Five Points
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Sanger estimated that the average full-time prostitute earned ten dollars per week, though whether he meant net or gross income is unclear. Even if half of these earnings went to pay room and board to a madam or rent at a house of assignation, this still left a weekly income far above what a woman could expect to receive at needlework, domestic service, or any of the other “women’s trades.” Of the “wretched females” who work as New York prostitutes, the directors of the House of Industry asserted accurately that “a majority are dragged down or bred from birth to their trade of death by inexorable WANT; victims, not of guilty choice, nor of treacherous lust, but of absolute starvation and despair.”22
Destitution, however, was not the only factor driving women to prostitution. Although more women cited that cause than any other when asked why they had become prostitutes (525 of 2,000), the variety of answers provided by the others is both surprising and illuminating. Nearly as many women (513) attributed their circumstances to “inclination,” 282 reported being “seduced,” 181 cited “drink,” 164 ill-treatment by their parents, 124 called it “an easy life,” 84 blamed keeping “bad company,” and 71 were “persuaded by prostitutes” to take up the trade. One must read such evidence with caution and skepticism, yet certain revealing trends are apparent. Sanger noted, for example, that many of the cases of “inclination” involved women who left their husbands because their spouses refused to give them liquor or were abandoned by their husbands because they drank to excess. These cases, combined with those who specifically cited drink as the cause of their plight, suggest that liquor played a significant role in driving many women to prostitution. Some might argue that crushing poverty may have induced these women to drink, and that it all circles back to destitution, but as is the case today, many nineteenth-century women became prostitutes in order to finance an addiction to stimulants.23
Mary O’Daniel and Ellen Cable would have classified themselves among the next largest group, those claiming that they were “seduced” into the sex trade. But most women using this term referred to a different experience—that of having been impregnated and then abandoned by a boyfriend or fiancé. Foster contended that the “great source” of New York prostitutes was young women from the countryside who came to the city “to escape infamy” after becoming pregnant out of wedlock. The immigration experience also provided ample opportunity for young women (especially those traveling alone) to be seduced. Of the 282 women who attributed their lives as prostitutes to “seduction,” 16 specified that they were “corrupted” on immigrant ships and another 8 in New York’s emigrant boardinghouses (where newcomers stayed before finding a permanent home).24
Dr. Sanger found that nearly half of New York’s prostitutes had been so employed for one year or less, indicating that few courtesans spent years in the trade. In fact, contemporaries reported that many women worked only sporadically as prostitutes when all other means of earning a living were exhausted. Sanger found that many were “women whose trades are uncertain, and who are liable at certain seasons of the year to be without employment. Then real necessity force[s] them on the town until a return of business provides them with work.” Seamstresses, poorly paid and frequently unemployed, were often associated with casual prostitution, but Sanger found that many more former servants worked in the sex trade than did needleworkers.25
Over the course of the antebellum years, the ethnic background of the district’s sex workers changed. In the 1820s and ‘30s, most of the neighborhood’s prostitutes were native-born. By the 1840s, however, native-born courtesans (and their madams) had abandoned Five Points, moving either uptown or west across Broadway. Adeline Miller, for example, ran brothels at 32 Orange in 1822, 85 Cross in 1826, and 44 Orange in 1835, but by 1838 had relocated to the West Side, where she continued to operate bordellos until 1859. Brothel keeper Phoebe Doty, proprietor of establishments on Anthony and Orange Streets in the twenties and thirties, had likewise moved west of Five Points by the forties, as had Sarah Tuttle. As was often the case in Five Points, the Irish filled the vacuum left by the departing natives.26
The gender of the typical brothel keeper began to change as well. In the 1820s, women ran more than three-quarters of all Five Points bordellos; in the 1850s, in contrast, they operated just 37 percent. This transformation seems to have resulted primarily from changes in the Five Points population rather than in the sex trade itself, for in neighborhoods where native-born prostitutes still predominated (such as the area between Canal and Houston Streets and the Lower West Side), madams outnumbered male brothel keepers by a margin of more than five to one. As Five Points became more heavily Irish, men managed to capture an increasing share of the profits from prostitution.27
