How to Run a Disorderly House in 1890
How to Run a Disorderly House in 1890
Early New York was littered with prostitution in the late 1800’s. On the streets and in the Bawdy or Disorderly Houses as the cops designated them, prostitution was a booming business. The brothel business abounded not merely because of lust and lawlessness, but because it was so closely allied with the desperation of poverty.
Here’s how it worked:
If you were a child in an impoverished immigrant family and your parents died of starvation, cold, fever, cholera or any one of a dozen the vile diseases that poverty, overcrowding and bad sewage made inevitable, what exactly would happen to you? Where would you go? How could you survive?
Brothels and Fagin Gangs
You’d be put out on the street by nightfall. Your parents’ bodies would
be stripped of anything that could be sold and then hauled away to Potter’s Field. ( it was where Macy’s now stands).
You and your sorrowing, traumatized and starving siblings would simply be left on the street to fend for yourselves.
Like as not, a scout for a brothel would swoop you up if you were alittle girl – there were always those who got a premium price for “breaking in” little girls. If you were a boy, you’d most likely be taken by a scout for a Fagin Gang. These gangs consisted of packs of street urchins who were apprenticed to older crooks, trained as pick-pockets, second-story men, or any number of lucrative thieving crafts.
In short, your fate would be sealed at age 4 or 6 or 8, by chance and poverty. Of course, you might be deposited by some neighbor at one of the Church-run orphanages – most of which were little better than workhouses, where your labor would be used and sold or where you yourself might be sold as an apprentice scullery maid or “tweeny,” if you were old enough.
Barnacle Billy
As I researc
hed and read first person diary accounts of these unfortunate children, Barnacle Billy’s character grew in my mind. Surely among them there was a little girl beautiful and smart enough to suffer all this and yet survive to become a famous madam – one for whose favors powerful men would risk their money and their hearts.
The twists and turns of Billy’s rise to infamy and fortune,
f
rom a waterfront hovel to the bedchambers of the politicians who ruled New York, were more than plausible in such sordid, yet larger-than-life times.
I think it soothed my soul to imagine that some of the female children in those perilous time might have overcome the horrors I’ve described and lived to triumph over fate by forging their own destiny.
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