Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

BOOKS Meet Grietje Reyniers, the First Known Prostitute of New York City She is reported to have often hiked her petticoats to display her wares to passing sailors.

Photo Credit: Kletr / Shutterstock.com

The following is an excerpt from the new book Sin, Sex & Subversion by David Rosen (Carrel Books, 2016):

Daily media reports often headline tantalizing stories of the New York Police Department arresting streetwalkers, breaking up a prostitution ring, and closing storefront massage parlors offering other, more genital, services. Sin still sells. However, between 2008 and 2012, the state Division of Criminal Justice Services reported the NYPD arrested only 5,834 people for patronizing a prostitute. On average, that’s only 1,167 arrests per year—twenty-two or so a week—and that’s in a city with millions of adult residents and visitors (e.g., businesspeople and tourists) prowling the city streets every day and night.

In 2012, the city’s police commissioner, Ray Kelly, championed yet another program to curb the oldest profession, Operation Losing Proposition; one can only wonder who “brands” these undertakings. Like similar programs before it, this one targeted the customers, the johns. It was armed with the latest, high-tech “solutions” that taxpayers’ dollars could pay for, using decoys armed with remote audio systems; “arrest teams,” and undercover officers providing backup. The NYPD—along with other local police forces and DAs across the nation—regularly holds press conferences promoting their latest prostitution busts.

These police efforts mostly target what is best understood as the low-hanging fruit of the flesh trade. Columbia University sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh makes this clear in a revealing 2011 study, “How Tech Tools Transformed NY’s Sex Trade.” His findings are simple: the flesh trade is big business in the Big Apple. “The economies of big cities have been reshaped by a demand for high-end entertainment, cuisine, and ‘wellness’ goods,” he notes. “In the process, ‘dating,’ ‘massage,’ ‘escort,’ and ‘dancing’ have replaced hustling and streetwalking. A luxury brand has been born. These changes have made sex for hire more expensive.”

Venkatesh segments the city’s commercial sex business into four groups, with the respective terms of services “for traditional intercourse.” A streetwalker got a $75 fee and her pimp’s cut was 25 percent (30 percent on weekends). Self-employed hookers got $150 per session and pocketed it all, but “she has to pay for online marketing, transportation, security, bribes to shopkeepers, and drugs for clients.” “Blue-collar” escort services charged $350 per outcall session and the sex worker got 60 percent, but the service “pays for advertising and on-call security officers. The client covers the hotel room and drinks.” Finally, for upscale escort services—like that used by former New York governor Eliot Spitzer and other high-rollers—the sex workers are paid separately; “if one gets the standard $2,000, the other gets the same. The client covers expenses.” What a great tax write-off.

The structure of the Big Apple’s flesh trade suggests the financial, social, and sexual organization of commercial sex operating throughout the country. A quick Google search of “prostitution” and “prostitution arrests” lists innumerable stories about sexual exchanges taking place everywhere and all the time throughout the country. However, according to the most recent FBI data, only 44,090 people were arrested in 2011 for “prostitution and commercialized vice”; this represents a 50 percent drop in arrests from the 2004 total of 87,872. The FBI offers no explanation as to why this remarkable decline has taken place.

The Oldest Profession

As the truism goes, prostitution is the oldest profession, and hookers in the Big Apple date from the earliest Dutch settlement. The city’s first madam is reputed to be Griet or Grietje (“Little Pearl”) Reyniers, a lively bawd or doxie. In 1668, when taunted by seamen on a departing sloop with the cry, “Whore! Whore! Two pound butter’s whore!” She allegedly responded accordingly: lifting her petticoat, she pointed to her naked backside, replying: “Blaes my daer achterin.” Repeatedly assailed by respectable citizens, she thumbed her nose at them, insisting, “I have long been the whore of the nobility, now I want to be the rabble’s whore.”

Reyniers was born in Amsterdam (some say Wesel, Germany) in 1602 and died around 1669 in Gravesend, Breuckelen (now Brooklyn). According to some researchers, her name indicates that her family was of Huguenot descent. She sailed to New Amsterdam in ’1629 aboard the De Zoutberg (“Salt Mountain”) and, according to some accounts, plied her trade with male passengers and seamen alike. Some aboard were scandalized when Reyniers pulled “the shirts of some of the sailors out of their breeches.” In addition to settlers, the ship she sailed on would likely have carried livestock, wagons, plows, tools, clothing, food seeds, firearms, and cheap goods for trade.

The Fort Amsterdam she found is really unimaginable today. It was a tiny port enclave with a population of about 270 Dutch folk and some Lenape Indians. Over the next three decades, the town’s population grew exponentially, reaching about 1,500 people in 1664 when the English seized it, renaming it New York. A few years before Reyniers arrived, in 1625 or ’26, the settlement witnessed the arrival of eleven slaves. These African men had been seized by Dutch privateers from Spanish or Portuguese ships and had names like John Francisco, Antony Portugsee, and Simon Congo. The Dutch claim to New Amsterdam was part of larger territory that stretched along the East Coast known as New Netherlands. It stretched from Gloucester, New Jersey, to Albany, New York, and into Brooklyn. In the 1698 census, the city had nearly five thousand inhabitants.

As a young woman in Amsterdam, Reyniers reportedly worked at Peter de Winter’s tavern, but was argumentative and was fired for acting discourteously to customers. The tavern mistress claimed to have seen her in a back room, “her petticoat upon her knees.” Nevertheless, she was married twice, the first time to Aelbert Egberts, a twenty-year-old tailor from Haarlem, in September 1626. A widow in December 1629, she married Anthony Jansen Van Salee [Jansz], a seaman from Cartagena; some reports say they married while sailing to the New World, while others claim they met and married in New Amsterdam. In May 1647, she was reported still married and the mother of four daughters.

