Tenderloin
Essay
In the final decades of the 1800s, a vice district emerged just north of Philadelphia’s city center. Bound by Sixth Street on the east, Thirteenth Street on the west, Race Street to the south, and Callowhill Street to the north, this neighborhood was called the Tenderloin, like similar districts in many other cities of the era. The Tenderloin, encompassing Philadelphia’s cheap amusements district as well as its tiny Chinatown, housed as many as 250 pool rooms, gambling resorts, saloons, opium dens, and brothels by the close of the nineteenth century.
The origin of the nickname “Tenderloin” is unclear, but newspaper articles from the late 1800s note that red-light districts—areas with concentrated commercial sex and vice enterprises—offered “prime cuts” for multiple constituencies: sex, drugs, and amusements for the working classes; good incomes for madams, pimps, and showmen; and graft opportunities galore for politicians and police officers.
As in other cities, Philadelphia’s Tenderloin developed at the edge of the growing central business district (then extending westward along the axis of East Market Street) and in the vicinity of new railroad stations (the major depot for the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad built in 1859 at Broad and Callowhill Streets and its replacement, Reading Terminal, on Twelfth Street between Arch and Market, in 1893). The shifting market functions of the city center produced change for the neighborhood once occupied by prosperous merchants. As the railroads made it possible for the professional classes to move to suburbs like Chestnut Hill and the Main Line, the district they left behind became home to wholesale and retail warehouses, tenements, stores, single-family houses, and furnished-room houses (high-density homes offering lodging to single people). An abundance of inexpensive housing attracted a new population of working-class Chinese and European immigrants as well as African Americans. Low rents and the proximity to the railroad depots created a venue for vice as well as quick access for visitors to the district’s dime museums, brothels, and vaudeville shows.
Tenderloin Amusements
The Tenderloin’s more unseemly offerings sprang up next to the district’s working-class entertainment options: minstrel shows, dance halls, and circus performances. On one block of Eighth Street, between Arch and Vine, three vaudeville theaters—including the Bijou and the Fourpaughs—emerged between 1875 and 1895. By 1910, this block contained five movie houses (in addition to the three vaudeville theaters), two dime museums, five shooting galleries for recreational target practice, and numerous other cheap diversions like penny peep shows and palm-reading parlors. A sociologist who surveyed the Tenderloin reported in 1912: “The tenderloin theatres are not composed entirely of degenerate residents of the slums, of wicked gamblers, of ‘furnished roomers,’ and painted blondes of doubtful virtue.” He conjectured that without the patronage of people passing through the city and others visiting from the suburbs and country, more than half of the Tenderloin’s theaters would fail. He also pointed to the district’s inexpensive housing stock, a plethora of low-cost rooming houses that furnished chorus girls and actors with temporary shelter and board.
The eastern outskirts of the Tenderloin and the warehouse district stretching east to the Delaware River attracted a Skid Row population of poor, homeless, and transient men and the missions, saloons, flophouses, and cheap restaurants that catered to them. This population, like the working classes, was drawn to the Tenderloin because of its inexpensive housing options and its proximity to the city’s rail yards and labor opportunities.
The abuse of opium, morphine, and cocaine ran rampant in the Tenderloin. By 1910, Americans consumed 68,000 pounds of opium annually, with many of the nation’s Chinatown neighborhoods facilitating the drug’s trade. The recreational use of opium had existed in China for centuries, and many Chinese immigrants brought a tradition of opium smoking with them when they arrived in the United States. Chinese immigrants settled the 900 block of Race Street in the 1870s and 1880s. The concurrent emergence of the Tenderloin around Chinatown ensured that opium dens catering to a Chinese clientele found new patrons of differing ethnic and racial backgrounds. During one midnight raid on Chinatown’s opium dens in 1900, Philadelphia police arrested more than forty Chinese-Americans, along with white and black men and women.
