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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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.