Quickly making the port home, Reyniers apparently loved to walk-the-walk up the Big Apple’s first “ladies mile,” the East River shoreline meeting-place known as the Strand (now Pearl Street). On these strolls, she is reported to have often hiked her petticoats to display her wares to passing sailors. Many of the goodly settlers of New Amsterdam were staunch Calvinists, members of the Reformed Dutch Church, and were deeply offended by her conduct. They organized a banishment campaign that led to the Common Council expelling her from New Amsterdam; adding insult to injury, she was forced to pay the cost of the trial.

In the three centuries following the Dutch arrival, the tavern was the nexus of New York—and American—civic life. It rivaled the church, functioning as the leading secular institution, housing the first governments and serving as a cultural venue. People didn’t drink local water for fear of infection and the local alcohol drinking hole was often more popular than the house of worship. It was a venue promoting alcohol consumption and civil sociability. It was often a second home for prostitutes.

During the colonial era, taverns, often located in a private residence, met important social needs. They were business venues offering congregation for locals and hospitality for travelers. The colony locally licensed public house welcomed qualified individuals, men (and occasionally women) who were judged to be respectable and sober. These establishments offered meals, beverages, and lodgings at fixed rates. They served as meeting places for elected officials, gathering places for the sharing of information and gossip, the reading of broadsides and political debate. They were also venues for entertainment, be it fiddle playing or storytelling. They provided travelers a primitive form of hospitality, offering questionable meals, dubious drink, and a shared bed for visitors; many provided food and shelter for a guest’s animals. More importantly, they offered wayfarers the opportunity to socialize with fellow travelers and locals. Women-of-the-night often came unescorted.

Following the Civil War and the horrendous 1863 Draft Riot, the city’s districts of ill repute moved farther uptown. The movement followed two trajectories: one up the west side, the other up the East Side. Going west, the first stop on this caravan was Greenwich Village, sometimes called “Little Africa” because of the black people who lived there, located between Bleecker Street and Washington Square, and home to fashionable prostitutes. A quarter-century later, at the turn of the twentieth century, the trade moved farther uptown to the Tenderloin, between 23rd to 42nd Streets and Fifth and Eighth Avenues. It was home to “parlor houses” and bordellos located near upscale hotels and theaters on Broadway. First-class sex establishments serviced “gentlemen,” while second-class brothels served clerks and mechanics. Below this level, a host of venues operated in working-class neighborhoods throughout the city providing the commercial sex engagement that met the needs of the poor and ethnic/racial minority males.

The Tenderloin was home to some of the city’s finest restaurants—the Fifth Avenue Hotel, the Hoffman House, and Delmonico’s—as well as Madison Square Garden and the Ladies Mile, the fashion district. At night this district was known as Satan’s Circus, home to innumerable saloons and sexual resorts. Among the leading dance halls were the Tivoli (West 35th Street near Broadway), the Bohemia (West 29th Street), Star and Garter (West 30th Street and Sixth Avenue), and Sailor’s Hall (on 30th Street), as well as Heart of Maryland, the Broadway Gardens, Stag Café, Paddy Pig’s, Pig’s Head, White Elephant, and the Chelsea. Buckingham Palace, on West 27th Street, was “the handsomest dance house in the city.” It was a two-story building, “gaudily decorated,” with an orchestra performing and a balcony running along the second floor with tables and chairs and where anything went. “The women present are the inmates of the neighboring houses of ill-fame and street walkers,” reported James McCabe. Another popular venue was the Cairo, located at 36 West 39th Street, decorated in an exotic “Turkish” style and where sexual solicitation was common. Still another unique attraction was the French Madam’s resort on West 30th Street, just off Sixth Avenue, famous for its dancing girls who performed a nude cancan in a private cubicle for a dollar a show—other exotic performances were charged accordingly. The area was also home to innumerable sexual resorts, including the White Elephant and the Cremorne. The Cremorne, located in a basement of a building on West 32nd Street, was named after a legendary London nightspot and offered very cheap drinks; it was dubbed, “one of the bawdiest resorts in the Tenderloin.”

In the early twentieth century, prostitution was identified as both a symptom and a cause of the moral decay allegedly corrupting the nation. Traditionalists and progressives joined in common cause to fight for its suppression. In 1910, Christian moralists secured the passage of the Mann Act outlawing interstate sex commerce. Prior to the outbreak of WWI, they succeeded in closing approximately 125 “red-light” districts located throughout the country under the requirements of “war discipline.” They got legislation passed that led to the arrest, forceful medical testing, and/or imprisonment of some thirty thousand women for allegedly being carriers of venereal disease and, thus, being “domestic enemies” undermining the war effort.

Naturally, it was poor, working-class, racial minority, and immigrant women who maintained the entire edifice. These women had few if any options and bore the brunt of social scorn and arrest, physical illness, and drug addiction, sometimes even beatings and death to keep the industry functioning. “All too often, a woman had to choose from an array of dehumanizing alternatives,” the historian Ruth Rosen astutely observed. These choices included “to sell her body in a loveless marriage contracted solely for economic protection; to sell her body for starvation wages as an unskilled worker; or to sell her body as a ‘sporting woman.’” Whatever the choice, some form of prostitution was involved. Respectable society was not kind to these women then, and that remains very much the same today.

Excerpted with permission from Sin, Sex & Subversion: How What was Taboo in 1950s New York Became America’s New Normal by David Rosen. Copyright 2015, Carrel Books, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

David Rosen is the author of 'Sin, Sex & Subversion: How What Was Taboo in 1950s New York Became America’s New Normal' (Skyhorse, Feb ‘16). He can be reached at drosennyc@verizon.net.