The Price of the Ride in New York City

Sex, Taxis, and Entrepreneurial Resilience in the Dry Season of 1919

Abstract

This essay considers the roles played by the taxi driver and the taxicab within New York City’s commercial sexual economy in the months before and after the start of wartime prohibition on 1 July 1919. An examination of undercover investigation reports produced by the Committee of Fourteen (COF), an influential anti-vice organization operating in New York City, illustrates that taxicabs were regularly used as spaces for sex, while cabbies facilitated and profited from the commercial sex trade in numerous ways as procurers, intermediaries, and possessors of market knowledge. As the COF’s investigation reports reveal, sex workers responded to heightened policing, the loss of commercial spaces previously used to conduct business, and a slew of practical and commercial challenges with impressive entrepreneurial resilience. They continued to operate under repressive wartime conditions by cultivating small-scale commercial networks, devising means to evade detection and circumvent legal barriers, and utilizing emergent technologies like the automobile and the telephone in innovative ways.