Part 2 (1/2)
”Signed (Mrs.) ----
”Sunday, May 28th.”
Call-houses are usually cozy and homelike, presided over by a woman who dwells upon her efforts to make her customers happy and comfortable. She declares that there are so many ”nice respectable men” who are lonely in a big city and who want places where they will feel absolutely safe, where they can meet pretty girls, spend the evening, and get a few drinks. The stock in trade of such a house is usually a collection of photographs of the girls who are ”on call.” In addition, the madame exhibits a description of them, with measurements to show their physical development; the prices are appended. Her victims are variously procured: sometimes in restaurants frequented by girls who are employed in offices and stores: again, her place of operation may be the ladies' retiring room, where she enters into conversation with girls, inviting them to a meal or to spend an evening in her apartment. If she sees a girl alone at a table, she asks whether she may sit down with her and urges her to have a ”little drink.”
Thus acquaintance springs up and ”dates” are made for the theater, the madame paying the bill. At other times she goes to a department store and selects a girl, from whom she makes her purchases. The girl may be flattered by evidences of interest and friends.h.i.+p, or tempted by the prospects of fine clothes, leisure, and opportunities for pleasure. The danger is especially great if she has previously lapsed.
On certain streets on the East Side below 14th Street and in Harlem there are a number of cider ”stubes” in the bas.e.m.e.nt of tenement houses. In these ”stubes” foreign girls act as waitresses, serving small gla.s.ses of cider or other soft drinks to customers. While serving, the girls solicit their customers to enter small rooms in the rear of the bas.e.m.e.nt. The keepers of these ”stubes” are constantly advertising in the foreign papers published in New York for waitresses, offering to pay five or six dollars a week for such service. There is no doubt that many ignorant foreign girls are thus lured into lives of prost.i.tution. One keeper who had a waitress about 38 years of age told the investigator that she expected to have two or three young girls in a few days. Another proprietor tried to secure the custom of the investigator by saying that he expected to secure two nice young girls for his ”stube.” Both were advertising in a German paper for help at the time. Such an advertis.e.m.e.nt for a very disreputable ”stube” on East 4th Street appeared in a German newspaper on March 29, April 6, 8, 12, 13, 14, and 19.
Our records abound in material ill.u.s.trating the foregoing account. For example, on May 19, 1912, at 7 P. M., and again on May 20, 1912, at 8 P.
M., the investigator visited a vice resort in a tenement in West 43rd Street.[40] There were four inmates in the receiving parlor, all claiming to have medical certificates. The madame[41] declared, however, that if none of them suited she would for a larger price call up a young girl who was not ”a regular sport.” Thereupon she summoned the girl by telephone.[42] The newcomer appeared to be about eighteen years of age.
While talking with the investigator, Irene said she had been in the ”business” since last September but worked in a department store in Brooklyn.[43] Previously to this she had been employed in a store on Sixth Avenue. About one and a half years ago--so she says--her sweetheart, a s.h.i.+pping clerk, who makes $12 a week, seduced her, promising marriage: he does not know that Irene is making money ”on the side” in this manner. Her aunt, with whom she lives, is very strict with her, requiring her to be home at ten o'clock every night.
The investigator pretended not to be satisfied with Irene; thereupon another girl, Margie, spoke up: she knew a ”kid” that would suit, but the price would be ten ”bucks” (dollars). From other remarks made, the investigator believes that the ”kid” referred to is her sister. Margie leaves the flat at 5.30 P. M., for her home in Brooklyn, where she lives with her parents. They are under the impression that she is employed through the day in a wholesale millinery store downtown. The madame still insisted that if the supposed prospective customer really wanted young and pretty girls she could get them: ”but,” she added, ”these girls come high, five and ten dollars.”
On November 6, 1911, a woman who was afterwards employed in this investigation received a letter concerning a cider ”stube” in a tenement in East 5th Street.[44] The letter read as follows:
”Reading of your good work in lending your services to a.s.sist the unfortunate creatures, I hope you will give your undivided attention, for this certain woman[45] is engaged in this business for the last seven years and is too shrewd to be caught. You will have to watch carefully her movements. She keeps a cider store on East 5th Street, New York.... Look up her record and you will see she was arrested a few times.... She just was sentenced four months over the Island....
