Sin in the Second City (4 page)

“Frisco Tessie” Wall, in San Francisco’s Barbary Coast, ran a decent business but was too old school, in the sisters’ opinion; and Nell Kimball, with her philosophical musings, was downright depressing. Like many madams, Kimball kept someone on staff to “work over” her courtesans if they got out of line. “A drunk is no good as a whore,” she advised. “You can’t hide her breath, and she doesn’t do her work in style. Hookers are mean but sentimental. They cry over dogs, kittens, kids, novels, sad songs. I never cared much for a girl who came to work in a house because it was fun for her. There was a screw loose somewheres.”

Walking the district, the sisters noticed that the harlots of each bordello, from Tessie’s place to the lowest “cow yard,” kept business cards on hand and distributed them at every opportunity. Most featured, simply, the name of a girl and the house to which she belonged, but some women chose to be infinitely more descriptive:

BIG MATILDA

THREE HUNDRED POUNDS OF BLACK PASSION

HOURS: ALL HOURS

RATES: 50C EACH: THREE FOR ONE DOLLAR

The sisters threw away the cards and shook their heads. They believed in advertising, but also in subtlety.

On to New Orleans. The famed Storyville district offered Belle Anderson’s mirrored rooms and expert dancers, and Madam Lulu White’s opulent bordello on the corner of Basin and Bienville streets. The city’s Blue Book, a catalog that listed every house, its specialties and “stock,” offered a kind description of White’s establishment:

“Nowhere in this country will you find a more popular personage than Madame White, who is noted as being the handsomest octoroon in America…her mansion possesses some of the most costly oil paintings in the Southern country. Her mirror parlor is also a dream. There’s always something new at Lulu White’s that will interest you. ‘Good time’ is her motto.”

A lively place, New Orleans, but the district overall wasn’t to their liking—did they really want to operate up the street from a hall called the Funky Butt?

St. Louis was tolerable, but Babe Connors, a revered black madam who ran a brothel called The Palace, monopolized the city. In her house, the great Polish artist Ignace Paderewski once sat down at the piano, and a cadre of Republican politicians wrote their national platform. A large woman with a round, rambling body, she had a smile that gripped her face. Her teeth, the Everleighs were delighted to discover, were inlaid with diamonds. Tacky but fabulous. Madam Connors took Belle Anderson’s mirror innovations one step further, installing an entire floor of reflective glass in her parlor. Minna made a mental note—wherever they settled, mirrored rooms would definitely be part of the décor.

New York City, with its hectic Tenderloin district, was marvelous, but Madam Rosie Hertz, the so-called godmother for prostitutes in the city, had already cornered the elite clientele, running several sporting houses on the Lower East Side while living on a moneyed block in Brooklyn. Rose Hicks dominated Philadelphia, “Lucky” Warren ruled Cincinnati, and Annie Chambers claimed Kansas City. Minnie Stevens in Boston and Belle Stewart in Pittsburgh had plenty of “wick dipping” going on, as the saying went, but their districts, too, were well below Everleigh standards.

Washington, D.C., with its bustling “Division,” was a possibility. During the Civil War, John Wilkes Booth was a reputed regular in the district, favoring a sporting house on Ohio Avenue. The sisters checked into the Willard Hotel and looked up Cleo Maitland. This madam was an old-timer, they’d heard, and could offer some sound advice.

Madam Maitland operated in a brick row house on D Street, posing as a landlady, with several girls living with her as female “boarders.” She welcomed the Everleighs inside her brothel, kissing their cheeks with dry, puckered lips. Her face was a topographic map, intricately rumpled and lined, but she sat spryly and alert while Minna talked. They’d finished their research, Minna explained, but had yet to find an appropriate city, one with plenty of wealthy men but no superior houses.

The madam had the answer. Chicago, Illinois! she said. An abundance of millionaires, a well-protected red-light district, and not one dominant brothel; the city’s best madam, Carrie Watson, had retired to the suburbs a few years earlier. Madam Maitland even knew of the perfect building: two adjoining three-story mansions with fifty rooms, built for $125,000 just before the World’s Columbian Exposition. The brothel’s current proprietor, Effie Hankins, wanted to retire and had told Madam Maitland to keep an eye out for a possible buyer.

