New York City Prostitutes

Hello! And welcome to my blog. My name is Sunny and I’m currently a student at LaGuardia Community College. This semester, I am enrolled in a class known at this college as: ENN195.0962: Violence in American Art and Culture, taught by Dr. Justin Rogers-Cooper.

Currently, we are reading a novel entitled: The Destruction of Gotham written by Joaquin Miller.

No connection to the new hit TV show Gotham. This novel was actually written in 1886 and flaunts issues present at the time in New York City. One such concern that has the city seemingly injected into a massive void of chaos is the topic of prostitution. To help unravel this concept, I would like to present a couple of passages that strongly highlight clear evidence that at one point in time, New York City was plagued by prostitution to the extent in which society considered it destructive to the city’s very existence. 

An excerpt located on page 17: 

It is estimated that every day hundreds of young women enter New York never to return. More than as many young men, also strangers, young, eager, ambitious, pour in upon the wonderful city from the South, the East, the West-from the four parts of the world. 

The girls are mostly good girls. The men are honest and industrious in the main. They have left poverty, obscurity, ignorance-all that is intolerable to pride and spirit and enterprise-behind them. This is the temple of fortune, where all may enter and implore their goddess.

To help deconstruct this passage, we must begin by analyzing keywords that will allow us to dig deeper into the surface material presented. Usually, the term “goddess” is used to describe a female god. However, in this text, it is used refer to a woman whose great charm or beauty arouses adoration. In this sense, we can assume that the term “goddess” is identifying the hundreds of young women entering New York as previously mentioned. If we look through the lens of a male perspective, we can probably envision in our minds hundreds of young men flooding the city in search of these beautiful and young women. From a female standpoint, however, we can also surmise that hundreds of women are invading the city to parade their beauty and establish intimate connections with the hundreds of young men that cannot avoid feelings of adoration for these women. So basically, both young men and women are pouring into the city attracted by the lure of fortune. The men have money and are willing to invest said money into young women for the small, but fair exchange of sexual endeavors. 

To further prove that this theme of prostitution exists throughout the rest of the novel, we can examine another bit of text found on page 31:

Ah! you hate, abhor this monster! Stop! Abhor and hate handsome, gay, dissolute men of this wonderful city who make her trade, and the growing trade of those like her, profitable. Look at the great gamblers, the big, red-faced men, with their big, red fists clutching tight and close to their millions upon millions. These are the men who maintain her in her trade-great spiders, in their webs of wire and railroad tracks, waiting to devour the body and soul she brings. Destroy these, and you destroy her. Hers is a hard business at best, full of peril and unpleasant work. She earns money.

To destroy this new and growing traffic, this dire fungus growing out of the unexampled opulence of this city, this more than Roman revelry and recklessness, you must know this woman, know these men. Hence these pages.

New York City is a thriving economic city. A city in which both men and women can create a little bit of success and live a lifestyle more desired than other region of the country. The lines above clearly explains how women are dependent on these working men to fuel their lifestyle. They offer their bodies in an unpleasant line of work in order to obtain some amount of money just to pay for the life they want. A life of materialistic pleasures.