Please I beg you to look into this matter. I would give you my name, but it is impossible for me to do so. I am a citizen of the U. S. A.
I know this place ruins many young girls.”
At 12.30 P. M., February 22, 1912, the investigator found two women in this place, by both of whom he was solicited to go to a rear room for immoral purposes. When they failed in their efforts, the proprietor said that she could get him a young girl if he preferred. Two days later the resort was visited by another investigator, who found two women acting as waitresses, by one of whom he was similarly solicited.
The various establishments above mentioned were all repeatedly visited in order to show their relatively permanent character and their freedom from interference: one[46] on Broadway was visited nine times in five weeks: another,[47] in West 29th Street, five times between February 8 and August 19; a third,[48] in the same neighborhood, five times in four months.
(2) a.s.sIGNATION AND DISORDERLY HOTELS
The parlor house and the tenement vice resort are, like shops, fixed places for the carrying on of prost.i.tution as a trade. There is, besides, an enormous amount of itinerant prost.i.tution utilizing mainly disorderly hotels. These places are commonly called ”Raines Law” hotels.
The history of the creation of the ”Raines Law” hotels in New York City is exceedingly interesting. The primary object of the framer of the law was to minimize the evils connected with saloons. As pointed out in the report of The Research Committee of The Committee of Fourteen, issued in 1910 under the t.i.tle of ”The Social Evil in New York City, a study of Law Enforcement,”[49]
”from the pa.s.sage of this law dates the immediate growth of one of the most insidious forms of the Social Evil. This growth was due to a heavy increase in the penalties for a violation and the expected increased enforcement of the law by state authorities beyond the reach of local influences. To ill.u.s.trate, the license tax was raised from $200. to $800., and the penalty of the forfeiture of a bond was also added.[50] To escape these drastic penalties for the selling of liquor on Sunday in saloons, saloon keepers created hotels with the required 10 bedrooms, kitchen and dining-room. The immediate increase was over 10,000 bedrooms. There being no actual demand for such an increase in hotel accommodations, the proprietors in many instances used them for purposes of a.s.signation or prost.i.tution, to meet the additional expense incurred. In 1905 there were 1407 certificated hotels in Manhattan and the Bronx, and of these about 1150 were probably liquor law hotels. In 1906 an important administrative provision was added to the law. This amendment, known as the Prentice Act, provided that hotels must be inspected and pa.s.sed by the Building Department as complying with the provisions of the law, before a certificate could be issued to them. As a result of this new legislation, 540 alleged hotels were discontinued in Manhattan and the Bronx. A large number of these places, however, continued under saloon licenses.”
Since that time the fight against these vicious hotels on the part of the Committee of Fourteen has been constant and effectual. As a result, the business of prost.i.tution as formerly carried on in them has been well-nigh suppressed. Very few of the hotels found to be used for ”a.s.signation” and ”disorderly” purposes during the present investigation are ten-room establishments. In 1912, 400 of the 425 ten-room hotels which now exist were conducted as hotels for men only.[51]
A disorderly hotel, as we use the term, is one which violates Section 1146 of the Penal Law (keeping a disorderly house) by admitting the same woman twice in one night with two different men, or by renting the same room twice in one night to two different couples, or by regularly admitting known and habitual prost.i.tutes. An a.s.signation hotel is one doing business with transient couples, the women not necessarily being habitual prost.i.tutes.
According to the official records, there were 558 hotels in Manhattan in 1912 which were certificated under the Liquor Tax Law. This number includes the legitimate commercial hotels as well as those which were the outgrowth of the Liquor Law. During the period of this investigation in 1912, 103 hotels were found which are cla.s.sed as being a.s.signation places, disorderly, or suspicious. Evidence was discovered which proved that habitual prost.i.tutes were openly soliciting men on the street and elsewhere to go to 65 of these hotels for immoral purposes. A woman investigator discovered 25 additional hotels where prost.i.tutes declared they could freely take customers or have them openly visit their apartments or rooms. This gives a total of 90 different hotels in Manhattan which may be cla.s.sified as ”disorderly.” In addition to these, seven different hotels were discovered which prost.i.tutes claimed to be able to use for immoral purposes, though admitting that they had to be careful not to frequent them too often. In some of these places prost.i.tutes are not allowed to use a room more than twice during every twenty-four hours, once during the day and again at night. There are six very high-cla.s.s hotels which prost.i.tutes a.s.serted to a woman investigator they had used, or could use, under certain conditions. It is no uncommon thing for the more prosperous and well-dressed prost.i.tutes to solicit trade in the lobbies of these hotels.
