There are about seventy-five or eighty concert saloons in New York,
employing abandoned women as waitresses. The flashiest of these are
located on Broadway, there being nearly twenty of these infamous places
on the great thoroughfare between Spring and Fourth streets. During the
day they are closed, but one of the most prominent sets out before its
doors a large frame containing twenty or thirty exquisite card
photographs, and bearing these words, "Portraits of the young ladies
employed in this saloon." It is needless to say that the pictures are
taken at random from the stock of some photograph dealer, and have no
connection whatever with the hags employed in the saloon. The Bowery,
Chatham street, and some of the streets leading from Broadway, contain
the greater number of these concert saloons. The majority are located in
the basements of the buildings, but one or two of the Broadway
establishments use second story rooms. These places may be recognized by
their numerous gaudy transparencies and lamps, and by the discordant
strains of music which float up into the street from them. The Broadway
saloons are owned by a few scoundrels, many of them being conducted by
the same proprietor. A writer in the New York _World_ was recently
favored with the following truthful description of these places by one of
the best known proprietors:
"A concert saloon is a gin-mill on an improved plan--that's all, my
friend. I don't pay the girls any wages. They get a percentage on the
drinks they sell. Some saloon-keepers pays their girls regular wages and
a small percentage besides, but it don't work. The girls wont work
unless they have to. Now, my girls gets a third of whatever they sell.
The consequence is, they sell twice as much as they would if they was on
wages. You never can get people to work faithfully for you unless they
can make money by it. The liquor is cheap, and I don't mind telling you
its d---d nasty, then we charge double prices for it. Now, I charge
twenty cents for drinks that a regular gin-mill would sell for ten. Then
there are a lot of drinks that the girls takes themselves, which we
charges fifty cents for. They don't cost us more than four or five, but
after a girl has said what she'll take, and a man has ordered it, he
can't go back on the price. Then hardly any man stops at less than two
or three drinks here, when he would take only one at a bar. The lights
are the same as they would be anywheres else, and the music don't cost
much. Then there's other ways to make in this business. But you don't
want to know all about the speculations. There's keno, for instance.
The keno business is attached to lots of saloons. You see the girls
manages to get young fellows that come here--like those hounds
yonder--pretty full, and then they says: 'Why don't you try your luck in
the next room, and go shares with me?' So the fool he bites at once, and
goes in for keno. Of course luck goes against him, for he's too drunk to
play--O, the game's a square one--and he finally comes back for another
drink. The girls then takes care that he doesn't go away till he's too
drunk to remember where he lost his money. Even if he goes away sober,
he seldom splits. I'll give the fellows that much credit. Bad as they
are, they seldom splits."
The concert saloons derive their names from the fact that a low order of
music is provided by the proprietor as a cover to the real character of
the place. It may be an old cracked piano, with a single, half-drunken
performer, or a couple or more musicians who cannot by any possible means
draw melody from their wheezy instruments.
Persons entering these places assume a considerable risk. They
voluntarily place themselves in the midst of a number of abandoned
wretches, who are ready for any deed of violence or crime. They care for
nothing but money, and will rob or kill for it. Respectable people have
no business in such places. They are very apt to have their pockets
picked, and are in danger of violence. Many men, who leave their happy
homes in the morning, visit these places, for amusement or through
curiosity, at night. They are drugged, robbed, murdered, and then the
harbor police may find their lifeless forms floating in the river at
daybreak.
The women known outside of the city as "pretty waiter girls," are simply
a collection of poor wretches who have gone down almost to the end of
their fatal career. They may retain faint vestiges of their former
beauty, but that is all. They are beastly, foul-mouthed, brutal
wretches. Very many of them are half dead with consumption and disease.
They are in every respect disgusting. Yet young and old men, strangers
and citizens, come here to talk with them and spend their money on them.
Says the writer we have quoted, after describing a characteristic scene
in one of these places:
"The only noticeable thing about this exhibition of beastliness is the
utter unconcern of the other occupants of the room. They are accustomed
to it. One wonders, too, at the attraction this has for strangers.
There is really nothing in the people, the place, or the onlookers worthy
of a decent man's curiosity. The girls are, without exception, the
nastiest, most besotted drabs that ever walked the streets. They haven't
even the pride that clings to certain of their sisters who are in prison.
The whole assemblage, with the exception of such stragglers as myself,
who have a motive in studying it, is a mess of the meanest human rubbish
that a great city exudes. In the company there is a large preponderance
of the cub of seventeen and eighteen. Some of these boys are the sons of
merchants and lawyers, and are 'seeing life.' If they were told to go
into their kitchens at home and talk with the cook and the chambermaid,
they would consider themselves insulted. Yet they come here and talk
with other Irish girls every whit as ignorant and unattractive as the
servants at home--only the latter are virtuous and these are infamous.
Thus does one touch of vileness make the whole world kin."