Touring the Red Lights District

Abstract

In 1890, the New York Press published an anonymous pamphlet entitled, Vices of a Big City. The avowed purpose of this pamphlet was to chart a moral cartography of New York City in terms of decency and indecency by supplying what Luc Sante describes as a “sort of index of areas to avoid or to redeem”—specifically, the locales of prostitution and vice.¹ It made these places visible, ostensibly, for demarcation and regulation: to demonstrate the limits of decency and to help upstanding middle- and upper-class citizens avoid encounters with such indecency, which were rather commonplace in nineteenth-century New York City. In City of Eros, Timothy Gilfoyle includes more than one anecdote from upstanding members of society who, in taking a wrong turn, found themselves accosted by prostitutes leaning out windows, sitting on stoops, or crowding the sidewalks.² As Sante suggests, however, the “listings of whorehouses, concert saloons, dance houses” in Vices of a Big City were so “impressively detailed” that the pamphlet likely served as a manual for those intending to indulge in this indecency. It included concert saloons that were “crowded with women nightly, who smoke cigarettes and drink gin.”³ It included cigar stores, small tobacco shops that had just enough merchandise inside to obscure the private room in the back, where prostitutes could be paid for any number of indulgences.