up, to have a real time out, meant turning around and heading back to the Bowery, and this did not seem—not at first, anyway—to be an option.
We hear the word Bowery—a long two-way boulevard running from Manhattan’s East Village into Chinatown—and light on phrases such as “skid row” or perhaps “junkie bum.” But back then it was a
Reigning over it all was a bunch of Irish boys, former gang members or pals who’d once worked together on the city’s famed volunteer fire crews. Now they worked mostly as journeymen and laborers. At least during the daylight hours. At night they came out dressed to rule. This was hostile male turf; girls were never entirely safe, but to some extent Bowery boys viewed the single girl as a compatriot—usually Irish and always working-class—and as such entitled to some brotherly protection. (Again, not that she was immune from brotherly advance and, sometimes, attack.) Raconteur and socialite Abram Dayton, a scion of the elite Knickerbocker clan, recalled that he’d gone down to the Bowery and easily slummed his way into numerous quick-sex encounters. But after the rise of the factory culture, with its rituals of the Friday-night stroll, he warned that “the Broadway exquisite who ventured ‘within the pale,’ was compelled to be… guarded in his advances… any approach… wither by work or look was certain to be visited by instant punishment.”
The Bowery boys, known in their self-created legend as “the b’hoys” (thus making the girls they kept around “the g’hals”), may be viewed as a first modern peer group. It was a time of union instability, so they were not organized as fellow laborers. They had no other political or religious affiliations. But they were linked, generally speaking, as ethnic laborers, an underclass only too aware of the distinctions between Broadway and the Bowery. If they shared no political or union line, they had a sensibility, a posture, a distinct manner of speech and a unique form of dress that marked them as members of an unofficial social club.
The b’hoy, from what’s described, wore his hair in a high combination of pompadour and ducktail. Abram Dayton recalled seeing “black straight broad-brimmed hat[s]… worn with a pitch forward… large shirt collar[s] turned down and loosely fastened… so as to expose the full proportions of a thick, brawny neck; a black frock coat… a flashy satin or velvet vest… pantaloons,” all worn with a lot of jewelry. The final image suggests fifties hoods dressed in drag. Low-life chroniclers characterized the b’hoys as a tough and defensive lot; still, they were so devoted to their “airs,” to their internal code of politesse, that they seemed posed there on the street kind of gallant.
The girls thought so.
As I’ve said, few girls made their way to the Bowery—not at first. (Even the ones who went to gape at Broadway were usually home by eight, telling wholesome lies to parents who could not begin to understand this new scheme.) The bold ones who “walked out” were usually, like the b’hoys, transplanted Irish—tough, independent, a bit hotheaded. An estimated eight out of ten young Irish girls had come, some alone, to the United States as family scouts. They sent for their relatives, as many as they could, using the pay they made as domestics.
Friday nights were a release, and all over the “east end” one might view “a continuous procession,” as George G. Foster wrote, “which loses itself gradually in the innumerable side streets leading… into the unknown regions of Proletarianism.” The girls busily losing themselves had dressed ecstatically. Using magazine illustrations, inexpensive patterns, or improvisation, the Bowery gals put their seamstressing skills to work and made dresses that paid homage to uptown fashions. Then, as if the dress was a cake, they decorated it. They loved notions: fancy buttons, lots of lace, ribbons, bows, fake-silk sashes, any small inexpensive item they could afford. One observer reported that these had no “particular degree of correspondence or relationship in color—indeed [it was common to] see… startling contrasts… a light pink contrasting with a deep blue, a bright yellow with a brighter red, and a green with a dashing purple or maroon.”
The Bowery girl declared her independence from proper female decorum by appearing in public without a hat. All good women wore hats. The only exceptions were prostitutes, who needed open faces to make eye contact with prospective johns. Proper women went further and trimmed their expensive hats with veils and, below, wore heavy clothing to cover every imaginable body part. Skirts were worn so long for a while that it was a class marker, a sign of breeding, to have a strip of mud on one’s hem. (It meant that one had been out, appropriately dressed, promenading, stepping into and out of a coach.)
Excluding the reform set, the suffragists, the bohemians, and the “aberrant” (for example, the Lucy Stoners, women who fought to keep their names after marriage), prominent women went out for walks, or promenades, at appointed hours. They shopped, had their lunches and tea dates, then, as if returning from an afternoon shore leave, scurried home quickly with muddy hems. (That is, unless they had a planned assignation; certain madams in the best, least suspicious of brownstones catered exclusively to upper-class women and their lovers.) Occasionally, through the veil of her hat, a woman caught a glimpse of a g’hal, known to her as a servant, wearing… the Lord knew what.
As one remarked, “The washerwoman’s… attire is now like that of the merchant’s wife… and the blackboot’s daughter wears a bonnet made like that of the empress of the French.”
The true Bowery g’hal liked to look at least as outlandish as her evening’s companion, the b’hoy, who had a very clear idea of how his date should appear. Those in the Bowery fraternity, it may fairly be said, worshipped themselves. They spent much of their time watching plays and theatricals devoted to their own exploits as firefighting heroes and rulers supreme of the boulevard. Many of these lengthy epics, performed at the Bowery Theater, concerned a legendary firefighting hero called Mose, a John Henry/Paul Bunyan type who could walk through flames and had with him at all times his proportionately sized woman, Lize. Every Bowery girl wanted to be a beloved, tough-looking Lize. Every “reporter” out on the Bowery hoped to find one.
“Her very walk has a swing of mischief and defiance in it,” wrote George G. Foster of the Bowery girl; Abram Dayton noted, “Her gait and swing were studied imitations of her lord and master, and she trips by the side of her beau ideal with an air which plainly says, ‘I know no fear and I ask no favor.’”
One less sympathetic writer characterized the g’hal’s this way: “The Bowery Girl, the ‘cruiser,’ …is taught early on that ‘the world is graft.’ …She knows that she must take care of herself… she must be shrewd and rely upon herself alone. She drinks very little, saves her money for clothes. Then, when she is gaily attired, she goes… and ‘grafts’ in various ways.”
GETTING HOOKED
No matter how comfortable she felt out promenading, the Bowery girl, like any woman on the streets, was likely to be viewed as a “vagabond,” a potential prostitute dressed not for an evening out but for work. The associations between prostitution and lone women were so deeply embedded in the culture that women themselves often assumed that their peers, other gals they happened to pass on the street, were on the make. Even a girl stuck at home, guarded by a tyrannical father, could easily adopt that view based on the stories she read. Novels and magazines were filled with tales of prostitutional woe; periodicals seemed to run entire tales-of-woe sections. Here, from a newspaper account, is the testimony of one landlady who’d lost a tenant to the streets:
I seen her. ’A tiltin’ off her head, to sees up and back on the street… this girl, ’corse, she’d ’a lived in my old house. I felt turrible about her leaving… a house that she know’d was decent and where she could manage to live within her means… she was good when she came to this house. When I seen her that day I tried to get her to come. Coffee. She looked almost grateful… but she saw a man… and turned on me and raced to do what she would.
In fact, it was extremely difficult to assess who was a real sex professional. During the nineteenth century and on into the twentieth, prostitution fell under the criminal heading of “vagrancy.” Vagrancy, as then defined,
