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79 PArt III The Tenderloin o N t h E S o u t h w E St E r N corner of 24th Street and Sixth Avenue an aging brick building sits in defiance of the sparkling new condos surrounding it. Until the 1990s and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s cleanup of sex establishments it was home to Billy’s Topless bar; today it is a bagel shop. But this 1886 structure, overshadowed by high-rises, bears the physical markings of a deeper history. Embedded in a section above the first floor, where two sides of the building meet, is a stone plaque with “The Corner” engraved in flowery letters; higher, near the building’s cornice, the words “KOSTER & BIAL” stand out in tribute to a bygone era. Well-known figures in 19th-century Manhattan nightlife, John Koster and Albert Bial used the 24th Street building as a poolroom and saloon, operating it as an adjunct business to their main concert hall on 23rd Street. Having opened in 1878, the hall gained renown for its “cork room,” a sanctum where men with financial resources and a taste for naughty adventure cavorted with female chorus dancers in a privately uninhibited setting, accompanied by the popping of champagne bottles. During the 1920s the entire concert hall was demolished, but the saloon building, with its plaque, survived. Today it offers a rare portal into a neighborhood that, starting in the 1870s and continuing to about 1910, became what historian Timothy Gilfoyle has described as “the most famous sex district in New York City history.”1 But, as Gilfoyle and others have pointed out, the Tenderloin, sometimes known as “Satan’s Circus,” was much more. By the 1880s it sat on a par with Union Square as a leading entertainment center, hosting luxurious theaters that had opened as Manhattan’s cultural life grew northward, among them the Grand Opera House at 23rd Street and Eighth Avenue (1868), the Fifth Avenue on 28th west of Broadway (originally Apollo Hall, 1868), and the Eagle at Broadway and 33rd (1875). Some of the city’s finest hotels, such as the 1871 Gilsey House—a Second Empire cast-iron masterwork that still stands at 29th Street and Broadway—were also to be found in the district. By day, out-of-town visitors could walk the busy thoroughfares, impressed by Manhattan’s glittering architecture. At 80 Part III night, however, the Tenderloin took on a different character, one largely defined by the streets that lay to the west of Fifth Avenue.2 One way to understand this element of the Tenderloin is to think of it as an area that developed, physically and conceptually, in back of the fancy hotels and theaters. It supported the thriving industries that had grown along Fifth Avenue and Broadway, and, as such, developed a reputation for high-bred, expensive vice—in a manner distinctly different from the working-class saloons and entertainment resorts of the Bowery. Still, the large size of the Tenderloin district—it stretched all the way from 23rd Street to the upper 30s, and from Fifth to as far west as Ninth Avenues— ensured the presence of cultural and economic variety. In keeping with what historian Luc Sante has pointed out as a general historical pattern of wealth concentrated near Manhattan’s center (in and around Fifth Avenue ), the Tenderloin grew more plebeian in nature as it progressed westward . Contrast was therefore one of its fundamental attributes, encapsulated by writer Samuel Hopkins Adams when he described the Tenderloin as “the district of theatres and brothels, of lordly hotels and half-dollar bed-houses, of the Metropolitan Opera House and the Haymarket Dance Hall, of Delmonico’s on Fifth Avenue and Clark’s [an inexpensive restaurant patronized largely by the working-class] on Sixth.”3 The Tenderloin, importantly, was not just a place of vice; people lived, worked, and socialized there. Its populist epicenter was broad, noisy Sixth Avenue. There, hidden behind the clattering elevated trains, sat rows of three-, four-, and five-story buildings filled with saloons, pool halls, and gambling parlors. In terms of its architecture, Sixth Avenue was not nearly as grand as Fifth, but it throbbed with music and life. It was democratic in nature, and many of its lodging houses and drinking establishments were racially integrated at a time when African Americans would have been turned away from Broadway’s expensive hotels and theaters. Show folk of all kinds, from circus strongmen to chorus girls, congregated here...

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