HELLHOLE

I just finished reading HELLHOLE: The Shocking Story of the Inmates and Life in the New York City House of Detention for Women, by Sara Harris. Published in 1967 and very out of print, I came across this book when I went to the Jefferson Market library with my friend Erica, who hadn’t been there before. I gave her a tour, and in the basement, we spent some time exploring the Reference Collection of books about New York. An excited research librarian asked if we were doing research. We said no, just browsing—but we were browsing enthusiastically, showing each other pictures out of different books, reading each other bits, so he got in on the action and started telling us about some of his neglected favorites.

He pulled HELLHOLE off the shelf, “the only copy left in the NYPL system,” he told us, and read us the first sentence: “This book begins, logically, on February 20, 1965, when two eighteen-year-old girls, Andrea Dworkin, a Bennington College freshman, and Lisa Goldrosen, a student at Bard College, were dispatched to the New York City House of Detention for Women following their arrest in a peace demonstration at the United States Mission of the United Nations.”

We talked for a while, and he made the mistake of telling us that if we saw anything we wanted to read, he’d be happy to loan it to us, since these books are just going unread and unappreciated. So I walked out with HELLHOLE. Then I actually had to read it.

The New York City House of Detention for Women, referred to by inmates quoted in the book as “the House of D.,” was next door to the Jefferson Market Courthouse (same building as the library, different function) at Sixth Avenue and Tenth Street in the West Village. There’s a great picture of it here. If you scroll down, it’s the picture captioned "Sixth Avenue, Northwest from West 8th Street and Greenwich Avenue, 1938," and the House of D. is the building foregrounded with Sixth Avenue and the elevated line in front of it, and Jefferson Market (the one with the tower) in the background. It's apparently the world’s only “Art Deco” prison, at least according to the internet.

Anyway the book is a piece of work. I’m curious to find out something more about Sara Harris, whose own “acquaintance” with the House of D. began in 1957 and consisted of four months working there as a social worker while researching Cast the First Stone, a book on prostitution in New York. HELLHOLE is part history of the prison, part case study of prisoners, and part social examination of the role of prisons in American society. The case studies are the best part, starting with a chapter titled “Here Are Vera and Me in the Nude When He Pulls Out His Badge,” about:

Name-Joyce Krans (Kranjewski)
Age-20
Education-Elementary School. Some High School
Marital Status-Single
Number of Times in the House of Detention for Women-Five. Has Four Sentences for Prostitution and One for Possession of Narcotics.

Joyce has blue eyes and straight blond hair, and is the daughter of a coal miner from Pennsylvania who lost his job when the mine closed. They moved to New York City when she was eleven, and it was all downhill for Joyce from there.

Harris also tells the stories of Bertha, Cora May, and Cindy Green, ages 46, 31, and 16, respectively, drawing some fascinating conclusions about women, specifically African-American women, citing such sources as her own primary research, Frazier’s Negro in the United States, and Kardiner and Ovesey’s The Mark of the Oppression. She notes that Dr. Lionel Ovesey and Dr. Abram Kardiner are “doubtless the two people in America today who are best acquainted with the terrible effects on Negro men and women of the reversal of roles between the sexes” due to their five-year psychodynamic study. She quotes them as attributing “the confusion of sexual and social roles among Negroes” to “’the arduous emotional conditions under which the arduous emotional conditions under which the Negro in America is obliged to live.’”

The book is impressively dated and well-intentioned. She also quotes Ovesey and Kardiner as saying that “’The defects of adaptation…together with their social sources, make a dismal picture of human misery, one for which it is hard to find a parallel. However, in spite of its defects when compared to white standards, we must not forget that, in the face of such hardships, it is a heroic achievement to be able to adjust and survive.’” And finally, “’The psychosocial expressions of the Negro personality that we have described are the integrated end products of the process of oppression. Can these be changed by education of the Negro? The answer is, no. They can never be eradicated without removing the forces that create and perpetuate them. Obviously, Negro self-esteem cannot be retrieved, nor Negro self-hatred destroyed as long as the status is quo. What is needed by the Negro is not education, but re-integration. It is the white man who requires the education. There is only one way that the products of oppression can be dissolved, and that is to stop the oppression.’”

