Apr 13, 2012 ARCHIVES | Entertainment | COLUMNS Richard Zacks
Doubleday
ISBN 978-0385519724
431 pages
$27.95
Reviewed by Daniel Stashower
A clergyman, a detective and a society swell walk into a bar ...
It sounds like a vaudeville routine, but, as Richard Zacks reports in "Island of Vice," his jaunty and beautifully researched portrait of New York at the close of the 19th century, it was actually the opening salvo of "a holy war on vice and government collusion." The clergyman, Rev. Charles Parkhurst of the Madison Square Presbyterian Church, had delivered a blistering sermon a few days earlier - on Valentine's Day of 1892 - in which he called out the corrupt powerbrokers of the city's Tammany Hall political machine. According to Parkhurst, the mayor and his subordinates were a "lying, perjured, rum-soaked and libidinous lot" growing fat on the city's houses of sin through an entrenched system of bribes and rake-offs. Something had to be done.
When city officials fought back with libel charges, Parkhurst launched an unlikely fact-finding mission, hiring a private detective to conduct him and a devout blue-blood parishioner on a tour of New York's seamy side. "I never dreamed that any force of circumstances would ever draw me into contacts so coarse, so bestial, so consummately filthy," Parkhurst declared. At one stop, the reverend averted his eyes from a display of nude leapfrog; at another, he fended off a 19-year-old girl's blunt proposition. History has drawn a discreet veil over the carryings-on at the "French Circus" on West 4th Street, but certain statutes invoked at the time made reference to birds, animals and corpses.
In the end, Parkhurst presented the city's district attorney with a list of 284 gambling joints, brothels and after-hours saloons. "Now," he demanded, "what are you going to do with them?" The challenge led, in time, to a clean-sweep election that brought in a reform-minded mayor, as well as a intrepid new police commissioner by the name of Theodore Roosevelt.
Roosevelt, writes Zacks, "was then a work-in-progress, years removed from San Juan Hill and the White House." At age 36, Roosevelt freely admitted that he "knew nothing of police management," but he compensated with a winning optimism and boundless energy that initially endeared him to the city's population. With his friend Jacob Riis, the pioneering photojournalist, Roosevelt undertook a series of "midnight rambles," rattling the cages of patrol officers found sleeping on the job or otherwise derelict in their duties.
Roosevelt's efforts went off the rails soon enough when he chose to enforce the city's long-neglected Sabbath laws, which required saloons to close on Sundays. The measure posed no hardship to Roosevelt himself, who seldom drank, but it did not sit well with the populace, many of whom looked forward to knocking back a beer or two after a six-day work week. Saloonkeepers scrambled to find loopholes, and soon discovered that any establishment selling food as well as drink might call itself a "hotel," thereby circumventing the ban. It was not necessary, however, that the food be eaten, and more than one newly minted hotel provided an "an old dessicated ruin" of bread and cheese that could pass untouched from one customer to another to satisfy the requirement. Soon the policy became the subject of jokes: During a pause in service at a particular watering hole, disgruntled customers were told, "Some idiot has eaten the sandwich."
Zacks, whose earlier books include "The Pirate Hunter" and "History Laid Bare," seems to take a professional interest in scoundrels and sinners. He's right at home in fin-de-siecle New York, a time when the city had 30,000 prostitutes and 8,000 saloons available to a population of not quite 2 million people. He has pumped his book full of entertaining details about such things as a "dog's nose," an ungodly beverage made up of barrel dregs and leavings from the glasses of other drinkers, and a five-cent whiskey that tastes of "kerosene oil, soft soap, alcohol and the chemicals used in fire extingushers." Though Roosevelt is the marquee name in his drama, Zacks makes good use of a fascinating array of supporting players, including the corrupt precinct captain "Big Bill" Devery, "a true Hell's Kitchen New Yorker, mixing charm and menace," and the exotic, Algerian belly dancer Little Egypt, who was fond of appearing in what she called "zee altogether."
Against such "brilliant evil," as one newspaper phrased it, Roosevelt never stood a chance. Within two years, as the anti-vice crusade stalled out amid "constant bickerings between men who know better," he looked for greener pastures. By then the press had dismissed him as a "blue-blooded Knickerbocker" who would never amount to anything. The New York Mercury declared: "No Roosevelt was ever President; no Roosevelt ever led an army to victory - and none ever will." By April of 1897, he had decamped for Washington as assistant secretary of the navy.
"It is fascinating and somewhat uncanny," Zacks writes, "that despite one of the most concerted efforts in the history of New York City to crack down on whoring, gambling, and after-hours drinking that all three somehow thrived." Uncanny? Perhaps, but as O. Henry, another keen observer of the city's vices, once declared, "It couldn't have happened anywhere but in little old New York."
Daniel Stashower is the author of "The Beautiful Cigar Girl."
Copyright 2012 Washington Post Writers Group
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