Despite the omnipresence of prostitution, residents did not hesitate to complain about a brothel when it disturbed the peace, especially when the bordello was located away from the Five Points intersection. In 1842, for example, neighbors filed a complaint about the brothel at 168 Leonard Street, where “dancing singing and carousing” went on “at late and improper hours of the night.” A year later, Robert Gordon of 10 Orange Street and Edward Blackall of 121/2 Orange pressed charges against John Donaho for keeping a house of prostitution in the basement of 12 Orange, where “persons of ill name & fame . . . are in the nightly practice of resorting until late and improper hours of the night to the great disgrace of the neighbourhood.” That same year, Thomas Flynn of 87 Mulberry, William Murkitrick of 85 Mulberry, and Bernard Kennedy of 76 Mulberry secured the conviction of John Jack for keeping a disorderly house of prostitution at 83 Mulberry. The “premises are a great nuisance and annoyance to the neighbours,” the complainants testified, “disturbances occurring there at late, and all hours of the night, persons complaining of being robbed in there, fighting and quarreling and disturbing the neighbourhood.” Prostitution may have been grudgingly tolerated by Five Pointers, but disturbing the peace was not.28
The penalties for those convicted in such cases—the charge was usually “keeping a disorderly house”—varied enormously. When in 1843, Five Points police officer William Nealis arrested seventeen “females of the Five Points, prostitutes and vagrants,” the judge sentenced each to four months in the penitentiary. A decade later, the Herald published a list of people, “mostly residents of the Sixth ward,” who had been convicted of operating unlicensed saloons that also served as “dens of prostitutes” and “resorts for thieves and vagabonds.” Their sentences ranged from two months to fifteen days in jail (the latter for the aforementioned Henry Hoffman for prostituting his own daughter) to fines of fifty dollars or less. But these were exceptionally severe punishments. The overwhelming majority of those found guilty of keeping a disorderly house of prostitution received just a judicial slap on the wrist. When Osman and Margaret Cutter were convicted of operating a disorderly house at 7 Elizabeth Street, the judge suspended their sentence on the condition that they vacate the premises. Likewise, when landlord John Devins of 24 Elizabeth Street was found guilty of the same crime (Devins lived in the basement while the prostitutes leased the upstairs), the magistrate suspended his sentence provided that Devins evict the prostitutes. Many other brothel keepers simply vacated their places of business when indicted, which they correctly surmised would lead to a dismissal of the charges. Ordinarily, only habitual offenders or those who tried to avoid paying their liquor license fees suffered a significant criminal penalty operating a Five Points house of prostitution.29
“CRIMES AND OUTRAGES ALMOST DAILY COMMITTED IN THIS NEIGHBORHOOD”
The first known press description of Five Points, from 1826, called the district “the resort of thieves and rogues of the lowest degree.” Another early newspaper account asked authorities “to put an end to the crimes and outrages almost daily committed in this neighborhood, which has become the most dangerous place in our city.” Antebellum police reports confirm that crime was endemic to the neighborhood. Hardly a day went by without the press announcing a number of arrests.30
One of the most common crimes was petty thievery. In contrast to the penalties for prostitution, those for theft could be quite severe. Mary Hoy of 83 Bayard Street, for example, charged her neighbor Margaret McCasken with stealing “some saucers and other crockery, worth fifty cents.” The judge found her guilty and sentenced her to two months in the penitentiary. Sometimes it seemed that the defendant’s status as a lowly Five Pointer motivated magistrates to impose particularly stiff punishments. Irish immigrant Mary White worked as a “housekeeper” for Ann Francis, “a negro woman, who keeps a sailors’ boardinghouse at No. 94 Park-street.” Francis supplemented her boardinghouse income by taking in clothes to wash, but after hiring White in 1857, she often found clothing missing. Her suspicions were confirmed when she noticed White wearing a frilled petticoat that had disappeared a few hours earlier. “I guess she stole the clothes,” declared the judge in rendering his verdict. “She’s no great shakes anyhow, to be housekeeper in a sailors’ boarding house kept by a nigger. We sentence her to the Penitentiary for two months.”31