Harris continues with a case study of Molly McGuire, 74-year-old Irish immigrant who grew up in “’the bloody oul’ Sixth Ward,’ the Five Points Area [which Nick and I think is probably officially Chinatown now, not too far from East Broadway], then and a long time earlier known as the most grisly neighborhood in the city, occupied mainly by descendants of Negro slaves, Irish immigrant families like Molly’s, and petty criminals whom Molly still designates by the names with which she first learned to identify them: ‘cats’ or ‘gooks’—the small-time madams she presently meets in the House of Detention; ‘bats or owls’—streetwalkers who work at night; ‘griffs’—young thieves, and ‘gips’—old ones.”

I have been writing an essay about Horatio Alger and how my knowledge of New York City as a child was based on his novels about street kids living here in the late 1800’s. Molly McGuire would have come to New York City in 1901, two years after Alger died, but she would have moved to the same Five Points in which many of his books were set, and basically become one of the kids he wrote about—though he wasn’t interested in girls, particularly, in any sense—and his moral tales could never have included young prostitutes like Molly, a “waitress-prostitute” first at De Vito’s Minetta House on Minetta Street in Greenwich Village from age twelve to sixteen, and then at the Bowery Glad House until she was twenty and too old. Besides, no Alger hero or heroine ever ended up on Skid Row. But Five Points would have been the same, whether the character fits into an Alger novel or not, and I realize now that most wouldn’t have. Harris describes the McGuire family apartment “on Water Street, the grisliest street in Five Points” as a “tiny, practically airless cellar room inadequately partitioned off from the larger cellar which contained fifteen bunks which were let out to both permanents and transients of either sex.”

I thought the section on Molly McGuire was one of the most interesting parts of the book, drawing connections between then-current experiences of “Negroes and Puerto Ricans” and earlier experiences of Irish and Italian immigrants, and describing the Bowery of the 1960’s, before luxury hotels and the New Museum. Harris is also detailing the final years of the people and the world that Alger had written about: “Between 1845—when the New York City Police Department was first created—primarily as a means of coping with Bowery derelicts—and 1855, the number of drunk arrests, mostly of Irish men and women, was 100,000. By the 1870’s, the number exceeded 40,000 Irish derelicts a year, and one out of every three arrested was a woman. Irish children as young as eleven years old were arrested in the 1870’s.” Harris continues with a description of the Bowery’s then-current population, a combination of “respectable old people living on their pensions or old age insurance, insane and feeble-minded people, cripples, blind beggars, prostitutes called ‘fleabags’ because they are inclined to be syphilitic, and a few elderly, egocentric Hobohemians.”

The last two case studies are of Louise Johnson, 30, one of the few high-class, college-educated call girls ever to do time in the House of D., and finally, Rusty Bricker, 27: “Every time you see Rusty she just got a haircut. Her mannish-cut red hair is constantly slicked down as tight as she can get it, and she smells of barbershop perfume. She wears new, resplendently bright (orange-brown with traces of yellow) men’s shoes, blue jeans but men’s jeans that button in front, a sickeningly green sweatshirt, and a thick, shaggy army jacket dyed brown in a vain attempt at matching the color of the highly shined shoes. Yet she’s a handsome woman, and would be even handsomer as a man, even though she’s drunk, reeking drunk, most of the time you see her. And she’s a mean alcoholic.”

This is when HELLHOLE gets odd and goes slightly soft porn, two hundred pages in. Harris tells the story of Rusty meeting “eighteen-year-old blond Patricia Mannis who ‘fell in love’ with [Rusty] a year ago when they were both in the House of Detention and who now lives with her in Greenwich Village.” We learn that a bulldyke—especially a “psychopath like Rusty” (and it is implied that bulldyke equals psychopath equals bulldyke) can have “domination over the jail” and “control the officers and the inmates.” After all, “they would seem to be more intelligent to anyone who holds shrewdness and secretive cunning and calculating canniness to be components of intelligence.” Harris describes Rusty as “sufficiently well endowed with these attributes” and many others.

