ON TEDDY ROOSEVELT

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thelivyjr
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ON TEDDY ROOSEVELT

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ISLAND OF VICE - Theodore Roosevelt's doomed quest to clean up sin-loving New York

Richard Zacks

PROLOGUE

A stunningly beautiful woman stood at the highest point of the Manhattan skyline.

She was naked, perched on her tiptoes at the very top of the tower of Madison Square Garden at 26th Street, more than 300 feet off the ground.

Fifty Edison lamps lit her up, revealing slim adolescent hips, pomegranate breasts, a hairless cleft.

Late-night revelers staggering home from the taverns and clubs tipped their hats to her.

The woman’s name was Diana.

She was a thirteen-foot gilded copper statue of the Roman goddess of the hunt.

Lovely Diana, virginal goddess, towered over the surrounding five-story buildings.

Guidebooks touted her as drawing as many visitors as that clothed giantess of liberty in the harbor.

Perfectly balanced on ball bearings, the statue could spin.

For more than a decade, Diana’s breasts and outstretched arm revealed the direction of the winds.

New Yorkers knew that nipples pointing uptown meant breezes to the north.

Architect Stanford White had paid for her out of his own pocket and demanded a pubescent body that matched his desires.

Famed sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens — better known for his equestrian heroes — had modeled this, his only nude female statue, after his young mistress, Julia Baird.

Under the respectable cloak of neoclassical art, Diana was the sly insider joke of these two famous men, a museum-worthy tribute to forbidden lust.

And so she was the perfect symbol of New York in the 1890s, a city of silk top hats on Wall Street and sixteen-year-old prostitutes trawling Broadway in floor-length dresses, of platitudes uptown and bawdy lyrics on the Bowery, of Metropolitan Opera divas performing Wagner and of harem-pantsed hoochie-coochie dancers grinding their hips on concert saloon stages.

Manhattan, then growing in prestige by the minute, rated handfuls of superlatives: nation’s financial capital (Wall Street), nation’s leading commercial port (144 piers), dominant manufacturing center (12,000 factories and 500,000 workers), arts capital (museums and 100 theaters delivering a forty-week season), nation’s premier residential address (Fifth Avenue), philanthropic center, cosmopolitan melting pot.

Almost two million people lived here, the wealthiest and the poorest crammed onto about a dozen square miles of one ideally situated island, with many neighborhoods joined by a mere five-cent cable car ride.

The city housed more Irish than Dublin, more Germans than any city but Berlin, with pockets of Syrians, Turks, Chinese, Armenians, and with a new steady influx of Italians and Russians.

The polyglot babble of the streets dizzied the minds of fifth-generation Americans.

While the upper crust aimed at a stagey British enunciation, à la the characters of Henry James and Edith Wharton, the poor of New York garbled the language into a street slang that often required interpretation.

When Billy McGlory, a notorious saloon keeper, testified about a prostitute stealing a man’s wallet and refusing to give it back, he said under oath in a courtroom: “If the bloody bitch had turned up the leather, I wouldn’t be in this trouble."

"It’s the first time I ever called a copper in my house on a squeal and I get it in the neck for trying to do what’s right.”

New York was a thousand cities masquerading as one.

Its noise, vitality, desperation, opulence, hunger all struck visitors.

Department stores such as Stern’s straddled city blocks; telephone companies linked 15,000 wealthy private customers.

Convicted vagrants served time in workhouses on Blackwell’s Island.

Columbia College bought the land of the Bloomingdale Lunatic Asylum for a new uptown campus.

The poorer districts smelled of sweat and horse manure.

Many tenements had courtyard outhouses.

The poorest slept in shifts.

Uptown near Central Park, liveried servants helped veiled ladies into black enameled coaches, some bearing family coats of arms acquired by marrying European princes.

Not a single traffic light or even a stop sign regulated the mad flow of tens of thousands of horses, carriages, wagons, public horse and cable cars.

Anarchy ruled the corners, and foreigners complained about the dangers of crossing busy streets.

New York wagon drivers, paid for speed, cursed in many languages.

Vehicles could ride in any direction on any street.

The five-mile-per-hour speed limit was routinely ignored; the only faint attempt to aid pedestrians trying to dart across the streets was a squad of two dozen tall policemen stationed at major Broadway intersections.

Thieves stole more horses in New York City than in the entire state of California or Texas, and then raced to outlaw stables scattered around town — the equivalent of modern-day “chop shops” — to quick-dye horses’ coats from dappled gray to black, clip tails, and repaint wagons.

Four massive elevated train lines — on Second, Third, Sixth,and Ninth Avenues — striped the island north and south, casting shadows and coal ash,and allowing intimate glimpses into second-story apartments.

Above all, New York reigned as the vice capital of the United States, dangling more opportunities for prostitution, gambling, and all-night drinking than any other city in the United States.

A man with a letch, a thirst, or an urge to gamble could easily fill it night or day.

Saloon owners, such as Mike Callahan, tossed their keys in the East River and never locked up.

