The Chop Suey Raids Come to Bloomingdale

Pam Tice is a member of the Bloomingdale Neighborhood History Group

In the early morning hours of April 14, 1918, the New York Assistant District Attorney led a group of police officers and military policemen in a series of raids of chop suey restaurants, beginning in the Tenderloin area of the city and culminating at Lee Suey’s restaurant at 210 Manhattan Avenue between West 109th and West 110th Streets.

Place after place was visited and closed up while the police interrogated the people found there. Women were asked if they were married to the man they were sitting with, and to provide a wedding ring to prove it. “Slackers,” as single young men were called, were ordered to show their military registration cards. Men in military uniforms were let go, but their names and addresses were taken.
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According to a description in the New York Tribune women who were not married to their escorts were taken to the local police station house unaccompanied, held until 6 am, and their names and addresses were taken with a warning not to frequent a chop suey restaurant again. They were warned they could be served with a subpoena that would bring them to the District Attorney’s office for further questioning. This must have been scary for a young woman who might be a stenographer, a bookkeeper, or in the entertainment industry as a chorus girl or an actress. Perhaps she had just had a date for a movie and stopped for something to eat afterward.

​What was happening in the northern blocks of the Bloomingdale neighborhood? The violation of the rights of the restaurant owners and their patrons is surprisingly harsh, at a time when the city was modernizing.

By the second decade of the 20th century, the West 110th Street blocks known as “Little Coney Island” had been pretty much removed by real estate developers who were building grand apartment houses along the street at the southern edge of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine’s property. The National Academy of Design had its building on West 109th and Amsterdam but had not been able to raise the funds to build a more permanent structure. The Women’s Hospital relocated to the south side of West 110th in 1906, near the corner of Amsterdam.

The dance halls and saloons of the earlier time had caused “disorderly houses” (the contemporary name for houses of prostitution) to be located on West 109th and West 108th Streets, and some even further south. These places seemed to be entrenched. In his book, City of Eros, Timothy Gilfoyle mapped the houses of prostitution on West 108th and West 109th Streets between Broadway and Central Park West, using the data in George Kneeland’s 1913 report on commercial prostitution in New York City.  

Closer to Columbus and Manhattan Avenues and Central Park West/Eighth Avenue, the elevated train made its wide curve and continued uptown, keeping the real estate values much lower at this end of the neighborhood. In the history of the early years of the 20th Century, Greater Gotham, historian Mike Wallace wrote about how the expansion of transportation provided new opportunities for sex workers to expand their locations. The creation of the Ninth Avenue El and later the subway under Broadway brought them to the Upper West Side, mostly around Columbus Circle, but also locations further uptown.  Gilfoyle comments in his book “At Healy’s Restaurant, on Columbus Avenue at West 66th, half the women were prostitutes and half respectable.”

In 1915, real estate developer Leon Sobel was accused of renting to “disorderly” tenants in buildings he owned on West 108th, West 109th Streets, and Manhattan Avenue. This violated the Tenement House Law prohibiting such use. The New York Tribune reported on February 6, 1918, that the police captain of the 100th Street station testified to specific locations at numbers 4,5, 6, and 107 West 109th Street, 19 West 108th Street, 12 West 101th Street, and 200 and 202 Manhattan Avenue. Along with his residential buildings, in 1913 Mr. Sobel built a theater with a roof garden on the southwest corner of West 109th Street and Manhattan Avenue. A 1915 jury trial failed to convict Mr. Sobel. In the spring of 1918, the Manhattan District Attorney had taken up the cause again.  

Some like to call chop suey the Big Mac of the era. New York City’s restaurants had developed for wealthier citizens and it wasn’t until the development and acceptance of the inexpensive Chinese food that so many chop suey restaurants opened all around the city.

In a song of the time, China We Owe A Lot to You, chop suey was recognized as a part of the American adaptation of Chinese products, although with lyrics that likely would not be acceptable today:

China, ‘way out near Asia Minor,

No country could be finer beneath the sun;

You gave us silk to dress our lovely women,

‘Twas worth the price,

And when we couldn’t get potatoes, you gave us rice.

We mix chop suey with your chop sticks,

You’ve taught us quite a few tricks we never knew,

We take our hats off to one thing we’ve seen,

Your laundries keep our country clean,

China,

We owe a lot to you.

(China We Owe A Lot to You words by Howard Johnson, music by Milton Ager)

Most chop suey restaurants were owned by Chinese businessmen who leased the space to individual operators for a relatively small investment. The food became a part of New York’s bohemian culture. The restaurants were near factory and office workplaces where workers could find a cheap lunch. They were an integral part of any entertainment district. Later, in 1929, Edward Hopper painted a picture as one of his iconic urban spaces.

The chop suey places had an edge: there might be a screened private booth, and benches instead of chairs that were viewed as an invitation to human contact. Even more of a problem were the waiters who would step out to the closest saloon to purchase liquor for a customer, serving it in a teacup to disguise it. Chinese-owned businesses also carried early 20th-century prejudices against the Chinese as purveyors of opium and promoters of “white slavery.”

