19th century reformers railed against sex &

Sex, booze and Irish jigs. That may not have the punch of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll, but the urges were the same. It didn’t matter what parents, politicians or police said. This generation wanted pleasure, and it wanted it now. Except now was the 19th century.

Dale Cockrell’s “Everybody’s Doin’ It” tells the tale of “Sex, Music, and Dance in New York, 1840-1917.” It’s a history as contemporary as last night’s warehouse party.

Sure, some details changed over the years. Initially, the mood-altering substance of choice was booze. Fiddlers supplied the music. And the love was anything but free.

But even more than 100 years later, those old New Yorkers’ search for pleasure feels familiar.

Cockrell begins his book in the early 1830s. Just over the past half century, New York had suffered through two wars, burned in the first and blockaded in the second. By now, its citizens were eager to have some fun, if they could.

Except some people declared they couldn’t.

The Rev. John McDowall arrived in Manhattan in 1830, fresh from Princeton Seminary and determined to minister to the poor. Instead, the Presbyterian clergyman became fascinated by prostitutes and porn.

He tried to save the souls of the first, through prayer. He tried to outlaw the second, by reprinting graphic examples in his crusading newspaper, McDowall’s Journal. Instead, his publication was banned for obscenity. By 1836 he was defrocked.

He died the same year.

Others took up his crusade against vice. They even mimicked his methods: Decry the lusts of men. Grieve over the ruination of women. Legislate against the bars and dance halls that enable them.

First, though, describe it all in as much titillating detail as possible.

By the 1840s, McDowall’s

journal was replaced by a rash of moralizing weeklies, hypocritical papers like Rake, Libertine and Whip. They regularly ranked the city brothels, noting the employees’ specialties. They even provided addresses.

After all, how else could their innocent readers know which neighborhoods to avoid?

There was a lot to cover. By 1848, at least 1,500 bordellos operated in New York. And it isn’t as if they had a monopoly on places selling sex.

Back then, the line between bar and brothel was as thin as a silk stocking. If there was liquor, there was music. And if there was music, there were women eager to dance with patrons.

Nothing was free, though. The house expected the man to buy the lady a drink afterward. And anything else? Well, that cost extra.

But the couple could always save on a hotel room by finding a dark corner. The boldest had sex right on the dance floor.

When Charles Dickens took a tour of America in 1842, he made sure to visit Five Points, the dangerous slum made infamous in “Gangs of New York.” Dickens frequented saloons filled with jugglers, acrobats and an organ-grinder with a monkey. And, he danced with a prostitute named Amanda Flagrant.

He also noted something remarkable about New York’s rude but vibrant nightlife – blacks and whites hung out.

Races crowded together in the same ghettos, sharing space and their traditions of music and movement. The Irish brought fiddles and jigs. The blacks contributed banjos and high-stepping dances.

Some places, like the Blackand-Tan on Bleecker St., specifically welcomed mixed crowds. Soon, a black-and-tan was any bar or dance hall where color didn’t matter.

The lack of segregation, though, bothered some of the supposed do-gooders more than the availability of easy sex. And the more freedom African-Americans acquired, the more easily outraged white reformers became.

By the 1890s, the Rev. Dr. Charles Henry Parkhurst of the Madison Square Presbyterian Church was one of Manhattan’s leading scolds. One night, accompanied by a private detective, he slipped off his collar for an undercover tour of the city’s dens of iniquity.

The two men observed dances where “vice, brazenfaced, tried to thrust itself upon innocence.” They saw a heavily rouged woman wearing a low-cut blouse which had “no value as a concealment of her buxom personality.”

But he and the detective saved most of their astonishment for a dance hall on W. 27th St., where they were shocked to find, not just underage patrons, but interracial