Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations: The Veil Lifted, and Light Thrown on Crime and its Causes, and Criminals and their Haunts. Facts and Disclosures.Howe, William F.
History
Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations: The Veil Lifted, and Light Thrown on Crime and its Causes, and Criminals and their Haunts. Facts and Disclosures.
Howe, William F.
Crime -- New York (State) -- New York; Criminals -- New York (State) -- New York; New York (N.Y.) -- Social conditions
The love of woman is usually pure and elevated. But when she devotes her
affections to a man who realizes her ideal, she does not hesitate to
sacrifice all she holds dear for his gratification. Actuated by a noble
self-abnegation, she derives a melancholy pleasure from the knowledge
that she has utterly given up all she had formerly so zealously guarded,
and she feels that her love has reached its grand climacteric when she
abandons herself, without redemption, to the idol she has set up in the
highest place in her soul. This heroic martyrdom is one of the
recognizable causes of the immorality that insidiously permeates our
social system.
The crime of prostitution can be witnessed in New York in every phase in
which it invites or repels the passions of men. There are the splendid
parlor houses distributed in the most fashionable parts of the city;
there are the bar houses; there are the dance houses; and there are the
miserable basements where this traffic is seen in its hideous deformity,
divested of the gaslight glare and tinsel of the high-toned seraglios.
The internal arrangements of the palatial bagnios are in many instances
sumptuous, magnificent and suggestive. The walls of these seductive
arsenals, too, are frequently of a color calculated to throw the most
becoming shade over the inmates, while the pictures on the walls usually
suggest resplendent sensuality. Many of these gilded palaces are
patronized by prominent citizens, officials in the government, state and
civic employ. Many of them, already married, keep mistresses in these
establishments, while others are content to be recognized as "lovers" of
the inmates. Many of the country merchants who periodically visit New
York insist on being taken the "grand rounds," as it is termed, before
they will order goods or attend to business at all. The salesmen in our
leading houses are expect to be posted, and to act as escorts sad
chaperones in this wine-guzzling tour. Indeed, so much is this
disgraceful feature recognized in some large business houses, that the
proprietors make an allowance to their salesmen for this purpose.
The proprietresses of these houses are all impervious to shame, and
carry on their trade with the sole ambition of realizing money. Many of
them have summer establishments and suburban villas at the
watering-places, and carry on their nefarious business at Saratoga, Long
Branch, Coney Island, Newport and Cape May during the summer mouths.
Many of them own handsome equipages, in which, gorgeously attired, with
liveried menials, they show themselves in Central Park to the envy of
the virtuous and honest of womankind. It is in the places kept by these
women, where the inmates are usually handsome young girls between the
ages of fifteen and thirty, that the precocious and well-to-do young men
of this city fall an easy prey to vice, and become in time the haggard
and dissolute man of the town, or degenerate into the forger, the bank
defaulter or the swindler.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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