The hotels above referred to are situated in the following sections of Manhattan: Sixth Avenue from West 23rd Street to West 46th Street; Eighth Avenue from West 116th to West 125th Streets; the side streets between Broadway and Sixth Avenue from West 34th to West 53rd Street; Lexington, Third, and Fourth Avenues, and Irving Place. The centers where soliciting for these hotels is most flagrant are as follows: East 14th Street and Third Avenue, and north on Lexington Avenue; Sixth Avenue and West 28th Street; Seventh Avenue and West 35th Street; Longacre Square to the east; Columbus Avenue from West 60th to West 62nd Street; Eighth Avenue from West 116th to West 125th Streets.
Of these resorts many are weather-beaten buildings, dirty and unsightly without, unsanitary and filthy within. The small rooms are separated by thin part.i.tions through which even conversations in low tones can be heard. The furniture is cheap and worn with constant use. A dilapidated bureau or dresser occupies one corner; a rickety wash-stand equipped with dirty wash bowl and pitcher stands in another. Cheap chromos hang on the wall, dingy with age. A small, soiled rug partly covers the floor which is seldom, if ever, scrubbed with soap and water. The air is foul and heavy with unpleasant odors, for the windows are rarely opened. The awnings that shut out the light are seldom lifted; they are sign-posts to the initiated, hanging mute and weather-beaten all the year round.
During the fall of 1907 a large number of parlor houses in the Tenderloin were raided and closed through the combined efforts of the Police Commissioner and the District Attorney's office. Some of these houses had been operated by men who subsequently transferred their activities to ”hotels,” where they continued to practise their former methods. Others took their women with them, lodging them in the ”hotels,” paying them certain commissions, and treating them in the same manner as in the house.
A group of women thus attached to a ”hotel” solicit for it on the street or in the rear rooms of saloons.
Between the proprietors of these ”hotels” there is great business rivalry. They constantly try to induce prost.i.tutes attached to other resorts to patronize their place of business and become ”regulars.” They even go so far as to hire young men to make friends with the women and to offer them large commissions and better protection than they can secure elsewhere. At times, saloon keepers who allow prost.i.tutes to solicit in their rear rooms do so on condition that the women take customers secured in their places of business to friendly hotels. For instance, the owner of a notorious saloon in East 14th Street demands that the women in his rear room take their customers to a certain hotel on Third Avenue. If one should break the compact and go to a rival place, she would be thereafter debarred, as if she had violated a code of honor.
Most of the solicitation for ”hotels” is nowadays done on the street. Even here the proprietor attempts to keep his women in line. He sets spies at work to see that they take the trade where it belongs. The young men so employed are often the ”pimps” of the street walkers, keen to see that their women do not ”get away with any money” by going to a strange hotel, from which they cannot collect the commission. A young man of this character stations himself near the entrance of a certain hotel on the Bowery and, as his woman enters with a customer, carefully takes a pin from the right lapel of his coat and puts it on the left lapel. Woe to the woman if she fails to produce the money represented by the acc.u.mulation of the pins in the left lapel, when the business of the night is over!
When the street walkers of certain hotels are arrested, the proprietor hastens to court to pay the fines, should such be imposed, or offer bail so that the girls may return to their ”duties.” In some cases he insists on repayment of the money he has advanced; and the girl is grateful because he has saved her from the Island. If a girl ”breaks away” from a hotel and goes to a rival place of business the proprietor will go so far as to have her arrested again and again to teach her the lesson of ”loyalty.” In some cases she is glad to return to his good graces, especially if she finds herself on the Island.