The Wickedest Man in New York: Faith, Sensationalism, and the Water Street Sham Revival of 1868

How journalism, religious ambition, and urban life converged to shape one of nineteenth-century New York's most public moral dramas. In The Wickedest Man in New York, Robert E. Cray revisits one of the most arresting episodes in nineteenth-century Manhattan: the brief season when a Water Street dancehall became the unlikely stage for a public religious drama.In 1868, journalist Oliver Dyer published a sensational profile of John Allen, a dancehall proprietor whose establishment was infamous for liquor, music, and the labor of the sex workers who lived there.Dyer's portrait of Allen as "the wickedest man in New York" gripped the city and pulled thousands of curious onlookers toward the Fourth Ward, a waterfront district long associated with poverty, sex work, and the tensions of a changing metropolis. As evangelicals from the Howard Mission entered Allen's world-hoping to reform the neighborhood, cultivate converts, and elevate their own ministry-reporters chronicled every turn.Prayer m