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.
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Notes
Luc Sante, Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1991), 191.
Timothy J. Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920 (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co, 1992), 197.
Ruth Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900–1918 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 14.
Chad Heap, Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885–1940 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 101.
Katie N. Johnson, Sisters in Sin: Brothel Drama in America, 1900–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1.
Lise-Lone Marker, David Belasco: Naturalism in the American Theatre (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 168.
Eugene Walter, The Easiest Way. In The Best Plays of the Early American Theatre: From the Beginning to 1916, edited by John Gassner and Mollie Gassner (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1967), 622.
Gavin Jones, American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in U.S. Literature, 1840–1945 (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008), 4.
Walter Prichard Eaton, At the New Theatre and Others (Cambridge, MA: The University Press, 1910), 94–95.
William Winter, The Wallet of Time: Containing Personal, Biographical, and Critical Reminiscence of the American Theatre (New York: Moffat, Yard and Co, 1913), 401.
George Jean Nathan, “Realismus,” in Mr. George Jean Nathan Presents: An After-Piece of More or Less Critical Confidences and Memoirs Touching Lightly Upon the Various Somethings Which Go to Constitute What is Called the American Theatre (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1917), 215–216; original emphasis.
Bruce A. McConachie, Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820–1870 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992), xi–xii.
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© 2014 J. Chris Westgate
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Westgate, J.C. (2014). Touring the Red Lights District. In: Staging the Slums, Slumming the Stage. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137357687_6
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