pressure, during which her aunt undoubtedly reminded Mary of how grateful she ought to be for having been taken in, Mary had sex with a man procured by her aunt, for which he paid McCarty ten dollars. Mary subsequently had intercourse with the man again, earning her aunt from one to two dollars per session. Soon Mary began going to bed with other men her aunt brought home. Before the end of the year, with the income generated by her niece, McCarty was able to transfer her household to a larger, two-room flat at 76 Mulberry Street.

  In early December, a fourteen-year-old, Ellen Cable, moved into McCarty’s Mulberry Street apartment. Ellen had lived in the Fourth Ward on Roosevelt Street until her mother sent her to find work as a domestic servant. According to the girl, McCarty (who had once been Cable’s neighbor) asked her “to go to her house to do house work.” After a few days, McCarty began pressuring Ellen to sleep with one of her customers, telling her, as she later testified, that the sex trade “would give me a good living.” Ellen stated that she initially refused to prostitute herself, but was eventually “compelled” to do so. She got into bed with a man that first night but would not have intercourse with him, even though he promised her ten dollars (apparently the going rate for a virgin). The persistent customer nonetheless stayed in bed with her all night. The next evening, he returned, and McCarty helped undress him and put him in bed with the girl. This time he “succeeded in having sexual intercourse with Deponent and seduced her.” He paid Ellen four dollars, which McCarty then confiscated. The next day, a friend of the previous night’s customer came to the house and McCarty locked him in the bedroom with Ellen, “and said man forced Deponent to undress herself and go to bed with him, and staid with her all that night and had sexual intercourse with her four times that night.” In the morning he paid McCarty one dollar.

  Ellen then went to the police, claiming that McCarty had forced her to have intercourse with these men against her will. McCarty denied the charges. “I work on shirts for a living,” she stated in her deposition, maintaining she had never had any female boarders or men come to her residences for sex. The combined testimony of Cable and O’Daniel effectively refuted McCarty, and she might have been convicted had Ellen not admitted under cross-examination that she had managed to tell her mother about the attempted seduction, and that her mother had told her to come home. Cable testified that she had nonetheless returned to Mulberry Street out of a determination to finish out her month of housework and receive the three dollars per month pay that McCarty had promised. After Cable’s mother confirmed this, Prosecutor A. Oakey Hall asked the judge to instruct the jury to acquit McCarty. The judge did so, and McCarty went free. Brothel keepers such as McCarty understood that
although prostitution was illegal, they could avoid prosecution so long as they did not keep prostitutes in the bordellos against their will and did not disturb their neighbors.17

  Bridget McCarty seems to have specialized in procuring young virgins for her clients. Five Points brothels varied enormously and featured a number of special attractions to lure customers. “Parlor houses” were the most expensive. These bordellos replicated the atmosphere of private residences, protected their clients’ anonymity, only accepted known customers or those with references from known clients, and charged as much as five dollars for a typical visit. They often limited their business to a particular type of customer, such as southerners, German Americans, or even visiting Philadelphians. Although few if any parlor houses remained in Five Points by the 1850s, a significant number probably operated there at one time. The bordello at 3 Franklin Street was a parlor house, situated on a relatively upscale block just three doors down from the ward’s police station. Helen Jewett, a highly paid twenty-three-year-old courtesan who became New York’s most famous prostitute after her grisly murder in 1836, resided in “Mrs. Cunningham’s” seraglio at that address until just three weeks before her violent demise.

  Much more common in Five Points, however, was the “public house,” a relatively inexpensive establishment that did little to hide the nature of its business and opened its doors to anyone. Whether public or private, brothels did their best to satisfy their customers’ tastes and predilections. Some featured mulatto women (said to be preferred by all black and some white men), while others offered only Irish paramours. The brothel at 62 Mott Street featured “ropes and braces.” Still other Five Points sex establishments had no women actually in residence at all. Such “houses of assignation”—sometimes rooms behind or above saloons, in other cases apartments in tenements—were used by streetwalkers who did not have a steady clientele or did not want to pay a madam.18

  One notorious form of brothel, the “panel house,” used the lure of sex as a mere subterfuge for robbery. The prostitute would lead her target to a windowless room with only a bed and a single chair and make sure he saw her lock the door. Once they were in bed and otherwise occupied, her accomplice, waiting in the next room, would slide a panel in the wall, reach into the bedroom to the man’s clothing on the chair, and empty his wallet while the prostitute made plenty of noise. When she subsequently asked for her payment, and the man discovered his money gone, he would claim to have been robbed, to which the prostitute would reply that this was impossible given the windowless room and the locked door. She and her partner would then chase the dupe from the brothel, threatening to have him arrested for refusing to pay for the sex if he should ever show his face in the neighborhood again. African-American Charles Quin, who was said to have lived in Five Points, operated panel houses in various parts of town, including one on Elizabeth Strreet. The Herald reported in 1841 that another “negro rascal” known as “Butcher Bill” and his partner Jenny Jones had robbed a man of $68 “by the stale trick of touch house.” Panel thieves tried to choose targets with lots of cash (out-of-town merchants visiting New York to buy wholesale goods or farmers who had recently sold agricultural products), those who appeared too upstanding to risk the embarrassment of complaining to authorities about having been robbed at a Five Points brothel.19