Harsh sentences did little to deter many of Five Points’ more hardened criminals. In 1850, Peter Meehan caught Patrick Murphy coming down the stairs of the tenement at 6 Mulberry Street carrying clothes, cash, and other items from Meehan’s own apartment. Authorities had released Murphy from jail only two days earlier for a previous crime. Professional burglars such as Murphy often made Five Points their home. The Old Brewery and Cow Bay were especially renowned as dens of thieves, but police found criminals congregating throughout the district. In 1851, a “tail diver” (pickpocket) caught by Five Points policeman William Bell admitted during his interrogation “that No 71/2 Elizabeth Street upstairs was a resort for small thieves—a number of them lodged there.” On another occasion Bell discovered that “No. 15 Orange St. is the residence of a Gang of Thieves.”32
Juvenile thieves abounded as well. “I went in Orange St. to look for a piece of blue pilot cloth that was stolen from the express wagon of Charles Croft of 70 Maiden Lane,” Bell recorded in his logbook in February 1851. “On Wednesday evening last while standing in front of No. 11 Orange St. I learned that it was stolen by a boy and taken into a house in the neighborhood.” When the husband of a woman whose bracelets were stolen placed a newspaper advertisement seeking information about the crime, he received word that a Five Points boy living in the basement of the rear tenement at 74 Mulberry Street had taken them. For the most part, such thefts seem to have been crimes of opportunity, in which children stole items they found unguarded, but some Five Pointers actually trained children to pilfer. Thirteen-year-old George Appo, for example, learned to pick pockets from two thieves who posed as newsboys.33
Five Points adult thieves especially targeted naive visitors carrying large sums of cash. In 1847, a pickpocket stole $45 (the equivalent of about $720 today) from an English sailor patronizing a brothel at 156 Anthony Street. Police in 1849 arrested Caroline Goldsmith for luring “greenhorn” Francis Oschatz into the “house” (brothel?) of Mrs. Cook at 81 Bayard and robbing him of $33 (more than $500 today). Sometimes criminals could reap substantial sums by doping their targets. An Illinois merchant passing through New York on his way to Boston with a load of butter claimed to have visited Five Points so that he could write about it to his friends back home. While at the corner of Cross and Orange, a woman asked him to treat her to a glass of gin. He did. But she drugged his drink and when he regained consciousness the woman had disappeared with his coat and a hundred dollars. Although he might have recovered his money by reporting the crime to the police, the man refused to do so and risk his reputable standing back home, where he served as a steward in his Methodist church.34
Tough New York juries had little sympathy for out-of-towners robbed after overindulging in Five Points saloons. In 1850, “three Five Point thieves” lured Reuben Knox into “John Orpen’s [public] house, corner of Centre and Anthony streets,” where they got him drunk playing cards and then stole his watch and thirty dollars. Knox complained to the police, who arrested the crooks, but Officer Denis Dowdican found Knox “so intoxicated that I deemed it my duty to take him to the station house for protection.” At the trial, the defendants’ attorney seized upon this last remark, arguing that the drunken Knox had lost the money and watch in the card game. The jury returned a verdict of not guilty. The chagrined judge released the prisoners, lamenting that the habitual criminals had been lucky to escape conviction. One of the three—Patrick Murphy—was the one caught a few days later robbing Peter Meehan’s Mulberry Street flat.35
Some stolen goods, such as crockery and frilled petticoats, could be used by the thieves themselves. Coats and pocketwatches were disposed of through fences, many of whom operated in the locale. Patrolman Bell constantly sought leads on Five Points fences. By “pumping” Joe Hancock, a recently arrested criminal, Bell “ascertained that Meyer Blas [of] 361/2 Orange St. was a fence.” A few months later while interrogating an accessory to murder, Bell learned of three more fences, including one in “a little rum hole in Cross St. near Orange.” Despite Bell’s detective work, prosecutors found it difficult to win convictions against fences who ran secondhand shops, because the storekeepers could claim ignorance as to the origins of the goods. When police investigating the theft of forty-one silk parasols questioned Polish immigrant Harris Solomon at his second-hand clothing shop at 9 Orange Street in 1852, the thirty-year-old claimed to have none in his stock. In a search of his house, however, police found four of them in a bureau under some old clothes. Although Solomon claimed to have purchased those umbrellas in California, skeptical prosecutors charged him with possession of stolen goods. The outcome of Solomon’s case is not known, but the paucity of such indictments in the district attorney’s records suggests that few fences were punished for their crimes.36
