"For its male habitués, sporting culture offered a kind of counteraction against the disciplines of market capitalism, a network of illicit spaces in which unfettered sexuality, physical prowess, and homosocial camaraderie could be pursued away from the drudgery of office work. Middle-class women, by contrast, perceived sporting culture as an obvious threat to the foundations of home, family, and equitable marriage."

Dancing across the Color Line
James W. Cook

Much of our ability to map this antebellum underground owes to the rediscovery of a fugitive source–the so-called flash press. Following much the same sarcastic, gossipy, sexually charged format initiated by London’s John Bull and The Town, the New York flash industry reached its high-water mark right around the time of Dickens’s visit. The new publications went by a variety of colorful names, including The Flash, The Libertine, The Weekly Rake, and The New York Sporting Whip. Most were short lived, not least because of their willingness to flout the boundaries of antebellum libel and obscenity law. Still, the scattered issues that have survived demonstrate a number of important things.

Fig. 2. A cover sheet from one of the underground flash papers: the New York Sporting Whip. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

First, they show that the athletic and nonathletic meanings of "sporting" were two sides of the same cultural coin. Reports on the ring and the turf routinely appeared side-by-side with articles about brothels, saloons, and gambling (a pattern largely invisible in less illicit athletic journals such as the Spirit of the Times or American Turf Register). These underground sheets also reveal a distinctly northern code of masculine honor that fused the ritual challenges of the rural gentry with the new conditions of urban-industrial life. Many issues featured some sort of "trial of skill" (sprinting, sparring, cockfighting, clog dancing, and the like), usually with a public wager to heighten the stakes. The cultural rituals themselves were descended from common eighteenth-century pastimes, yet after the Second Great Awakening their social status declined precipitously. The flash press thus provided something relatively unique in the era’s urban journalism: an alternative public sphere for white-collar men who rejected the values, tastes, and lifestyles of middle-class moralists.

Beyond its descriptions of physical contests and friendly wagers, the flash press hints at deeper socio-economic tensions. These tensions surface most clearly in a litany of complaints about the excessive rowdiness of the east side "soaplocks" and "jack tars" with whom white-collar sporting men routinely rubbed elbows. Flash readers, in other words, seem to have been happy to enjoy a drink with the locals, perhaps even mimic some of their fashion trends, slang, and dance moves. But the very same columns that make this interclass mutualism visible also demonstrate that the vice economy produced its fair share of resentment and snobbery.

Above all, the sheer scope of the flash industry suggests that antebellum sporting culture was a relatively pervasive phenomenon. There were well over a dozen New York based publications during the 1840s. And the large numbers of gossip items and letters-to-the-editor attest to a population of self-identified sports from as far away as New Jersey, Long Island, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Louisiana, and California. The evangelicals, it seems, were quite right to worry.

Such entertainments, they realized, threatened the gender norms upon which middle-class self-definition depended. For its male habitués, sporting culture offered a kind of counteraction against the disciplines of market capitalism, a network of illicit spaces in which unfettered sexuality, physical prowess, and homosocial camaraderie could be pursued away from the drudgery of office work. Middle-class women, by contrast, perceived sporting culture as an obvious threat to the foundations of home, family, and equitable marriage. Significantly, it was female evangelicals who most aggressively pursued moral reform in the Five Points, founding three different missions within about one hundred yards of Almack’s. The women who actually worked in the vice trade faced a different set of challenges. Between about 1820 and 1860, when women managed many of the dance halls, brothels, and boarding houses, the cash generated by sporting men supported an unusual degree of female independence. But the proliferation of consumers did not produce greater autonomy. Rather, it led to the emergence of a new profession–the pimp–and an increasingly male-controlled sex industry.

What’s missing here, of course, is race, and more specifically, the question of minority agency. Somewhat paradoxically (but not surprisingly), the "lowest" forms of white literature provide the largest number of clues. Consider E.Z.C. Judson’s The Mysteries and Miseries of New York (1848), probably the best-known pulp novel before the Civil War. Like Dickens, Judson describes an evening tour of the Points, with a lengthy stop at an interracial venue and ecstatic descriptions of black dancing. And here again, the story points to white-collar patronage. Judson’s fictional guide is a young male secretary by the name of Frank Hennock, whom we soon discover has an intimate knowledge of Five Points dance halls. When the party arrives at Almack’s, Hennock suddenly breaks into first-name familiarity with the doorman: "[Y]ou know me, Sam, I’m on the cross!"

Unlike Dickens, however, Judson (who wrote under the name of Ned Buntline) had himself spent a good deal of time in the Points, and this experience generated a much finer grain of detail on the page. We discover in Mysteries, for example, that the "landlord" of Almack’s was an African American man by the name of Pete Williams; that his dance hall was located on Orange Street and cost a shilling to enter; that it held almost two hundred customers of various classes and complexions; that the star of Williams’s floor show was known as a juba dancer; and that his dances included "flings, reels, hornpipes, double shuffles, and heel-and-toe tappers."

