Devil's Mile by Alice Sparberg Alexiou

Author:Alice Sparberg Alexiou
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Steve Brodie’s Saloon

He plastered the walls with pictures of bridges, as well as famous fighters: he used Brodie’s for staging boxing bouts. Brodie’s became a Bowery go-to place, and the owner’s exploits were written into a play, On the Bowery, in which Brodie played himself. At the play’s climax, Brodie jumps off the Brooklyn Bridge to save his girlfriend, Pearl, who has fallen into the East River. He emerges with her in his arms, as he sings: My Poil Is a Bowery Goil.

* * *

As the Bowery was becoming the national symbol of urban debauchery, moral reform movements, all under the auspices of old guard Protestants, were starting up throughout America. Many had good intentions, such as those having to do with temperance. Alcohol abuse was a real problem everywhere; many American men were drinking away their wages, leaving their families to starve. Prostitution was another target of these groups and a perfectly justified one if they were coming at it for the right reasons—that is, out of concern for the welfare of poor young women. But the purest of intentions often get hijacked by peoples’ irrational hang-ups, and genuine concern over the effects of alcohol on families sometimes turned into code for xenophobia, because wine and beer and saloons played vital roles in the social lives of various immigrant groups. And what started out as honest attempts to prevent the sexual exploitation of women got all twisted up with some Americans’ hysterical hatred of anything having to do with sex.

Such was the case with Anthony Comstock, whose name turned into a synonym for prurient aggression. Comstock, a short, bulky man with muttonchop sideburns, believed that dime novels, alcohol, and all forms of public entertainment, even legitimate theater, were the work of the devil. He derived his convictions directly from his Puritan forebears. He came from a strict Congregationalist family in Connecticut, one of ten children. Arriving in New York in 1864 as a young man after serving in the Union army, he found a room in a boardinghouse on Pearl Street and a job as a shipping clerk. He also discovered New York’s cornucopia of theaters, gambling dens, concert saloons, and brothels, racy tabloids like the Police Gazette, and dime novels with titles like The Gay Girls of New York and New York Naked. He was especially offended by the dirty postcards and brothel guides that were openly displayed at newsstands.

Comstock began tipping off police to where they could find obscene materials—“obscene” being a decidedly arbitrary label that in his mind included anything having to do with contraception. In 1871, this self-appointed arbiter of public morality found a perfect life partner: Margaret Hamilton, an eighty-two-pound wisp of a woman ten years his senior. She was a model Victorian “wifey,” as he affectionately called her, who completely subordinated herself to her husband. The couple had no children.

Eventually Comstock insinuated himself into the YMCA. The organization’s mission—offering young men a place to go to that had good Christian values as an alternative to the temptations of the big, bad city—nicely dovetailed with his ideas.

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