No. 870
Crime, Eccentricity, and the Sporting Life in 19th Century America.
June 16, 2026

Pandemonium in a Tumult.

Raid on the Broadway Concert Saloons, New York.
June 16, 2026
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Tag: Police Gazette

Garrotting.

To Choke.

8/12/2025

Circumstances Alter Cases.

The Gallant 'Cop' on the Crossing - Old and Ugly vs. Young and Pretty.

11/4/2024

A Sleep-Walker’s Act.

Miss Belle Collis, of Newark, N. J., surprises the neighbors by her want of thought.

3/26/2016

“For Members Only.”

11/10/2014

Murderous Assault by a Wife on Her Husband.

10/6/2014

Set Fire to the Bed.

9/22/2014

A Minister’s Scrape.

7/21/2014

Thimble Rig A La Mode.

3/18/2014

Unmindful of their Attire.

A Fire in the Chicago Opera House creates a stampede among pretty actresses who rush to the street dishabille.

3/11/2014

A New Shoplifting Dodge.

A female thief who carries a baby in her arms and made its flowing skirts a cover for stolen goods

12/3/2013

Hallow Eve Sports.

The cool reception that some frolicsome young Doylestown girls gave to a verdant beau who was not posted as to the manners and customs of the Pennsylvania Dutch

10/27/2013

She Had a High Old Time.

8/13/2013

Shooting at the Elevated.

After-dinner pistol practice at the trains that rush by windows

5/7/2013

Blood on the Moon.

4/16/2013

George Dixon’s Victory over Australian Billy.

2/26/2013

Vive Le Sport!

1/15/2013

John L. Sullivan Saved by a Neck.

11/6/2012

A Fiendish Husband’s Desperate Deed.

10/16/2012

Serpent and Dove.

10/2/2012

A One Legged Baseball Club.

9/11/2012

Beauty as a Shield.

Beauty Conquers avarice and outlawry "We won't rob this house to-night."

7/24/2012

Female Tobacco Chewers.

What a Correspondent Asserts Regarding a Boston Girl.

7/10/2012

Torturing a Lover.

6/26/2012

Hospital Horrors.

3/20/2012

Being Initiated.

3/13/2012

It Was Another Kind of Cat.

2/21/2012

A New Gag.

Her health drunk by a young lawyer in slipper-full of champagne.

2/7/2012

A Plucky Elberon, N. J., Girl

1/31/2012

Whipped By Women

11/8/2011

Rum on Tap.

Kyana, Indiana, 1890 - The women of Kyana, Ind., go to the railroad depot and demolish a cargo of liquor.

8/29/2011

Hid the Girls' Skirts

8/22/2011

Shot Down in His Office

Ruined and Despondent Ronald Kennedy, a Philadelphia speculator, kills broker Charles H. Page, and then commits suicide.

8/8/2011

“I’ve Taken Poison, Maudie!”

7/25/2011

Recruiting For Sin's Army

7/5/2011

Sparking in Tompkins Square

Cupid in Tompkins Square

6/28/2011

Terrible Struggle with Flame and Flood

The burning of the steamer John H. Hanna near Plaquemine, Louisiana, by which thirty lives were lost

6/20/2011

Belles of the Bowling Alley.

The athletic diversions of an association of dashing damsels in their club rooms in Chicago. 

6/6/2011

A Newspaper Man’s Plight

Denver Col., October 1892 – Correspondent Jake Hirsh cowhided by indignant Lizzie Gonzales, an actress, in Denver.

5/22/2011

Hazing at the Stock Board

How the battering-ram process is applied by the bulls and bears to while away the idle hours of the dull season.

5/8/2011

The Girls Biffed Each Other

4/16/2011

Did the Naughty Midway Dance

Pretty Ida Lawrence gets arrested while entertaining some hackmen in Cincinnati, O.

3/28/2011

Chorus Girls in a Panic.

An unruly horse causes great excitement in the Metropolitan Opera House, this city.

