The “Spieler” Girl of the Bowery

The dance-hall is truly a passion with working-girls. The desire to waltz is bred in the feminine bone. It is a familiar thing to see little girls on the East Side dancing rhythmically on the street, to the music of some hand-organ, while heavy wagons roll by unheeded. When those little girls grow older and become shop-girls they often continue to indulge their passion for the waltz. Some of them dance every night, and are so confirmed in it that they are technically known as “spielers.” Many a girl, nice girl, too, loves the art so much that she will dance with any man she meets, whatever his character or appearance. Often two girls will go to some dance-hall, which may or may not be entirely respectable, and deliberately look for men to dance with. On one occasion, at a Harlem dancing-place, where all kinds of working-girls go, I saw a girl compel her escort, a man who could not dance, to ask men she had never met, and whom he did not know, to dance with her. A girl of that character may never want to see her fellow waltzer again, but many of these girls get involved with undesirable men, simply through their uncontrollable passion for the waltz. When carried to an excess, it is as bad as drink or gambling.

Girls of the “spieler” class of society are of an extreme simplicity, too simple even to be practical. They lack the hardness of the swell department-store girls; but make up for it by their “toughness”; which, as already explained in another chapter, is the conventional atmosphere of the Bowery. They strive to be nothing but what they are, and altho they, as a rule, express little, what they do express is characteristic. They have no false refinement; no refinement, indeed, in the acquired sense, but they have that kind of distinction which results from a simplicity of feeling and experience due to their lives being near “de limit.”

I met one of these little Bowery “spieler” girls, who, too independent to stay at home, spent $2.50 a week for food and room and the other $2.50 of her $5.00 salary for clothes and amusements. She could get what she deemed a good meal for fifteen cents, but ordinarily spent only five or ten cents. Her mind was as simple as her life; she had no ideas, but everything she said was as real as poverty and as significant as the sounds made by the instinctive animals.

I went one day, with this little girl and a relative of hers—an ex-pickpocket—to a wedding-reception in one of the lower wards of the city, where I had an opportunity to see what “the people” are like. Imagine a little room about twelve by eight feet, crowded with truck-drivers and hod-carriers [brick carriers] and factory girls and tailor-girls—as many as fifteen or twenty—all lined up against the wall drinking beer, except a few who were dancing wildly in the middle of the room, stepping indiscriminately upon the toes of the others and spilling beer in great quantities over the floor. Altho the orgy had begun three days before, and the third cask of beer had been broached, yet the sternest moralist would have found nothing wrong with the occasion. It was “low,” to be sure, and exceedingly free, but nobody did anything he was ashamed of. The bride danced with everybody and kissed almost everybody; and almost everything was said. Nothing could exceed the affair for freedom. But the utmost un-selfconsciousness prevailed. The only person who was at all aware of himself was the ex-thief. He was the swellest person in the room, and looked uncomfortable when his shoes were inundated with beer. He was also the only person who seemed unfortunate or unhappy. Surely, Walt Whitman would have reveled in the scene: for here were human beings as lacking in misery and respectability as even the great poet could desire.

Source: Hutchins Hapgood, Types from City Streets (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1910), 134–37.