The Politics of Vice
Though police disrupted illegal activity in the Tenderloin, the press noted a pattern of inconsistent law enforcement in the district. Newspapers and reformers had long observed connections between the city’s political machine and its most well-known vice district. In a 1905 editorial in the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Rev. Daniel I. McDermott, rector of St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church, claimed that the machine had “made a Sodom out of the heart of the city” by regulating vice in the Tenderloin. Many of the district’s “dens of infamy” remained operational by bribing local police officers and paying tribute to the Republican political syndicate. McDermott chided the police and the mayor, asking what right they had to “dedicate a section of the city to debauchery, to make it a plague spot, to scandalize its residents, to imperil the virtue of its youth and depreciate the value of property.” A grand jury investigating the Tenderloin echoed McDermott’s sentiments and went even further, blaming the prevalence of “disorderly houses” (brothels) not only on police graft and political interference, but also on the leniency of the courts. Many prostitutes simply saw their court fines as licensing fees.
To attack the social evils of the Tenderloin, reformers sought to dismantle the Republican political apparatus from the top down. They rallied around Rudolph Blankenburg (1843-1918), who became mayor of Philadelphia in 1911 after what the New York Times later called “one of the greatest reform campaigns ever fought in this country.” Blankenburg—a rarity as a reform-minded Republican within a then-unscrupulous party—appointed a Vice Commission, which uncovered a thriving market throughout the city for commercial sex, gambling, and drug use. The investigators found the largest number of vice houses in the Tenderloin (the city’s sixth and eighth police districts), which accounted for much of the $6.2 million spent on prostitution per year in Philadelphia. Three-quarters of all the city’s arrests for streetwalking (prostitution solicitation in the streets) took place in the Tenderloin.
Like other Progressive-era reformers, Blankenburg believed vice to be a social evil requiring treatment similar to contagious diseases. The social contamination caused by vice, they reasoned, required quarantine and suppression. This segregationist approach to vice differed from two other common approaches to combating vice in this era—the first involved licensing and regulation, while the other, referred to as “abolition,” required constant repression until annihilation was achieved.
Although Blankenburg may have leaned toward a segregationist approach, neither he nor the Vice Commission considered the Tenderloin to be a segregated district because respectable people lived and worked throughout the district despite the presence of vice. Just north of the Tenderloin sat the furnished-room district, home to a burgeoning class of office workers—many of whom traversed the Tenderloin every day on their way to and from work in Center City. If not entirely segregated, the Tenderloin occupied the space of de facto red-light district in the city’s popular imagination, thanks to regular media coverage of the district’s seamy character.
The Tenderloin became a site of spectacular police raids, open-air political stumping, and missionary moralizing. In 1910, more than fifteen hundred religious reformers marched into the Tenderloin from City Hall on a Saturday evening, intent on interrupting the vice trade and focusing press attention on the city’s underbelly. In the wake of the 1913 Vice Commission’s investigation, Mayor Blankenburg took a walking tour of the Tenderloin, and within the span of four blocks, hundreds of onlookers had joined him for an excursion through the neighborhood. Although Blankenburg declared in 1912 that vice was “practically eliminated” in the city, and again in 1915 that “the much-heralded ‘Tenderloin’ does not exist,” vice squads continued to locate and interrupt illegal activity. During a single night in July 1916, police arrested more than five hundred people. Critics claimed that highly publicized raids and marches drew unnecessary attention to the red-light district while at the same time displacing vice onto other neighborhoods.
The Decline
As in many other red-light districts across the country, the Tenderloin’s sex trade declined around 1920. The United States’ entrance into World War I in 1917 introduced a marked national effort to repress vice and promote healthy living among servicemen. Police clamped down on districts like the Tenderloin, and in Philadelphia vice migrated to the main commercial thoroughfare, Market Street, where department stores and motion picture houses drew men and women from a variety of backgrounds for work and pleasure. Changing gender norms, economic opportunities, and the massive federal apparatus of Prohibition also shifted the landscape of vice by pushing drinking culture and its attendant behaviors further underground.