3/14/2011
Via Newspapers.comIt’s time for some Mystery Blood!  The “Sacramento Bee,” August 16, 1870:At the Juapa, at the residence of Mr. John Baldwin, one of those phenomena occurred for which it is so difficult to account. On the 15th instant, a shower of blood fell at the dwelling of Mr. B., spattering the doorstep and the surrounding grounds. There had been only an instant before a perfect calm,
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Strange Company - 6/17/2026
"As his son I am proud of hisefforts to succeed in life"Jefferson Randolph Smith IIIArtifact #93-2Jeff Smith collection(Click image to enlarge) oapy's son hires a legal firm to stop the defamation of his father's name. At age 30, Jefferson Randolph Smith III, Soapy and Mary's oldest son, was protecting his father's legacy and his mother's reputation from "libel" and scandal. He was also
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Soapy Smith's Soap Box - 10/13/2025
Getting around the western Bronx by foot means encountering hilly streets, lots of hilly streets. The pitched terrain comes from ridges of bedrock formed millions of years ago extending into Northern Manhattan. Back in the early 1900s when the Bronx was undergoing urbanization, all these hills posed a challenge to transit engineers, since some roads […]
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Ephemeral New York - 6/15/2026
Youth With Executioner by Nuremberg native Albrecht Dürer … although it’s dated to 1493, which was during a period of several years when Dürer worked abroad. November 13 [1617]. Burnt alive here a miller of Manberna, who however was lately … Continue reading
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Executed Today - 11/13/2020
 Stephen Pettus gave Hannah Southworth a glass of drugged champagne and had his way with her while she was unconscious. Hannah became pregnant and for years after, she badgered Pettus to acknowledge that he had ruined her. When all legal means were exhausted, she avenged her honor by shooting him in the back on a Brooklyn street.Read the full story here: Avenging Her Honor.
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Murder By Gaslight - 6/13/2026
Be sure to stop by our Facebook page tomorrow for a Prosecution Marathon of witnesses. Here are the witnesses for Wednesday, June 14th, Day 9 Rufus Hilliard, City Marshal, Mayor John Coughlin, Mrs. Hannah Gifford (seamstress and dressmaker), Anna Borden ( wealthy socialite who was on Lizzie’s grand tour of Europe, distantly related to Lizzie), Lucy Collett (watching the office of Dr. Chagnon day of the murder), Thomas Bowles ( handyman who once rented a room from Addie Churchill and was wa
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Lizzie Borden: Warps and Wefts - 6/13/2026
  [Editor’s note: Guest writer, Peter Dickson, lives in West Sussex, England and has been working with microfilm copies of The Duncan Campbell Papers from the State Library of NSW, Sydney, Australia. The following are some of his analyses of what he has discovered from reading these papers. Dickson has contributed many transcriptions to the Jamaica […]
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Early American Crime - 2/7/2019
| Athletics.

Pandemonium in a Tumult.

Raid

Raid on the Broadway Consort Saloons, New York.

If there Is In New York one spot more Infamous than another, that spot is the section of Broadway on the east aide, between Bleecker and Houston streets. Hell gapes widely here for all who may pass after 7 o'clock in the evening. From Bleecker to Spring Street, there are at least three hundred abandoned females employed in those dens of infamy known to the public as concert saloons. During the last twelve months, this evil has grown to almost gigantic proportions, yet nothing was done to abate it until the evening of the 22d Inst., when sixty-eight concert saloon waiter girls were arrested, together with three or four of the managers and proprietors of the dens.

The girls were found in all these places dressed in "tights," in the fashion of the amazons of the "Black Crook." Gaudy and obscene pictures and temptations of the vilest nature are the only inducements held forth to enter these places, and yet night after night gray-haired men, many of whom are supposed to hold respectable positions in society, may be found here sipping beverages at double the rates charged in an ordinary drinking saloon. Boys, too, of a tender age, seduced by the glare and licentious glitter of these devil's traps, some of them have the bloom and freshness of green fields on their cheeks, with found mothers waiting patiently for their return to their homes, may be side by side with these painted harlots, spending the money which they have filched from employers' tills.

If the clearing out of the pandemonium upon Broadway has been successfully accomplished, the community has reason for joy and gratitude to the police authorities.


Illustrated Police News, February 1, 1872.