100 years ago in The Record
Sunday, March 10, 1918
“Recent revelations in the criminal courts of the city and county demonstrate in a very clear way that there is need of a moral awakening in Troy,” the Sunday Budget reports today.
One revelation during the past week was the trial of Joseph Campine for robbing a local farmer “who came to the city to buy clothing, but who fell among thieves.” Campine’s companion Winnie Morris got the farmer drunk at several Troy saloons before taking him to her “camp” on Federal and Eighth streets, where she and Campine drugged and beat him. During the trial, Campine admitted to being an ex-convict and draft dodger, evading military service by falsely claiming to be married.
“The Campine type of degenerate is not uncommon,” a Budget reporter writes, “He poses as the protector of the miserable white slave he exploits, and out of whose vicious earnings he lives and dresses in a flashy way. There are more than a few of the type in Troy, and within the law they are vagrants, for they have no visible means of support – honestly gotten.”
On another page, the Budget reports on the transformation of “one of the side streets near the Delaware & Hudson bridge” into a Trojan Bowery. Its status was acknowledged during a recent parade when a marching band turned up the street and began playing the “The Bowery,” the song inspired by the notorious New York City street where “They do such things and they say such things.”
Not long ago, that street boasted “places of an unimpeachable respectability,” and even the saloons, according to a local property owner, “were high class institutions of the kind.” Some of those saloons flourish today “not as strict drinking places, but as convenient meeting places where the lewd and underground hounds congregate to conduct the business on which the department of justice has placed the ban.”
Despite intermittent efforts to close the city’s red-light district, “camps” like Winnie Morris’s have taken its place. “The camp is the successor to the joint,” the property owner explains, “The joints were regulated with a certain standard of morals which usually guaranteed the safety of the patron….This is far from so with regard to the camps.”
With thousands of war workers expected to move to Troy this year, many residents are demanding a new crackdown on vice.
“Imagine a man moving his family into a flat in the very heart of the city, and on an apparently respectable street, to find that he is living in the same dwelling with the most disreputable throng that ever invaded Troy,” the property owner says.
— Kevin Gilbert