The Epic of New York City (71 page)

On the other hand, Abram S. Hewitt, onetime mayor of New York, declared that every immigrant worker meant a $5,000 increase in the nation's wealth. Aleš Hrdli
ka, an American anthropologist born in Bohemia, once said, “So far as science is able to see, there has not been . . . a trace of any bad effect of these mixtures on the American people. Much rather otherwise. Probably a good part, perhaps a very important part . . . of the power and strength of the American people is the result of these very mixtures.” Italian-born Edward Corsi, who became an important American political figure, remarked, “Roughly one-half the total population of the United States traces its beginning to Ellis Island.”

Between 1855 and 1892 nearly 7,700,000 aliens entered this country through New York State's big immigration station at Castle Garden near the Battery and through the state's subsidiary depot on Wards Island in the East River. Conditions at Castle Garden became
so bad that when Grover Cleveland was sworn in as governor in 1883, he devoted part of his first message to the problem. A state investigation resulted in better conditions there. With the increase in immigration, facilities at Castle Garden and on Wards Island became so inadequate that both were closed. In 1890 immigration control was transferred from the state to the federal government, and Ellis Island was chosen as the new immigration station.

On January 1, 1892, the first foreigners arrived at Ellis Island in the Upper Bay of New York Harbor. The island served as the main gateway to America until 1954. After numbing days and nights sardined in steerage, fretted by seasickness and homesickness and fear and a sense of rootlessness, many aliens arrived in a state of physical and emotional exhaustion. Their spirits did not revive until some—the lucky ones—walked into the main reception hall and up to the famous “kissing post,” where they were reunited with relatives and friends who had preceded them to the New World. These scenes were very touching and very American because America is a nation of immigrants and New York City is the most cosmopolitan city in all of cosmopolitan America. Dutch blood flowed in the veins of patrician Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who once began a speech to the Daughters of the American Revolution with the words: “Fellow immigrants—”

Chapter 34

T
HE REPORTER
wondered what he was doing in church. W. E. Carson of the
World
had been urged to attend the Madison Square Presbyterian Church on Sunday morning, February 14, 1892. Half-suspecting that the tip might be a hoax, but hesitant to overlook a good story, Carson strolled into the Gothic brownstone church at Madison Avenue and Twenty-fourth Street. Sitting down in a pew, he peered past green granite columns and soon spotted a frail and aging man, who held his silk hat between his bony knees. The reporter recognized him as Thomas C. Platt, Republican boss of New York State, who recently had declared war on Richard Croker, leader of Tammany Hall and thus boss of New York City.

Now the minister stepped into the pulpit. He was the Reverend Charles H. Parkhurst, a fifty-year-old man with a slender figure, a long and narrow face, nearsighted eyes peering intensely through rimless glasses, a chin cloaked in a Vandyke, and curly hair worn long at the sides and the back of his head. Dr. Parkhurst looked like the scholar he was. A graduate of Amherst College, he had also studied in Germany, and he knew Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit. That Sunday morning he wore a black clerical robe with a white starched bib at his throat.

He had spoken no longer than a minute when a gasp rose from the congregation, and the
World
reporter reached for a pencil inside his pocket. New York City, the pastor declared, was thoroughly rotten. He laid the blame squarely on Mayor Hugh J. Grant, District Attorney De Lancy Nicoll, and the police commissioners. “Every step that we take looking to the moral betterment of this city,” Dr. Parkhurst charged, “has to be taken directly in the teeth of the damnable pack of administrative bloodhounds that are fattening themselves on the ethical flesh and blood of our citizenship. . . .”

The Presbyterians sat in a state of shock. The reporter scribbled notes as fast as he could. Republican Boss Platt narrowed his eyes as he schemed how to use this sermon for his own political ends. But no man present that day could foresee the full consequences of the remarkable sermon.

It shook the town because the
World
played up Carson's story. Mayor Grant angrily called on the minister to prove his allegations. Tammany politicians denounced Dr. Parkhurst as “un-Christian” and “vulgar.” Charles A. Dana, editor of the
Sun,
urged that the minister be driven from his pulpit. Other pastors felt that if Dr. Parkhurst wished to denounce evil, he should have stuck to Sodom and Gomorrah. And District Attorney Nicoll ordered him to appear before a grand jury.

Nine days after his sermon the preacher was haled before the jury and asked for legal evidence of his charges. He had none. His attack had been based on newspaper articles never denied by public officials. Nearly everyone realized that vice was rampant in the city, but Dr. Parkhurst had not documented the case. The grand jury, which was partial to Tammany, rebuked him and called his charges sweeping and groundless. The jury sent its report to the court of general sessions, whose presiding judge agreed. Dr. Parkhurst was depressed. “I had waked up a whole jungle of teeth-gnashing brutes,” he later
said, “and it was a question of whether the hunter was going to bag the game or the game make prey of the hunter.”

