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Prostitution exposed! (1839)

February 10, 2010 in Writing New York by Bryan | 1 comment

This morning in lecture I spent some time talking about Horatio Alger’s 1868 novel Ragged Dick as belonging, in part, to the genre of the urban tourbook, offering armchair tourists an introduction to several of the city’s important civic landmarks and public spaces. Talking a little more generally about NYC guidebooks in the 19th century, I contrasted Alger’s approach — in which Dick scrupulously avoids taking his readers to the seedier neighborhoods he no doubt knew well — with books that offered to take readers into the depth of the city’s depravity, either in poverty-stricken neighborhoods where sin ran unchecked or behind the closed doors of the licentious upper-crust, on Bond Street and elsewhere.

As I usually do in this lecture, I showed a slide with this title page and frontispiece from an 1839 “moral reform directory”:

I’ve long used this image in lecture, but only recently came across a really fine discussion of the text itself. This morning (blame it on the hour!) I mixed up a few of the details, conflating this book with a publication it’s no doubt satirizing, a reform serial by the name of McDowall’s Journal.

As Donna Dennis recounts in Licentious Gotham, which I finally finished reading, McDowall’s Journal was published by a young Princeton Theological Seminary grad named John McDowall, who with the backing of New York’s Female Benevolent Society founded the publication to expose what he saw as a burgeoning sex trade and erotic publishing industry in the city. (He claimed that New York had 10,000 active prostitutes, which would have made one in ten New York females a sex worker.) McDowall ended up running afoul of civic authorities, who claimed that in exposing the details of the city’s seamy side he was merely peddling smut himself. It may have been the case that his threat to expose the names of prominent johns also made them nervous. In any case, he unwittingly set the model for a popular 19c stereotype: the moral reformer who takes up his cause in order to satisfy his own prurient interests. Following McDowall’s indictment by a grand jury for publishing material “calculated to promote lewdness,” the doors were opened to public discussion of sexual scandal and to popular literature that played to erotic interests.

Dennis follows her account of McDowall’s Journal with a discussion of Prostitution Exposed. If you can’t make out the details in the small print, the full title reads: PROSTITUTION EXPOSED; or, a MORAL REFORM DIRECTORY, Laying Bare the Lives, Histories, Residences, Seductions, &c. of the most celebrated COURTEZANS AND LADIES OF PLEASURE of the city of New-York, Together with a Description of the Crime and Its Effects, as also of the Houses of Prostitution and the Keepers, HOUSES OF ASSIGNATION, Their Charges and Conveniences, and other particulars interesting to the public.

Ostensibly intended to direct readers away from such “houses of assignation,” such “moral reform directories” nevertheless provided lists of names, addresses, prices, physical descriptions, and typical clientele and so doubled as directories for the trade itself.

Dennis sees Prostitution Exposed as intended in part to satirize the efforts of possibly prurient do-gooders like McDowall. She also notes the political implications of the double-entendre in the author’s pseudonym: “A Butt Ender.”

The slang clearly referred to a defiantly boisterous, unruly faction of egalitarian, prolabor Democrats in the 1830s (generally knows as Locofocos) that was closely linked to emerging machine politics. The Butt Enders probably took their name from the workingmen’s style of constantly chomping on the “butt end” of a “segar,” as popularized by the character of Mose, the famous Bowery B’hoy.

Mose, the moral reformer! A new line for his c.v. And to whom is this moral reform directory dedicated? To the “Ladies Reform Association for the Suppression of Onanism.” Nothing like a prostitute to keep the kids from indulging in the solitary vice. As Dennis notes, Prostitution Exposed is the “earliest surviving book dealing with material of a plainly libidinous nature to be both written and published in the city.”

Previously.

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Paul Bunyan in Billyburg

February 4, 2010 in Fashion by Bryan | 2 comments

Did I call this one in lecture the other day or what? This week’s New York Magazine contains the late-breaking news that — imagine! — plaid flannel shirts are back. (Thank God they’re fitted this time around, is all I have to say: if this really were a 90s grunge revival we’d all be back to wearing things two sizes too large, and NOBODY wants that.)

Earlier this semester I suggested that the proliferation of red flannel, lumberjack boots, and beards among urban hipsters is a 21st-century version of the cowboy craze that took over the East Village in the late 1960s. Back then, the whole Lower East Side was the frontier. Now Brooklyn’s Alaska, apparently. None of this is all that new: the indie rockers have been sporting big old beards for years now. My Melvillean beard done came and went a long time ago.

