I wish to notice particularly Bill Massey, my editor, who was both the impetus for this book and its guiding spirit.
I am also indebted to a number of books: foremost, Luc Sante’s marvelous Low Life, a study of New York’s dark side; and Edwin C. Burrows’s and Mike Wallace’s massive Gotham, a history of New York to the end of the nineteenth century. Three period guidebooks helped me: Baedeker’s United States 1893 (reprint, 1971); Charles Hobbs & Co.’s Street Directory and Map of New York City, 1892; and M. F. Sweetser’s and Simon Ford’s How to Know New York City, 1893 (ninth edition). F. C. Clark’s Vices of a Big City, An Exposé of Existing Menaces to Church and Home in New York City, 1890, (from Sante’s bibliography) was useful for its house-by-house details of “dives and disorderly houses,” as was Jonathan Ned Katz’s Love Stories: Sex Between Men Before Homosexuality for its pages on Paresis Hall. Several works were invaluable for period slang: John Ayto’s Oxford Dictionary of Slang; A Dictionary of Americanisms, ed. Mitford M. Mathews, 1951 edition; and H. L. Mencken’s The American Language (fourth edition with supplements, abridged, 1973). Nancy Bradfield’s Costume in Detail was useful for matters of dress. As well, I looked into Edmund Morris’s The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and Pierre Nordon’s Conan Doyle: a Biography, but neither of the books is responsible for what I did with—or to—their subjects.