called New York City the "modern
Gomorrah" for allowing the Tenderloin to exist. Early in the 19th century, the major
vice district had been located in what is now
SoHo, called at the time "Hells' Hundred Acres", but as the city grew steadily northward, the theater district along Broadway and the
Bowery moved uptown as well, as did the legitimate and illegitimate businesses that were usually connected with show business. For some time, the city's
"Rialto" theater district centered on
Union Square and
14th Street, but the
Fifth Avenue Hotel broke new ground when it opened at
23rd Street and
Fifth Avenue in 1859, beginning the expansion of the Union Square Rialto to 23rd Street and
Madison Square. By the 1870s, the Fifth Avenue Hotel had many competitors in the area, and where the hotels were, the
prostitutes followed. The clientele of these establishments was not necessarily working-class: one set of seven sisters ran side-by-side
brothels in a residential neighborhood on West 25th Street, inviting their upper class customers with engraved invitations. On some nights only gentlemen in formal evening dress were allowed to attend, and the girls of these houses were as socially adept as they were sexually; Other well-known venues in the Tenderloin included
Koster and Bial's Music Hall at
Sixth Avenue and 23rd Street, a concert saloon where inebriated customers could watch the
can-can being performed; the Haymarket, a dance hall on Sixth below 30th Street, where rich clients could dance with prostitutes, but not too closely, although they could take them into curtained-off galleries to have discreet sex, and sex exhibitions were on display in the balconies; West 29th Street, which featured an almost uninterrupted row of brothels; and the many gambling dens run by
John Daly or the
Madison Square Club of
Richard A. Canfield on West 26th Street. for a popular 1897 song shows a police
billy club and uses "Clubber" Williams' nickname: "The Czar of the Tenderloin" , anti-vice crusader The "Main Street" of the district was
Broadway between 23rd and 42nd Streets, which was known as "The Line". In the mid-1890s, after the advent of electric lighting, the stretch of Broadway from 23rd Street to
34th Street came to be called "
The Great White Way" because of the numerous illuminated advertising signs there. This moniker was transferred to
Times Square when the theater district moved uptown. Eventually, the processes which created the Tenderloin also served to dismantle it. Once again, theaters and hotels began moving uptown, and the brothels and dance halls and so on followed after them. As early as 1906, McAdoo noted that the northern boundary of the district had moved to 62nd Street, and the "New Tenderloin", as he called it, was now bounded by 42nd Street on the south. The movement, he said, "is rapidly depleting the ranks of the sporting vicious element in the Old Tenderloin". == Crime ==