In this section, we learn that some of the officers are lesbians! Rusty tells Harris that the first thing she saw when she came into the House of D. was “’Patricia, all that golden hair she’s got.’” But the second thing was “’this officer with red hair. And I thought to myself, you know I know her and I know that she’s gay because I’ve seen her at the Sea Colony, and when she passed by me, she gave me a funny look. Like she recognized me too and was scared. And her eyes, it was like she was begging me not to say what I knew. And I gave her a look back like “You’ll be my slave now and I’ll blow your whole scene if you don’t do what I want.”’”

Rusty tells Harris that intimidating gay officers and threatening to out them “is one way I become king of my floor in whatever jail I’m in. That is one way. And I am always the king, always the leader, in jail and out.” Most of the rest of the book is devoted to Rusty and those of her kind. We learn that Rusty’s mother died when she was only five, and her father was not interested in her upbringing, leaving it to his sister, a cold woman who wore too much jewelry and was always “over-made-up.” At fifteen, Rusty “became involved with Miss Madison, a lesbian teacher in her school.”

Rusty says, “’I first got to know her in gym. She’d always pay more attention to me than to the other girls. Then one thing led to another and we started out kissing, you know. It gradually ended up till we went all the way together. Then, one time, I stayed behind in the gym after everyone else was gone and I wanted her to give up the work to me, you know. But she was afraid. Well, then, she did it anyhow when I kept asking and asking her to.’” They are caught by the janitor and Rusty is pulled out of school, “’But I’d meet her anyhow. I’d sneak out to meet her. What I did, I’d tell my aunt I was going to a girl friend’s house.’"

However, “’Miss Madison wasn’t a straight les, you know. She turned out to be one of those bisexual bitches. And she was involved with this guy at the same time she’s carrying on with me.’” Miss Madison leaves Rusty for a man, so Rusty burns down Miss Madison’s mother’s house, sending her down a long terrible road that will end in the House of D. But first she is sent to a mental hospital where she is diagnosed as a psychopath, and then she goes to a school for delinquents, still only fifteen. “Here she found young girls, like the women in the House of Detention today, who were her natural and logical prey.” Rusty “pitted the girls against the matrons and was even able to pit some of the matrons against one another.” When she is released, she “becomes a vital, sought-after part of the Miami teenage gay crowd,” most of whom are “her acolytes from the moment they met her.”

Rusty survives by “petty pilfering” and, often “femmes and butches, working together, picked up tricks and put on circuses for them.” Rusty did a good bit of this kind of prostituting before she was seventeen.” She says, “Most times the tricks were old. Their dicks went hard watching us and we played with them if they asked us to.” Then she gets arrested for getting back at a trick who “tried to go all the way with me. We let him have it where it’d hurt—his wife.” In the workhouse, she gets “a butch haircut, and when I came out, I went all the way butch—started wearing men’s clothes.” Her father asks her, “’”Have you decided that you want to be a homosexual?”’” She tells him yes, because, as she explains to Harris, “’I had been out with guys a little bit so I knew the score on both sides. I didn’t want to be possessed. I didn’t want them domineering me. I wanted to be the domineerer.’” She leaves home and spends some time with Judy, a femme knockout in Delray Beach, until one night Judy’s mother comes to Rusty and begs Rusty not to see Judy anymore because she is making her gay. Rusty agrees to leave if Judy’s mom will give her “’travel expenses and some bread over.’” This conveniently leads Harris to a discussion of Rusty and other bulldykes “playing” with straight girls in prison, turning them gay and manipulating them, but according to Rusty, Judy had had a crush on Rusty “and was always begging me to come and stay with her,” so it seems that Judy’s mother and Harris seem to be blaming Rusty for something that wasn’t quite her fault—at least not this time.

