Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885-1940 Book

For all of you who read Karen Abbott's "Sin and the Second City" and pretty much had an experience that was pretty, well, anti-climatic, this book is the antidote.

Mind you, it's no walk on the North Side. This is all hardscrabble, South Side grit - there's no sugarcoating, it's pure facts and purient analyses of the slumming life in New York and Chicago from 1885 to 1940. It's an urban history examination of middle- and upper-class whites' forays into the slums through several vogues, from prostitution and opium dens and Bohemian thrillage to Negro exploitation and homosexual cabarets. Along the way, Heap, an academic at George Washington, explores how an understanding of various racial and sexual conditions were unintentionally and surreptitiously arrived at by the slummers. The verbatim and historical accounts of the sights, scenes and spectacles are interesting as hell, and honestly, the post-Victorian immigrants make Paris Hilton look like a virgin. If she even made it through the wilderness that was Harlem, Chinatown, Bronzeville, Times Square, Towertown and the Levee District.

At times, the hot jazz and cold gin screech to a standstill when Heap inadvertently makes repetitive conclusions and draws too many neat parallels between incidents and reflections. Rather than put us through similar motions, I felt that this could have been part of a more detailed conclusion. I mean, nobody wants to be halted mid-shimmy to do the family fox trot. Still, the research and thinking that have gone behind this book is exhaustive and fascinating to no end, and the only thing that could have brought those pre-, post- and during Prohibition years larger than life would have been more pictures. A man bent over in the bathroom of a masquerade ball on the South Side as others filled the bathroom, standing in line to take turns at him? Who would have thought, Chicago? But then again...