Tenderloin, Manhattan
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- This article is about the New York City region. For other uses, see Tenderloin.
Tenderloin was a once-seedy neighborhood in the heart of the New York City borough of Manhattan. Police Captain Alexander Williams allegedly coined the term in the late 1870s.[1] This district was in Midtown Manhattan from 23rd Street to 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue to Seventh Avenue.
The Tenderloin was a notorious red-light district. The raffish reputation of the Tenderloin's 1890s bordellos, repeatedly raided by Anthony Comstock's "vice squad" was sentimentally recreated in the somewhat kitsch 1960 musical Tenderloin, from the Fiorello! team: music by Jerry Bock and lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, the book by the old master George Abbott and Jerome Weidman, based on a novel by Samuel Hopkins Adams.
The Tenderloin of the early 20th Century is described from a police perspective in "Behind the Green Lights," the memoirs of Police Captain Cornelius Willemse.
By 1914, middle-class Blacks from the Tenderloin district started moving to Harlem, which had been primarily white.
The name is hardly ever heard currently as it appears to have fallen out of favor in recent decades as residential buildings have replaced older commercial structures and the neighborhood has become more gentrified.
[edit] References
- ^ "CLUBBER" WILLIAMS, accessed December 4, 2006
[edit] External links
- Origin of Name.
- "Tenderloin," the musical.
- Middle class Blacks start to leave for Harlem.
- "Clubber" Williams coined term "Tenderloin" "I've had nothing but chuck steak for a longtime, and now I'm going to get a little of the tenderloin."
- See section titled "The Tenderloin" on page 2. Also called "Satan's Circus".
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