Island of Vice Read online

  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?” 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.

  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.

  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.) 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.”

  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-hock needle—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 fis
t.” 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.”