Architectural interventions further disrupted the neighborhood’s identity. The 1926 opening of the Delaware River Bridge (later renamed the Benjamin Franklin Bridge) led to more traffic around Franklin Square—the eastern boundary of the Tenderloin. By the mid-1900s, as commercialized vice disappeared from all but a few pockets of the Tenderloin, the former red-light district became known as Skid Row, as a longstanding homeless population continued to inhabit the neighborhood. The late-twentieth-century building of the Vine Street Expressway through the exact center of the former Tenderloin shifted the character of the Skid Row and Chinatown neighborhoods even more. A destination for pleasure seekers and a home to many working-class people in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the former Tenderloin became simply a place for commuters to pass through on their way elsewhere.
Annie Anderson is the senior research and public programming specialist at Eastern State Penitentiary and the coauthor, with John Binder, of Philadelphia Organized Crime in the 1920s and 1930s (Arcadia Publishing, 2014). She received her M.A. in American Studies from the University of Massachusetts Boston. (Author information current at time of publication.)
Copyright 2016, Rutgers University
Gallery
Philadelphia's Tenderloin, 1915
In the final decades of the 1800s, a vice district emerged just north of Philadelphia’s city center. Roughly bound by Sixth Street on the east, Thirteenth Street on the west, Race Street to the South, and Callowhill Street to the north, this neighborhood was called the Tenderloin, like similar districts in many other cities of the era. A large section of Philadelphia’s Tenderloin is visible in this 1915 photograph taken from the tower at City Hall.
The scarcity of records documenting the Tenderloin before 1893, when the Reading Terminal at center of this photo, with huge roof) opened on Twelfth Street between Arch and Vine, indicates that the rail hub may have influenced the district’s emergence. As the railroads made it possible for the professional classes to move to suburbs like Chestnut Hill and the Main Line, the district they left behind became home to wholesale and retail warehouses, tenements, stores, single-family houses, and furnished-room houses. An abundance of inexpensive housing attracted a new population of working-class Chinese and European immigrants as well as African Americans. At the same time, trains brought leisure travelers and pleasure seekers into the city from the suburbs and the country.
Philadelphia’s Tenderloin was unusual in that respectable people lived and worked throughout the district despite the presence of vice. Just north of the Tenderloin sat the furnished-room district, home to a burgeoning class of office workers—many of whom traversed the Tenderloin every day on their way to and from work in Center City. Moreover, prostitution houses and family homes mingled indiscriminately. According to a 1913 vice commission report, “The condition [in Philadelphia] has no parallel in any other city, so far as we know, and our investigators, accustomed as they were to the vice conditions of Chicago and New York, were astonished at the open association of the worst forms of vice and of innocence, and the certainty of contamination which must necessarily ensue.”
The Bijou
Library Company of Philadelphia
Visitors to and residents of the Tenderloin could choose from a variety of working-class entertainment options including minstrel and vaudeville shows, burlesque performances, and later, motion pictures. The Bijou Theater–depicted in this 1922 illustration–was part of the B.F. Keith Circuit, a chain of vaudeville houses owned by Benjamin Franklin Keith and Edward Franklin Albee II. The theater opened in 1889 at the northwest corner of Eighth and Race Streets.
In 1895, the Bijou became the first theater to show motion pictures in Philadelphia. By 1910, this same block of North Eighth Street contained five movie houses, two dime museums, five shooting galleries for recreational target practice, and numerous other cheap diversions like penny peep shows and palm-reading parlors. Even more unseemly offerings sprang up next to these amusements.
Dumont's Minstrels
Visitors to the Tenderloin enjoyed the district’s many working-class entertainment options, including minstrel shows. “Minstrelsy,” wrote Frank Dumont in 1899, “is the one American form of amusement purely our own. . . . ” Minstrel shows were live performances that featured comedy sketches, musical numbers, and dance routines typically performed by white actors who used burnt cork to blacken their faces. Typical minstrel characters were racist caricatures— exaggerated stereotypes of black men and women.
