Sin in the Second City (5 page)

Custom House Place, the adjacent area, earned an international reputation during the World’s Fair. Its most infamous attractions were dives called “panel houses.” The walls in these resorts were punched full of holes, placed strategically behind chairs where the johns hung their pants. As one harlot distracted a trick in bed, another would slip her hand through the crack and snatch his wallet.

Number 144 Custom House Place was operated by Madam Mary Hastings, one of the pioneers of what was known in Europe—and soon in America—as “white slavery.” During frequent trips to neighboring cities, she extolled the virtues of Chicago and its high-paying jobs, returning with gullible young girls aged thirteen to seventeen. She took the girls’ clothing and locked them in a room with six professional rapists. Once “broken in,” the girls were sold to other madams for $50 to $300 each, depending on age and appearance. The eminent British journalist William T. Stead visited Hastings’s brothel while researching
If Christ Came to Chicago,
his damning 1894 screed about sin in the Second City.

The Everleighs vowed never to deal with pimps, desperate parents selling off children, panders, and white slavers. If you treated girls well, they would come begging for admittance. A prospective Everleigh courtesan must prove she’s eighteen in order to earn an interview, understand exactly what the job entailed, and know she’s free to leave anytime, for any reason, without penalty.

Riding through Custom House Place, the sisters noted it was still a busy district, even six years after the World’s Fair. Mayor Carter Harrison II had ordered all brothels on Clark Street, the neighborhood’s main thoroughfare, to evacuate, citing complaints from citizens who took the new trolley car to and from work. The majority of madams and saloon keepers defied the edict and stayed put, others migrated to the West Side, and the rest, very gradually, packed up their furnishings, piano professors, and harlots to transfer south, settling into the growing vice district around Dearborn and 22nd streets. This latter contingent constituted the sisters’ new neighbors and competitors, though none of them looked like much of a threat.

The California, across the street from the Everleighs’ building, was one of the roughest resorts in the district. Operated by a three-hundred-pound bruiser named “Blubber” Bob Gray and his wife, the California offered thirty girls whose uniforms consisted of high-button shoes and sheer chemises that barely brushed their bottoms. Most nights, they appeared naked at windows or in the doorway, gyrating and pointing between their legs.

“Pick a baby, boys!” the madam yelled at her clients. “Don’t get glued to your seats!”

She charged a dollar, but 50 cents would do if a man could prove by turning out his pockets that he had nothing more. Here, as in other bordellos, harlots “rolled” their clients, slipping a dose of morphine into his wine or beer and robbing him while he was passed out cold. The sisters added additional rules to their list: no knockout powders, no thieving, no drugs of any kind.

On Armour Avenue stood a notorious resort called the Bucket of Blood—the sisters shuddered to think what passed for entertainment behind its walls. Flogging, they supposed—all the rage in the lower dives and another activity they would not tolerate. Farther down the block, a brutal resort blithely called the Why Not? operated near Japanese and Chinese whorehouses that also catered only to white men. The sisters heard that the “Orientals,” unable to bear the frigid Chicago climate, practiced their profession during the winter months clad in long woolen underwear.

Two brothers, Ed and Louis Weiss, both of whom seemed inordinately curious about what the sisters were up to, flanked the Everleighs’ place on either side. Finally, there was a tight clique of upscale brothel keepers, led by one Madam Vic Shaw, who considered their resorts the Levee’s finest attractions. True, their houses came closest to Everleigh standards—but in the sisters’ opinion, not nearly close enough.

Amateurs, all of them, and not worth another moment of the Everleighs’ time.

ANOTHER
UNCLE TOM’S CABIN

Stead was a man we are sorry not to have known. He
was just a little before our time. So broad-minded.