Some Five Points robberies could be quite violent. Police in 1849 arrested African-American William Peterson who, along with “two other darkies,” knocked William Everson (also black) senseless in Cow Bay with a missile from a slingshot and then robbed him of a “five franc piece and a shilling.” Prosecutors in 1847 charged two other African Americans, Sam Rice and George Morgan, with assaulting a man from New Jersey while he walked on Orange Street, dragging him into an alley, and robbing him of eight dollars, his coat, and boots. Women could use violence to perpetrate crimes as well. Frances Wilson, a “colored woman,” lured a man into a building on Little Water Street, then knocked him down and took his coat and a five-dollar bill. The man tried to hide his sterling silver pocketwatch, but Wilson “bit his clenched fist to get it out of his hand.” The trial judge sentenced her to ten years in Sing Sing prison, probably because of the violence involved and her status as a repeat offender. In contrast, when Ann Gannon assaulted Bridget Fitzpatrick in front of 49 Mott Street and “knocked some of her front teeth out,” she merely received a suspended sentence.37
Violence against women seems to have been especially common in Five Points. James Adams stabbed fellow African-American Margaret Turner in the back at her home at 76 Orange Street in 1853 because he was jealous of the attention she paid to other men. In 1872, a drunken Bayard Street man shot to death his live-in “lover” of two weeks because she went out with friends despite his objections. The Times described the murderer as a habitual thief while the victim was a twenty-year-old “waitress in a low concert saloon on Chatham-street.” Their tenement at 61 Bayard was “a resort for the vilest type of low people.”38
Marriage provided no guarantee of safety from the opposite sex. Spousal abuse was apparently common, though it was almost never reported to the police. In one of the few such cases described in the press, the Tribune noted the arrest of both Lewis Vatty Sr. and Jr. Police found the son “beating the father without mercy” because he had discovered his father “beating the wife.” One Five Points girl insisted on leaving midway through Sunday school class each week to be sure her drunken father was not battering her mother again. He was finally jailed. A more common s
ituation was probably the one a Times reporter found in the basement lodging house at 35 Baxter Street in 1859. The keeper of the establishment “had been ‘banging his wife, and hit [a lodger] a lick sideways that almost killed her.’ The wretch had kicked another girl so severely that she had gone to bed early in the day and not got up since.” Despite the violence directed against her, the man’s wife defended her husband, saying her “old man was a little wild when he was in liquor” but was otherwise a good mate. Given the utter dependence of Five Points wives (especially those with children) on the incomes of their husbands, most would have hesitated to press charges.39
Rape was another violent crime against women that was rarely recorded. Perhaps the close-knit nature of the Five Points community discouraged such a crime. Or, like spousal abuse, it may have gone unreported. The only two cases from Five Points found in a survey of antebellum New York newspapers and a sampling of indictment records both involved the rape of Irish-American women by non-Irish men. One involved Bridget Heney, a recently arrived Irish immigrant residing at 13 Mulberry Street. Heney had just lost her position as a live-in domestic servant and could not have been very happy as she tried to find her way back to Five Points on a Sunday evening in late January 1852. Her husband Patrick was still in Ireland, expecting her to earn money to pay for his passage to New York. According to her subsequent deposition, she was on Centre Street between Broome and Grand when she asked a passerby for directions to Mulberry Street. The young man, butcher John Holberton, convinced her to come inside and warm up before completing her journey. Holberton led Heney up a flight of stairs to the Centre Street Market militia drill room, where he threw her to the ground and raped her, telling her that he had plenty of cash and “would let her have some of the money” afterwards if she did not resist. When Holberton had finished, Heney (according to her own account) asked for the promised money. Holberton asked how much she wanted. Heney demanded two dollars, but Holberton refused to give her more than one. Holberton said he would give her the money downstairs, but before he could do so four or more of Holberton’s friends arrived, forced Heney back inside, and raped her as well, one after the other. The men then literally dragged her outside and left her on a doorstep.