Before Rusty makes it to the House of D., she spends time in L.A., specifically in Las Palmas where, according to Harris, “the fairies, surveying the streets for someone cute, and the bulldykes, doing the same, take over in the desperate hours after midnight.” In the Las Palmas Coffee shop, “primarily for teen-aged queers and those who want them,” Rusty meets Jenny, a “highly paid prostitute” who “took good care of Rusty for a short while. But like most lesbians outside of jail, she wanted variety in her love life. Once she and Rusty had poured out the intimate details of their lives, Jenny’s interest in Rusty took a nosedive, as did Rusty’s interest in her. She still liked her in bed—on occasion. But Jenny had other bulldykes. And Rusty found other femmes.” (We know that Harris’s expertise on the inner workings of the House of D. come from her four months as a social worker there, but she never explains her expertise or cites sources regarding her knowledge about most lesbians out of jail.)

Rusty's titillating life story goes on and on: “About two weeks after Jenny and Rusty became ‘tight,’ they separated. Rusty began going to private clubs in the hills, up twisting dirt roads where men dance with men, women with women. And to the leather bars with bright-colored murals on their walls, moving pictures of men and women wearing black leather jackets and wrestling realistically, their faces sexually aroused. Here she picked up with femmes and other bulldykes who threw weekend parties, usually planned in an instant on Friday and lasting at least until Monday. You went into locked bedrooms with girls you’d never seen before and stayed for half and hour maybe. And as the door opened to let you out, you glimpsed the girl who was coming to take your place with the one you’d been with.” But Rusty “became disgusted with Los Angeles” and leaves town, ending up in New York where “Rusty came to the ‘meat rack’ of Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village. This is a place that was recognized long ago as the magnet for lonesome men and women homosexuals from all over.”

Eventually Rusty ends up in the House of D., and at this point, Harris shifts the focus to a discussion of power structures among inmates within the prison, and another thirty pages of details about lesbian relationships in the House of D. This may further her cause of closing the House of D. and ending these abhorrent practices or it may not. Harris does say later, in another context, that “the colorful Rustys have a fascination that drab women, like the majority of those who land in the House of Detention, find hard to resist,” and that might explain the amount of space she devotes to them. However, Harris discusses Rusty’s “fascination” in the context of her argument that “the Rusty Brickers can—and sometimes do—hurt their ‘turned-out femmes’ irreparably. The femmes may be ruined for a life of heterosexuality.”

Harris starts Chapter 10, “I Love You, Baby, for Cigarettes and Candy,” by informing the reader that “the ‘hustle,’ the ‘racket,’ is closely intertwined with the patterns of homosexuality and the homosexual hierarchy in the institution.” She tells us that “The ‘racket,’ except in rare instances, is organized and controlled by the most masculine-oriented among the women, ‘bulldykes’ or ‘stud broads’ like Rusty, who are practicing homosexuals in the world outside the jail. The ‘stud broads,’ when they are outside the institution, often ‘mac’ it or dress in men’s clothes. It is possible to ‘mac’ it within the jail with only one item of ‘drag’—men’s undershirts, which are meant for imprisoned men and are made in the sewing factory and smuggled out by the inmates who work there. In addition to the ‘stud broads’ who dress in ‘drag,’ there are others who, like Rusty, can ‘take or leave drag clothes, not have to depend on clothes to make the man, you know. You can show what you are by the way you stand and sit and smoke your cigarettes.’”

We learn that “doubtless the greatest single affection among the ‘stud broads’ in the House of Detention is the close-cropped men’s haircut, ranging from a practical crew to the popular ‘Duck’s Ass.’ Since the House of Detention regulations forbid inmates to cut their own hair (they must request haircuts from the small beauty parlor specializing in frilly femme hairdos), desperate bulldykes steal razors or break light bulbs and use the ragged edges for giving themselves haircuts. In 1965 twelve bulldykes were punished for known infractions involving the pilfering of razors and the breaking of light bulbs.”

Harris explains that “The femmes, whose status, as in the world outside, depends on their physical attractiveness, are, with rare exceptions, definitely below the bulldykes in the hierarchical system. But they are, far and away, superior to the unaffiliated inmates. Except for the few of the unaffiliated who are so good-looking or whose crimes on the outside are so impressive the other inmates must respect them no matter what, it is only good sense to join the racket out of opportunism if not desire. Therefore, many inmates who are not practicing homosexuals outside the jail, and who, in fact, are repelled by homosexuality, seek it out here. They are known as ‘j.t.’s,’ jailhouse turnouts.”