Richard Canfield ran his elegant casino — recommended guests only — at 22 West 26th Street, under the shadow of Diana.

Swells in frock coats played faro and roulette for thousands, with no money exchanged, only elegant inlaid-ivory chips gliding across tables.

A four-star chef waited in the basement for dinner orders.

Other gamblers, wanting to bet on horse races as far away as New Orleans, could find “poolrooms” with telegraph tickers in the second floors of saloons and back rooms of hotels.

More than 30,000 prostitutes worked daily, from the expensive soubrettes of the Tenderloin brothels to the impoverished Russian Jewish girls charging fifty cents down on Eldridge Street.

No man could walk far at night without being propositioned by a street walker.

One do-gooder doing the math estimated that each prostitute averaged four clients a day and that on most days one out of every six adult men in New York City paid for sex with a prostitute.

TO BE CONTINUED ...
thelivyjr
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Re: ON TEDDY ROOSEVELT

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ISLAND OF VICE - Theodore Roosevelt's doomed quest to clean up sin-loving New York, continued ...

Richard Zacks

PROLOGUE, concluded ...

“The traffic in female virtue is as much a regular business, systematically carried on for gain, in the city of New York,” conceded Thomas Byrnes, the city’s leading police detective, “as is the trade in boots, and shoes, dry goods and groceries.”

At a trial in 1895 of a police captain accused of sheltering brothels, a witness, a magazine illustrator named Charles Higby, recounted that his studio on 14th Street overlooked a seedy hotel used by streetwalkers.

“What did you see?"

"Tell us exactly,” he was asked.

“Fornication."

"Three windows at a time,” he replied, adding that during the “intermission” a maid changed the sheets.

Prosecutor: “Was it not offensive to you to see these different couples going in there and fornicating?”

Higby: “Sometimes, [but] sometimes very amusing.”

Around this time, French prostitutes in New York began offering oral sex, a taboo-in-America pleasure that cost twice the price of intercourse.

Peddlers sold French postcards; gents went to audio parlors and paid a nickel to hear music or dirty jokes.

(“She’s a ballet dancer; first she dances on one leg, then on the other; between the two she makes a living.”)

The Tenderloin, the most popular public vice district of the fin de siècle city, was a two-block-wide swath on either side of Broadway from 23rd Street to 42nd Street.

Dancehalls such as the Star & Garter and Haymarket, with orchestras playing waltzes, charged twenty-five cents admission for men; women entered free.

One song, with a cloying melody, ran: Lobsters! rarebits! plenty of Pilsener beer! Plenty of girls to help you drink the best of cheer; Dark girls, blond girls, and never a one that’s true; You get them all in the Tenderloin when the clock strikes two. Your heart is as light as a butterfly, Tho’ your wife may be waiting up for you; But you never borrow trouble in the Tenderloin In the morning when the clock strikes two.

New York City was the Island of Vice.

And then suddenly in 1894, after a series of particularly ugly police scandals involving brutality and shakedowns of even bootblacks and pushcart peddlers, Tammany lost the mayor’s election.

And the new mayor, independent-minded William L. Strong, appointed Theodore Roosevelt as a police commissioner on May 6, 1895, with the understanding that Roosevelt, a law-and-order Republican, would be elected president of the four-man Police Board, the highest-ranking police official.

It was a respectable return for the New York City native, whose career was petering out in a bureaucratic post in Washington,D.C., and whose books were never best-sellers.

Theodore Roosevelt was then a work-in-progress, years removed from San Juan Hill and the White House.

He was energetic, stubborn, opinionated, with a fondness for manliness — boxing, hunting, military history — and a knack for head-on collisions with allies and enemies alike.

“He was tremendously excitable, unusually endowed with emotional feeling and nervous energy,” said William Muldoon, who lived not far from him on Long Island Sound, “and I believe his life was a continual effort to control himself.”

Roosevelt (“Theodore” to his wife and friends, never “Teddy”) was born into one of the city’s wealthiest families.

His Dutch ancestors had parlayed a hardware and plate-glass business into a real estate and banking empire; his namesake father had inherited the then staggering sum of $1 million in 1871.

After finishing his studies at Harvard, Roosevelt had dedicated himself to a career in writing and reform politics.

He had served three years in the gritty New York State Assembly fighting Tammany Hall and boodle and kickbacks.

He lost his mother and first wife on the same day in 1884, salved his soul in the Dakotas, then was defeated for mayor in 1886.

His reputation as an uncompromising reformer drew catcalls from the seedier elements of the city.

Abe Hummel, a criminal lawyer, said Roosevelt’s tombstone should read: “Here lies all the civic virtue there ever was.”

Roosevelt had spent the last six years working in semi-obscurity on the Civil Service Commission in Washington.

Clearly, that obscurity had chafed him.

“He went everywhere,” wrote the Washington Post of those years, “pervaded the whole official atmosphere, turned up where he was least expected, bullied, remonstrated, criticized and denounced by turns."

"Never quiet, always in motion, perpetually bristling with plans, suggestions, interference, expostulation, he was the incarnation of bounce, the apotheosis of inquisition.”

