Brooklyn Today for March 15
Good morning. Today is the 74th day of the year. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle for March 15, 1902, reported that an organization known as the Brooklyn League was starting a campaign against vice in the borough. The drive targeted “disreputable dives” and hotels in which prostitutes either plied their trade or else rested once their day’s (or night’s) work was done. Interestingly, the article mentioned male as well as female prostitutes, a subject rarely discussed in those days.
In some of these places, the League added, customers were fed drugged wine, then robbed of their possessions. The League was shocked that many of these goings-on took place near Police Headquarters in Downtown Brooklyn, and that many employees of the Edison Illuminating Company (the ancestor of today’s Con Edison) patronized them.
Well-known people who were born today include model Fabio, Brooklyn-born U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, singer Dee Snider of Twisted Sister, singer-musician Sly Stone of Sly and the Family Stone, actor Judd Hirsch (“Taxi”) and singer-musician Mike Love of the Beach Boys.
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