City of eros: new york city, prostitution, and the commercialization of sex, 1790-1920

Winner of the Allan Nevins Prize of the Society of American Historians and the New York State Historical Association Manuscript Prize. 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 men's and women's 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 "women's 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 York's 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