“Rusty Bricker and the other confirmed lesbians are, on the whole, mistrustful and contemptuous of jailhouse turnouts. Being old-timers and well versed in prisoner and prison psychology, they know, within themselves, that many ‘turned out’ femme inmates, no matter how seriously in love they are with women while they are in the jail, will revert back to heterosexuality once men come on their horizon again. True homosexuals (whether or not they are psychopaths like Rusty) have, therefore, in truth, and certainly in their own minds, every reason for feeling vindictive and resentful toward inmates who ‘play’ in prison, rather than entering relationships as they themselves do because, as Rusty says, ‘Once you have a woman, really have her, you’ll never want a man again.’ And their vindictiveness and resentment enable them to use the turnouts for sexual outlet when it serves their purpose and for opportunistic and political reasons when those are appropriate.”

It would seem that “j.t.’s” are using people for opportunistic and political reasons as well. Not to mention sexual outlet. But what do I know. However, Rusty “constantly emphasizes” that “’These femmes are one kettle of fish, and Patricia is another. Because femmes in jail, except for some like my Patricia, aren’t worth your little finger because they won’t be any good on the outside, no matter if they do behave right here.’” Harris explains that “When Rusty talks of ‘behaving right’ in homosexual terms, she is not talking of one woman’s being sensually aroused by another, or of kissing, hand-holding, or embracing when these actions are not followed by overt sexual behavior. She is talking of relationships between two women involving, at the very least, kissing and fondling of breasts and genitals as well as apparent intercourse.” [Not a statement I’m even going to try to parse.] However, she continues that “Actually, some jailhouse turnouts are so moved by the sexuality they experience in jail that they change their sexual patterns after they leave jail. This is particularly true among the few inmates who turn out to be bulldykes instead of femmes. Some of them, like twenty-nine-year-old Florence Somers, actually ‘discover’ themselves in the jail.”

For more details, including the stories of j.t. Linda Lewis, an exotic dancer, and her butch, Topper; eighteen-year-old Jean Fontana and her butch Tony, who reminded Jean of her brother Joe; Dorothy Blue and her bulldyke Mickey Loeb; and Mary Thomas and Big Time Reed (who made Mary feel good: “I made her feel better than a man”), you’ll have to track down HELLHOLE for yourself. There is also a whole chapter devoted to “the true story of the relationship of Knocky Nelson and Lucky Lopez,” officer and prisoner, including a fascinating anecdote about how Lucky discovered she was gay at fifteen when her father brought her to a whorehouse and told her to wait downstairs while he went up with one of the whores. There happened to be “this cute whore there, she wasn’t any young chick exactly, but she pulled Lucky up the stairs with her and took her to bed. And that, says Lucky, was the last time in her life she ever played femme and let anybody give up the work to her. From that day on, she knew herself to be a dyke and she was the one who gave the work up to other girls.” [Another statement I will not attempt to parse—though it seems to me to run counter to most of what I thought I understood about butch/femme relationships…?]

The tragic story of Lucky and Knocky, including Lucky’s final dismissal of Knocky as one of those “jerked-up femmes” who deserves to spend the rest of her life in the House of D. because she is “too weak and sick to live on the outside” leads Harris nicely into her final chapter equating this cruel dismissal with Lucky’s psychopathy, and implicating us all by reminding us that “unfortunately, the citizens of New York and their elected representatives, through their inaction over the years, have done as Lucky would have them do,” namely cursed the poor women of New York City by dooming them to an existence in a hellhole. Her concluding sentence is a doozy: “The House of Detention for Women, as the life stories of Joyce Kranjewski, Bertha, Cora May, and Cindy Green, and Molly McGuire prove, will not be changed from the hellhole it is today—no matter where or how elegantly it is eventually housed—until the City Departments of Health, Welfare, and Hospitals take upon their shoulders the responsibilities they’ve been sloughing off—until the great city of New York, instead of resting content when its poor people are out of sight in jail mobilizes all its resources to attack the terrible poverty in its midst.”