Tenderloin (Manhattan)
Tenderloin (English: "Filet; tender sirloin") was the name of an entertainment district and red light district in the heart of New York City 's Manhattan borough from the late 19th to early 20th centuries .
location
The tenderloin originally stretched from 23rd Street to 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue to Seventh Avenue . By 1900 it had expanded north to 57th Street and 62nd Street and west to Eighth Avenue . The southern boundary of the neighborhood also shifted north to 42nd Street. This New Tenderloin included areas such as today's Flatiron District , NoMad , Chelsea , Clinton , the Garment District and the Theater District at the beginning of the 20th century .
Name story
Police Captain Alexander S. "Clubber" Williams named the area in 1876 when he was transferred to a police district in the heart of this Fourth. Regarding the higher payments he would probably get for the protection of lawful and unlawful machinations here, especially from the many brothels, Williams said: “ I've been having chuck steak ever since I've been on the force, and now I'm going to have a bit of tenderloin. "(German:" Since I've been with the troops I've only ever had beef neck steak and now I'm going to get a little fillet. ") Williams was a legendary symbol of police corruption at the time and took so many bribes that he In 1895 he was forced to retire as a millionaire when he was forced to retire.
history
In the early 19th century, the most important red light district of New York City was still south of what would later become Tenderloin in the area of today's SoHo and was then called Hells' Hundret Acres (translated: "The one hundred acres of Hell"). But as the city continued to expand north, the theater district and the Bowery, along with the legal and illegal businesses that usually went with show business , also shifted north - initially around Union Square and 14th Street .
When the Fifth Avenue Hotel opened its doors on 23rd Street and Fifth Avenue in 1859, this shift in entertainment continued northward and the tenderloin was born: by 1870, the hotel faced a lot of competition in this area and where hotels were located, moved the prostitutes after. In the 1880s, most were in the Tenderloin nightclubs , saloons , brothels , casinos , dance halls and strip clubs ( clip joints ) in New York City. According to an estimate from 1885, around half of all buildings here are said to have been used for one of the various offers of an entertainment district. The area was then also known as Satan's Circus and Pastor Thomas De Witt Talmage , who fought against the vice, denounced the city of New York as "modern Gomorrah " because it allowed this condition.
The clientele of these establishments did not necessarily belong to the working class . Seven sisters ran their brothels right next to each other in a residential area on West 25th Street and invited their upper-class customers with engraved invitations. On some evenings only gentlemen in formal evening attire were allowed in and the prostitutes in these houses were also very well-versed on the social level. On December 24th, the sisters donated the proceeds to charity.
Other well-known entertainment venues were the Koster and Bial's Music Hall on Sixth Avenue and 23rd Street, a concert hall in which, for example, the cancan was performed, or the Haymarket , a dance hall on Sixth Avenue south of 30th Street, where sex exhibitions were shown and the rich clientele could dance with prostitutes - but not too closely. For undisturbed sex, the suitors could retire here with the prostitutes in compartments that were partitioned off with curtains. West 29th Street had an almost uninterrupted line of brothels, and West 26th Street was home to many of the gambling dens operated by John Daly or the Madison Square Club by Richard A. Canfield .
The “main street” of the neighborhood was Broadway between 23rd Street and 42nd Street - also known at the time as The Line . In the mid-1890s - after the introduction of electric lighting - the section of Broadway from 23rd Street to 34th Street was nicknamed The Great White Way due to the numerous illuminated advertising signs . This moniker carried over to Times Square when the Theater District moved north.