Of course, whenever I hear someone talking about fashion-forward urbanites in red flannel it puts me in mind of Bowery B’hoys like Mose, above left. The New York Magazine feature made me wonder: Was the Mose get-up self-consciously mimicking the costume of the California miner 49ers? Or were the red shirts standard fireman issue? Anyone have a better origin story for Mose’s suspenders and red flannel work shirts?

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No dainty kid glove affair

February 3, 2010 in City on Stage, Writing New York by Bryan | 3 comments

I wound up today’s lecture on the varieties of 19th-century NYC theater with a long quote from one critic’s recollection of the opening of A Glance at New York, the play that made Mose the Bowery B’hoy a household name, made b’hoy red-flannel fashion an instant craze, and launched Mose’s career in American folklore. The account of opening night comes from William Knight Northall’s Before and Behind the Curtain (1851), a theater history of the preceding 15 years, published only three years after Glance’s debut and two years after the notorious riots at the Astor Place Opera House. Northall recalls A Glance at New York’s impact on the venue in which it premiered, the Olympic Theater, and on New York’s theater scene in general:

For four months did this unmitigated conglomeration of vulgarity and illiteracy keep the stage … The theatre was crowded from pit to dome nightly, and the hi-hi’s of the pit testified how happy they were to see a congenial vulgarity thrust under the nostrils of a better class of people. It would be scarcely fair to judge of a person’s taste, simply because they spent an evening in witnessing the rowdyism of Mose. The piece was the town talk, and few could resist the inclination to go and see for themselves what had produced such an extraordinary excitement all around them. …

The house was filled with a constant succession of strangers, for we venture to assert that no man with any pretension to good taste, with any love for the stage, or any desire to see it fulfil its proper uses, would ever go there twice, and sit through the abomination the second time. When the public curiosity had been somewhat satisfied … the boxes no longer shone with the elite of the city; the character of the audiences was entirely changed, and Mose, instead of appearing on stage, was in the pit, the boxes, and the gallery. It was all Mose, and the respectability of the house mosed too.

Northall’s account differs slightly from the apocryphal but widely circulated story of Mose’s first appearance on the stage, in which an audience of rapt workingmen break into uproarious approbation on seeing one of their own stride on stage. Instead, he offers a story of a Bowery audience’s take-over of a respectable theater. Bowery audiences had already controlled their own theater spaces — most notably the Bowery Theater itself — for more than a decade. Though city officials hoped the Bowery Theater would help gentrify the neighborhood and provide civilizing social uplift for poorer patrons, they misjudged, and working-class audiences made that space their own, to the dismay of some officials and elite onlookers.

The growing class divisions to which Northall nods weren’t merely confined to theater spaces. Class-based riots erupted throughout the 1830s and 40s. But the theater became a special site for wearing your class politics on your sleeve: literally, in the sense of fashion and taste. B’hoys soaped their locks and dressed like Mose, promenading on the Bowery; the genteel set daintily applauded the construction of the Astor Place Opera House (pictured), a new spot for refined entertainment, built at the head of Lafayette, a street created expressly for the purposes of exclusive real estate. (The new street also bisected an old entertainment spot, Vauxhall Gardens, where Glance at New York concludes.)

In spite of the rosy cross-class friendships at the end of Glance, the class tensions in these plays—and the competing styles of masculine behavior among audiences—would culminate in one of the most famous episodes in New York theater history: the Astor Place riots of May 1849, only a year after Glance premiered at the Olympic and three after Fashion played to friendly audiences at the genteel Park.

The riots, which have been written about by dozens of historians (most recently Nigel Cliff, whose book I haven’t yet managed to read) were the culmination of an ongoing rivalry between two leading Shakespearean actors. William Charles Macready was an Englishman, Edwin Forrest an American. The two had different acting styles that appealed to different audiences. Macready was refined, aristocratic, and appealed to wealthy, genteel New Yorkers: the Park set. Forrest typified the Bowery style: rough, forceful, and patriotic. He was something of a teen idol for the Bowery B’hoys. Philip Hone—the mayor who had dedicated the Bowery in 1826—considered Forrest “a vulgar, arrogant loafer, with a pack of kindred rowdies at his heels.”

The two actors had a longstanding feud. Forrest had toured England to poor reviews, which he blamed on Macready. He struck back by hissing Macready during a performance of Hamlet. British newspapers came down hard on Forrest, who defended himself, in true Bowery fashion, by asserting his right as an audience member to express his dramatic criticism on the spot.

