Nothing seems so characteristic of this city, after its architectural
shapelessness, as the eating and drinking constantly going on in the
restaurants and hotels, of every quality, and the innumerable saloons.
There may not be really more of these in New York, in proportion to
the population, than in other great cities, but apparently there are
more; for in this, as in all her other characteristics, New York is
very open; her virtues and her vices, her luxury and her misery, are in
plain sight; and a famishing man must suffer peculiarly here from the
spectacle of people everywhere at sumptuous tables. Many of the finest
hotels, if not most of them, have their dining-rooms on the level of
the street, and the windows, whether curtained or uncurtained, reveal
the continual riot within. I confess that the effect upon some hungry
passer is always present to my imagination; but the New-Yorkers are so
used to the perpetual encounter of famine and of surfeit that they do
not seem to mind it.
There is scarcely a block on any of the poorer avenues which has not
its liquor store, and generally there are two; wherever a street
crosses them there is a saloon on at least one of the corners;
sometimes on two, sometimes on three, sometimes even on all four. I had
the curiosity to count the saloons on Sixth Avenue, between the Park,
and the point down town where the avenue properly ends. In a stretch
of some two miles I counted ninety of them, besides the eating houses
where you can buy drink with your meat; and this avenue is probably far
less infested with the traffic than some others.
You may therefore safely suppose that out of the hundred miles of
shops, there are ten, or fifteen, or twenty miles of saloons. They
have the best places on the avenues, and on the whole they make the
handsomest show. They all have a cheerful and inviting look, and if you
step within, you find them cosy, quiet, and, for New York, clean. There
are commonly tables set about in them, where their frequenters can take
their beer or whiskey at their ease, and eat the free lunch which is
often given in them; in a rear room you see a billiard-table. In fact,
they form the poor man’s club-houses, and if he might resort to them
with his family, and be in the control of the State as to the amount
he should spend and drink there, I could not think them without their
rightful place in an economy which saps the vital forces of the laborer
with over-work, or keeps him in a fever of hope or a fever of despair
as to the chances of getting or not getting work when he has lost it.
If you suggested this to the average American, however, he would be
horror-struck. He would tell you that what you proposed was little
better than anarchy; that in a free country you must always leave
private persons free to debauch men’s souls and bodies with drink, and
make money out of their ruin; that anything else was contrary to human
nature, and an invasion of the sacred rights of the individual. Here
in New York, this valuable principle is so scrupulously respected that
the saloon controls the municipality, and the New-Yorkers think this
is much better than for the municipality to control the saloon. It is
from the saloon that their political bosses rise to power; it is in
the saloon that all the election frauds are planned and fostered; and
it would be infinitely comic, if it were not so pathetic, to read the
solemn homilies on these abuses in the journals which hold by the good
old American doctrine of private trade in drink as one of the bulwarks
of the constitution.