Sin in the Second City

by Karen Abbott

  The 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.

  Even 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?”

  By 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.

  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 n
eighborhood’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.

  —MINNA EVERLEIGH

  Before 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.

  —CARL SANDBURG, “Chicago”

  The 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.

  She soon had a long list of eager prospects, and set up one-on-one interviews.

  “I talk with each applicant myself,” Ada later explained.
“She must have worked somewhere else before coming here. We do not like amateurs. Inexperienced girls and young widows are too prone to accept offers of marriage and leave. We always have a waiting list. To get in a girl must have a pretty face and figure, must be in perfect health, must look well in evening clothes. If she is addicted to drugs or to drink, we do not want her. There is no problem in keeping the Club filled.”

  The elder Everleigh grilled every candidate, measuring hips and busts and waists, hoisting up sleeves to check for needle tracks. After deciding on the final roster—the most luscious collages of curves and hair and tinkling laughter a man could ever meet—she sent them to Minna for proper instruction and lessons.

  Minna embraced Honoré de Balzac’s philosophy—“Pleasure,” he wrote in 1834, “is like certain drugs; to continue to obtain the same results one must double the dose, and death or brutalization is contained in the last one”—and she stressed to her girls that contemplation of devilment was more satisfying than the act itself. In an establishment like the Everleigh Club, she advised, a girl could get away with a sly smile and a coy aside, like “Wait until I know you better.” Temper the instinct to rush a man, to exploit his baser fantasies. Flirtations and banter could begin in any of the parlors, but a girl must have a deft touch once she escorted a man upstairs.

  There was also the matter of appearance. Minna forbade Everleigh girls to wear those tawdry negligees that passed for standard uniforms in other houses. How would that look, after the girls had so judiciously studied the poetry of Arthur Symons and Ernest Dowson and Longfellow? No, they would wear elegant, full-length evening gowns and all the jewelry they owned, as long as it wasn’t gaudy. Only Minna could pull off such excess.