“See Effie,” the old madam urged, escorting the sisters out. “She’ll listen.”

T
he engine bell began its raucous clamor, and the train windows offered a brilliantly vile panorama: slaughterhouses, steel mills, factories, silos, coal piles that doused the sky with black. “She-caw-go! She-caw-go!” the brakeman called, and the train sputtered to a stop beneath a long roof made of glass and steel. A porter took the sisters’ gloved hands in his and helped them down the stairs, where a hansom cab waited. Dodging insulated ice wagons, streetcars, and droves of private carriages, the Everleighs’ hansom pulled up to 2131–2133 South Dearborn Street.

The imposing stone mansion boasted two mahogany staircases that spiraled gently upward. Broad windows dotted the façade, greedily inhaling the light, topped by strips of molding curved like haughty frowns. The place stood like a peacock amid pigeons.

Madam Hankins welcomed the sisters inside and told them to take their time, look around. Minna could see the brothel needed work—the 2133 side wasn’t yet habitable, and both buildings would benefit from plusher rugs, fresh paint, art, statues, books, and mirrors, of course—but it was
right.
The feel of that staircase under her palm, so solid and heavy, was like gripping a piece of permanence.

“It’s home to me and all I have,” Madam Hankins said, poking teary eyes with a handkerchief. “For fifty-five thousand dollars it is yours even though I hate to part with it.” She turned, tucked two fingers inside her mouth, and blew a shrill whistle. “Come, girls,” she called, “let my guests see how nice you look.”

Her harlots obliged, heels scuffing the floor as they trudged into a listless single file. The scent of cheap perfume soaked the parlor. Flesh bulged in all the wrong places. And their faces…Three words registered in Minna’s mind: sloppy, uncouth, hardened. These harlots simply wouldn’t do—not for the prices she and Ada planned to charge. With all due respect to Madam Hankins, these girls looked as if they’d logged more miles than the Chicago Limited.

“Thanks,” Minna said, and Madam Hankins shooed the harlots away. “How much for the rent?”

“Five hundred a month…not high when you consider there are two buildings.”

They struck a deal. The sisters advanced $20,000 and agreed to pay the remaining $35,000 within half a year, plus the subsequent $500 monthly fee.

“We have catered only to the best people,” Madam Hankins insisted, shaking each sister’s hand.

“Oh, yeah,” Minna replied, voice rimmed with sarcasm.

She felt Ada’s elbow poke her side, a clear warning to watch what she said. She knew Ada worried that her candor would one day bring them trouble.

T
he Everleighs took long carriage rides through their new city, peering from behind dark curtains, knees touching. Chicago was a city of superlatives, at once both spectacular and foul. Native Americans, after noting the presence of wild leeks in the watershed, began calling the city’s river “Chicagoua.” The word, aptly enough, reflected both the indigenous vegetation and its rank smell, also translating to “striped skunk.”

The streets were flat and stretched without end. In the Loop, named for the pulley system that turned cable cars around the city’s center, a dense forest of buildings stretched skyward, eclipsing the sun. Turn on Washington, and they saw the Herald Building, designed by the famous architects Daniel Burnham and John Root, with windows that arched upward and met like the hands of a man in prayer. On North Clark Street stood the Chicago-Clark Building, topped by turrets that speared the sky. Society ladies strolled down State Street, hats of every shape and color blooming from heads, a riotous country garden in motion.

The lake was a kaleidoscope of majestic blues and greens, the river rat-infested filth. A twenty-eight-mile-long canal would soon reverse its flow, sending the waste from Chicago’s tenements, factories, and slaughterhouses downstream (over objections from St. Louis) instead of into Lake Michigan, which had caused devastating outbreaks of cholera. The din was omnipresent and relentless: horses’ hooves clopped, elevated trains clattered, streetcars screeched, newsboys and peddlers shouted, all against the restless backdrop of ragtime.

William Archer, a Scottish critic who traveled throughout the United States, captured Chicago’s dichotomy. “Walking in Dearborn Street or Adams Street of a cloudy afternoon, you think yourself in a frowning and fuliginous city of Dis,” he wrote. “Driving along Lake Shore to Lincoln Park in the flush of sunset, you wonder that the dwellers in this street of palaces should trouble their heads about Naples or Venice.”

