ening cannot safely be
much longer deferred, it is partly the mission of the present chapter to
show. For it is useless to deny that we have in this city to-day, a
condition of affairs very similar to that which aroused the indignation
and called for the severe repressional measures of our immediate
predecessors. Up-town, in many instances closely contiguous to the
dwellings of people of the highest respectability, there are dens as
vile and infamous as ever disgraced any civilized community. Hardly a
street, however apparently exclusive and fashionable, can boast that it
is free from gambling, prostitution or panel houses.

Some time since, a journalist connected with a prominent morning paper,
took great pains to collect statistics concerning houses of prostitution
in New York. The article in which the results of his investigation were
given, estimates that over $15,000,000 was invested in that business,
and that the yearly amount spent in those houses averaged over
$10,000,000. In this chapter, however, the reader's attention is more
particularly invited to the class of assignation and prostitution
bagnios, known as panel houses.

The name "panel house" was originally derived from a false impression
prevalent in the community, that the rooms occupied by the inmates were
fitted with sliding panels in the walls and partitions, through and by
means of which most of the robberies were committed. But, as will be
seen hereafter, the term is a misnomer, so far as the fact is concerned.
But they had to have some distinctive appellation, and "panel house" is
a convenient generic term.

The proprietors of panel houses, in years gone by, were nearly all
professional gamblers, a fact which is more or less true to-day, where
the real, genuine house of that character exists, but there are hundreds
of women who work the "panel game" upon their victims, who hire a simple
room in some furnished-room house. If detected the entire house has
conferred upon it the name of panel house, and is ever afterwards
described and known as such in police and court records.

The real, Simon-pure panel thief is generally a young and pretty female,
who has been initiated into the mysteries of the game by either a
gambler or a lover, and of whom she is the mistress. It is the
conception of a man's brain, needing the assistance of an attractive
woman to carry out the scheme, and was probably originally devised by
some broken-down gambler to secure