  One oft-noted aspect of Five Points prostitution was the brazen manner in which the prostitutes openly solicited business. “As evening sets in,” reported Foster in New York by Gas-Light, “the inmates of the house, dressed in the most shocking immodesty, gather [and] the door is flung open wide, if the weather will permit it; and the women, bareheaded, bare-armed and bare-bosomed, stand in the doorway or on the sidewalk, inviting passers-by, indiscriminately, to enter, or exchanging oaths and obscenity with the inmates of the next house, similarly employed.” The Boston author and lawyer Richard Henry Dana Jr. toured Five Points in 1844 in the dead of winter, but he too observed that “at almost every door were girls standing, & whispering loud to me as I passed, ‘Come here,’ ‘Come here, dear,’ ‘Good evening,’ ‘Where are you going?’ & the like.” Nathaniel P. Willis also found that “women stood at every door with bare heads and shoulders . . . showing a complete insensibility to cold” and even quoting their prices.20

  Those who ventured inside one of these bawdy houses found little variation from one to the next. Because they were not written expressly to shock the public, Dana’s diary entries (one written in 1843 and the other a year later) provide the most reliable portrait of a Five Points brothel interior and thus deserve to be quoted at length. Looking for a little excitement after an evening spent with New York social luminaries Theodore Sedgwick and William Cullen Bryant, the twenty-eight-year-old Dana put on his “rough coat & cap,” left his luxurious room at the Astor House, and walked to “that sink of iniquity & filth, the ‘Five Points.’” Heading east on Anthony Street, Dana found that “the buildings were ruinous for the most part, as well as I could judge, & the streets & sidewalks muddy & ill lighted. Several of [the] houses had wooden shutters well closed & in almost [each] such case I found by stopping & listening, that there were many voices in the rooms & sometimes the sound of music & dancing. . . . Grog shops, oyster cellars & close, obscure & suspicious looking places of every description abounded.” He peeked inside one saloon and saw “a dozen or so men & two women, the women cursing & swearing most dreadfully & using the most foul language I ever heard come fr. human lips.” Successfully working up the courage to enter one of these dives, Dana walked in and found “an old harradan [sic], with fat cheeks & a quick, sharp, devilish eye, standing at the door, & four girls, all young, & three of whom must have once been quite handsome.” None appeared older than seventeen. “There was only one man in the room, who had a girl in his lap”; “obscene prints” hung “about the walls to help excite [the] passions of the young who should drop into the house. Some sailors came in swearing & calling for drink, & I slipped out.”

  On his second visit to Five Points, Dana found a brothel “removed from sight & in an obscure place, where no one seemed in sight.” Inside, he discovered two women,

  one apparently old, probably the “mother” of the house, & the other rather young, as well as I could judge from her voice & face. They invited me to walk in & just say a word to them. . . . The room had but little furniture, a sanded floor, one lamp, & a small bar on which there were a few glasses, a decanter, & behind the bar were two half barrels. The old woman did not speak, but kept her seat in the door way. The younger one, after letting me look round a moment, asked me in a whisper & a very insinuating air, putting on as winning a smile as she could raise, & with the affectation of a simple childish way, to “just step into the bed room: it was only the next room.”

  Dana feared that the woman might have an accomplice waiting to rob him, but was too curious to refuse her invitation:

  The bed room was very small, being a mere closet, with one bed & one chair in it, the door through wh. we came & a window. There was no light in it, but it was dimly lighted by a single paine of glass over the door through which the light came from the adjoining room, in wh. we had been. The bed stead was a wretched truck, & the bed was of straw, judging from the sound it made when the woman sat upon it. Taking for granted that I wished to use her for the purposes of her calling she asked me how much I would give. I said “What do you ask?” She hesitated a moment, & then answered hesitatingly, & evidently ready to lower her price if necessary, “half a dollar?” I was astonished at the mere pittance for which she would sell her wretched, worn out, prostituted body. I can hardly tell the disgust & pity I felt. I told her at once that I had no object but curiosity in coming into the house, yet gave her the money from fear lest, getting nothing, she might make a difficulty or try to have me plundered. She took the money & thanked me, but expressed no surprise at my curiosity or strangeness.21

  What circumstances could force women into such degrading lives? Foster contended that “female prostitutio
n is the direct result of the inadequate compensation for female labor.” What little evidence exists on the subject seems to confirm his observation. In a survey of two thousand New York prostitutes conducted on the eve of the Civil War, Dr. William Sanger—chief physician at the hospital/prison complex on New York’s Blackwell’s (now Roosevelt) Island—found that most courtesans had tried to support themselves through other means before turning to the sex trade. They reported earning $1.50 a week as a “tailoress,” $2 a week as a cap maker, or a dollar a week sewing shirts, and that only when they could find work. A domestic servant–turned–prostitute told Sanger that she had sent all her earnings to her mother, so that when she lost her position she quickly became destitute and turned to prostitution as a last resort. A police captain told Sanger that he saw many impoverished women live on bread and water in the streets before becoming prostitutes.