slide (#1 & #2)

[George Thompson]

        A few nights ago I was looking over a book on lowlife in NYC -- as I so
often do -- and found the word "slide" with a meaning new to me.  Not new
to Jonathon Green, howver, but my citation is decades earlier and from
the U. S.
        Later that evening I was looking over a book on lowlife in Dallas --
travel is broadening -- and found another sense of the word "slide", not
known to me or to JG.
        The ever-to-be-cursed Berelsmann family prevents us from knowing whether
these are also new to JL.

Slide #1
        A Captain Ryan testified he had "closed up every disorderly-house, every
gambling-house and policy office, and every slide and dives [sic] in the
precinct [within] three months of taking command.  When asked if he were
sure he knew what a slide was, he reminded the questioner that "we had
one of the most notorious slides in the world in Bleecker street when I
had command of that precinct."  His comment both confirms the fame of
the Slide, which he had shut down in 1892, and suggests that the
resort's management had deliberately used the slang term in maning the
club in order to announce its character (even though, in fact, the
fairies there did not dress as women).
        Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay Male
World, 1890-1940, by George Chauncey. (New York: Basic Books, c1994), p.
68, citing (p. 391) Report and Proceedings of the Senate Committee
Appointed to Investigate the Police Department of the City of New York,
(Albany, J.B. Lyon, State Printer, 1895, 5 vols.), p. 5591.
        The [] are supplied by Chauncey; the Committee was appointed by the NY
State Senate and was commonly known as the "Lexow Committee".
        JG's Cassell's Dictionary has this, defined as "an establishment where
transvestites solict conventionally dressed men"  [from memory] and
locates it as mid 20th C, in England.
        Frank Stevenson's The Slide was on Bleecker street, probably between
Thompson and Sullivan.

Slide #2
        "They had to have a Model Tailor suit," Isaac Goldstein recalled.  "Good
slides [shoes], a good hat, and a Model Tailors suit."
        Deep Ellum and Central Track: Where the Black and White Worlds of
Dallas Converged, by Alan B. Govenar and Jay F. Brakefield, (Denton:
University of North
Texas Press, c1998), p. 61, citing "Sam Stillman, interview with
Jay Brakefield, March 22, 1992."  Stillman is elsewhere (p. 65) described as
having "worked for years at The Model Tailors in Deep Ellum" -- perhaps
he is quoting his boss here?
        The definiton of "slides" is supplied by Govenar and Brakefield.  The
time referred to was during the lifetime of Blind Lemon Jefferson -- the
1920s.

GAT

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.

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