—M
INNA
E
VERLEIGH

B
efore the Everleigh sisters so optimistically decided to improve their industry, and to apply a dignified sheen to its public image, a group of reformers in England embarked on a similar campaign of their own. Chief among them was William T. Stead, who, along with fellow activist Josephine Butler, wanted to raise England’s age of consent for girls from thirteen to sixteen. The campaign needed, as Stead put it, its own
Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

In 1885, nine years before he published
If Christ Came to Chicago,
Stead, prepared to assume the role of Harriet Beecher Stowe, descended upon London’s underworld. Recalling a letter Butler received from Victor Hugo—“The slavery of black women is abolished in America,” it read, “but the slavery of white women continues in Europe”—Stead set out to find a story so sensational that Parliament would be forced to act. A story that would redirect the debate over prostitution, shifting the focus from the courtesan to those who profited from her work. A story that would recast her role in society from that of necessary evil to exploited victim—a “white slave.”

He found the story in the case of Eliza “Lily” Armstrong, a thirteen-year-old girl living in a west London slum with her alcoholic mother, Elizabeth. Destitute, Elizabeth agreed to sell Lily to a woman, working in concert with Stead, for the sum of £5—£3 down and £2 after her virginity had been professionally certified. Stead, meanwhile, acting the part of the “purchaser,” waited in a predetermined brothel for Lily to arrive.

“The poor child,” Stead wrote, “was full of delight at going to her new situation, and clung affectionately to the keeper who was taking her away—where, she knew not. The first thing to be done after the child was fairly severed from home was to secure the certificate of virginity.”

Stead’s cohort took Lily to a midwife, who confirmed the girl’s chastity and produced a small vial of chloroform to “dull the pain.”

“This,” the midwife advised, “is the best. My clients find this much the most effective.”

The brothel was the next stop. The madam admitted Lily without question, ordered the girl to undress, and injected chloroform into her arm. A few moments later, Stead entered the room.

“And the child’s voice was heard crying, in accents of terror,” he later reported, “‘There’s a man’s in the room; oh, take me home!’”

Stead crept away. Lily’s cries, he insisted, were proof he’d “had his way” with her. Police rescued the girl and placed her in the care of the Salvation Army.

In July 1885, Stead’s “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” was published in the
Pall Mall Gazette.
Crowds gathered in front of the paper’s offices, clamoring for copies. One and a half million unauthorized reprints were circulated. Thousands rioted. Virgins clad in white marched through Hyde Park, demanding passage of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, which proposed to raise the age of consent. It was passed in August. Stead kept his triumph—and himself—in the public eye when, in October, he was sent to prison for three months on a procuring charge. He relished his martyrdom, even publishing a pamphlet titled “My First Imprisonment.”

Across the Atlantic, American reformers took careful note.

GETTING EVERLEIGHED

The alcove of the Blue Bedroom at the Everleigh Club.

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them,
for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps
luring the farm boys.

—C
ARL
S
ANDBURG
, “Chicago”

T
he Everleigh sisters were perhaps the first cathouse proprietors to apply the inverse formula for success: The more difficult it is to gain entry to an establishment, the greater the number of people who vie to do so. Minna told no one about their grand opening, planned for February 1, 1900. No free passes for critics, no advertisements in newspapers, no engraved invitations to Mayor Carter Harrison II or members of the city council, no klieg lights sweeping garish streaks across Dearborn Street. Their notoriety would come gracefully, like a red carpet slowly unfurled—leave the fireworks for those who cast no spark of their own.

Besides, Minna knew Chicago was preoccupied with other news, especially the brutal temperature, eight below zero. Telephone operators for the city’s police stations experienced difficulty transmitting or receiving messages over the wires. Batteries in the patrol boxes had iced over, making communication almost impossible. Forget trying to take a streetcar anywhere. Horse carcasses turned up on corners, sometimes in pairs or groups, like capsized carousels. Several homeless people froze, splayed in rag doll poses across the slush and ice.

But inside the double mansion on South Dearborn Street, Minna and Ada bustled about, warm beneath their gowns, silk whispering with each step. It was a cataclysmic night in their lives—more important than their success in Omaha, more gratifying than leaving their pasts in the South. The past few months had been grueling and frantic; they’d had to dispose of Madam Hankins’s tacky old furnishings and even shabbier girls.

Ada had taken charge of recruiting. She notified the harlots who worked their brothel in Omaha, and word spread quickly through the underworld pipeline. A few theater acquaintances expressed interest, too—after all, acting and whoring drew from that same facet of the psyche that allowed the body to be in one place, and the mind another.