On this day in history: Depravity on the park

At the end of a long and frantic day with no park visit, I decided, just for the heck of it, to see if the Brooklyn Eagle had any references to Prospect Park for this very day, starting with 1902, the most recent year in their online database. I hit a doozy. Right opposite the park's Willink Entrance, at Flatbush Avenue and Malbone Street (now Empire Boulevard), complaints were heating up about a notoriously "objectionable resort" where booze was sold on the Lord's day and the dancing went on til the wee hours.

Image, left: Evelyn Nesbit and Jack Clifford, via Streetswing.com.

 

This den of iniquity was called Niederstein's, although it seems to have had many alternative monikers, including the Hotel Royal, the Hotel Meteor, and the Haymarket. I'm betting the picture at right is it; in their nifty photo book Brooklyn's Flatbush, archive-meisters Brian Merlis and Lee A. Rosenzweig label it "hotel and beer garden, northeast corner of Flatbush Avenue and Malbone Street, 1902," adding, "This old saloon was demolished when construction on the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens began, about 1905."

By any name, this "hotel" was apparently of the hourly-rate variety, a dance-hall appendage intended to get around the city's "Raines law" forbidding alcohol sales on Sunday except in hotels. The dance hall itself had bedeviled the good burghers of Flatbush since at least the previous year, when a virtuous Eagle reader, signing himself simply, "A Young Man," proclaimed, "It is a shame that such a place as this dance hall should be allowed to exist in the borough, and especially at the principal entrance of our beautiful park."

In 1902, an Eagle reporter staked out the place before midnight on Saturday. "Promptly at 12, the majority of the incandescent lights in the barroom were extinguished," he wrote, "the entrance from the street barred, and those in that section...compelled to repair to the wine room immediately adjoining, the dance hall pavilion beyond, or the glass-enclosed veranda upstairs which runs around the exterior of the building on two sides. The shades...were pulled down...and a trusty attendant retained a cautious hold on the door...an exodus of sporty youths, some in tan driving coats, and young women from inside ensued." The crowd dispersed in "pneumatic tired runabouts, automobiles, coaches, and trolley cars."

But at 12:15, the reporter gained entrance with some other after-hours revelers to discover "nearly 100 couples...in the mazes of the 'half-time' inside the pavilion, and the enclosure, dense with tobacco smoke, was crowded." Admission: 25 cents for men, 10 cents for women. Dancing was still in progress when the reporter left at 1 a.m. to file his story for October 27.

Apparently, this vice magnet attracted clientele from as far away as Manhattan. In 1901, the Eagle reported that "during the dancing, nearly every woman held her skirts so her ankles could be plainly seen by the men...who ogled them as they danced by." Despite these outrages, proprietor John Niederstein seemed to outwit prosecution. (I suspect he belonged to the dynasty that owned a historic German restaurant in Middle Village, Queens, demolished in recent years for an Arby's). The residents of Flatbush tried and failed to buy up the block and build a flower garden; by 1903, the annual report of the New York City parks department stated that the land opposite the Willink entrance "bounded by Washington Avenue, Malbone Street, Flatbush Avenue, and the present southerly border of Institute Park" [the Botanic Garden's future site] was "now in process of condemnation." Curiously, the report also states that J. Niederstein gave the park "one pair red foxes and one golden eagle"; if this zoological gift was intended to curry official favor, it doesn't seem to have worked.

As for Malbone Street, a grimmer legacy awaited it; almost exactly 16 years later, its name would become so steeped in tragedy that the city fathers rechristened it Empire Boulevard. That, children, will be our haunted bedtime story for this Halloween weekend.

Comments

[m.thew]

Bare ankles, in Brooklyn? What is the world coming to?

Your readers may find it interesting to note that my NYC Dept. of Consumer Affairs sightseeing guide license (valid until 3/10/10) came with a set of rules that says I'm not supposed to guide people to houses of ill-repute. This may be because some of the first guidebooks to the city were essentially guides (and ratings; hello, Zagat!) to bordellos.

[ff]

Sounds exactly like today... just when things are finally starting to get fun, the God-fearing burghers have to shut it down.

[Rob Lenihan]

"...an exodus of sporty youths..."

They're the worst!