Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Judith Walkowitz is professor of history at Johns Hopkins University and the author of City of Dreadful Delight. She lives in New York.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

NIGHTS OUT

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

List of Illustrations.........................viiiAcknowledgments...............................xiiIntroduction..................................11 Cosmopolitan Soho...........................172 Battle of the Empire........................443 The "Vision of Salome"......................644 The Italian Restaurant......................925 Schleppers and Shoppers.....................1446 A Jewish Night Out..........................1827 The Shady Nightclub.........................2098 Windmill Theatre............................253Epilogue......................................286Abbreviations.................................304Notes.........................................305Selected Bibliography.........................377Index.........................................402

Chapter One

An early modern parish map of St. Anne, Soho appears on the front of a postcard circulated by the Soho Society, a local amenities group organized in 1972 (Plate 1). Joe's Basement, a premier photographic shop on Wardour Street, Soho, produced the map in appealing green colors, suggestive of the pastoral origins of sixteenth-century Soho as open space and hunting ground between Westminster and the City of London. The caption of the postcard reads: "First published c.1690, this map shows the original pattern of Soho streets, still easily recognizable today."

The Soho Society reproduced this artifact to defend the integrity of Soho's urban gridwork against the rapacious designs of late twentieth-century property speculators and municipal planners. The early-modern engraving also carried its own political design: its intention was to delineate the (1686) parish boundaries of St. Anne, Soho, and to mark its interior territory as readable, knowable, and clearly bounded. St. Anne appears as a manorial village, with parish church (designed by Wren's office), market, aristocratic residences, squares, and orderly streets. In this drawing, St. Anne stands alone, disconnected from the rest of London. Carved out of four aristocratic estates, the new parish was surrounded by ancient highways. To the north is Tyburn Road, the traditional name of Oxford Street, before it became a world-famous shopping street. Hog Lane, the top part of what is now Charing Cross Road, sets the eastern limits, while Wardour Street, a straight north-south line, forms the seventeenth-century western frontier of Soho. No sharp line delineates the southern boundary of the parish, which encompassed Leicester Fields (now Leicester Square) and what the Survey of London (1966) describes as the "higgledy-piggledy" development in the southeastern corner around Newport Market.

In the seventeenth century, Soho was a fashionable but mixed neighborhood, home to aristocratic fashion, foreign ambassadors, and Huguenot Protestant artisans who were fleeing religious persecution in France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685). The map conveys very little of Soho's diverse social character: its two-dimensional ground plan obscures most of the private property and social distinctions in the parish, but highlights the legal and administrative orders that preside over them. Only the public institutions—the great houses and the church—are noted by name and signaled with little house ideograms. In contrast, the map reduces private houses, with all their variegated shapes and sizes, to defined rectangular blocks along the street grid. In these structures resided artists, artisans, and aristocrats. One may, nonetheless, detect some social differentiation in the numbered alleys and courts that thread their way through the larger streets; these entities are keyed to a list located on the top right of the engraving. As evidence of a foreign presence, virtually coincident with the parish's foundations, the "French Church" on Hog Lane appears as no. 14 on this list.

Soho's seventeenth-century street patterns would persist into the twenty-first century, but Soho's geographic and social identity has always been more mobile, fluid, and contested than this orderly engraving or subsequent mappings of Soho would suggest. Soho's "recognizable" boundaries have, in fact, been historically mutable, the result of changing and overlapping jurisdictions of governmental and philanthropic institutions, as well as new roadways and commercial development. They have also shifted in relation to changing social usages and informal annexations of contiguous spaces by Sohoites.

Material and imaginative forces converged to shape Soho as a cosmopolitan space in late Victorian and Edwardian London. This chapter first assesses the changing built environment and social geography of Soho and its West End peripheries in the nineteenth century. Then it turns its attention to the new mental mappings of cosmopolitan Soho by a series of key social actors, texts, and media events between 1894 and 1914. At the turn of the century, social surveys, fiction, and popular journalism figured Soho as a plague spot of international crime, subversive politics, and illicit sex, while also charting its new status as an attractive stage set for bodily pleasures, appetites, and modern technologies of the self. A new genre of Victorian local history was especially crucial to Soho's enhanced cachet. Soho reformers and ethnic entrepreneurs exploited books on Soho and its historical associations to advance contemporary Soho's reputation as the repository of memories of Old London and as a benign site of sophisticated, cosmopolitan pleasures.

Urban Cosmopolitanism and New London

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, a central district devoted to cosmopolitan consumption was assembled along the street improvements of Regent Street, Shaftesbury Avenue, and Charing Cross Road and the older environs of Oxford Street and Leicester Square. These West End boulevards cemented Soho's modern identity, but they also opened up the district for commercial and industrial exploitation. Nineteenth-century thoroughfares ripped through the central rookeries of Old London, displacing thousands of residents from the noisome slums that resisted police supervision. Simultaneously, they transported new social actors into the district, including legions of service and theatrical workers who assisted and entertained suburbanites and tourists descending on the West End to visit the shops and the shows. By the first decade of the twentieth century, the electrified underground railways disgorged thousands of travelers along the entire circumference of Soho, at stations located at Oxford Circus, Piccadilly Circus, Tottenham Court Road, and Leicester Square.