Fig. 3. Detail from an 1831 map of New York City by William Hooker (Peabody and Co.). The Five Points neighborhood is visible within the city's sixth ward, outlined here in blue. Pete Williams's dance hall was on Orange Street above Cross. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

Mysteries further suggests that Williams’s hall was ransacked on at least one occasion by William Poole (the real-life "Bill the Butcher") and a gang of nativist toughs. It is not at all clear whether this actually happened. Court documents from the late 1840s show no record of an attack, which may indicate that Judson simply invented the scene as a sensational plot twist. Or the antebellum courts may have chosen to ignore the property rights of a minority businessman victimized by a local powerbroker. Either way, though, this scene points to one of the central dilemmas of black entrepreneurship following emancipation. It was at this very moment that African American dance hall owners began to advertise their products more aggressively across the color line. But this policy was always double-edged in its effects. While advertising brought in growing numbers of Frank Hennocks, it also made these "amalgamated" spaces occasional targets for vandalism and violence.

Two years later, Almack’s resurfaced in George Foster’s New York by Gas-light, the era’s best-selling city guide. By 1850, the hall was known as "Dickens’s Place" (due to the popularity of American Notes) and had been forced to relocate because of a fire. Foster presents the performance space as a large underground room with white-washed walls, wooden benches, and an orchestra platform occupied by fiddle, trumpet, and bass drum. He also notes an interior apartment where patrons gambled, purchased cold cuts, chewed tobacco, smoked cigars, and drank homemade champagne. "Three quarters of the women," according to Foster, "were negresses, of various shades and colors," although he mentions a "less tidy and presentable" group of white women, too. His taxonomy of men was more elaborate, ranging from thieves, loafers, Bowery b’hoys, and rowdies to firemen, greenhorns, and "honest, hard working people."

Foster’s most intriguing comments focused on Pete Williams. Above all, he emphasized that Williams "made an enormous amount of money," a somewhat nebulous claim to be sure, but one which at least hinted at the possibility of minority success within the vice trade. Foster also suggested that Williams used his profits to attend a wide range of New York theaters–including the city’s most elite venue, the Astor Place Opera House–and may have even written anonymous reviews for the newspapers. Scholars have generally assumed that blacks were confined to the upper gallery of antebellum theaters, or banned altogether. But Foster presents Williams as a regular figure in the pit, calling out for sporting favorites such as Edwin Forrest and Charlotte Cushman. He even compliments Williams for his theatrical acumen, describing him as a "first-rate" critic.

It is worth pausing for a moment to consider the complexity of these claims. Both Judson and Foster clearly knew Williams’s club from first-hand experience. But the texts in which their claims appeared were mass-circulated commodities intended for a variety of market segments. Thus, the ideological registers and racial attitudes can often seem wildly inconsistent. At some moments, Judson and Foster express the transgressive tastes and bawdy humor of white-collar sports; at others, they gasp on behalf of affronted middle-class moralists; at still others, they champion the politics and prejudices of the urban artisanry. The boundaries between the voices, values, and bigotries are not always clear. It is important, therefore, to follow a number of angles of approach into this underground cultural terrain.

City directories make it clear that there was an African American businessman named Pete Williams living and working in the Five Points. The first listing is from 1830, and describes Williams as the "colored" owner of a "boardinghouse" at 41 Orange Street. Over the next sixteen years, he surfaces four more times: at 36.5 Orange in 1836 and 1837, and at 67 Orange in 1843 and 1846. These entries quietly confirm that Williams was an exceptional figure in New York’s economic landscape. During the 1830s and 40s, city directories rarely included blacks at all. And those who were included tended to be more elite figures such as church pastors; or barbers, shoemakers, and restaurateurs, who provided useful services for white businessmen (the directories’ primary readership). The inclusion of Williams was thus exceptional in terms of race, but also consistent with the market-driven logic of the directories. No other black impresario appeared in these listings. But the fact that Williams did appear suggests that he was unusually successful, and probably counted more than a few white merchants among his customers.

If directories confirm Williams’s existence, an 1845 article from the New York Tribune helps to clarify Foster’s claim that the dance hall was forced to relocate "some three or four years ago":

At first glance, this article merely underscores the challenges of seeing the local population as three-dimensional historical subjects. It is only because of a random tragedy that the Five Points "masses" became newsworthy. And even in this context, the reporter seems to have been more concerned with denigrating the "wretches" than getting "a correct list of the sufferers." Still, the fire served to illuminate a number of patterns more commonly suppressed in the antebellum press. We learn, for example, that Williams’s venue was physically connected to at least three white businesses–one above it and two on either side–as well as an interracial shanty colony in the back. This latter fact may explain why Williams was sometimes listed in the directories as a "boardinghouse keeper."

The architecture itself also complicates the extreme divisions of "high" and "low" that structured the narratives of Judson, Foster, and Dickens. For the first time, we see that this heterogeneous space included artisanal labor (a carpenter, a cooper) as well as white-collar consumption, cottage industries as well as drinking and dancing. If we follow the addresses in the Tribune back to contemporary street directories, the picture becomes even more complex. The white folks on this stretch of Orange Street, it turns out, had Irish, Jewish, and perhaps even Italian names: Hugh McBride, Pat Hart, Eliza Mendlesome, and Philip Costello. And contrary to the stereotypes about a brothel in every Five Points building, Mendlesome was listed as a shoemaker with her own business.