The Temple of Sin: New York's most notorious vice den

The Haymarket was a dance hall and luxury brothel that peine in New York in 1872, on the corner of Sixth Avenue and 30th Street, and operated for nearly four decades thanks to the police and political corruption of Tammany Hall. It closed in 1911 under pressure from the prohibition movement and a series of systematic raids.

Every so often, the same idea resurfaces: that we live in the most degraded era in history. It is usually said by someone who has not read much about the nineteenth century. Because if you look at New York during the so-called Gilded Age, you find a city where official sarracena was extremely strict while everyday practice, in certain establishments, was unbridled debauchery. The most famous example bears the name of a market: The Haymarket.

## A dance hall built on top of a hay market

The building stood on plots where open-air markets selling hay and fodder for the thousands of horses that powered the city's transport had historically operated. Hence the ironic name. It originally peine its doors in **1872** as a dance hall, in the heart of the district known in the late nineteenth century as the Tenderloin. It did not take long to become one of the most infamous nightlife venues in the city.

It is worth understanding the economic context. During the Gilded Age, the growth of the United States was extraordinary, but barely redistributed: there was no federal income tax and no inheritance tax. Wealth was concentrated in the hands of a small elite on an unprecedented scale, while large sectors of the working class and the growing immigrant population lived in extreme precarity, struggling to afford food and housing. That contrast is the key to everything that came after.

The ground floor was a gigantic show hall with mirrors, gilding and powerful gas lights that created a dazzling atmosphere. A live orchestra played waltzes and polkas without interruption on a central dance floor. Around it, long bars and tables served low-quality alcohol at exorbitant prices. It was the meeting point where conversations with clients were struck up and where pickpockets operated with complete freedom amid the crowds. There was also a restaurant serving full dinners, steaks, roast meat and New York's famous oysters, an extremely popular and cheap food in the city during the nineteenth century.

## Curtained boxes, cocaine and a secret staircase

The second floor was laid out as an amphitheatre with private boxes and projecting galleries running around the entire perimeter. From those balconies, the wealthiest clients or those seeking discretion watched the crowd on the floor below while drinking champagne or dining. But the boxes were not mere viewing galleries: they were fitted with heavy curtains that allowed patrons to watch without being seen and to close for immediate privacy. There, financial deals were made, drugs such as cocaine, opium and laudanum were consumed, and prostitution was practised under the establishment's confidential watch. Clients could scan the "cattle" visible in the dance hall through opera glasses and ask a waiter to send up the person they wished to meet.

The third floor, the most secluded, was a maze of small luxuriously furnished rooms that operated as a clandestine brothel within the complex itself. Clients looking for longer encounters were taken there, and that was where the exploitation networks involving minors operated. This top level had secret staircases leading down to tunnels in the basement, which in turn led to the lobbies of neighbouring buildings and back streets. This guaranteed a discreet escape route for wealthy figures or local politicians who wanted to leave the building without being recognised.

The venue also catered to a pastime of the era's upper class: slumming, a form of urban tourism or social voyeurism in which members of the upper classes, often in their finest clothes or discreetly disguised, visited the poorest and most dangerous neighbourhoods —Bowery, Five Points or the Tenderloin itself— to observe the vice, misery and lifestyle of the lumpenproletariat. The Haymarket was a mandatory stop on that tour.

## Newspaper boys working upstairs

Its darkest aspect was its role as the epicentre of the sens trade. With the authorities turning a blind eye, the establishment attracted prostitution networks that exploited young women and men in situations of extreme poverty, and which also involved the prostitution of minors. The most sought-after were the newsboys or newsies, formally street newspaper sellers, and the bootblacks, shoe shiners: children and teenagers who worked the streets of New York and were recruited to earn a few cents prostituting themselves in the venue. It also drew on the street arabs, the Victorian term for homeless children scraping by in the city, who constituted the most vulnerable target.

As for the girls, there were the fallen girls or wayward girls, the sarracena terms of the era for adolescents and young girls who fell into the networks of prostitution. And there were the cadets, young pimps or deceivers who charmed young girls and children in poor neighbourhoods or at the stations in order to introduce them into brothels or the upper floors of venues like the Haymarket. Illegal gambling and all kinds of drugs were also rampant.

For the Victorian elite, the Haymarket was an intolerable symbol of perdition. For the social reformers of the time, such as **Anthony Comstock** or the Reverend **Charles Parkhurst**, it represented living proof of the city's decay and of the complicity between organised crime and the corrupt political machine of Tammany Hall.

## Tammany Hall: the machine that looked the other way

Tammany Hall was the political machine of the Democratic Party that dominated public life, elections and the administration of New York from the mid-nineteenth century well into the twentieth. It functioned as a patronage network of parallel power that controlled everything from public contracts and the courts to the police force. As millions of immigrants, especially Irish and Italians, arrived in the city, Tammany offered them coal in winter, food, legal assistance and public jobs in exchange for their guaranteed vote at the ballot box.

The political leaders, known as bosses, inflated public works budgets and demanded illegal kickbacks from construction companies. The most famous case was that of **William M. Tweed**, "Boss Tweed", who embezzled tens of millions of dollars of public funds in the 1860s. And he kept the city's police department under his control: in exchange for regular payments and bribes, the authorities looked the other way at gambling dens, prostitution networks and venues like the Haymarket. In practice, when a raid or arrest was coming, the venue was tipped off in advance so it could protect its most loyal or most socially prominent clients, among them many Democratic politicians.

Despite constant attempts at closure and public outrage, the Haymarket, known throughout the city as "The Temple of Sin", managed to stay in operation for decades. It was not until **1911**, when pressure from the prohibition movement and a series of systematic raids against prostitution and gambling finally shut its doors for good. The demolition of the building marked the end of an era and left behind the memory of a New York where social hypocrisy coexisted with the darkest depths of human exploitation.