The rebuilding of Soho's peripheries began with the Regent Street project of the 1820s, a large canyon, 120 feet wide and two miles in length, fronted by palatial, six-story shops and residences. Built on Crown lands, Regent Street was the centerpiece of John Nash's renovation of the "court end" of London, providing a parade ground and shopping street for a fashionable neighborhood. The new street also connected the royal green space of Regent's Park at its northern end to the Prince Regent's palace at Carleton House in the south. It supplied a main sewer pipe under the surface and badly needed access for north-south traffic through central London. Its sham-stuccoed facades and window displays of "female fripperies" immediately gave it a Parisian impression. Regent Street became an elite shopping street catering mostly for ladies, as well as a gilded parade ground for high-class prostitutes.

Regent Street was also a massive work of social engineering. It created an east-west spine that stratified the labor market, residential patterns, and consumer pleasures of central London for the next century and longer. One of Nash's stated objectives was to provide "a complete separation between the Streets occupied by the Nobility and Gentry, and the narrower Streets and meaner houses occupied by mechanics and the trading part of the community." The Regent Street project razed the streets around Swallow Street and displaced thousands of residents.

The process of slum clearance and reconstruction of central London continued in the 1840s with the construction of New Oxford Street as an east-west thoroughfare through London's center that eliminated the maze of old rookeries of St. Giles. Once again, a metropolitan improvement resulted in the eviction of thousands of poor inhabitants, forcing them into the few poor areas that remained and intensifying the problem of overcrowding in the inner city.

Public uproar forced Parliament to require that future metropolitan improvements provide housing for displaced inhabitants. In the late 1880s, when the Metropolitan Board of Works undertook the construction of Northumberland Avenue, the Charing Cross Road, and Shaftesbury Avenue, it felt obliged to provide housing for some, but not all, of the 10,000 inhabitants displaced by the new streets. Its passion for economy led it to construct narrow thoroughfares with restricted vistas that carefully hewed to pre-existing roads. Opened in 1886 and running through eastern St. James and St. Anne, Shaftesbury Avenue became the center of late Victorian Theatreland, on which six theaters were constructed, as well as restaurants, shops, and mansion blocks. It was a nondescript roadway lacking vistas, "a story of a wasted opportunity," a street where pedestrians "hurry by." The Charing Cross Road was equally undistinguished. Opened in 1887, it retained all the "pot-houses" of old Crown Street, while over time accruing a miscellaneous collection of theaters, dark, brooding tenements, secondhand bookstores, "rubber good stores," pornography shops, and governmental offices towards its southern end. The Charing cross Road established the eastern boundary of modern-day Soho, hiving of fan eastern part of St. Anne's parish around St. Martin's Lane. After the construction of these two thoroughfares, municipal agencies largely tended to ignore Soho as a built environment, despite periodic calls for the construction of wider roads linking Regent Street and the Charing Cross Road.

Meanwhile the older sedimented landscapes of Oxford Street and Leicester Square underwent considerable renovation. A mile-long thoroughfare extending eastward from Park Lane to Tottenham Court Road, Oxford Street was already an ancient highway and turnpike before Nash's "New Street" materialized. Affectionately christened the "old Mediterranean" by Thomas de Quincey, the Oxford Road dated back to Roman times. It possessed an unsavory reputation as the site of Tyburn Tree, the location of today's Marble Arch, where public executions were held between 1171 and 1783. Once it was cleansed of the Tyburn association, however, it became a Regency shopping street and site of entertainments for residents of the newly fashionable quarters of Marylebone. By the late Victorian period, it was the most popular shopping street in London, the center of a heavily capitalized retail trade in ladies' wear. It would always remain a less select, less uniform, less "Parisian" environment than Nash's "new" street. With its "expanding" shops, its "windows larger and more attractive," Oxford Street "grows busier every year for foot and carriage traffic," observed George Duckworth, one of Charles Booth's social investigators, in 1898.

Following the lead of retailers in New York, Paris, and the north of England, Oxford Street drapers began to expand into department stores. Because they were not as constrained by Crown property management as their Regent Street counterparts, they could more easily renovate their fronts and interior spaces. Within a few years after the Great Exhibition, Oxford Street traders redesigned their shop fronts to accommodate large sheets of glass to exhibit "large-scale specimens" of their goods to passersby. In 1909, this retail development culminated with the opening of Selfridges's grand emporium that added a "note of exclamation" to the otherwise humdrum architectural scene of Oxford Street. Selfridges advertised itself as a magnetic social rendezvous and center of "cosmopolitan style" dedicated to female pleasure and notable for "change, variety, diversity, mutation."

At Soho's southern border, Leicester Square, home of the "Shows of London," underwent its own late-Victorian makeover. The road expansion of Coventry Street, the rehabilitation of the Square's central "piazza," and the construction of elite variety theaters along the north and eastern part of the Square helped to spruce up a district that had gone into sad decline during the early decades of the nineteenth century. Calling themselves the "greatest cosmopolitan clubs in London," the Alhambra and Empire theaters of variety provided a range of foreign and native entertainments devoted to the exhibition of the "female form divine."

