Fireplace Remodeling in Tenderloin, NY

Early in the 19th century, the major vice district had been located in what is now SoHo, called at the time “Hells’ Hundred Acres”, but as the city grew steadily northward, the theater district along Broadway and the Bowery moved uptown as well, as did the legitimate and illegitimate businesses that were usually connected with show business. For some time, the city’s “Rialto” theater district centered on Union Square and 14th Street, but the Fifth Avenue Hotel broke new ground when it opened at 23rd Street and Fifth Avenue in 1859, beginning the expansion of the Union Square Rialto to 23rd Street and Madison Square. By the 1870s, the Fifth Avenue Hotel had many competitors in the area, and where the hotels were, the prostitutes followed.

By the 1880s, the Tenderloin encompassed the largest number of nightclubs, saloons, bordellos, gambling casinos, dance halls, and “clip joints” in New York City, to the extent that one estimate made in 1885 was that half of the buildings in the district were connected with vice. Reformers referred to the area as “Satan’s Circus”, and one anti-vice crusading minister, the Rev. Thomas De Witt Talmage, denounced the entire city of New York as “the modern Gomorrah” for allowing it to exist.

The clientele of these establishments was not necessarily working-class: one set of seven sisters ran side-by-side brothels in a residential neighborhood on West 25th Street, inviting their upper class customers with engraved invitations. On some nights only gentlemen in formal evening dress were allowed to attend, and the girls of these houses were as socially adept as they were sexually; on Christmas Eve profits were given to charity.