The Price of the Ride in New York City: Sex, Taxis, and Entrepreneurial Resilience in the Dry Season of 1919

Filling the Saloon Vacuum

The advent of wartime prohibition in the summer of 1919 brought sweeping changes to New York City's nightlife and, by extension, its clandestine sexual economy. The mass shuttering of saloons and other commercial spaces of late-night amusement in the span of a few short months meant that the use of these spaces by women marketing illicit sexual services was systematically interrupted. The campaign against white slavery, begun in earnest in the early teens, had succeeded in breaking down the city's parlor house system. The few brothels that survived were mostly closed in the crackdown that immediately followed the United States' entrance into the First World War. As the brothel declined, many female sex workers and other participants in the city's underground vice industries had increasingly come to rely upon saloons, dance halls, and other commercial amusement spaces to conduct business—procuring clients, arranging dates, negotiating terms, and so on—late into the night. As wartime prohibition targeted these spaces with unprecedented restrictions and shuttered hundreds of the city's dancing and drinking establishments within the space of a few months, sex workers, male intermediaries, and others involved in clandestine commercial activities responded with entrepreneurial resilience and ingenuity.¹

By exploiting the burgeoning availability of the automobile and the telephone and forging links with male intermediaries (elevator operators, waiters, entertainers, clerks, newsboys, taxi drivers, and more), sex workers, customers, high-end brothel owners, pimps, and other participants in the commercial sex trade cultivated small-scale, trust-based, clandestine commercial networks, building on basic trade patterns and arrangements already emergent during the war. The use of these networks and technologies enabled sex workers to continue to procure clients, secure private spaces in which to perform sexual labor, avoid the prying eyes of private and municipal anti-vice authorities, and snatch control over conditions of trade. As economic actors, sex workers weighed the potential risks involved in cooperating with male intermediaries—for cooperation involved placing trust in the hands of strange men—against the opportunities such collaboration generated, helping drive fundamental, long-lasting transformations in the urban sexual economy in the process.² Meanwhile, cabbies and their vehicles assumed new roles within the city's changing landscape of sexual practices and commercialized sexual services. Cabbies seized on the window of opportunity afforded by the saloon's decline by extending their involvement in the underground economy. They developed formal and informal partnerships with sex workers and brothel matrons, arranged dates, facilitated communication between buyers and purveyors of sexual services, referred would-be customers to madams and other brothel proprietors, furnished means of transport, held and advertised privileged knowledge about concealed underworld market conditions, and (rarely) operated as pimps profiting regularly from the labor of a fixed set of workers. Further, the taxicab's back seat offered a cheap, discreet, and ubiquitous space for sex, a commodity that was highly sought after by sex workers and their customers, and by couples engaged in nonmonetary forms of sexual commerce, since wartime ordinances posed considerable obstacles to both groups when it came to locating a private place fit for nonmarital intercourse.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the saloon stood at the center of sociality in New York City. More than just a space of leisure, to many working-class New Yorkers the saloon had long been "the principal gathering place for social intercourse, the arranging of jobs, acquiring knowledge of current events, meeting and making of friends; in short, the clearing house of the worker and toiler."³ The stroke of midnight on 1 July 1919 heralded the beginning of wartime prohibition and the end of the saloon in New York City. The Anti-Saloon League's deft leveraging of the state of exception created by wartime mobilization had produced an unprecedented series of handily won legislative victories over the preceding years.⁴ By the summer of 1918, the demand for specific wartime restrictions, including prohibition on sale of alcohol to uniformed servicemen, had...