Part 3 (2/2)
Nevertheless, it would be unjust to condemn indiscriminately all persons connected with the places which indirectly promote vice. An exception should be made of certain proprietors of dance halls and amus.e.m.e.nt parks, the commissioners of public parks, and some excursion boat owners.
(1) DISORDERLY SALOONS, CONCERT HALLS, AND CABARET SHOWS.
These places may all be considered under one heading because they are connected with saloons: they differ only in the character and grade of entertainment given in them, this varying with the ingenuity of the proprietor.
A disorderly saloon is one where indecent acts occur, where indecent language is used publicly, where there is open solicitation for immoral purposes, or to which known and habitual prost.i.tutes resort. The records in the office of the State Commissioner of Excise show that up to and including January 28, 1913, 4,583 liquor tax certificates were issued in the Borough of Manhattan under Sub-Division One of the Liquor Tax Law.
During the period of this investigation, _i. e._, from January 24, 1912, to December 15, 1912, the rear rooms of 765 saloons at separate addresses were investigated. Unescorted women, who from their actions and conversation were believed to be prost.i.tutes, were seen in 308 of the 765 rear rooms investigated, and the investigators were openly solicited by prost.i.tutes for immoral purposes in 107 separate rear rooms. In some of these places white men and colored women, in others colored men and white women, mingle freely.
The majority of disorderly saloons are situated on Third Avenue and side streets from East 10th to East 125th Streets; on Sixth Avenue and side streets from West 22nd to West 49th Streets; on Seventh Avenue and side streets from West 23rd to West 52nd Streets; and on Eighth Avenue and side streets from West 14th to West 125th Streets. There are other disorderly saloons on the lower East Side, on the Bowery and surrounding streets, on Amsterdam, Columbus, and Lexington Avenues.
Many of these disorderly saloons occupy the ground floor of buildings the upper floors of which are used as a.s.signation and disorderly hotels under the same management. The rear rooms are filled with small tables, where customers are served with drinks from the bar. Some of the rooms are large and clean, others small and exceedingly dirty. The ladies' retiring rooms in the most disorderly places are very unsanitary. A report on one of the rear rooms describes it as being ”long and narrow, with a row of tables down the length of two walls and in the center. So narrow and low and dirty is the room that it is as if a stable had been hastily emptied and swept out and turned into a temporary drinking booth.”
The managers of these establishments are sometimes sober and industrious men. They have been selected by the brewers to open saloons because of their personal qualities; for they are hail fellows well met, ”good mixers,” who make and hold friends. But these qualities do not always go hand in hand with business sagacity. The ”good mixer” soon finds himself in debt to the brewer who set him up in business. The iron-clad mortgage which the brewer holds on the fixtures hangs over the saloon keeper like a menacing hand. He finds that he cannot make any money in the ordinary business of selling liquor over the bar; sales are increased if women of the street are encouraged to use the rear room as a ”hangout” where they can enter unescorted to meet men. In addition, the proprietor finds that he can still further increase his profits by renting rooms over the saloons to the women and their customers. ”We have to evade the law to make any money,”[69] remarked the owner[70] of a resort in East 116th Street.
Some of the saloon keepers, of course, need no forcing. They started out to exploit prost.i.tution in connection with the liquor business. Their business is organized with that in view. Prost.i.tutes are attached to the rear room, as to the hotels previously described, by certain rules and customs. For example, one woman is not permitted to entice the customers of another; the girl who is unable to hold her customer is gradually forced to saloons that are less exacting. When the prost.i.tute has secured her customer, she must in certain saloons order fancy drinks. This has to be cleverly done so as not to offend. The girl intimates that she loves to drink wine because it makes her jolly and companionable. If she is personally attractive and well dressed, the man does not object. ”You know,” she murmurs, ”I hate a cheap skate who won't treat a girl like a lady.” If she is unsuccessful in persuading her customer to buy expensive drinks, the proprietor puts her out as a poor ”wine agent,” discharges her from his employ, as it were. This is the practice of the manager of a well-known saloon in East 14th Street.[71] On the other hand, the proprietor protects the successful prost.i.tute, just as does the hotel keeper, previously mentioned.
The giving of commissions to prost.i.tutes on the sale of drinks to their customers in the rear rooms of saloons does not appear to obtain as a general practice in Manhattan; but it is understood that women do receive commissions on bottled wine and beer which customers order when occupying with them the rooms upstairs.
Efforts are frequently made to enliven the scene by music and singing. In the ordinary rear room, with cheap furniture, flickering lights, bad air, and filled with rough men, a sallow-faced youth, with a cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth, sits at a piano and indifferently bangs out popular airs in wild, discordant notes. This becomes a ”concert hall”
when the proprietor provides more music and additional singers. After a while a cafe is established, where food can be obtained as well as drinks.
The grade of the entertainment improves a bit further and the place is known as a cabaret show, a poor imitation of the legitimate cabaret show given in respectable restaurants. Besides music, dancing, sometimes of an obscene character, is carried on in the rear room. Dancing is, indeed, cultivated for the express purpose of stimulating the sale of liquor and what goes with it. The dances are frequented by prost.i.tutes, pimps, thieves, and those who want to see the ”sights.” Young and foolish girls, for whom ”social club” dances have become commonplace, are persuaded to visit these saloons. Here they meet men whose sole object is their subsequent exploitation for pleasure or for money. Under this influence and environment they drift all the more rapidly into lives of professional prost.i.tution.
