Urban Underworlds: A Geography of Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture

1. Going Down: Narratives of Slumming in the Ethnic Underworlds of Lower New York, 1890s–1910s

1 / Going Down: Narratives of Slumming in the Ethnic Underworlds of Lower New York, 1890s–1910s “On the morning of June 18 last, New York was horrified by the discovery of the body of a murdered girl hidden in a trunk in a Chinese waiter’s room over a chop suey restaurant in Eighth Avenue. Within a couple of hours, detectives and newspaper men had established the girl’s identity, and the news of the crime went ringing to the ends of the world.”1 So began William Meloney’s 1909 sensational exposé “Slumming in New York’s Chinatown: A Glimpse into the Sordid Underworld of the Mott Street Quarter, Where Elsie Sigel Formed Her Fatal Associations.” Meloney ’s report had all of the ingredients of a lurid scandal and a cautionary tale: murder, the seduction and corruption of innocence, opium addiction, an exotic locale, and an interracial love affair gone horribly wrong between a working-class, Chinese immigrant and a white, uptown “nineteen-year-old Sunday-school teacher” who was “a granddaughter of [a] famous Civil War general” (229). What began as a well-intended, if naïve “obsession to save ‘heathen souls’” ended with chloroform and “death with a cord” wrapped tight by the “yellow fingers” of Leung Lim (229, 230). If anything positive resulted from the Sigel murder case, it was the validation of the quick work of the police and of newspaper men, like Meloney himself, who sounded the alarm about the fatal attractions lurking in New York’s “sordid underworld” of immigrants (229). Elsie Sigel’s murder may have been the occasion for William Meloney ’s report for Munsey’s Magazine, but the scope of the article was wider and deeper. When Meloney returned to the scene of the crime, he did so not to search for clues to Lim’s motives, but to map firsthand going down / 31 a newly emergent geography of criminality that was a threat to more than girls of “impressionable character” (229). In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century journalism, the Chinese regularly were depicted as hermetic and inscrutable, and Meloney’s report, which characterized them as “contemptuous, blandly mysterious, serene, foul-smelling, . . . and implacable,” was no exception (230). But if the faces of the Chinese could not be read—as many turn-of-the-century investigative reporters implied—then perhaps their streets, where other murderous desires were assumed to be incubating, could be. Accompanied by police captain Mike Galvin, Meloney led his reader on a walk through the “unfathomed and unknown” “Mongol quarter of New York,” an excursion that began, not insignificantly, with a reassuring stroll past “the Tombs and the Criminal Courts Building” in lower Manhattan (230). Meloney thus escorted his reader as if he or she were an extralegal agent or citizen enforcer of public morality. “Let us enter Chinatown from Chatham Square,” he stated at the beginning of a tour which, complete with photographs of street scenes and domestic interiors, proceeded to peer into opium dens where Chinese men and white women stared out with “hollow cheeks” under “sputtering lights,” on into a cluttered tenement that showed a “true Chinese disregard for the fitness of appearances ,” and on through the streets of Chinatown that seemed to possess their own agency and twisted logic (231, 233, 237). In the wild terrain of the immigrant underworld, Meloney’s reader discovered that the streets themselves “dart . . . at crazy angles,” “wind . . . tortuously,” and “run . . . full tilt” (231). With its strange odors and tongues, Chinatown was nothing if not difficult to navigate. Physically, as well as cognitively, it was terra incognita. For Meloney’s Captain Galvin, the district’s supposed tolerance for drug use, gambling parlors, and dirty streets led directly to greater moral and legal transgressions: interracial commingling and eventually murder. One hundred and thirty white women lived in Chinatown in 1909, by Galvin’s own count. To drive whites out of the “yellow quarter ,” he pushed for the strict enforcement of “the sanitary provisions of the tenement-house law” and his “campaign for cleanliness” was in full swing “when the Sigel tragedy startled the world” (241). The dream of bringing the district to order was to die a double death. Meloney’s article concluded with the police captain throwing up his hands in frustration, declaring a wish to “‘pile all of it on a barge and sink it in the East River’” (241). In this chapter I consider the meanings of and reasons why a particular urban geography—the...