by Betsy Israel
We hear the word Bowery—a long two-way boulevard running from Manhattan’s East Village into Chinatown—and light on phrases such as “skid row” or perhaps “junkie bum.” But back then it was a scene. At sundown every day, this hub of the butcher’s trade became the site of a daring all-night party. Couples crowded for miles beneath the elevated train, or El, whose tracks cast slatted lantern strips across the gaudy attractions—the famed Bowery Theater, freak shows, oyster houses, hundreds of eateries and food carts, some selling the first mass-produced ice cream, and the concert saloons (saloon was a takeoff on the word salon); these were for men only. In the average concert saloon, “waiter girls” were often topless and there were bedrooms at the back.
Reigning over it all was a bunch of Irish boys, former gang members or pals who’d once worked together on the city’s famed volunteer fire crews. Now they worked mostly as journeymen and laborers. At least during the daylight hours. At night they came out dressed to rule. This was hostile male turf; girls were never entirely safe, but to some extent Bowery boys viewed the single girl as a compatriot—usually Irish and always working-class—and as such entitled to some brotherly protection. (Again, not that she was immune from brotherly advance and, sometimes, attack.) Raconteur and socialite Abram Dayton, a scion of the elite Knickerbocker clan, recalled that he’d gone down to the Bowery and easily slummed his way into numerous quick-sex encounters. But after the rise of the factory culture, with its rituals of the Friday-night stroll, he warned that “the Broadway exquisite who ventured ‘within the pale,’ was compelled to be… guarded in his advances… any approach… wither by work or look was certain to be visited by instant punishment.”
The Bowery boys, known in their self-created legend as “the b’hoys” (thus making the girls they kept around “the g’hals”), may be viewed as a first modern peer group. It was a time of union instability, so they were not organized as fellow laborers. They had no other political or religious affiliations. But they were linked, generally speaking, as ethnic laborers, an underclass only too aware of the distinctions between Broadway and the Bowery. If they shared no political or union line, they had a sensibility, a posture, a distinct manner of speech and a unique form of dress that marked them as members of an unofficial social club.
The b’hoy, from what’s described, wore his hair in a high combination of pompadour and ducktail. Abram Dayton recalled seeing “black straight broad-brimmed hat[s]… worn with a pitch forward… large shirt collar[s] turned down and loosely fastened… so as to expose the full proportions of a thick, brawny neck; a black frock coat… a flashy satin or velvet vest… pantaloons,” all worn with a lot of jewelry. The final image suggests fifties hoods dressed in drag. Low-life chroniclers characterized the b’hoys as a tough and defensive lot; still, they were so devoted to their “airs,” to their internal code of politesse, that they seemed posed there on the street kind of gallant.
The girls thought so.
As I’ve said, few girls made their way to the Bowery—not at first. (Even the ones who went to gape at Broadway were usually home by eight, telling wholesome lies to parents who could not begin to understand this new scheme.) The bold ones who “walked out” were usually, like the b’hoys, transplanted Irish—tough, independent, a bit hotheaded. An estimated eight out of ten young Irish girls had come, some alone, to the United States as family scouts. They sent for their relatives, as many as they could, using the pay they made as domestics.
Friday nights were a release, and all over the “east end” one might view “a continuous procession,” as George G. Foster wrote, “which loses itself gradually in the innumerable side streets leading… into the unknown regions of Proletarianism.” The girls busily losing themselves had dressed ecstatically. Using magazine illustrations, inexpensive patterns, or improvisation, the Bowery gals put their seamstressing skills to work and made dresses that paid homage to uptown fashions. Then, as if the dress was a cake, they decorated it. They loved notions: fancy buttons, lots of lace, ribbons, bows, fake-silk sashes, any small inexpensive item they could afford. One observer reported that these had no “particular degree of correspondence or relationship in color—indeed [it was common to] see… startling contrasts… a light pink contrasting with a deep blue, a bright yellow with a brighter red, and a green with a dashing purple or maroon.”
