ABSTRACT
In The Nether Side of New York; or, the Vice, Crime and Poverty of the Great Metropolis, the crime journalist Edward Crapsey reported the results of investigations he had conducted in the period 1868-71. Crapsey had systematically traversed lower Manhattan, accompanied most of the time by a patrolman-guide, to investigate harbor crime as well as violations committed in the areas now known as Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side. His purpose, he explains in his preface, is to “furnish a basis of fact for the operations of the social reformers of the future.” The Nether Side of New York is organized into twenty chapters, most of which deal with a type of criminal (harbor thieves, fences, prostitutes) or with some closely related aspect of life in the city’s underworld (tenement life, outcast children, haunts of vice). Crapsey is sometimes as hard on the criminal justice system as he is on offenders, accusing officials of laziness, senseless procedures, and corruption.