In May 1849, the two actors performed in New York in competing performances of Macbeth. Forrest took a dig at Macready by emphasizing Macbeth’s line, “What purgative drug will scour these English hence?” This led to several minutes of sustained applause from his audience. The same night, Macready performed at the two-year-old Astor Place Opera House, whose dress code included white kid gloves for gentlemen, a detail that particularly pissed off the b’hoys. Forrest’s friends and fans still managed to infiltrate the opera house and showered Macready with vegetables, glass bottles, and chairs during his performance. The pit and gallery from one house, in essence, had taken over another that belonged to a higher class. In other words, the whole city had become a theater like the one Irving’s Jonathan Oldstyle had portrayed earlier in the century.

At his next performance, nearly 15,000 people gathered outside the Opera House, most of them spectators. Inside, the crowd again showered Macready with eggs and tomatoes. Outside, the crowd began to throw bricks through windows and tried to break down the theater doors, which had been barricaded. The militia fired into the crowd, killing over 20 and wounding over 100 others. It was the first time American militia had fired on American citizens.

86 people were arrested. They were primarily workingmen, many of them butchers, like Mose. The papers picked up on the class politics and framed the event as stemming from working class resentment against “aristocratizing the pit.” The episode allows us to see how theater politics were one manifestation of larger public issues, and how they fed into larger public issues as well.

More on the response to the riots by writers including Irving and Melville sometime next week.

My quick account of the riots here is cobbled from a lot of sources: the longstanding classic is Richard Moody’s The Astor Place Riot (1958). Philip Hone’s account, quoted above, is reprinted in Phillip Lopate’s anthology Writing New York. The title of this post comes from Walt Whitman’s recollections of the Bowery Theater in “The Old Bowery” (1892).

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New York’s Vauxhall Gardens

February 6, 2009 in City on Stage, History, Writing New York by Bryan | No comments

New_York_Vauxhall_Gardens_1803.jpg

Benjamin Baker’s 1848 farce A Glance at New York, which I wrote about earlier this week, concludes in Vauxhall Gardens, a “pleasure garden” situated on Lafayette between 4th and 8th. Wikipedia has a decent entry on it, drawing for the most part from Mark Caldwell’s New York Night (2005) and Mary Henderson’s classic The City and the Theatre (rev. ed. 2004).

According to the article, the pleasure garden — named after the famous London entertainment spot — was originally opened by Samuel Fraunces, proprietor of Fraunces Tavern, a version of which remains on lower Pearl Street in the financial district. His Vauxhall existed in present-day TriBeCa, at the intersection of Greenwich and Chambers, where my daughters’ old elementary school, P.S. 234, now stands. It later moved to Broome Street, between Broadway and Bowery (which is where I happen to live), and then relocated to Lafayette between 4th and 8th (pictured above in 1803), where it remained until 1859. Until the middle of the 1850s its facilities included an outdoor theater and restaurants. It would have been this location represented in Glance’s final scene.

Several things strike me as interesting about the gardens’ final location. First, it would have been adjacent the Astor Place Opera House, scene of New York’s most infamous theater riots in 1849, only a year after Glance premiered. (The land the gardens were on also belonged to Astor.) Second, its location — with Broadway on one side and Bowery on the other — placed it smack in between the centers of upper-class fashion and working-class life. Vauxhall also would have separated the Bowery culture from the Olympic Theater, on Broadway (though a little lower, between Howard and Grand), where Glance opened. (See my prior post for a contemporary protest against the impact the play had on the theater’s audience makeup.)

According to the Wikipedia article, again citing Henderson and Caldwell, the gardens drew patrons from both elite and working-class neighborhoods until around 1850, when the Bowery folks won out for the park’s remaining decade. This would make Benjamin Baker’s choice of the spot for the conclusion of his play a rather interesting symbolic geography: a place where classes mingled, but one increasingly coming under working-class influence. And it does seem as if Mose and Lize are more at home at Vauxhall than are the play’s upper-class characters. Harry, one of the wealthier characters, acknowledges to his new girlfriend Jane that she has “condescen[ded]” to “honoring this place with [her] presence.” By contrast, Mose, with his “outré” manners, sits and delivers his famous order to the waiter: “Bring me a large plate of pork and beans. Say, a large piece of pork, and don’t stop to count de beans!”

Bonus: check out the Bowery Boys’ podcast on the “original bowery b’hoys,” along with a group of kid actors known as the “Bowery Boys” in the 1930s and 40s.

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“Big Mose must of dropped it.”