The thirty-six-year-old family man now had four young children — Ted Jr., Kermit, Ethel, Archie — to go with eleven-year-old Alice from his first marriage.

He and his wife, Edith, had been maintaining a house in D.C. and one in Oyster Bay, and despite income from his inheritance and fees from his six books (such as the 541-page War of 1812) and numerous magazine articles, he was having trouble paying his bills.

Roosevelt in 1895 was an outspoken crusader for a vast array of causes that would decades later be bannered under the umbrella of progressive reform, a term then unknown.

He wore thick pince-nez glasses, stood five feet nine, often dressed nattily; he had a knight-errant quality about him, eager to call out the frivolous rich, the lazy poor, the sleazy politicians.

Reformers in New York City were ecstatic at his police appointment.

Everyone expected the fight to be tough and some thought it might be made even tougher by the man undertaking it.

“There is very little ease where Theodore Roosevelt leads,” conceded his longtime friend and future biographer, Jacob Riis.

Roosevelt had returned home to clean up the Island of Vice.

TO BE CONTINUED ...
thelivyjr
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Re: ON TEDDY ROOSEVELT

Post by thelivyjr »

ISLAND OF VICE - Theodore Roosevelt's doomed quest to clean up sin-loving New York, continued ...

Richard Zacks

I. PARKHURST AND THE SIN TOUR

The battle started with a poorly researched sermon.

The Reverend Charles H. Parkhurst, adorned with an abundant goatee and steel-rimmed, thick-lensed glasses, just shy of his fiftieth birthday, stood on February 14,1892, before about 800 well-dressed parishioners in Madison Square Presbyterian Church, at 24th Street off the park.

The understated building — a long and narrow slab of drab brownstone with a classic steeple — evoked earnestness, in stark contrast to the exuberant yellow-and-white Madison Square Garden tower nearby, topped by nude spinning Diana.

In the pews sat the city’s elite; scrubbed boys and girls fidgeted but their parents certainly did not, not that morning.

Parkhurst sent no advance notice of the subject of his sermon nor did he distribute the text to the press during the prior week, but afterward almost every newspaper requested it.

Parkhurst didn’t thunder from the pulpit.

He spoke evenly and favored erudite words, befitting an Amherst graduate (class of 1866), one who had studied abroad at Leipzig and once penned an essay on similarities between Latin and Sanskrit verbs.

He sometimes showed a sly dry wit.

On that Sunday winter morning, his calmly delivered words stunned his audience.

He called the Tammany men ruling New York, especially the mayor, the district attorney, and the police captains, “a lying, perjured, rum-soaked and libidinous lot.”

He accused them of licensing crime, of polluting the city for profit.

He said he would “not be surprised to know that every building in this town in which gambling or prostitution or the illicit sale of liquor is carried on has immunity secured to it by a scale of police taxation” as “systematized” as the local real estate taxes.

He asserted “your average police captain is not going to disturb a criminal if the criminal has means.”


TO BE CONTINUED ...
thelivyjr
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Re: ON TEDDY ROOSEVELT

Post by thelivyjr »

ISLAND OF VICE - Theodore Roosevelt's doomed quest to clean up sin-loving New York, continued ...

Richard Zacks

I. PARKHURST AND THE SIN TOUR, continued ...

Parkhurst was born on a farm outside Framingham, Massachusetts; he revered his rural roots.

He had never seen vice until he moved to the big city.

He taught school tillage thirty-three.

For the past dozen years at Madison Square Presbyterian he had been praised for geniality and charitable works but was little known outside his congregation.

That would change overnight.

The minister, his quiet cadence building, wrapped his sermon in a biblical theme, charging that gambling places “flourish on all these streets almost as thick as roses in Sharon,” that day or night, “our best and most promising young men” waste hours in those “nefarious dens.”

He said he had firsthand experience that the city government “shows no genius in ferreting out crime, prosecutes only when it has to, and has a mind so keenly judicial that almost no amount of evidence that can be heaped up is accepted as sufficient to warrant indictment.”

He explained that, as the president of the Society for the Prevention of Crime, he had recently met with the district attorney and confronted him about McGlory’s — a notorious den of prostitutes and thieves that thrived for years.

The D.A. had replied that he had no idea that such “vile institutions” existed.

“Innocence like that,” added Dr. Parkhurst, “in so wicked a town ought not to be allowed to go abroad after dark.”

Parkhurst promised his rapt congregation that he was not speaking as a Democrat or a Republican but as a Christian.

He complained that the word protest was no longer driving “Protestants.”

He called for action.

“Every effort that is made to improve character in this city, every effort to make men respectable, honest, temperate and sexually clean is a direct blow between the eyes of the Mayor and his whole gang of drunken and lecherous subordinates.”

Tammany Hall was a vast Democratic political club, a confederacy of strivers that had ruled the city since the late 1860s.

The organization blessed lawbreaking mostly of a victimless nature in exchange for a payoff.


