In the “old” countries, girls had moved seamlessly from the father’s house, perhaps briefly to an employer’s, and then to the husband’s. Usually the family knew the fiancé and his parents; marriages were often arranged. In the new world, and in its odd new single sector, girls would soon wander off in gangs to the Bowery, to the crowds and dance halls, so that their families could not possibly oversee whom they met or what they did. And men in New York City seemed less reliable than they had back home; they moved on—to other women, to other jobs outside the city.
As Christine Stansell wrote, in City of Women, “As people moved around… from the Old World to the New… and from country to city… and [amidst] the mobile and anonymous circumstances of the city… methods of ensuring male responsibility weakened.”
The most extreme example of this breakdown was the Alma Sands case. Sands was a Quaker girl who lived with her parents and took an interest in the family’s boarder, one Eli Weeks. The two slept together—not unusual in certain Old Country courtship systems; in fact, it was viewed as a sign of the couple’s seriousness and especially the commitment of the prospective bridegroom. Then, on the night before she was supposed to marry Eli Weeks, Alma Sands turned up dead. After weeks of wild public speculation, a jury indicted Weeks, describing him as a man who understood the depth of his commitment—an engagement—and in “fury” at “his unbearable promises” took unique, punishing measures to break free.
The Sands murder evoked a response similar to the hysteria surrounding the 1969 Manson murders. Everyone talked about it in gory detail and traded in rumors about witchcraft and satanic practices. Hundreds lined up to see the house where it occurred and, later, to see the girl’s shrouded body. Mothers, in particular, dragged their daughters to make a point that was sadly never less than confusing: Know and trust the man, my dear, although it’s hard now to ever know or trust the man. In cartoons a joking case was made for marrying one’s brother. Although who was to say how city life had changed one’s brother?
In the early days of working-girl life, most avoided the Bowery and instead gathered in groups of four or five and, arms linked, headed to Broadway. In an 1863 guidebook, Miller’s New York as It Is, or a Stranger’s Guidebook, the authors made the distinction: “To denizens of New York, society is usually known under the generic divisions of Broadway and the Bowery.” Broadway was the street—the golden thoroughfare of theaters and their wealthy clientele in furs and silks. For a working girl, there was little else to do but look. To hook up, to have a real time out, meant turning around and heading back to the Bowery, and this did not seem—not at first, anyway—to be an option.
We hear the word Bowery—a long two-way boulevard running from Manhattan’s East Village into Chinatown—and light on phrases such as “skid row” or perhaps “junkie bum.” But back then it was a scene. At sundown every day, this hub of the butcher’s trade became the site of a daring all-night party. Couples crowded for miles beneath the elevated train, or El, whose tracks cast slatted lantern strips across the gaudy attractions—the famed Bowery Theater, freak shows, oyster houses, hundreds of eateries and food carts, some selling the first mass-produced ice cream, and the concert saloons (saloon was a takeoff on the word salon); these were for men only. In the average concert saloon, “waiter girls” were often topless and there were bedrooms at the back.
Reigning over it all was a bunch of Irish boys, former gang members or pals who’d once worked together on the city’s famed volunteer fire crews. Now they worked mostly as journeymen and laborers. At least during the daylight hours. At night they came out dressed to rule. This was hostile male turf; girls were never entirely safe, but to some extent Bowery boys viewed the single girl as a compatriot—usually Irish and always working-class—and as such entitled to some brotherly protection. (Again, not that she was immune from brotherly advance and, sometimes, attack.) Raconteur and socialite Abram Dayton, a scion of the elite Knickerbocker clan, recalled that he’d gone down to the Bowery and easily slummed his way into numerous quick-sex encounters. But after the rise of the factory culture, with its rituals of the Friday-night stroll, he warned that “the Broadway exquisite who ventured ‘within the pale,’ was compelled to be… guarded in his advances… any approach… wither by work or look was certain to be visited by instant punishment.”
The Bowery boys, known in their self-created legend as “the b’hoys” (thus making the girls they kept around “the g’hals”), may be viewed as a first modern peer group. It was a time of union instability, so they were not organized as fellow laborers. They had no other political or religious affiliations. But they were linked, generally speaking, as ethnic laborers, an underclass only too aware of the distinctions between Broadway and the Bowery. If they shared no political or union line, they had a sensibility, a posture, a distinct manner of speech and a unique form of dress that marked them as members of an unofficial social club.
The b’hoy, from what’s described, wore his hair in a high combination of pompadour and ducktail. Abram Dayton recalled seeing “black straight broad-brimmed hat[s]… worn with a pitch forward… large shirt collar[s] turned down and loosely fastened… so as to expose the full proportions of a thick, brawny neck; a black frock coat… a flashy satin or velvet vest… pantaloons,” all worn with a lot of jewelry. The final image suggests fifties hoods dressed in drag. Low-life chroniclers characterized the b’hoys as a tough and defensive lot; still, they were so devoted to their “airs,” to their internal code of politesse, that they seemed posed there on the street kind of gallant.
The girls thought so.
As I’ve said, few girls made their way to the Bowery—not at first. (Even the ones who went to gape at Broadway were usually home by eight, telling wholesome lies to parents who could not begin to understand this new scheme.) The bold ones who “walked out” were usually, like the b’hoys, transplanted Irish—tough, independent, a bit hotheaded. An estimated eight out of ten young Irish girls had come, some alone, to the United States as family scouts. They sent for their relatives, as many as they could, using the pay they made as domestics.
Friday nights were a release, and all over the “east end” one might view “a continuous procession,” as George G. Foster wrote, “which loses itself gradually in the innumerable side streets leading… into the unknown regions of Proletarianism.” The girls busily losing themselves had dressed ecstatically. Using magazine illustrations, inexpensive patterns, or improvisation, the Bowery gals put their seamstressing skills to work and made dresses that paid homage to uptown fashions. Then, as if the dress was a cake, they decorated it. They loved notions: fancy buttons, lots of lace, ribbons, bows, fake-silk sashes, any small inexpensive item they could afford. One observer reported that these had no “particular degree of correspondence or relationship in color—indeed [it was common to] see… startling contrasts… a light pink contrasting with a deep blue, a bright yellow with a brighter red, and a green with a dashing purple or maroon.”
The Bowery girl declared her independence from proper female decorum by appearing in public without a hat. All good women wore hats. The only exceptions were prostitutes, who needed open faces to make eye contact with prospective johns. Proper women went further and trimmed their expensive hats with veils and, below, wore heavy clothing to cover every imaginable body part. Skirts were worn so long for a while that it was a class marker, a sign of breeding, to have a strip of mud on one’s hem. (It meant that one had been out, appropriately dressed, promenading, stepping into and out of a coach.)