The Bowery girl declared her independence from proper female decorum by appearing in public without a hat. All good women wore hats. The only exceptions were prostitutes, who needed open faces to make eye contact with prospective johns. Proper women went further and trimmed their expensive hats with veils and, below, wore heavy clothing to cover every imaginable body part. Skirts were worn so long for a while that it was a class marker, a sign of breeding, to have a strip of mud on one’s hem. (It meant that one had been out, appropriately dressed, promenading, stepping into and out of a coach.)
Excluding the reform set, the suffragists, the bohemians, and the “aberrant” (for example, the Lucy Stoners, women who fought to keep their names after marriage), prominent women went out for walks, or promenades, at appointed hours. They shopped, had their lunches and tea dates, then, as if returning from an afternoon shore leave, scurried home quickly with muddy hems. (That is, unless they had a planned assignation; certain madams in the best, least suspicious of brownstones catered exclusively to upper-class women and their lovers.) Occasionally, through the veil of her hat, a woman caught a glimpse of a g’hal, known to her as a servant, wearing… the Lord knew what.
As one remarked, “The washerwoman’s… attire is now like that of the merchant’s wife… and the blackboot’s daughter wears a bonnet made like that of the empress of the French.”
The true Bowery g’hal liked to look at least as outlandish as her evening’s companion, the b’hoy, who had a very clear idea of how his date should appear. Those in the Bowery fraternity, it may fairly be said, worshipped themselves. They spent much of their time watching plays and theatricals devoted to their own exploits as firefighting heroes and rulers supreme of the boulevard. Many of these lengthy epics, performed at the Bowery Theater, concerned a legendary firefighting hero called Mose, a John Henry/Paul Bunyan type who could walk through flames and had with him at all times his proportionately sized woman, Lize. Every Bowery girl wanted to be a beloved, tough-looking Lize. Every “reporter” out on the Bowery hoped to find one.
“Her very walk has a swing of mischief and defiance in it,” wrote George G. Foster of the Bowery girl; Abram Dayton noted, “Her gait and swing were studied imitations of her lord and master, and she trips by the side of her beau ideal with an air which plainly says, ‘I know no fear and I ask no favor.’”
One less sympathetic writer characterized the g’hal’s this way: “The Bowery Girl, the ‘cruiser,’ …is taught early on that ‘the world is graft.’ …She knows that she must take care of herself… she must be shrewd and rely upon herself alone. She drinks very little, saves her money for clothes. Then, when she is gaily attired, she goes… and ‘grafts’ in various ways.”
GETTING HOOKED
No matter how comfortable she felt out promenading, the Bowery girl, like any woman on the streets, was likely to be viewed as a “vagabond,” a potential prostitute dressed not for an evening out but for work. The associations between prostitution and lone women were so deeply embedded in the culture that women themselves often assumed that their peers, other gals they happened to pass on the street, were on the make. Even a girl stuck at home, guarded by a tyrannical father, could easily adopt that view based on the stories she read. Novels and magazines were filled with tales of prostitutional woe; periodicals seemed to run entire tales-of-woe sections. Here, from a newspaper account, is the testimony of one landlady who’d lost a tenant to the streets:
I seen her. ’A tiltin’ off her head, to sees up and back on the street… this girl, ’corse, she’d ’a lived in my old house. I felt turrible about her leaving… a house that she know’d was decent an
d where she could manage to live within her means… she was good when she came to this house. When I seen her that day I tried to get her to come. Coffee. She looked almost grateful… but she saw a man… and turned on me and raced to do what she would.
In fact, it was extremely difficult to assess who was a real sex professional. During the nineteenth century and on into the twentieth, prostitution fell under the criminal heading of “vagrancy.” Vagrancy, as then defined, meant loitering—standing or else walking up and back along a stretch of sidewalk. (Mothers, waiting to cross streets, were anxious to keep their girls moving lest they seem “loitery.”) Vagrancy arrests more than doubled between 1850 and 1860, but how many of these related to prostitution and how many were the result of more girls simply out on the street, it’s hard to say.
