Arrests for Homosexual Solicitation –– Mills Houses residents
One hundred years ago today … To be gay, or be suspected of being gay, in New York City, in 1920, was to be on the wrong side of the law. According to George Chauncey, author of Gay New York, more than 750 men were convicted–not arrested, convicted–of homosexual solicitation, just in Manhattan, in 1920. This was “an eightfold increase” from just four years earlier (Chauncey, 147). This was due to police collaboration with the Society for the Suppression of Vice, directed by John Summer (whom we will meet again in these pages).
According to the SSV’s own records, on March 9th, 11th, and 13th, the police targeted and arrested residents of the Mills Houses, three separate structures that were known as housing gay men (though “gay” was not yet the term). Chauncey reports that the men were “a forty-three-year-old Irish laborer, a 42-year-old Italian barber, and a 38-year-old French cook.” (See Chauncey pp. 155 and 412n.13).
Outdoor courtyard at one of the Mills Houses, 1902. New York Public Library.
The Mills Houses were opened by philanthropist Darius Ogden Mills between 1897 and 1904, intended as clean and inexpensive habitations for working class men–alternatives to tenement living. Mills House #1, on Bleecker Street, still stands. The building once housed a legendary jazz club, the Village Gate, in a space that now holds Le Poisson Rouge, another music venue. According to a wistful piece in The New York Times, the first Mills House had 1,560 rooms, nearly all of which were 5 by 7 feet. Each had “either a glazed window facing the street or a screen window facing the courtyard.” In addition:
Each room had an iron bedstead, a hair mattress and pillow, a feather pillow, a chair and a clothes rack; there was no room for anything else. The walls stopped about a foot short of the ceilings, apparently to assure good ventilation. On each floor four toilets and six basins served 182 men, with the main bathrooms on the ground floor. A writer for the magazine Municipal Affairs expressed astonished approval that more than 300 men showered every day.
(Gray, Christopher. “Streetscapes/Mills House No. 1 on Bleecker Street; A Clean, Airy 1897 Home for 1,560 Working Men,” New York Times, 6 Nov. 1994, section 9, p. 7.)
Mills House #1 on Bleecker Street/Thompson Street, 1905. The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection. New York Public Library.
An issue of Comfort magazine from 1900 featured this advertisement for the building:
Comfort Vol. 13 p. 21, 1900. Published by Gannet & Morris, Augusta, Maine. Google Books.
The other two Mills Houses were built at Christie and Rivington and 36th Street/7th Avenue.