February 3, 2009 in Odds and Ends, Uncategorized by Bryan | 1 comment

mose.jpg

Over the course of the last month as I wrapped up my own contribution to our Cambridge Companion — a chapter on nineteenth-century theater, with a special focus on plays set in the contemporary city — I had the occasion to revisit the essay that remains the definitive scholarly account of Mose the Bowery B’hoy: Richard M. Dorson’s “Mose the Far-Famed and World-Renowned,” published in the journal American Literature in 1943. (Click here to access the article via JSTOR; institutional subscription required.) A revised version of the piece appeared in Dorson’s 1973 book America in Legend: Folklore from the Colonial Period to the Present.

From first page to last, one rich footnote after another, Dorson’s article on Mose delights. One of the first professionally trained folklorists in the United States, and a major force behind Indiana University’s renowned program in folklore for several decades, Dorson was a meticulous collector of stories about American characters. Mose was just one of those, although Dorson was forceful in his belief that folklore emerged in cities as easily as it did anywhere else, and Mose — butcher, fireman, benevolent protector of the Bowery — is probably the most uniquely urban folk hero America has produced. (Students in Writing New York may be interested to know that Dorson’s first article, published in 1940, was on the character type pioneered by Royall Tyler’s Jonathan, the “stage Yankee,” almost always portrayed as a bumpkin bewildered by the city, the very opposite of Mose.)

Dorson had obviously spent hours and hours in the theater history collection at Harvard’s Houghton Library, which makes his notes on Mose as rich as the essay itself. For example, his opening note on the definition and use of the term “b’hoy” includes the following authoritative description:


The term applied to a type of loafer-dandy familiar on Chatham Street [now Park Row] and Centre Market Square in the forties, distinguished by his rolling gait, surly manner, slangy talk, and extravagant costume; the last is frequently catalogued as a shiny stovepipe hat tipped over the forehead, soap-locks plastered flat against the temple, a “long nine” cigar uptilted at an angle of forty-five degrees, bright red shirt, heavy pearl-buttoned pea-jacket, and rolled-up trousers tucked into the boots.

Just in case you need some ideas for next Halloween. And Dorson leaves tantalizing little hints of things he can’t fully describe in polite company, such as Mose’s cameo in a “lurid work” titled Asmodeus! or, The Iniquities of New York. (Actually, I looked it up on Google Books and it seems pretty tame.)

Dorson is clearly attracted to Mose’s popularity — what made the character such a hit, from his first appearance in Benjamin Baker’s 1848 farce A Glance at New York to his many incarnations and spin-offs, national theater tours (played by Frank Chanfrau, who defined the role, and many others), and adventures in sequels that took him to China, California, and even the moon. At the same time, he’s sensitive to the cultural tension Mose caused, citing, among other accounts, William Knight Northall’s Before and Behind the Curtain (1851):

For four months did this unmitigated conglomeration of vulgarity and illiteracy keep the stage–a compliment entirely due to Mr. Chanfrau. Except the acting of this gentleman, there was not a redeeming feature in the whole affair. It was low in design, vulgar in language, and improbable in plot. … The theatre was crowded from pit to dome nightly, and the hi-hi’s of the pit testified how happy they were to see a congenial vulgarity thrust under the nostrils of a better class of people. It would be scarcely fair to judge of a person’s taste, simply because they spent an evening in witnessing the rowdyism of Mose. The piece was the town talk, and few could reisit the inclination to go and see for themselves what had produced such an extraordinary excitement all around them. The house was filled with a constant succession of strangers, for we venture to assert that no man with any pretension to good taste, with any love for the stage, or any desire to see it fulfil its proper uses, would ever go there twice, and sit through the abomination the second time. When the public curiosity had been somewhat satisfied … the boxes no longer shone with the elite of the city; the character of the audiences was entirely changed, and Mose, instead of appearing on stage, was in the pit, the boxes, and the gallery. It was all Mose, and the respectability of the house mosed too.

When the play closed at the Olympic, it moved to the Chatham, which Northall felt was a more appropriate venue.

Dorson writes of Mose’s afterlife in folklore, once the plays about him had fallen out of popularity in the 1860s:

Underworld stories sprang up around a fabled Bowery giant, twelve feet tall, with hands as big as hams reaching down almost to the ground; he wore a red shirt and a red helmet as big as a tent. When Big Mose charged into battle against the New York gangs, he carried an uprooted lamppost in one hand and a butcher’s cleaver in the other; wrathfully he hurled paving blocks ripped from the streets at the Plug Uglies and the Dead Rabbits. For sport he drank drayloads of beer at a sitting, or jumped from Manhattan to Brooklyn, or blew ships back down the East River with the fumes of a two-foot cigar, or unhitched a horse car and ran with it pell-mell the length of the Bowery. When his girl turned him down, Big Mose fled the Bowery for the South Seas, where he married an island princess, became the king of the Sandwich Islands, and raised forty half-breed children. But even today when a bum picks up a cigarette stub he says, “Big Mose must of dropped it.”