Like other cities, New York had a long tradition of hysterical estimates. In 1832 the evangelical Magdalene Society wrote in its annual report: “We have satisfactorily ascertained the fact that the numbers of females in this city, who abandon themselves to prostitution is not less than 10,000!” Throughout the mid-nineteenth century the Ladies’ Industrial Association, an early union, with almost all the city papers concurring, would claim that poor girls were turning in desperation to the street or low houses at rates approaching, roughly, 50,000 to 100,000 per year. The Justice Department predicted that by 1910 the figures would rise to 200,000 nationwide, and New York City, of course, would hold its own.
The obvious fact was that no one could live on two dollars a week—the typical salary—or even on a generous raise to four dollars or, if she was very lucky, seven. In 1870 the Herald estimated that 5 to 10 percent of all young working women made extra money by hooking, treating it as an adjunct to their jobs, although most sources, the Herald included, believed that the majority did not take it up as a career. But so hopeful a conclusion was open to ongoing debate.
In The Women of New York, or Social Life in the Great City (1870, “with numerous engravings”), George Ellington, wealthy man-about-town and writer, told the whole story, cold. In a chapter entitled “Women of Pleasure,” he ran through what a girl could earn for sex in all kinds of situations. On the street, if she survived, she could make per session what a factory girl made during a week, roughly three to four dollars. In the “disorderly” houses, usually down by the seaport, arrangements were made on the spot, while at the merely down-at-the-heels parlor houses, pay ran at ten dollars a week and at the cleaner ones reached twenty to twenty-five. More respectable parlor houses paid live-in girls up to seventy dollars a week. At the elite houses the women—white women, usually actresses, showgirls, other out-of-work performers—started at two hundred per week and were known in some cases to marry their clients.
Prostitution was a major slice of the underground economy, a fact well known to politicians and the police, who accepted regular payoffs. Many landlords preferred hookers over working-class tenants because they obviously made much more money. (And under common law, owners were not regarded as accessories to a criminal act that happened to take place on their properties.) For a percentage, theater owners allowed prostitutes to see clients in the third-tier balcony. Several of the city’s most exclusive bordellos were run out of luxurious brownstones owned by the Catholic church.
As hierarchical, almost organized as this sounds, there was a randomness to sex work. Women never knew exactly when they’d need to go out there, and many were so terrified by the prospect that they postponed it as long as possible. Here is a recounting of a first time out, an act of enormous desperation, taken from a novel called The G’Hals of New York by Ned Buntline (1850). The story: Mary and Susan, the oldest of several orphaned sisters, are broke and about to be evicted. As a last resort, Mary has miserably agreed to an assignation. It’s dusk when she leaves. Susan waits. And waits.
The wind swept hoarsely, in loud wild wailings, up against the windows, as if they were moaning over the sacrifice her sister had that night made… to shield her sisters from absolute want and death… Mary, out on such a cold and fearful night on such a horrid mission… [Susan’s] dreamy fantasies ran… the body of a girl, half naked, stark and cold… A girl who had gone forth from that very house on Essex Street…. the clock struck four and Susan’s heart began to throb heavily and painfully…. Mary had not come home…. [but] the door swung back and Mary, herface flushed and haggard, her eyes fearfully wild and brilliant, and half-glaring like a maniac’s came whirling into the chamber—stretching out her right hand in which she clutched a number of bank notes [and] muttered in a hoarse deep toned voice: “’Tis here, the price of infamy—money! Money! We’ll gorge on’t. Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!”
ONE VERY LONG DAY
There are few extant records of the working girl’s life, whether she spent it working in a brothel, a factory, or both. Because of language barriers, illiteracy, or all-out exhaustion, very few of the earliest single girls took many notes.
It’s a real discovery, then, to come across The Long Day (1905), a vivid diary reworked in prose form by a young woman named Dorothy Richardson. Her story begins on a train as she travels from rural Pennsylvania to New York City, where she arrives “an unskilled, friendless, almost penniless girl of 18… a stranger in a strange city.” There is but one thought in her head, which she repeats like a mantra: “work or starve, work or starve.”