Cops, many with Irish accents, closed their eyes, and police captains and Tammany grew rich with the blindness.

The annual rakeoff totaled in the millions of dollars, back when the average annual wage topped out at $500 or less.

The boodle was breathtaking.

All the while, the great city, growing into a cosmopolitan masterpiece, prospered, with lip-service platitudes about morality by cynical Tammany Hall orators and everyday embrace of vice.

The Tammany machine prospered, despite the downfall of “Boss Tweed.”

The machine engineered many landslide victories.

The Democrats of Tammany, dominated by the Irish, harnessed the votes of new immigrants through gifts of coal and ice, and a job.


“If a family is burned out,” explained state senator George Washington Plunkitt, “I don’t ask whether they are Republicans or Democrats, and I don’t refer them to the Charity Organization Society, which would investigate their case in a month or two and decide they were worthy of help about the time they are dead from starvation ..."

"I just get [living] quarters for them, buy clothes for them.”

Tammany harnessed the loyalty of fellow politicians and campaign donors through larger gifts than buckets of coal.

A Tammany contractor, when confronted with delivering one-tenth of the agreed-upon amount of sponges to the sanitation department, replied under oath: “Hell, did you weigh them dry?”

TO BE CONTINUED ...
thelivyjr
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Re: ON TEDDY ROOSEVELT

Post by thelivyjr »

ISLAND OF VICE - Theodore Roosevelt's doomed quest to clean up sin-loving New York, continued ...

Richard Zacks

I. PARKHURST AND THE SIN TOUR, continued ...

The current Tammany boss, Richard Croker, a hulking, inarticulate bruiser, discovered that “successful government in the American democracy was a vile exchange of favors, and his abiding offense is that he demonstrated the fact,” wrote Thomas Beer, author of The Mauve Decade.

The cops often formed the front line in the corruption of the city, interacting with criminals and citizens alike.


Employment records reveal that about two-thirds of the police force were undereducated Irishmen or first-generation Irish Americans, as were most of the top men in Tammany Hall.

These tough fellows — whose ancestors had suffered through what they deeply perceived as centuries of British Protestant misrule and injustice — didn’t give a fiddler’s fart for the mostly Protestant, mostly wealthy reformers of New York.

Reformers boiled with indignation at this lawlessness, but Tammany — when it bothered to discuss the matter — privately defended its actions as giving the people what they wanted.

The vast majority of New Yorkers wanted to drink beer in saloons on Sundays, their only day off from a fifty-hour workweek.

We take a cut to undo the killjoy misery the Republicans are trying to inflict.

Men who wanted to put a dollar on Lovely Lorna in the fifth race at Gravesend could find a Tammany-protected curbstone bookie.

Poor girls who didn’t want to earn a dollar a day standing for twelve hours in a Sixth Avenue department store could earn that amount in less than an hour in a brothel - if they so chose.

Parkhurst was in effect demanding a holy war on vice and government collusion.

The next day, Tammany Hall officials, buttonholing any available reporter, voiced their utter outrage that a man of the cloth would dare pollute the pulpit with such unsubstantiated charges.

Several fellow ministers and even some Republican politicians thought Parkhurst had gone too far.

He expected a fight, but he was flabbergasted when Tammany district attorney DeLancey Nicholl called him before a grand jury on charges of libel.

The minister was in effect attacking the respectable wing of Tammany Hall — not the election-day thugs or street-corner bullies, but the elite corps of the organization: men in silk top hats, men who cut ribbons on new buildings, men who gave speeches about the paving of the avenues.

These men — many now wealthy and respectable in Democratic circles - didn’t appreciate being called “a damnable pack of administrative bloodhounds ... fattening themselves on the ethical flesh of and blood” of New York.

TO BE CONTINUED ...
thelivyjr
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Re: ON TEDDY ROOSEVELT

Post by thelivyjr »

ISLAND OF VICE - Theodore Roosevelt's doomed quest to clean up sin-loving New York, continued ...

Richard Zacks

I. PARKHURST AND THE SIN TOUR, continued ...

On March 1, that grand jury delivered a scathing presentment indicating that the minister had “no evidence” on which to base his statements; the Tammany judge, reading the report, sanctimoniously rued the day a clergyman would try to destroy lives based on “nothing but rumor, nothing but hearsay.”

Judge Martine added: “Well-meaning people who go off half-cocked are a terror and a stumbling block to every good cause.”

Even Parkhurst himself would later concede of his February sermon: “I could not swear as of my own knowledge that the district attorney had lived an immoral life, that police officers were blackmailers, that police justices encouraged bunco-steering and abortion or that the entire Tammany organization was not a disguised wing of the Prohibition Party.”

Reverend Parkhurst vowed that he would “never again be caught in the presence of the enemy without powder and shot in my gun-barrel.”

He knew — and he knew that all those seemingly shocked Tammany officials also knew — that his charges of widespread vice and police complicity were absolutely true.

Now he must go out and prove them.

Parkhurst, the married middle-aged minister, hired a young private detective named Charlie Gardner to take him on the ultimate sin tour of New York City.

