The Bowery Boy is the personification of the New York “b’hoy” with a careless swagger and insolent leer. He cares “nothing for nobody,” but is bent on having a “general good time anyhow.” He is found hanging around porterhouses or corner groggeries in company with others of like proclivities. He is well known to the police, and well instructed in all ingenious dodges for the evasion of legal process. He is an object of aversion to the law-and-order-abiding citizen, of horror to the timid.

We see the Bowery girl with her gay turban and flowing head dress, yclept “waterfall,” aping, so far as her limited resources will permit, the style of her more fortunate sisters. She steps mincingly and stealthily along, casting from side to side covert glances through her semi-masque veil. She is cat-like in motion and demeanor. She works hard on the hoop-skirt or the sewing machine, and as day after day glides by without any special improvement in her social and pecuniary circumstances, she looks to marriage as the only relief from poverty, and often, trusting too implicitly the representations of a “friend,” she becomes the victim, and then sinks rapidly into a sad state of moral degradation.

Broadway

The Broadway belle is an object of much consideration. She saunters carelessly along, indifferent to everything but the admiration of others. She is far from indifferent to fashion, but consults contrast and conspicuity in her mode of dress. Does fashion prescribe a large bow to her bonnet strings, she is very likely to increase the size of said bow and permit long ends to flow gracefully down either side. She is a strange compound of simplicity and affectation, of naiveté and shrewdness, of intelligence and ignorance; at one time charming by her vivacity, at another repelling by her dullness or airy affectedness. She to a great extent controls her own fortune, and is not all the painted toy which many account her. She is the dashing, sprightly spaniel.

Fifth Avenue

The Fifth Avenue blood claims to be of all others, the very

The Fifth Avenue flirt is a craft of a very different rig. She believes in “Full sail,” in crowding on “all the canvas.” Fashion is one of her chief gods, and they who can not come up to its requisitions re dropped out of her “set.” She sweeps grandly along with an air of assumption and importance that is as ludicrous as it is supercilious. She claims for herself aristocratic privileges, and she is not to be judged according to the “low, mean” standard of common people. Her portrait, as we give it, well portrays the purse-proud, stuck –up sentiments which reign within her mind. She may be likened to the indulged, capricious, and fickle poodle.

A rat pit is one of those under-ground novelties occasionally seen in Boston by gaslight.

From Police records and recollections, or, Boston by daylight and gaslight for two hundred and forty years, by Edward Savage, 1873:

The pit consists of a board crib of octagon form in the center of the cellar, about eight feet in diameter ad three and one half feet high, tightly secured at the sides. On three sides of the cellar are rows of board seats, rising one above the other, for the accommodation of spectators. On the other side, stands the proprietor and his assistant and an empty flour barrel, only it is half full of live rats, which are kept in their prison-house by a wire netting over the top of the cask. The amphitheatre is lighted with oil lamps or candles, with a potato, a turnip, or an empty bottle for a candlestick. Spectators are admitted at twenty-five cents a head, and take their seats, when preparations for the evening’s entertainment commence. The proprietor carefully lifts the edge of the wire netting over the rat barrel, and with an instrument looking much like a pair of curling tongs, he begins fishing out his game, rat by rat, depositing each carefully inside the pit until the requisite number are pitted. The assistant has brought in the dog, Flora, a favorite ratter, which he is obliged to hold fast by the nape of the neck, so eager is she for the fray. Then commences the betting, which runs high or low according t the amount of funds in the hands of the sports

“A dollar. She kills twenty rats in twelve seconds!” “I take that!” “Half a dollar on the rats!” “Don’t put in them small rats!” “Two dollars on Flora in fifteen seconds!” “Done at fourteen!”  “No you don’t!” “Don’t put in all your big rats at once!” “Five dollars on the rats in ten seconds!” (no takers.)

The betting all seems to be well understood, but it would puzzle an outsider to tell whether there were really any genuine bets or not.

The bets having been arranged, time is called, and Flora is dropped into the ring. Flora evidently understands that her credit is at stake; but the growling and champing, and squealing, and scratching is soon over, and the twenty rats lie lifeless at the feet of the bloodthirsty Flora, when time  is again called, and the bets decided, and all hands go up and liquor. This exhibition is repeated several times, with different dogs, and lasts as long as the live rats hold out.

Source:

Savage, Edward. Police records and recollections, or, Boston by daylight and gaslight for two hundred and forty years. Boston: J.P. Dale, 1873.