New York’s two classes: “the poor and the rich”

We hear a lot about the growing divide between the rich and poor in the U.S., but also in New York.

Middle-class enclaves are disappearing. Moderate-income residents can’t afford the city’s crazy-high housing prices.

None of this would be news to New Yorkers in the late 19th century.

“Strangers coming to New York are struck by the fact that there are but two classes in the city—the poor and the rich,” states James D.McCabe in his 1872 book Lights and Shadows of New York Life.

“The middle class, which is so numerous in other cities, hardly exists at all here,” writes McCabe.

“The reason of this is plain to the initiated. Living in New York is so expensive that persons of moderate means reside in the suburbs, some of them as far as forty miles in the country.”

A later chapter in the book, from which the excerpt above was taken, may sound strangely familiar to residents today.

[First and third images: NYPL Digital Collection, 1869]

Sex ads placed in 19th century newspapers

In the 20th century, they ran in the back pages of alternative weeklies like The Village Voice, and today, they clog up Craigslist and other online sites.

But in the 1870s, respectable newspapers were the only venue for sex-related ads, like the one above, arranging a meeting between semi-anonymous partners.

“Many of these advertisements are inserted by notorious roues, and others are from women of the town,” writes James D. McCabe in his 1872 guidebook Lights and Shadows of New York Life, where reproductions of the ads appear.

“Women wishing to meet their lovers, or men their mistresses, use these personal columns,” he added.

There must have been some degree of public outcry about these ads. McCabe quotes the New York World, apparently defending their placement:

“The cards of courtesans and the advertisements of houses of ill-fame might as well be put up in the panels of street cars.”

“If the public permits a newspaper to do it for the consideration of a few dollars, why make the pretense that there is anything wrong in the thing itself? If the advertisement is legitimate, than the business must be.”

Newspapers also published the 19th century versions of Craigslist’s Missed Connections.

How 19th century New Yorkers spent Sundays

During the workweek, the city was fast-paced and cutthroat, just as it is today.

But in the 19th century, that workweek generally ran from Monday through Saturday.

Which made Sunday the city’s day of leisure, when the mood of New York drastically changed, explains James McCabe’s Lights and Shadows of New York Life, from 1873.

“On Sunday morning New York puts on its holiday dress. The stores are closed, the streets have a deserted aspect, for the crowds of vehicles, animals, and human beings that fill them on other days are absent.”

Around 10 o’clock, New Yorkers went to church—preferably on Fifth Avenue, so well-to-do residents could promenade on the city’s most fashionable street afterward.

“The toilettes of the ladies show well here, and it is a pleasant place to meet one’s acquaintances,” says McCabe.

Dinner was served at 1 p.m.; servants had the rest of the day off. “After dinner, your New Yorker, male or female, thinks of enjoyment.” That meant more promenading, a drive in Central Park, or if you were working class, a picnic in the park or skating session on one of the frozen lakes.

Concerts were well-attended; saloons had plenty of business too. By sunset, “the Bowery brightens up wonderfully, and after nightfall the street is ablaze with a thousand gaslights. . . . Bowery beer-gardens do a good business.”

And with Sunday over, it was time to start the workweek . . . and do it all over again.

[Top two illustrations: NYPL digital collection]

The thieving street walkers of 1870s Soho

“Strangers visiting the city are struck by the number of women who are to be found on Broadway and the streets running parallel to it, without male escorts, after dark,” wrote James D. McCabe in his 1872 guidebook Lights and Shadows of New York Life.

“They are known as Street Walkers, and constitute one of the lowest orders of prostitutes to be found in New York.”

“They are nearly all thieves, and a very large proportion of them are but the decoys of the most desperate male garroters and thieves.”

One common scam, McCabe explains, was for a street walker to lure a tourist to her room in one of the subdivided “bed houses” in today’s Soho.

There, the street walker and a male confederate would rob the tourist while threatening his life.

Another trick was what McCabe called “panel thieving”:

“She takes her victim to her room, and directs him to deposit his clothing on a chair, which is placed but a few inches from the wall at the end of the room. This wall is false, and generally of wood.”

While the street walker and customer do their thing, a male thief will quietly slide out from behind the fake wall and lift the customer’s wallet.

The sucker won’t realize what has happened until he is out on the street, the street walker and her co-conspirator long-gone.

New York in 1872: A city filled with drunks

It’s tough to say whether the New York of 2011 is any more or less a drunken city than the New York of the post-Civil War years.

But the author of the 1872 guidebook Lights and Shadows of New York Life makes the case that 19th century city residents imbibed at incredible levels.

Among the venues for more respectable men were the large saloons and “better-class bar-rooms.”

The down and dirty places to get wasted: “Broadway rum palaces,” “gin mills” of the Bowery,  and the lowest of the low, the “bucket shops of the Five Points.”

And it’s the copious amounts of drinking done by female New Yorkers at what he deems “ladies restaurants” that really seems to shock the book’s author:

The 1870s version of Missed Connections ads

Think those missed connections/I saw you personals are only as old as Craigslist or the back page of the Village Voice?

Nah. They were around at least 140 years ago, according to a city guidebook called Lights and Shadows of New York Life, published in 1872, which reproduced several in its pages.

The book detailed the appeal of the “personals” printed in the first column of an unnamed city paper:

“Very many persons are inclined to smile at these communications, and are far from supposing that these journals are making themselves the mediums through  which assignations and burglaries, and almost every disreputable enterprise are arranged and carried on.”

So then as now, these missed connections-type ads don’t always have an innocent, romantic aim.

But apparently many did. “If a lady allows her face to wear a pleasant expression while glancing by the merest chance at a man, she is very apt to find some such personal as the following addressed to her in the next morning’s issue of the paper referred to.”

So what are the odds that any of these men hooked up with the lady they were looking for? I guess we’ll never know.