Dumont, who had been performing in blackface since he was a teenager, moved to Philadelphia in 1881. In 1895, Dumont purchased the Eleventh Street Opera House, which served as a venue for his minstrel troupe. The quote above was taken from Dumont’s The Witmark Amateur Minstrel Guide and Burnt Cork Encyclopedia, a “how to” guide that provided instructions for stage managers and performers as well as a dictionary of stage terms and more than one hundred pages of scripts.
Sometime around 1910, Dumont relocated to a building he purchased at the corner of Ninth and Arch Streets, shown in this 1914 photograph. Dumont died on March 17, 1919, in the box office while his troupe performed the afternoon matinee inside the theater. In addition to the encyclopedia, Dumont left behind a massive scrapbook documenting the history of minstrelsy that is now housed at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
The Trocadero, 1917
The Trocadero Theater—or “the Troc,” as it is better known—first opened in 1870 as the Arch Street Opera House. At that time, the theater featured traveling minstrel shows as well as musical comedies. The building, which was designed by Philadelphia architect Edwin Forrest Durang, had to be rebuilt in 1872 following a devastating fire. Just over a decade later, it was rebuilt again after yet another fire. By the turn of the century, the theater had been remodeled several times and operated under numerous names before settling on its current name in the mid 1890s. By that time, the theater hosted vaudeville and burlesque shows. As late as the 1950s, the Troc continued to operate as a burlesque house, boasting performances by prominent professional showgirls such as Mara Gaye. Nevertheless, over the next decade, the theater fell into serious disrepair.
In the late 1970s, the Troc was fully restored and added to the National Register of Historic Places. In the mid-1980s, the facility was remodeled once more for its modern use as a dance club and concert venue. In addition to live music and DJs, the Troc in 2016 was hosting comedy shows as well as a weekly movie night. According to the theater's management, the Trocadero is the only Victorian-era theater still in use in the nation.
Rudolph Blankenburg
Historical Society of Pennsylvania
Prominent businessman and civic reformer Rudolph Blankenburg was born in Germany in 1843. He immigrated to the United States in 1865 and soon settled in Philadelphia, where he worked in importing and manufacturing. He and his wife, Lucretia, both became involved in civic causes. A Republican, Blankenburg nonetheless opposed the Republican Party "Organization" that dominated the city and state during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His activism on behalf of good government led to his election as mayor in 1912, an achievement the New York Times later called “one of the greatest reform campaigns ever fought in this country. Although he only served one term, Blankenburg earned a reputation as the "Old War Horse of Reform.” As mayor, Blankenburg reformed city financial management, established civil service by merit, stopped ward leaders from collecting assessments from police and elected officials, and appointed a Vice Commission to investigate the extent of the city’s vice problem.
Skid Row Map
Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries
The eastern outskirts of the Tenderloin and the warehouse district stretching east to the Delaware River attracted a population of poor, homeless, and transient men and the missions, saloons, flophouses, and cheap restaurants that catered to them. This population, like the working classes, was drawn to the Tenderloin because of its inexpensive housing options and its proximity to the city’s rail yards and labor opportunities.
By the mid-1900s, as commercialized vice disappeared from all but a few pockets of the Tenderloin, the former red-light district became known as Skid Row, as a longstanding homeless population continued to inhabit the neighborhood.
This map comes from a 1952 report titled “What About Philadelphia’s Skid Row?: A Report on Homeless and Transient Men Living in the Vicinity of 8th and Pine Streets.” In addition to depicting two areas designated for major redevelopment to the north (top of map) and east (lower right), the map reveals a high concentration of bars, theaters, hotels, and missions along Eighth and Ninth Streets from Arch to Callowhill Streets.
Backgrounders
Links
- Prostitution in Philadelphia: Arrests 1912-1918 (Stanford University)
- The Rise and Fall of Blackface Minstrelsy in The City of Brotherly Love (The PhillyHistory Blog)
- The Skeleton Man, the Jersey Devil and a Multitude of Other Attractions (The PhillyHistory Blog)
- The Trocadero Theater (VisitPhilly.com)