"Some of the tenements managed to boast a saloon, brothel, or dance hall on every floor."

An excerpt about raffish pre-Civil War New York saloons from Luc Sante’s great book Low Life:

“The low-class Bowery dives just emerging featured a novelty: no glasses. Drinks, at three cents per, were served from barrels stacked behind the bar via thin rubber tubes, the stipulation being that the customer would drink all he wanted until he had to stop for a breath. Needless to say, there were many who developed deep lung capacity and tricks of circular respiration in order to outwit the system. In the decades before the Civil War the worst dives were located on the waterfront, and they traded with a highly elastic clientele of sailors. Sailors were free spenders, rootless, and halfway untraceable; they were marks of the first order. The street most overrun by sailors was Water Street, and there some of the tenements managed to boast a saloon, brothel, or dance hall on every floor. Notable were John Allen’s saloon-cum-whorehouse and Kit Burns’ Sportsmen Hall, which was an entire three-story building in which every variety of vice was pursued, but none so famous as its matches to the death between terriers and rats, held in a pit in its first-floor amphitheater, hence the resort’s more common name, the Rat Pit. Commerce was aided by the fact that, whether through fluke or graft, Kit Burns’s was the terminus for one of the early stage transit lines.”