After moping a few days, Dr. Parkhurst sought the advice of commission merchant David J. Whitney, a founder of the Society for the Prevention of Crime. This was a private organization of clergymen, merchants, and lawyers. Parkhurst had been its president for the past year. Humiliated by the grand jury, he wanted to pick up where he had left off but didn't know how to proceed. Whitney urged him to make a personal tour of the underworld to collect evidence at firsthand. The merchant also put the minister in touch with a private detective, named Charles W. Gardner, who agreed to act as guide. This young man wasn't an altogether savory character, but Parkhurst didn't know it at the time. Gardner flaunted a huge mustache, which curled at the ends, and wore the hard hat popular with most private eyes of that era.

The detective and the pastor met in Parkhurst's home at 133 East Thirty-fifth Street. For six dollars a night, plus expenses, the detective agreed to show the cleric the seamy side of New York life. He also promised to hire other private detectives to collect further data on their own. As the two men conversed, young John Langdon Erving entered the room. One of Parkhurst's parishioners, Erving was tall and blond, a society dandy, and the scion of a rich family. It was decided that Erving would accompany his pastor and the detective on their outings. The three men agreed to meet on Saturday evening, March 5, in Gardner's apartment at 207 West Eighteenth Street. Naturally, they would need disguises. Gardner later wrote a book, called
The Doctor and the Devil, or Midnight Adventures of Dr. Parkhurst,
in which he told how he changed the pastor's appearance.

Their first night out on the town the three men stopped at Tom Summers' Saloon, at 33 Cherry Street, where they drank whiskey that tasted like embalming fluid and watched little girls buy booze at ten cents a pint to take home to their fathers. When the detective praised the pastor's ability to hold his liquor, Parkhurst closed his eyes and smiled. Next, they headed for a whorehouse at 342 Water Street, where painted women stood in the doorway soliciting trade. Two harlots grabbed Parkhurst, dragged him inside, and sat him down on a chair. He chatted easily with them, fended off their advances, and got away. The next stop was another red-light house, where a young prostitute asked Parkhurst to dance. To save the minister embarrassment, Erving danced with her, while Parkhurst
sat and watched. Two old hags drifted up to him, begged him to buy them drinks, and he did. This so won the heart of a 200-pound crone that she leered at Parkhurst, asked him to call her Baby, and invited him upstairs. Again he managed to escape.

The night of March 9 the minister, detective, and socialite resumed their explorations. At Water Street and Catherine Slip they ducked into the bar of the East River Hotel, where they found two uniformed policemen enjoying drinks on the house. Parkhurst told Gardner to jot down their badge numbers. Then, acting like a roisterer, the minister ordered drinks for everyone in the bar. It cost Parkhurst only eighty cents to provide each of the sixteen customers with a whiskey. Next the trio visited a five-cent lodginghouse for men at 233 Park Row. Although this was a legal establishment, Parkhurst wanted to see it because Gardner had said that in places like this Tammany recruited voters to cast ballots frequently and fraudulently. In a room thirty feet wide and eighty feet long, dozens of foul-smelling bums slept on bare canvas cots; their stench drove Parkhurst out into the street.

On their next nocturnal trip the explorers headed for the Bowery and visited several brassy cabarets, known as concert gardens. Then they saw “tight houses,” where all women wore tights. Brothels were classified by the nationalities of their inmates, so on Forsyth Street the three men visited a “German house.” The madam said that the five scantily clad girls in the parlor were her daughters. Pushing on, the men got within a stone's throw of Police Headquarters, at 300 Mulberry Street, when they were accosted by fifty tarts. One woman enticed them to a house on Elizabeth Street, which she described as “a boarding house for the most respectable policemen in the city.” By the time they left this place, Parkhurst had become ill from mixing his drinks, so the detective led him into a Third Avenue saloon for a glass of soda. As luck would have it, there sat a drunk who had gone to Amherst with the minister. When he greeted Parkhurst by name, the bartender looked up in surprise and fright, ordered the trio out of the place, and threw their money after them. Feeling better physically, Parkhurst demanded that Gardner “show me something worse.”

In Chinatown, northeast of what is now Foley Square, they watched a game of fan-tan and then padded into the murky room of a nearby building, where they found a Chinese man, his Caucasian wife, and their eight-year-old son smoking opium. Next came a visit
to the Negro district around Sullivan and West Houston Streets, called Coontown. Then Frenchtown on the southern fringe of Washington Square in Greenwich Village. Entire blocks consisted of houses of prostitution—of all kinds. Worst of all, to the sensitive Parkhurst, was a four-story brick house on West Third Street, called the Golden Rule Pleasure Club. There they were greeted by “Scotch Ann,” who bade them enter the basement. This was partitioned into small dens, each containing a table and a couple of chairs.

As Gardner described it: “In each room sat a youth, whose face was painted, eyebrows blackened, and whose airs were those of a young girl. Each person talked in a high falsetto voice, and called the others by women's names.” Puzzled, the minister turned to the detective and whispered a question. Gardner explained. For the first and only time Parkhurst was frightened. Running outdoors, he panted in horror, “Why, I wouldn't stay in that house for all the money in the world!”