Some selections:
DAY ONE, 6 A.M.: I had written the YWCA some weeks before as to respectable cheap boarding houses…. Was this it?… I jumped out of bed…there was a little puddle of water in the middle of the floor under the skylight, and the drip had brushed against… my shirtwaist and soaked into the soles of my only pair of shoes.
MEET THE NEIGHBORS: Breakfast consisted of heterogeneous little dabs of things… [I turned] my observations… to the people at my table…an old woman [who had] difficulty in making food reach the mouth… a little fidgety stupid-looking and very ugly woman… and a young girl who seemed to be dancing in her seat beside me.
HAVE YE WORK?: Advertisements for cigar and cigarette workers were numerous, accordingly I applied to the foreman of a factory at Avenue A who wanted “bunch makers.” He cut me off, asking to see my working card; when I looked at him blankly, he strode away in disgust. Nothing daunted me for I meant to be very energetic and brave…. I went to the next factory. They wanted labelers… this sounded easy… I approached the foreman…. He asked for my experience. “Sorry we’re not running a Kindergarten here.”
DAY TWO: “Girls wanted to learn binding and folding—paid while learning!” The address took me to Brooklyn Bridge and down a strange dark thoroughfare… zigzag alleys wrigg[ling] through a great bridge arch into a world of book-binderies…. Supervisor civil. He did not need girls until Monday, but he told me to come back then and bring a bone paper cutter. Might find something better.
DAY THREE: I found it! Salesladies—experience not necessary—Brooklyn. Lindbloom’s. After much dickering, Mr. L. and wife decided I’d do on $3 a week—working from seven until nine in the evening, Saturdays until midnight… if I must Work and Starve, I should not do it in Lindbloom’s.”
In the meantime—day four—the landlady has revealed herself as a religious nut, spying on girls, entering and searching rooms. Our protagonist flees.
TOO DEAD TIRED TO MIND: I had a chance with the janitress of a fourteenth street lodging house. She had a cleft palate, and all I could understand was [it would cost] one dollar a week with light housekeeping… bedtime arrived. I moved closer to the most… mutilated cook-stove that ever cheered the heart of a… “light housekeeper.” …Its little body [was] cracked and rust-eaten—a bright merry little cripple of a stove…. On its front… in broken letters [it said] “Little Lottie.” …Straightaway, Little Lottie gave me an inspiring example of courage and fortitude. Still precaution prompted me… to drag my mother’s trunk against the door… this was the first journey it had made since it carried her bridal finery to and from the Philadelphia Centennial.
NEW MANTRA: How different it all was in reality from what I had imagined it would be!
BOXED IN: The office of E. Springer & Co. was in pleasant contrast… A portly young man who sat behind a glass partition acknowledged my entrance by glancing up…. The man opened the glass door…. Possibly he had seen my chin quiver… and knew that I was ready to cry…. The foreman sent word that No. 105 had not rung up that morning, and that I could have her key. The pay was $3 a week to learners, but Miss Price, the superintendent, thought I could learn in a week’s time… the portly gentleman gave me the key, showed me how to “ring up,” in the register…. henceforth I should be known as “105.”
FIRST DAY OF WORK: Sickly gas jet, and in its flicker a horde of loud-mouthed girls were making frantic efforts to insert their keys into the time-register…. Everyone was late…. I was pushed and punched unmercifully by the crowding elbows, until I found myself squeezed tight against the wall… thread[ing] a narrow passageway in and out the stamping, throbbing machinery…. By the light that filtered through the grimy windows, I got vague confused glimpses of girl faces shining like stars out of this dark, fearful chaos of revolving belts and wheels… through the ramparts of machinery, we entered… Phoebe, a tall girl in tortoise earrings and curl papers, was assigned to “learn” me.
WHAT PHOEBE SAYS: “No apron!… Turn your skirt! The ladies I’m used to working with likes to walk home looking decent and respectable, no difference what they’re like other times.”
WHAT PHOEBE SAYS TO ANY REMARK, MADE BY ANYONE: “HOT A-I-R!”
WHAT THEY DO: …paste slippery strips of muslin over the corners of the rough brown boxes that were piled high about us in frail, tottering towers reaching to the ceiling.