Bruce Edward Hall’s Diamond Street Hudson, New York – The Story of the Little Town with the Big Red Light District is every new resident’s introduction to a part of the history of Hudson missing from conventional touristics materials. Turns out that Hudson has depended on weekend traffic far longer than the current economy of Manhattanites (and others) coming to enjoy the mile of antiques and art along Warren St. For over a hundred years up to 1950 Hudson served a different weekend crowd, almost all men, men in search of sex, alcohol, gambling, and other male excitements. According to Hall’s history, Hudson ( a city of just 2.7 square miles and never more than 11,000 inhabitants) had over 60 bars and dozens of brothels, floating crap games and telegraphic feeds of horse race results from upstate and down. Hudson was a sleepy factory town that was transformed by arrivals via car and rail into a thriving hub of vice every weekend.
Virtually very public official was on the payroll or at the very least winking broadly. There would be sporadic attempts at ending the corruption but it seems that for most of this period, occasional police raids, mostly netting the female side of the traffic and leaving the “johns” to wander home unscathed, was the norm. During periods in the 1920s and 1930s, the city attempted to normalize the prostitution by imposing weekly blood tests on the prostitutes for venereal diseases.
As a newcomer to Hudson it is interesting to learn that the divide between the North and South sides of Warren St. is not a new phenomenon. One block, the 300 block of Columbia St (long named Diamond St.) was the center of the prostitution for much of the city’s history. Today it is a truck route with ramshackle housing.
Somewhere in this story may be an explanation for why Hudson was one of the few cities to be offered a Carnegie library that turned it down leaving the city without a public library until 1949.
The book appears to be very well researched with ten pages of Notes and Bibliography as well as a serviceable Index. Hall’s writing is fluid and journalistic with lengthy stories that dig into key moments and bring to life the details of how the city became so interwoven with it life of crime and dependent on it. There is a five page “Diamond Street – The Hudson “Red Light District” Tour – A Self-Guided Low Life Adventure, 1994″ at the end of the book for those who want to visit the scenes in person. The 223 pages are a delightful read.
Who is the author, Bruce Edward Hall? He died in 2003, but lives on at his own eponymous website. It is not clear what brought a Chinese American who grew up in NYC’s Chinatown to research and write about Hudson. Perhaps it is just the delight in a good story that also happens to be history receding into the mists.