Surrounded by these commercial peripheries, Soho became the dark, industrial back region that serviced the spectacular front stage of the West End pleasure zone. The bright, open boulevards did not sweep away all of the unsavory elements of vice, crime, and overcrowding associated with the nearby slums. Nor did the street improvements fully erase the plebeian world of industrial labor and toil from the central district. In the streets north and south of Oxford Street, a vast, new industrial backstage arose to service the shopping and restaurant habits of metropolitan visitors. In his walks around Oxford Street, George Duckworth observed how Peter Robinson, the great Oxford Street emporium, had expanded its work operations into the side streets, with barrack accommodations for shop assistants and workrooms for the army of tailors and dressmakers who labored to produce the mantels, blouses, etc. retailed in the store. Cheek by jowl with these establishments, Duckworth and his accompanying policeman noted brothels, massage establishments, and apartments where women who walked Regent Street and Piccadilly resided with their general servants.

West End commercial development refashioned old Georgian Soho into a modern site of doubtful commerce and industry, employing a new cosmopolitan workforce of immigrants. By the late nineteenth century, Soho had become decisively more proletarian than its early modern incarnation, and more ethnically diverse, filled with cosmopolitan masses. A new geography of Soho emerged from an informal amalgamation of St. Anne and the eastern part of St. James. Some internal differences between the two regions would persist: overall, St. Anne remained more Latin, more prosperous, its Georgian fabric more refined; the congested streets east of Regent Street in St. James attracted poorer trades and became the primary West End settlement of Jewish tailors. But increasingly observers treated the parallelogram between Regent Street and Charing Cross Road as a single district, accommodating 24,000 residents in 1901. They expressed astonishment at its surprising array of occupations and ethnicities and the movement of outsiders through the streets. Rather than segregate and contain Soho, the late Victorian thoroughfares laid bare "the foreign quarter of the metropolis ... for the inspection of the world at large."

Into the twentieth century, Soho retained a French gloss, but its foreign population diversified in the post 1848 era, when tailoring workshops and culinary businesses attracted new settlements of Jewish, Italian, and other European immigrants eager to find employment. At the same time, Victorian Soho became notoriously impoverished. St. James, Westminster and St. Anne, Soho were the most densely populated parishes in mid-century London and the epicenter of the cholera epidemic in the 1850s. But the end of the century, overcrowding in St. Anne, Soho had abated. Plate 2 shows the state of St. Anne and the eastern part of St. James in 1889, according to Booth's "map of poverty." St. Anne's streets are marked pink (comfortable with good wages) or purple (mixed, some comfortable, some poor), but the winding streets in adjoining St. James, Westminster remained poor (uniformly marked on the Booth maps as below the poverty line, in purple and blue). As the cockney population began to desert Soho and environs, its streets were repopulated by Italian, French, and German immigrants, some of them refugees of failed revolutions, most of them economic migrants. By the 1890s, Eastern European Jews moved in and represented the last major diasporic settlement in Soho before the Great War. In 1900, the vicar of St. Anne, Soho declared that two-thirds of his parish (8,000 out of 12,000) were foreign. Throughout the twentieth century, Soho would remain heterogeneous and polyglot, and no ethnic grouping exerted cultural or political predominance.

"The Worst Street in London"

Events in 1906 brought Soho's reputation for dangerous cosmopolitanism into sharp relief, as a set of social actors competed to speak for and about Soho. At the center of the dispute were two representatives of official London. In October of that year, Inspector McKay of the Met's C Division vilified Greek Street, Soho, before the Royal Commission on the Police, which was investigating charges against the police for corruption and bribery related to prostitution, gambling, and the mistreatment of foreigners. When asked about the character of the street, McKay denounced Greek Street as the "worst street in the West End of London." "Crowds of people gather there nightly who are little else than a pest. I will go further and say that some of the vilest reptiles in London live there or frequent it." By the next day, the national dailies had reproduced McKay's testimony as banner headlines: "Worst Street in London," "Vilest Reptiles of London," and the "Dangers that Police Have to Cope with in Soho," including the "Risk of the Knife."

McKay's negative testimony provoked Reverend J. H. Cardwell of St. Anne, Soho to mount a defense of the hardworking, foreign residents of Greek Street. Cardwell resided on Dean Street, only a few hundred yards from Greek Street. Along with some prominent businessmen and residents, he denounced McKay's testimony as an absurd calumny. "I will say that there is not a single disreputable character in Greek-street. I will even go so far as to say that there is scarcely one in the whole of Soho," a claim deemed sufficiently excessive at the time to provoke a disclaimer from the Evening Standard: "we should have thought disreputable characters were to be found everywhere." Cardwell buttressed his defense of Greek Street by pointing to the moral improvements wrought by recent anti-vice campaigns that he had spearheaded: "Soho ... by no means perfect is a cleaner and purer place than it once was."

(Continues...)

Excerpted from NIGHTS OUTby JUDITH R. WALKOWITZ Copyright © 2012 by Judith Walkowitz. Excerpted by permission of YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.