J. W. Buel. Metropolitan Life Unveiled: The Mysteries and Miseries of America’s Great Cities, Embracing New York, Washington City, San Francisco, Salt Lake City, and New Orleans. San Francisco: A. L. Bancroft & Co., 1882.
By the early 1880s San Francisco was the country’s ninth most populous city, New Orleans ranked tenth, and Washington fourteenth, making them fitting subjects for urban portraits. In Metropolitan Life Unveiled, Buel describes the prostitution, opium trade, and fortune telling among San Francisco’s Chinese; characterizes New Orleans as a “hotbed of sensuality”; and notes the house of assignation found within the Capital to service “salacious” congressmen. The author even scrutinizes Salt Lake City, merely the 93rd most populous city at the time, because of the “sumptuous” lifestyles church elders built for themselves by exploiting their members, who live in poverty.