In sum, here was the vice problem of 1918: young single women, unattached men, cheap food, and liquor. In the northern edge of the Bloomingdale neighborhood, add Mr. Sobel’s theater, and, close by, his disorderly houses. 

There’s another piece of background to the 1918 raid story. The United States was a full year into World War I by the spring of 1918. The Spanish Flu pandemic was just getting started but would not be recognized until later that year. The U.S. Military initiated an effort to protect young soldiers and sailors from getting involved in “vice” at their points of embarkation so they would be healthy when they arrived in France.

Earlier that year, the military police had taken over certain districts in Philadelphia to “wipe out vice”. Then they sent Captain Timothy Pfeifer to New York City to work with the municipal authorities to guard against the young men becoming involved with liquor and other vices. District Attorney Edward Swann and his Assistant DA, James E. Smith, undertook the raids seemingly with great relish.

Captain Pfeiffer was part of the law enforcement division of the Commission on Training Camp Activities (CTCA), part of the U.S. War Department’s effort to control venereal disease under the Selective Service Act of 1917. The CTCA would create vice-free zones for a five-mile radius around military installations. While Manhattan did not have a training camp, it was a point of embarkation and thus brought the military to help out in clearing vice locations.

The head of the CTCA was Raymond Fosdick, brother of the esteemed preacher at Riverside Church, who had learned his vice-elimination skills while working for New York’s Committee of Fourteen chaired by John D. Rockefeller. Bloomingdale’s own Episcopal minister, John Peters, was an active participant in the work of the Committee of Fourteen which had helped close down the “Raines Law hotels” as centers of vice. Fosdick ensured the Committee of Fourteen participated in the city’s moral crusade against vice in the spring of 1918.

An attorney for the Chop Suey restaurant owners asserted the illegality of the DA’s actions but did not challenge the raids in court. The proprietors met with Mr. Smith, as reported in The New York Times on April 19th, promising not to admit intoxicated soldiers or sailors or girls under eighteen years old. They promised to remove the screens and to provide chairs instead of benches. They promised that their waiters would not go out for beer for their patrons.

There was also a movement developing that spring in New York that restaurants should be licensed and would not be allowed to stay open all night. No one should be dining out between 1 am and 5 am. Licensing the saloons had helped the government get control over them; now they wanted to license the restaurants also.

Another aspect of the spring 1918 raids was the push at both the federal and state levels that there should be no “slackers,” men of working age who did not have proper jobs. On April 22, 1918, the New York Herald reported a raid on Ed Green’s cigar store on Manhattan Avenue between West 109th and West 110th Streets where several young men and four dice were taken from a backroom.

Like other states, New York passed a law that went into effect on July 1 that year but the District Attorney seemed to be enforcing it before that date. If you were a young man and could not produce a registration for the military, you were picked up. Also in early July, the War Department issued a “work or fight” order that if you were of draft age and not working, or working in an unproductive industry (including the entertainment industry) you would be called up for military service.

As reported in The New York Tribune on April 29, 1918, the federal officials who came to New York City to participate in the “housecleaning” were pleased with the orderliness of the city.

In 1917, Baltimore journalist H. L. Mencken wrote an article satirizing the work of the CTCA, comparing an earlier time when white slavery narratives characterized prostitutes as innocent victims with wartime discourse depicting all sexually active women as “diseased harpies.”

In the summer of 1918, Congress passed the Chamberlain-Kahn Act, authorizing the quarantine of citizens suspected of having venereal disease. Under the law, women suspected of being prostitutes could be stopped, detained, inspected, and sent to a rehabilitation facility if they failed their examination. By 1919, thirty states had constructed facilities to detain and treat women; historians estimate that 30,000 women were held during World War I. The law lasted into the 1950s.
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In this photo from the 1920s, there is a Chop Suey Restaurant under the El at West 110th Street

Sources
Chin, Gabriel J. and John Ormonde “The War Against Chinese Restaurants,” Duke Law Journal, Volume 67, Number 4 (January 2018) pp 681-741

Gilfoyle, Timothy J., City of Eros, New York City, Prostitution and the Commercialization of Sex 1790-1920, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 1992

Keire, Mara L., “Swearing Allegiance: Street Language, US War Propaganda, and the Declining Status of Women in Northeastern Nightlife,” Journal of the History of Sexuality, Volume 25, Number 2 (May 2016) pp 246-266

Reilly, Kimberly “A Perilous Journey for Democracy: Soldiers, Sexual Purity, and American Citizenship in the First World War,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, April 2014, Volume 13, Number 2 (April 2014), pp. 223-255

Wallace, Mike, Greater Gotham: A History of New York City, 1898-1919, Oxford University Press, New York, 2017

Manhattan Borough President photography collection at the Municipal Archives

www.newspapers.com

New York City Public Library Map Division.