TO BE CONTINUED ...
thelivyjr
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Re: ON TEDDY ROOSEVELT

Post by thelivyjr »

ISLAND OF VICE - Theodore Roosevelt's doomed quest to clean up sin-loving New York, continued ...

Richard Zacks

I. PARKHURST AND THE SIN TOUR, continued ...

On the evening of Saturday, March 5, 1892, twenty-six-year-old Charlie Gardner, an independent detective trying to launch his own agency after five years at the Gerry Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, showed up at Dr. Parkhurst’s home at 133 East 35th Street.

Gardner came recommended by a wealthy member of the congregation, though he was a rough-around-the-edges investigator — he’d had several run-ins with the police over the years.

He dressed sharp, tried to act a bit jaded, and sprinkled his conversation with slang.

Despite working for the Gerry Society, he liked to drink, especially beer and wine, and the police had accused a few of his partners of shaking down suspects.

They also would later claim that his ex-wife had participated in a scheme to abduct girls for brothels.

(Parkhurst knew none of this at the time.)

A strapping six footer, with blondish-red hair, pink cheeks, and a clipped mustache, he looked younger than his announced mid-twenties age.

Gardner had a mischievous side and seemed very much to enjoy the prospect of corrupting the Madison Avenue minister.

“I still flatter myself that I whirled him from the pinnacle of a church leader to the depths of criminal New York at a pace never taken by any other man,” Gardner would later write in his memoir The Doctor and the Devil.

Parkhurst, for his part, would very soon state from the pulpit: “I never dreamed that any force of circumstances would ever draw me into contacts so coarse, so bestial, so consummately filthy as those I have repeatedly found myself in the midst of these last few days."

"I feel as though I want to go out of town for a month to bleach the sense of it out of my mind, and the vision of it out of my eyes.”

Gardner arrived at Parkhurst’s townhouse; his fee had already been negotiated: the ample sum of $5 a night, plus expenses.

A young devout parishioner had volunteered to go along with the reverend as another witness.

Both the parishioner and Parkhurst had dressed for slumming.

Gardner took one look at the two of them and burst out laughing.

Parkhurst wore his oldest black broadcloth suit — frayed at the cuffs but still ministerial.

Twenty-five-year-old John Langdon Erving — tall, thin, delicate, with large blue eyes and blond hair parted in the middle — wore clothes fished from the depths of his closet.

The wealthy young man, with a Van Rensselaer in his family tree, looked like “a Fifth Avenue lounger...a fashion plate of a dead year,” according to Gardner.

Erving taught Sunday school, led polite high-society dances, and gave off a sheltered otherworldly air.

His religious devotion sometimes worried his parents.

Gardner told Parkhurst and Erving that they would get barred from joints or perhaps beat up on principle dressed that way.

He hailed a carriage and took them to his apartment at 207 West 18th Street for the slum tour makeover.

The tall detective decked out Reverend Parkhurst in a pair of his own black-and-white-checked trousers “loud enough to make a noise in the next block,” and Gardner cinched them up so high on Parkhurst’s chest that “to get in his hip pocket, the Doctor would have had to run his hand down the neck of his shirt.”

He added a worn double-breasted sailor’s jacket, but Gardner still found Parkhurst looking faintly churchly so he wrapped a ripped red sleeve around Parkhurst’s neck as a scarf and soaped down the minister’s wavy coiffed hair to a greasy, limp derelict look.

The final touch was an old dirty brown slouch hat.

For Erving’s makeover, Gardner slid the young man’s delicate feet out of fine leather shoes and into big awkward rubber boots and gave him a pair of pants that didn’t reach within five inches of the ground.

He mussed his hair to remove that college-boy center part.

A puffy red satin necktie provided the final found-in-the-ashcan touch.

The trio boarded the Third Avenue Elevated, traveling downtown from 18th Street to Franklin Square in the older part of the city.

The disguises seemed to be working, as a pretty young woman irritatedly moved her skirts away from Dr. Parkhurst.

Gardner had decided to start with the waterfront dives of Cherry and Water Streets that attracted alcoholics, prostitutes, and thieves, and go sleazier from there.

The Cherry Hill neighborhood was once fashionable enough to attract the likes of then president George Washington, but now gangs ruled the streets, including "Swamp Angels” who pulled heists, then disappeared into the city’s sewers.

Dilapidated buildings housed a mongrel mix of Irish and Italians and visiting sailors, with one block dubbed Penitentiary Row.

Gardner shepherded his wide-eyed twosome into 33 Cherry Street, a typical dive saloon in a ramshackle two-story building with a long bar and a moth-eaten green pool table in the back.

The pool players peered over a five-foot partition and eyed the three newcomers as fresh prey.

Gardner introduced Parkhurst — who was about half a head shorter — as his “South Carolina uncle” to the bartender.

To kick off the first night, Gardner ordered them each a ten-cent glass of whiskey from a bottle labeled “Manhattan Club Reserve.”

