The City Wilderness (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1898 edition. Excerpt: ... real degradation of this district, then, consists far less in the crimes, great and small, committed here, or in the lawbreakers of various kinds and degrees that resort here, than in the existence of conditions and of agencies which make crime easy and fascinating, and virtue hard and unattractive, for the people in general. Comparatively unproductive of graver crime, the district is most prolific in vice and immorality. Drunkenness and prostitution flourish rankly. Both are involved together with crime, but each has also an existence more or less by itself. Gambling, which usually is associated with all these, has been reduced in the South End, by police vigilance, almost to the vanishing point. Boys match pennies, negroes indulge on the sly in policy, and the Chinese play fan tan. With these exceptions there is now but little gambling aside from playing for drinks in pool rooms and saloons. Nearly all the arrests for this offense are among the Chinese, who are brought to Station 4 in groups of from two or three to twenty or more. Gambling is so much a part of the life of that race that it cannot easily be dislodged from among them. While the Chinese remain here, patrol wagons filled with them will continue to drive up to the police stations. The number of places where liquor licenses are held varies year by year. In 1897 it was almost exactly two hundred, including groceries, wholesale liquor establishments, restaurants, and saloons. About one hundred of them were ordinary bar-rooms. This, it should be remembered, is in an area of less than three quarters of a square mile. Besides the licensed places for the sale of liquor there is a considerable number of resorts where it is sold illegally. These are called "speak easies...".