The prost.i.tutes who frequent certain saloons in Manhattan combine their immoral business with crime, particularly stealing. They boldly seek out a man who appears to be ”green,” or under the influence of liquor, and ”trim him,” as they say. The girls use their pimps, or, what may be nearer the truth, the pimps use their girls, to carry out these robberies. A pimp, becoming acquainted with a stranger, ”steers” him ”up against” his ”gun mol” (a prost.i.tute who is a pickpocket), who aids in the ”tr.i.m.m.i.n.g”
process. Sometimes, if the hour is late and they are in the right place, the pimps and their women become so bold as openly to go through the pockets of their victims and afterwards throw them into the street. On one such occasion the victim called loudly for the police, and, though an officer stood on the other side of the street, his eyes were withheld and his ears were stopped. The pimp laughed at the stranger and told him to ”yell louder” for all the good it would do him.
Of the statements just made abundant confirmation is at hand:
A saloon in East 14th Street,[72] one of the landmarks of this busy street, has been notorious for many years. Its proprietor has a wide reputation. His home life, according to report, is all that it should be; no one has ever seen him intoxicated. Big, jolly, aggressive, he is the embodiment of hospitality as he stands at the bar, greeting those who enter with a kindly shake or a friendly nod. In the rear room of his resort disgraceful conditions exist. At one end there is a small platform, on which a young man sits, playing popular airs on a piano through the long hours of the night. White-faced waiters, with their hair carefully cut and plastered down, glide noiselessly about the tables. Carefully trained are these young men in keeping the gla.s.ses full. They work quickly. About the tables sit equally well-trained prost.i.tutes. A man who entered at 6.30 P. M., January 26, 1912, and stayed until 8.30 saw the waiters urge the men customers to invite different girls to their tables.
Two of the girls were not engaged. As the rule of the place forbade them to go to the table where men were sitting, they enlisted the waiter's aid.
Gliding to the table where three men were drinking, he soon succeeded in having the girls invited to join the party. The investigator gained the confidence of the girls with whom he conversed. ”A girl must order fancy drinks here when she is treated,” said one of them; ”if she don't, the manager[73] orders her out and won't let her come in again.” Pearl, a girl about twenty years of age, solicited him to go to a hotel[74] not far away. Two months later, at about 11 P. M., there were more than twenty prost.i.tutes and fifteen men in this rear room. The same conditions existed during the evening of April 8, 1912, when a woman entered the rear room alone. She walked to the extreme end of the room and saw eleven prost.i.tutes and four men sitting at tables. If this woman had been a ”regular,” that is, one who frequented the place night after night, a waiter would have brought her, entirely free, a small gla.s.s of beer or ginger ale. She learned on inquiry that if a ”regular” was ”arrested” the manager would ”fix it up.” Inducements were also offered in the hope that she would enter the service of this house. The ”suckers” all come down here, she was told: ”We get them before the girls on Sixth Avenue do.”
On January 20, 1912, a well known pimp[75] met his woman in the rear room of a saloon on Seventh Avenue.[76] An investigator saw this prost.i.tute give him a ten dollar bill. The pimp upbraided the girl for not having more money and struck her a heavy blow in the face. She fell to the floor.
There was some excitement when this occurred. The girl was advised to have the pimp arrested, but she refused to do so although her eyes were swollen and discolored. This same rear room harbors other prost.i.tutes who night after night take their customers to a furnished room house in West 27th Street,[77] where the landlord charges twenty-five cents for the use of a room.[78]
(2) MISCELLANEOUS PLACES
In New York City there are places of a certain type which cater directly to vice in that they are frequented, for the most part, by immoral and dissolute persons who not only solicit on the premises for immoral purposes, but create conditions which stimulate the business of prost.i.tution. The proprietors have a guilty knowledge of the fact that prost.i.tutes and their kind use the premises as an adjunct to immoral trade. Such places include restaurants, pool rooms, delicatessen stores, candy shops, hair dressing and manicure parlors, barber shops, cigar stores, palmist and clairvoyant parlors, livery stables, and opium dens.
The places in question are usually situated in the vicinity of vice resorts. To the ordinary observer their outward appearance is that of any respectable business establishment. The signs are on the windows, goods are displayed, customers may come and go, and there is a general air of activity. From January 24, 1912 to November 15, 1912, 180 reports were made in connection with conditions in 91 such miscellaneous places.
In some of these places, known as ”hangouts,” respectable trade is neither sought nor encouraged. A stranger is looked upon with a certain amount of suspicion and treated as an intruder. If he asks for a meal, he is told that the hour for serving meals has pa.s.sed; if he desires to purchase a package of food from the shelves, he is informed that the particular brand he seeks is missing.
The real purpose of the place is to afford a rendezvous where confidences may be exchanged and deals planned--where birds of a feather may flock together and be fed or entertained. It is indeed a varied group that sit about the tables or lounge idly at the entrance: owners of houses of prost.i.tution, madames and inmates, street walkers, pimps, procurers, gamblers, pickpockets, thieves, and crooks of every shade and kind. Young boys of the neighborhood become fascinated with the adventurous lives of the men who frequent these places and soon join their ranks.
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