Crime was also an important aspect of the Tenderloin, which was considered the most criminal area in the most criminal city in the United States . To some extent, police bribery kept crime under control as it regulated the financial relationship between the police and the criminals, but the area was too big for street crime to be fully under control. In 1906 William McAddo , who was New York City Police Commissioner in 1904 and 1905, wrote that "Tenderloin Police Department is, as everyone knows, the most important district in New York, if not the United States or perhaps the world, in terms of the size of the police force, which are fulfilled here, and the character of the neighborhood. "(English:" Tenderloin [police] precinct, as every one knows, is the most important precinct in New York, if not in the United States, or probably in the world, from the amount of police business done there and from the character of the neighborhood. ")
In addition, the Tenderloin was also a residential area where a large part of Manhattan's Afro-American population lived - especially in the southern and western parts of the area. This is how Seventh Avenue in Tenderloin was called African Broadway . However, by 1914, middle-class African Americans began moving from the Tenderloin to Harlem , which was originally a residential area with a white population.
Every now and then there were organized attempts to clean up the tenderloin. Reformist mayors such as William Russell Grace and Abram Hewitt approved raids on saloons or brothels, even if they were under the protection of “Clubber” Williams, but the effect was usually limited in time: the prostitutes then went into hiding outside the tenderloin and came back again, when the wave of raids died down. The bottom line is that these actions only drove up the costs of protecting the establishments, which only made Williams richer, which is why he was finally able to retire as a millionaire and Tammany Hall also received more money as it was from bribes at the time and benefited from the neighborhood's corruption.
The frustration of the situation led to Anthony Comstock's campaign against vice in that neighborhood with support from the New York Chamber of Commerce , the US federal government and its United States Postal Service, and major city residents such as J. P. Morgan . Comstock's crusade knew no bounds. He could just as well denounce "dirty literature" in the libraries as well as prostitution in the tenderloin and together with the pastor Talmage he succeeded in enforcing a law to ban billiard bars, which were still operated afterwards.
Finally, the same circumstances that had produced the Tenderloin also led to its dissolution: When the theaters and hotels moved north again, the brothels and dance halls followed, so that as early as 1906 William McAdoo discovered that the northern border of the Tenderloin became 62nd Street had moved and the southern limit of this " New Tenderloin " - as he called it - was 42nd Street. In his opinion, this development ensured a “rapid dissolution of the pleasure-oriented, vicious part of the Old Tenderloin.” (English: “is rapidly depleting the ranks of the sporting vicious element in the Old Tenderloin.”)
Tenderloin in literature and musicals
- The tenderloin of the early 20th century is described in the memoir Behind The Green Lights by Police Captain Cornelius Willemse .
- Owen Davis set a series of stories for the Police Gazette in the dance halls and restaurants of the Tenderloin. They were later collected as Sketches of Gotham (1906) published under the pseudonym "Ike Swift".
- The brothels of the Tenderloin, the repeated raids of the troops of Anthony Comstock were affected were the venue for the musical Tenderloin of Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock from 1960, which on a novel by Samuel Hopkins Adams based.
See also
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d Lisa Elsroad: Tenderloin. In: Kenneth T. Jackson (Ed.): The Encyclopedia of New York City. Yale University Press, New Haven 1995, ISBN 0-300-05536-6 , p. 1161.
- ↑ a b c d Burrows & Wallace, p. 959.
- ↑ a b c d e f New York City Landmark Preservation Commission : 23rd Police Precinct ('Tenderloin') Station House Designation Report. (PDF; 5.6 MB), pp. 2–3.
- ↑ a b Federal Writers Project, S. 147th
- ^ Federal Writers Project, p. 164.
- ↑ Burrows & Wallace, pp. 1148-1149.
- ↑ Burrows & Wallace, p. 1066.
- ↑ Burrows & Wallace, p. 1112.
- ↑ Burrows & Wallace, p. 1163.
- ↑ Burrows & Wallace, pp. 1163-1165.
literature
- Edwin G. Burrows, Mike Wallace: Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. Oxford University Press, New York 1999, ISBN 0-19-511634-8 .
- Federal Writers' Project: New York City Guide. Random House, New York 1939, ISBN 0-403-02921-X (Reissued by Scholarly Press, 1976; often referred to as the "WPA Guide to New York City").