Dr. Parkhurst — maybe to settle his nerves or show his resolve — downed his in a gulp.

(Gardner would find himself impressed by Parkhurst’s “capacity for holding liquor,” stating that the minister vomited only once in their several nights out.)

TO BE CONTINUED ...
thelivyjr
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Re: ON TEDDY ROOSEVELT

Post by thelivyjr »

ISLAND OF VICE - Theodore Roosevelt's doomed quest to clean up sin-loving New York, continued ...

Richard Zacks

I. PARKHURST AND THE SIN TOUR, continued ...

Aristocratic Erving swallowed his but immediately poured himself a water chaser, “a breach of Cherry Street etiquette that brought a smile of contempt” from the bartender.

The young detective told the barkeep that his “South Carolina uncle” was looking to buy a “clock and slang” (i.e., a gold watch and chain).

Tom Summers fanned out a stack of pawn tickets.

(Summers’s customers stole, say, a watch, pawned it for a pittance, maybe 10 percent of its value, bought drinks, then used the pawn ticket for a last round.)

Barkeep Summers didn’t ask many questions; neither did the pawnbrokers; neither did fellows buying pawn tickets from Summers.

Parkhurst’s education was beginning.

He noticed several boys and girls, about ten years old, whose heads didn’t reach the bar, motioning to the bartender and pointing to the pitchers and cans they were carrying.

The children handed over coins, and the bartender filled the containers with beer, which the children tried not to spill as they hauled them outside.

(Children “rushing the growler” for their parents, even at midnight, was a New York tradition.)

Parkhurst tried to hide his disgust.

Gardner told Summers that none of the watches described on the pawn tickets suited his uncle.

After drinking another whiskey, the trio exited, with only Erving staggering a bit.

They meandered through the tumbledown, gas-lamp-lit neighborhood of low buildings until a handful of streetwalkers, including one “old enough to have been the mother of Columbus,” linked arms and dragged them into 342 Water Street.

At a wooden table sat some down-on-their-luck women on the far side of forty.

Several smiled missing-tooth smiles and tried to jolly the men into going upstairs.

Two cheap chromos provided the only décor besides a ratty red carpet.

After a glass of beer, with too many pleas echoing in their ears by ladies wanting to be “treated,” the trio fled outside.

Down the next block, they heard music seeping out of 96 Cherry Street, a storefront with colored lights.

Gardner led them into Jim Jensen’s sailor dance hall, a large square room with a bar down one side.

That block and others nearby featured saloon boardinghouses catering to the homesick sailors of various nations, such as this Swede joint.

The bartenders and working women in each spoke the language of the home country.

(The fleecing was swifter.)

In Jensen’s, an old black man sat in the corner, playing a waltz on a “wheezy” accordion while a half dozen drunken couples danced and smoked at the same time.

The tour guide Gardner identified the male clientele as mostly sailors, thieves, pimps, shoestring gamblers, and the women ... if they were in that joint ... as “abandoned.”

Erving requested “ginger ale”; the scar-faced barkeep lined up three beers.

A “short, well developed girl” about nineteen years old came up to Parkhurst and said, “Hey, whiskers, going to ball me off?” which might have meant dance with her.

Gardner intervened and convinced her to head out on the dance floor with Erving, whose tiny feet were ensconced in those giant rubber boots.

Gardner later wrote in his memoir that the pretty young lady led the high-society man in an energetic, limbs-entwined waltz — never to be seen on Fifth Avenue — full of “vice and shame.”

While Erving danced, a “200-pound” drunken woman elbowed her way over to Parkhurst and slurringly asked him to treat her.

They drank together and she whispered to him that her name was “Baby” and added suggestively that she lived within a block of the place.

Parkhurst declined the invitation as politely as he could and bought her another beer.

She raised the glass and told Parkhurst to ask for “Baby” anytime he came down there.

The abrupt entrance by a Salvation Army band cast a pall on everyone’s entertainment and ended their first night.

The next night when they met, Parkhurst told Gardner: “Show me something worse.”

That was his mantra, and for the next two nights Gardner tried to deliver in Little Italy, Chinatown, and elsewhere, all by way of preliminaries before their final night of maximum debauchery.

Gardner took Parkhurst to the back room at the East River Hotel.

An economic slide that would turn into the Panic of 1893 caused as many as 50,000 men and women to seek temporary shelter on any given night.

The hotel allowed anyone who bought a five-cent drink after midnight to sit, sprawl, cower, or sleep on benches or on the floor till morning.

Hell’s waiting room, some called it.

The desperately poor preferred a night there to a park bench or a “penny hang,” where seated people looped their arms over a rope till morning.

The long bar at the hotel was “stained yellow” by “innumerable quarts of tobacco” spit by customers; the bar’s edge was “charred and burnt ... by thousands of cheap cigars and cheaper cigarettes.”

Drunken women — “hair tangled and matted around rum-flushed faces” — tried to lure them to the stalls in the back.

A fellow sawed “Bonnie Doon” on an out-of-tune violin while another tried to dance a jig.

