City of Eros: New York City Prostitution and the Commercialization of Sex 1790-1920
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About this book
From the early years of the nineteenth century on New York saw the development of a new commercialized sexuality at the center of a world of entertainment consumer goods newspapers and advertising. Deftly blending the experiences of real New Yorkers with pathbreaking demographic research this illuminating book opens a window into the dark heart of urban American life showing:. How the sex industry grew in step with the city itself. New York never had a red-light district; instead prostitution spread through all its neighborhoods rich and poor from the Bowery to Harlem and prostitution made itself equally at home in the street and the brothel the tenement flat and the hotel the music hall and the saloon. The cultural stereotypes of prostitution. What New Yorkers - purity reformers journalists popular novelists artists and ordinary citizens of all kinds - thought of the prostitutes and customers in their midst and their perceptions of "fallen woman " "white slave " and "sporting man" reveal shifting American attitudes toward mens and womens roles from colonial days to the Roaring Twenties. The economic structure of prostitution. Landowners including members of such prominent families as the Livingstons and the Lorillards realized enormous profits from renting housing to prostitutes at inflated rates and corrupt politicians and police made the payoff a fact of life for prostitutes. For women prostitution could be a temporary resort in times of economic hardship an avenue to financial independence when "womens work" in factories shops and domestic service was desperately low paid and even for some ambitious entrepreneurial madams a way of achieving substantial wealth. The futility of efforts to stamp out commercial sex. Throughout New Yorks history resigned municipal toleration of prostitution alternated with frantic efforts to suppress or control it. The role of race class and successive waves of immigration. More than any other