In some ways it seems a crime — but then again it may be your and my good fortune — that Dorson’s America in Legend can be found used on Amazon for under a dollar.

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City on Stage

August 6, 2008 in City on Stage by Bryan | No comments

There’s a famous anecdote about the first appearance of Mose the Bowery B’hoy on the New York stage. Played by neighborhood boy Frank Chanfrau, Mose, the fireman-butcher, makes his entrance in Benjamin Baker’s 1848 farce A Glance at New York by vowing to break with his fire company: he ain’t gonna run with his machine no more. As the story goes, Mose’s opening line brought down the house.

200px-Frank_Chanfrau_as_Mose.jpg

The success of Baker’s play is often attributed — like that of an earlier, more genteel comedy, Royall Tyler’s The Contrast (1787) — to the audience’s desire to see itself portrayed on stage. When haven’t New Yorkers liked to watch themselves on stage or screen? Mose the Bowery B’hoy looked and sounded like his most important audience members, the Bowery working class, just as Tyler’s target audience was expected to identify with his principals, especially the ones who gently parodied the new republican elite. But unlike many middle-class portraits of city life, there’s no railing against fashion in Baker’s play; instead, Mose crystallized a popular street style and probably reinforced it for years to come. (I’d like to know more than I’ve been able to find out about the popularity and endurance of Bowery B’hoy fashion.)

Both plays are too
simplistically understood as a form of New York narcissism, though. For one thing, the half-century that intervenes between the plays allows Baker to write working-class characters who, though they still delight in fleecing naive rubes visiting from the country, win the play’s sanction rather than its opprobrium.

But both plays should be
taken more seriously still, as demonstrating how theater has, in different ways over time, informed controversies about social division and public space. I’ve been thinking through a half dozen or so such “City on Stage” plays for my contribution to our Cambridge Companion, and I taught an advanced undergrad seminar on the topic last spring. One thing I’ve noticed about the century or so following Tyler’s first portrait of New Yorkers on the New York stage is how consistently these plays obsess about the city’s public spaces. From the class-stratification encouraged by eighteenth-century theater architecture (when audiences were divided along class lines into different portions of the audience space) to the mid-nineteenth century, when increasingly pronounced class divisions had led to separate theaters altogether based on class, from anxieties about women’s theater attendance to Barnum’s innovation of separate “Negro” showtimes for black audiences, theaters served as a highly visible crystallization of urban anxieties and conflicts, which sometimes — especially for upper class audiences — masqueraded as a fear of “the city” itself. In what ways did “City on Stage” plays aim to quell such anxieties, and in what ways did they foster them?

If Clyde Fitch’s 1909 Broadway play The City is any indication, the
blame for vice had shifted from the city itself to the individuals who inhabit it — regardless of class. In response to the play’s grisly portrait of political corruption, sexual
decadence, and drug use, the chastened protagonist, who will lose his bid for New York’s governorship due to a series of family scandals, begs his audience not to blame the city: “It’s not her fault! It’s our own! What the City does is to bring out what’s strongest in us. If at heart we’re good, the good in us will win! If the bad is strongest, God help us!” The city is a stage, here, in other words, for proving one’s self, in a way
a country village will never allow you. A “big, and busy, and selfish, and self-centered” city is a virtue: “she comes to her gates” and welcomes the man coming from the country village, “and she stands him in the middle of her market place . . . and she paints his ambition on her fences, and lights up her skyscrapers with it! — what he wants to be and what he thinks he is! — and then she says to him, Make good if you can, or to Hell with you! And what is in him comes out to clothe his nakedness, and to the City he can’t lie!” The emphasis here on advertising, clothing, ambition, and the market suggests that one function of the “City on Stage” trajectory over the course of the century was to naturalize what was still deeply problematic when Tyler wrote The Contrast. If, in Fitch’s play, there’s still very little distance between the stage and street, by the early twentieth century performance and artifice were taken to be the deepest expression of who a person is.

Perhaps the biggest lesson to be learned from the century-long pattern of New Yorkers putting themselves on stage, then, is the relationship between the institution of the theater and what would become modern consumer culture. What does the culture of consumption do to class divisions in the modern city? My hunch is that the answer has to do with the kinds of performance involved in high-fashion promenades — the problematic starting point of Tyler’s play, but something Mose and his G’hal take, as it were, in stride.

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