The 1918 Upper West Side ‘Chop Suey Raids’

By Pam Tice

In the early morning hours of April 14, 1918, the New York assistant district attorney led a group of police officers and military policemen in a series of raids of chop suey restaurants, beginning in the Tenderloin area of the city [roughly West 23th to 42nd Streets], and culminating at Lee Suey’s restaurant at 210 Manhattan Avenue between West 109th and West 110th Streets. 

Every restaurant was closed while the police interrogated the people found there. Women were asked if they were married to the man they were sitting with, and to show a wedding ring to prove it. “Slackers,” as single young men were called, were ordered to show their military registration cards. Men in military uniforms were let go, but their names and addresses were taken.

According to a description in the New York Tribune women who were not married to their escorts were taken to the local police station unaccompanied, held until 6 am, and their names and addresses were taken with a warning not to frequent a chop suey restaurant again. They were warned they could be served with a subpoena that would bring them to the District Attorney’s office for further questioning. This must have been frightening for a young woman who might be a stenographer, a bookkeeper, or in the entertainment industry as a chorus girl or an actress. Perhaps she’d had a date for a movie and stopped for something to eat afterward.

What was happening on the northern blocks of the Bloomingdale district of the Upper West Side? 

Around the turn of the 20th century, West 110th Street was known as “Little Coney Island,” because of the saloons and dance halls located there. The blocks further south, particularly West 108th and 109th Streets, had “disorderly houses,” which is what houses of prostitution were called then. An effort to change the neighborhood began, and soon the area around the Cathedral [of St. John the Divine] was gentrified with new apartment houses, the Women’s Hospital, and the National Academy of Design.

Over on Eighth Avenue where the Ninth Avenue Elevated stopped at 110th Street, it was a different story. One particular tenement-house owner, Leon Sobel, was accused of renting to “disorderly” tenants in the numerous buildings he owned on West 108th and 109th Streets. He built a theater with a roof garden at Manhattan Avenue and West 109th Street. It was a good spot for a chop suey restaurant, what some call the McDonald’s of their time. This inexpensive Chinese food was the choice of New York’s growing bohemian citizens and a feature of entertainment districts.  

Chop suey places had an edge: there might be a screened private booth and, instead of chairs, there were benches, which were viewed as an invitation to human contact. Even more of a problem were the waiters who would step out to the closest saloon to purchase liquor for a customer, disguised in a teacup. The businesses also carried early 20th-century prejudices against the Chinese as purveyors of opium and promoters of “white slavery.” 

The United States was a year into World War I in 1918 when the U.S. Military initiated an effort to protect young soldiers and sailors from getting involved in “vice” at their points of embarkation, so they would be healthy when they arrived in France. While New York City did not have a military camp, it was a point of embarkation and the military police reached out to the authorities in New York City to do some house cleaning in the city’s vice districts. New York’s Tenderloin District in midtown was the most widespread, but the area around the elevated stop at West 110th Street was a vice district in miniature. 

Following the April 18th raids, an attorney for the chop suey restaurant owners asserted the illegality of the DA’s actions, but did not challenge the raids in court. The proprietors met with the New York District Attorney, as reported in The New York Times on April 19th, promising not to admit intoxicated soldiers and sailors, or girls under eighteen years old. They promised to remove the screens and to provide chairs instead of benches. They promised that their waiters would not go out for beer for their patrons. 

There was also a movement developing that spring in New York that restaurants should be licensed and would not be allowed to stay open all night, as it was thought, no one should be dining out between 1 am and 5 am. Licensing the saloons had helped the government get control over them; now they wanted to license the restaurants also. 

Another aspect of the spring 1918 raids was the push at both the federal and state levels that there should be no “slackers,” men of working age who did not have proper jobs. On April 22, 1918, the New York Herald reported a raid on Ed Green’s cigar store on Manhattan Avenue between West 109th and West 110th Streets where several young men and four dice were taken from a backroom. 

In July 1918, the War Department’s “work or fight” order was issued, stating that if you were a man of draft age and not working, or working in an “unproductive” industry, including any job in entertainment, you would be called up for military service. 

As reported in The New York Tribune on April 29, 1918, the federal officials who came to New York City to participate in the “house cleaning” were pleased with the orderliness of the city. 

Chop Suey continued to be a part of the scene at West 110th Street, as shown in the 1928 photo of the area below. 

A longer version of this article can be found at the Bloomingdale Neighborhood History Group’s site — HERE.

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