They had sampled ten-cent-a-glass whiskey; now Gardner led them to try five-cent-a-glass whiskey.

“If you [have never tasted it,] then you are a lucky man."

"It tastes like a combination of kerosene oil, soft soap, alcohol and the chemicals used in fire extinguishers, I fancy, although I have never touched a drink of that particular kind of brew.”

TO BE CONTINUED ...
thelivyjr
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Re: ON TEDDY ROOSEVELT

Post by thelivyjr »

ISLAND OF VICE - Theodore Roosevelt's doomed quest to clean up sin-loving New York, continued ...

Richard Zacks

I. PARKHURST AND THE SIN TOUR, continued ...

In Chinatown, they saw Chinamen with single braided pigtails wearing bright-colored long silk robes running late errands from hand laundries.

“Celestials” was the polite name for them; “chinks” or a sarcastic “John” was more common.

Gardner introduced them to restaurant owner Lee Bing, who led them to an opium den in a rundown building on Doyers Street; the place was crowded with pipe smokers.

Dozens of rugs covered the wood floor; white pillows abounded; cots lined the walls.

The exotic scent of cooked opium pervaded the soft darkness.

“But what struck Dr. Parkhurst most was the absolute silence,” wrote Gardner, who called it a “silence that wraps itself around you until you want to shout, scream, yell, do anything to make a noise.”

(Young novelist Stephen Crane, visiting a similar opium den for the New York Sun, advised the first-time user not to expect hallucinations of “porcelain towers and skies of green silk” but rather a fine languor. “The universe is readjusted,” he explained. “Wrong departs, injustice vanishes; there is nothing but a quiet harmony of all things until the next morning.”)

Parkhurst asked Gardner to buy him an opium layout — long pipe, oil lamp, yen-hockneedle — as a souvenir.

The next night, they wandered into Little Italy, a place notorious for crime and operatic violence.

Italian men liked to play the “finger game” for money.

“[They] would sit around a table in a dingy room and begin guessing at the number of fingers which each suddenly releases from his closed fist.”

A police officer called it “as fine a prelude to homicide as was ever invented.”

Off the narrow streets of Mulberry Bend, sidestepping garbage, overhearing constant Italian, the trio gingerly walked down a few steps into a basement “stale beer” dive, which ranked as the lowest-type saloon in New York City.

Dirt floor, a dark open underground rectangle with crude benches on the side, a plank for a bar.

Unwashed tramps and derelict women clustered around kerosene lamps swilling ungodly brew from tomato cans.

“If you ever went below decks on a slave ship, you smelled the same stench but nowhere else,” later observed Gardner.

He ordered them a round of two-cent beers and explained that the beer was commonly known as “dog’s nose” or “swipes” because “it was the drippings left in barrels by Bowery saloon keepers, the leavings of glasses of Avenue A dive keepers, the floating scum of thousands of saloons, all over town.”

The two-cent whiskey there exhausted Gardner’s stock of hyperbole; he called it “indescribably vile.”

A fight broke out between two missing-toothed women competing to be treated by Parkhurst’s party.

Parkhurst, often the silent observer, commented: “Horrible, horrible, I had no idea such places could exist in a civilized town.”

They later visited a big Bowery concert saloon, the Windsor; the female performers left the stage and sat on the laps of men.

A woman in makeup applied “in liquid form by a fire engine” enticed them to buy twenty-five-cent brandies.

One wore “a blue satin skirt that reached to her knees only.”

At a “tight house” on Bayard Street, the women wore nothing but body-hugging toe-to-neck tights and danced with a party of soldiers on leave from Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn.

Within a block of police headquarters, at 300 Mulberry Street, the trio encountered at least fifty prostitutes walking the streets.

“I suppose none of the police officers in yonder building know what is happening,” commented Parkhurst dryly.

Gardner was about to launch into a “wise up, Doc” speech when he realized the clergyman was kidding.

At the next joint, they witnessed a Bowery actress standing on her head while smoking a cigarette.

She offered more private acrobatics for three dollars but they passed.

On Friday night March 11, 1892, Gardner delivered on his promise to show “something worse” ... brothels and French circuses.

Since several hundred brothels, mostly in nondescript walkup buildings, dotted the city, Gardner had plenty of options.

He selected two of the city’s main redlight districts: the Tenderloin (19th Precinct) and the area south of Washington Square.

Gardner had chosen a wonderful meeting place — the Hoffman House bar.

The now-forgotten Hoffman House was then the most famous bar in New York City.

Guests entered on 24th Street just west of Madison Square Park and found themselves in a high-ceilinged private art gallery primarily featuring nudes, with marble and bronze statues of “Eve” and “Bacchus” and paintings such as Harem Princess.

Seventeen bartenders worked each shift, squeezing fresh fruit into elaborate cocktails, pouring rare French wines or fifty-year-old brandy.

But it wasn’t the fine drinks, or even most of the artwork, that drew patrons, it was one painting, directly opposite the long mahogany bar, “unquestionably the biggest single advertisement any hotel in this country — probably in the world — ever had,” according to William F. Mulhall, a former manager.

