If you liked the above movie you'll enjoy this book, City of Eros, NewYork City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920, by TJ Gilfoyle.
This work discusses the stages of prostitution and who made the money? The landlords took the biggest pieces of the pie and often preferred the protitutes who could pay their rent as opposed to poor working men who couldn't. Gilfoyle describes the impact of prostitution on police, politicians, moralists, and the middle class.
Prostitution functioned at the nexus of social relations in the nineteenth century city. Bourgeois Americans sought to create an ideal world of public and private spheres separating vice from virtue, illicit from licit, the disreputable from respectable But such a divided binary vision never conformed to reality. Prostitution blurred neat and easy distinctions between good and evil. "Respectable" institutions and individuals directly supported and participated in the "disreputable" underworld of New York. Ultimately, prostitution and the corresponding commercialization of sex exposed the limits and contradictions in the ways nineteenth-century New Yorkers defined "freedom." pg.19 Gilfoyle
The Five points area of the movie "Gangs of New York" figures largely in the business of prostitution at it's lowest form. Five points had the prostitues who serviced customers in the doorways of bars and grocery stores. Many of these women barely half dressed so as to let the customer see what they are getting.
This book helps set the stage for the likes of women reformers like Margaret Sanger, Stanton, and Anthony. It's amazing that anyone would consider the 19th century as "the good old days."
Panda of the I like reading class