The sisters’ driver detoured through the red-light districts, up and down streets littered with abandoned hansoms. At night they shook, as streetwalkers entertained their tricks inside. Messenger boys scurried, the cold turning their breath to steam, fetching makeup or booze or chop suey for whatever whorehouse hired them, delivering Western Union telegrams to the demimondes. Minna pictured how she and Ada would elevate the district, transform their profession from an accident of circumstances to a genuine calling.

E
ven in its frontier days, Chicago oozed vice rooted in liquor and gambling, with prostitutes and pimps following closely behind, tailed in turn by the hoodlums, pickpockets, burglars, con men, ropers, and dopers. The town’s board of trustees, as early as 1835, imposed a fine of $25 upon any person convicted of operating a bordello. But the dive keepers merely shrugged and continued about their business.

A mere three years later, brothels lined Wells Street—shoddy, lowbrow establishments, but the genesis of the largest red-light region in United States history. The Great Fire of 1871 left seventy-three miles of streets in charred ruins and almost one hundred thousand people homeless, but Chicago knew its priorities. During the first eight months of 1872, the city granted 2,218 saloon licenses—approximately 1 to every 150 citizens. The vice districts, slung like a tawdry necklace across the city’s South Side, were more brazen than ever. Junkies shot one another up with “guns”—hypodermic needles—in the middle of drugstore aisles. Women lounged stark naked against doorways, calling out obscene suggestions to passersby. And the competition grew fiercer as hundreds of newcomers settled in the red-light district every week.

The sex trade even enjoyed its own weekly newspaper throughout the late 1870s and early 1880s, a sort of Page Six forebear that cheekily chronicled the comings and goings of madams and sporting girls. It covered fashion, personal peccadilloes, drinking habits, and long-running feuds:

“Black-eyed Amy, of 478 State,” one edition warned, “you had better let up on your foolishness with that married man, F., or you will think a freight train has run over you. DO YOU HEAR?”

B
y the time Chicago garnered international attention as the host of the 1893 World’s Fair, the city’s vice neighborhoods had cultivated distinct personalities. There was Little Cheyenne, a nod to the town in Wyoming, which at the time was considered a very depraved place. (Cheyenne returned the favor by calling their vice district “Little Chicago.”) A six-foot, 220-pound black woman named Hattie Briggs ruled Little Cheyenne. Hattie was feared, not necessarily for her size and color, but for something she gave off: an unseen, wild-rooted purpose that circled the air around her. Wearing a flowing scarlet coat, she robbed male customers by slamming their heads against a wall until they were too dazed to resist.

Little Cheyenne and other vice neighborhoods observed strict rules about race and even ethnicity. A guide to neighborhood brothels titled
The Sporting and Club House Directory
offered separate, pointed entries for “French Houses” (“everybody knows what a ‘French’ house is,” the editor wrote, “and we need offer no further explanation”) and “Colored Houses.” Upscale black madams like Vina Fields employed blond-haired black prostitutes who serviced only white men, and Madam Lillian Richardson emphasized that her brothel was “the least public colored house in the city.” Little Cheyenne was also home to Carrie Watson’s elegant house on Clark Street, which for years enjoyed worldwide fame despite the fact that its only advertising was courtesy of the resident parrot. Housed inside a gilded cage near the entrance, the avian pimp squawked, “Carrie Watson. Come in, gentlemen,” in emphatic repetition.

The Everleighs had heard of Madam Watson. They knew she was once revered by Chicago leaders and left alone by the police. Most important, she’d affected the right attitude. “Miss Carrie Watson says she would be willing to reform,” one red-light newspaper reported, “but she can’t think of any sins she has been guilty of.” The sisters intended to pick up exactly where the legend left off—and improve on every one of her contributions to the trade.

The line of brothels and dives on State Street, from Van Buren to 22nd, was known as Satan’s Mile. Kitty Adams, better known as “the Terror of State Street,” hailed from Satan’s Mile and in the span of seven years robbed more than one hundred men. She and her partner, Jennie Clark, were arrested in August 1896 for slugging an old man and fishing $5 from his pocket. The Honorable Judge James Groggin, who presided over the case, acquitted the women, issuing a celebrated ruling that any man who ventured into the district deserved whatever he got.