The massive canvas, painted with almost photo realism by W. A. Bouguereau in 1873, seemed to invite viewers to climb into a lush erotic landscape.

In the eight-foot-tall Nymphs and Satyr, four voluptuous, naked young women are seen trying to wrestle a playfully reluctant male into the cold water and over toward another cluster of naked nymphs on the far side of a stream.

Highlighted and of dazzling whiteness, one callipygian goddess dominates the tug-of-war, and perhaps never has a luminous backside been viewed so adoringly by so many men with cocktails in hand.

Parkhurst was late.

While waiting, Gardner noticed two large men, seated at a table, staring at them.

Since his guided vice tour had been going on for a few days, he suspected that these two fellows might be plainclothes cops out to catch Dr. Parkhurst in some compromising position.

TO BE CONTINUED ...
thelivyjr
Site Admin
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Re: ON TEDDY ROOSEVELT

Post by thelivyjr »

ISLAND OF VICE - Theodore Roosevelt's doomed quest to clean up sin-loving New York, continued ...

Richard Zacks

I. PARKHURST AND THE SIN TOUR, continued ...

Gardner tried an experiment.

He took Erving and walked out onto 24th Street to see whether the men would follow; indeed they did.

Gardner, no rookie at surveillance, boarded the Sixth Avenue El at 28th Street, as did their pursuers.

Gardner waited till the train was moving, yanked open the gate between the cars, and jumped off and happily watched the detectives sail by.

Gardner sent a boy with a message to Dr. Parkhurst to meet them instead at the St.James Hotel at Broadway and 26th Street, a place that attracted “sporting men” and actors.

(“Sporting men” might be defined as men who gamble, drink, do not work regular hours, and are rarely seen in the company of their wives.)

They met Dr. Parkhurst at the nearby hotel.

From there, they walked to a Tenderloin brothel chosen for its proximity to Parkhurst’s Madison Square Church.

The threesome reached 33 East 27th Street around midnight, mounted the steps, and rang the bell.

The building amid a row of attached buildings did not stand out.

Hattie Adams, the madam, about forty-two years old, “a scraggly little thin woman” with curled “hay-colored” hair and wan green eyes, opened the door.

Gardner had slipped by earlier in the evening and said he would be returning with a friend, an “old man from the West” who had lost money gambling and needed cheering up.

The three men — all well dressed enough to have been allowed in the Hoffman House — followed Mrs. Adams down a long dimly lit hallway to a comfortable back parlor, full of armchairs and sofas.

Waiting there were seven young women — not garbed in the elaborate corseted, petticoated outfits of the era, but rather in “Mother Hubbards,” light simple dresses, low cut and reaching well above the ankle.

“This is rather a bright company,” said Dr. Parkhurst, with mock cheer.

While the men waited for a servant to fetch beer — two large bottles — from a nearby saloon, Gardner bargained with Mrs. Adams for a “dance of nature,” eventually knocking the price to three dollars per girl for five girls.

One of the prostitutes blindfolded the seven-dollar-a-week piano player because “the girls refused to dance [naked] before him.”

All was ready.

Four of the five women then walked into the hallway and pulled a sliding curtain and undressed; the fifth just slipped behind an armchair.

Removing a “Mother Hubbard” did not take long.

For the next fifteen minutes, to the piano plink of popular music, the nude women danced, sometimes alone, sometimes in pairs, wearing only stockings held up by garters.

At one point, they linked arms for a brief nude Folies Bergère–style can-can.

One of the naked girls, however, held aloof and refused to dance.

“Hold up your hat!” she shouted to Gardner, who in turn yelled over to Parkhurst to toss him his black derby.

Gardner stood up and held the derby about six feet off the ground.

“The girl measured the distance with her eyes ... and [she] then gave a single high kick, and amid applause sent the hat spinning away.”

Various naked girls then took turns, scissoring a leg ceilingward and launching a hat.

Flesh jiggled; girls giggled; the sightless “professor” played.

The eyes of the bashful Columbia College graduate Erving darted from the floor to wobbling nipples and thickets of hair, and then back to the floor; the young man was judged a world-class blusher.

The naked women kept inviting the men to dance.

Gardner claimed he couldn’t; Parkhurst refused, so once again Erving was drafted.

Elegant in a “business suit,” Erving danced a waltz with a naked prostitute for about two minutes.

He held her left hand and perched his right hand on her naked hip.

The girl who had refused to dance suggested nude leapfrog.

To boisterous piano music, each of the women put her hands on the squatting girl in front and launched herself upward and forward, legs splayed for clearance.

A giggling heap of bodies was often the result.

After the performance, the girls put back on what Dr. Parkhurst described as their “summer outfits.”

A pair plunked themselves down on the laps of Gardner and Erving.

They all kept whispering for the men to mount the stairs to the bedrooms.

But the group drank one more round of beer, then left around 12:45 a.m., with Hattie Adams bidding them to come again.

TO BE CONTINUED ...
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