Professional Prostitutes

Prostitution is an appalling evil in New York. One can scarcely look in any direction without seeing some evidence of it. Street walkers parade the most prominent thoroughfares, dance houses and low concert halls flaunt their gaudy signs in public, and houses of ill-fame are conducted with a boldness unequalled anywhere in the world.

These things are sad to contemplate, and disagreeable to write about. The whole subject is unsavory; but no picture of New York would be complete did it not include an account of this terrible feature of city life, which meets the visitor at almost every turn; and it is believed that some good may be accomplished by stripping the subject of all its romance, and presenting it to the reader in its true and hideous colors.

It is difficult to learn the causes which induce these women to adopt a life of shame. Some are young women who have been led astray by men who have failed to keep their promises to them, and have drifted into sin to hide their shame; others are wives who have left, or have been deserted by, their husbands; others are widows who have been left without any other means of support; others still have deliberately chosen the life in the hope of escaping poverty, or to gratify their love of money and dress; and others again appear to be influenced by motives of pure licentiousness. Whatever the cause of their adoption of such a life, it is evident that they have seen better days.

The women earn large amounts of money, but a considerable portion of this goes for board and other expenses in the house, and their extravagant habits and tastes exhaust the rest. They save nothing , and if taken sick must go to the Charity Hospital for treatment. Their dream of saving money lasts but a short time, and they leave the fashionable house penniless. The shamelessness with which men of standing and prominence, many of whom are husbands and fathers of families, resort to these houses, and display themselves in the parlors is astounding. Indeed, the keeper of one of the most fashionable houses boasts that married men are her principal customers. Sometimes the visitor desires that his visit shall not be known. For such persons there are private rooms, where they are sure of seeing no one but the proprietress and the woman for whom their visit is intended.

Men who at home are models of propriety seem to lose all sense of restraint when they come to New York. When the prostitute is unfit for companionship with the aristocratic associates of the first class house, she is removed to a worst fate. The proprietress quickly detects this, and remorselessly orders them from her house.

Having quitted the fashionable house, the wretched woman has no resource but to enter a second-class house, and thus go down one grade lower in vice. The difference between this house and the house she has left is very great. The proprietress is cruel and exacting, and boldly robs her boarders whenever occasion offers. The visitors are more numerous, but are a rougher and coarser set than those who patronized her in the first stage of her career. Money is less plentiful, her life is harder in every way, and she
seeks relief from the reflections that will crowd upon her in drink, and perhaps to drunkenness adds the vice of opium eating. Her health breaks fast. 

What was left of her beauty when she entered the house soon fades, and two or three years she becomes unfit to remain even in a second class house. The poor creature is obliged to submit in silence to any wrong practiced upon her. The woman whose career opened so brilliantly is now a confirmed prostitute and drunkard, bloated, sickly, and perhaps diseased. There is nothing left to her but to sink still lower. Her companions are the vilest of her class, and the visitors are thieves, roughs, and men who cannot gain admittance into places such as she has left. She is a slave to the keeper of the house, she is robbed of her earnings, is beaten, and often falls into the hands of the police. She is a mass of disease, utterly vile and repulsive, steadily dying from her bodily ailments, and the effects of rum and gin. She has reached the bottom of the ladder, and can go no lower. She is a living corpse. The end soon comes.

The Street Walker

On Broadway, Sixth avenue and the Bowery these women are very numerous. They pursue certain regular routes, until they pick up their companion. The neighborhoods of the hotels and the places of amusement are their "cruising grounds" and their victims are mainly strangers to the city. As a rule, they are vicious in the extreme, they drink heavily, and are fearfully diseased. Many of the street walkers are in the regular employ of the "panel houses" which abound in the city. These house are kept by men, who are among the most desperate roughs in New York. The woman is either the mistress of one of these men, or in his pay. Strangers in the city incur a terrible risk in accompanying street walkers and women whom they meet at concert and dance halls to their homes. Robbery is certain, murder is too often the result of such an adventure.

The concert saloons flourish along certain parts of Broadway, Sixth avenue and the Bowery, where they provide a low order of music, and the service of the place is rendered by young women, many of whom are dressed in tights and all sorts of fantastic costumes, displaying their figures as much as possible. The girls are hideous and unattractive, foul-mouthed and bloated.

The dance halls are often handsome places, but all are the rendezvous of street walkers, and men who come to seek their company. Men meet the street walkers here and accompany them to their homes, risking disease, robbery, and even death, with a recklessness that is appalling. One of the greatest evils of the city is the existence of a class of men and women who make
their living by practicing abortion upon women who have been betrayed, and seek to remove the consequences of their sin. Infanticide flourishes in New York, and every year the city journals contain numerous accounts of the death of women at the hands of professional abortionists.

One of the most notorious women of this class was the late Madame R______. A large part of her income derived from the sale of drugs warranted to bring on miscarriages. She amassed a large fortune by her business, built a magnificent house on Fifth avenue and lived in royal style.