Sin in the Second City

by Karen Abbott

  Suzy Poon Tang lasted only one night at the Everleigh Club. The sisters’ millionaire client was so taken with “the roses he found blooming at the gateway to ecstasy,” as her courtesan tutor, Doll, later put it, that he whisked her away to his North Side mansion and married her within the week. The rest of the Everleigh butterflies, relieved to be rid of the competition, cornered Minna and Ada and assaulted them with kisses, thanking the madams for releasing her.

  And a harlot they’d lost in unhappier circumstances was found again. Nellie, plotting, plundering Nellie, turned up in the river, her skin blanched and limbs ballooned, bumping up against the moorings along a stretch of water where the crew teams raced on Saturday afternoons. The police recovered her purse, too, inside which she had tucked a note:

  “I’ve made mistakes all my life, and the only persons to forgive me were two sisters in a sporting house. Kindly tell, for me, all the psalm-singers to go to hell and stick the clergymen in an ash-can. That goes double for all the parasites who talk a lot but don’t do a damn thing to help a girl in trouble. Call Calumet 412. I’m sure of a decent burial if you do.”

  Minna and Ada obliged, selecting for their fallen courtesan a gleaming, silk-lined casket and dozens of vivid bouquets, and took turns consoling all the girls who had known poor Nellie. Along with liars and thieves, madams inevitably hired harlots with the saddest tendencies of all.

  IT DON’T NEVER GET GOOD

  UNTIL THREE IN

  THE MORNING

  The annex of the Coliseum, on the eve of the 1908 First Ward Ball.

  The Tribune has come out against syphilis.

  Bet you 8–5 syphilis’ll win.

  —ANONYMOUS

  As usual, Ada was ready first, her dark honey hair rolled and pinned, her quiet gray gown ribbed with jewels, her lips coated in a soft pink gloss. Reclining on a silk settee in her sister’s boudoir, she watched Minna pace across the length of the floor, ornamenting herself, one at a time, with rings and bracelets and necklaces and pins and brooches until her every inch shone and blinked. At last, fastening around her waist a thick stomacher of diamonds, emeralds, and rubies, Minna was satisfied.

  Midnight approached, and the First Ward Ball could not properly start without them—Bathhouse John Coughlin called them the perennial queens of the event. The Everleigh butterflies were already milling about the downstairs parlors, just the right touch of daring with their mousseline waists, slouching plateau hats, and long strands of pearls dipping behind corsets. Katie, Ethel, Lillian St. Clair, “Jew Bertha” Morrison (not to be confused with “Diamond Bertha”), Virginia Bond, Bessie Wallace, Rose Harris, Belle Schreiber, Grace Monroe, and the rest all looked impossibly refreshed despite the recent visit from a client named Uncle Ned. Once a year, around the holidays, Uncle Ned took over the Music Room, thrust his bare feet into buckets of ice, downed a tall glass of sarsaparilla, and ordered the girls to circle him and sing “Jingle Bells.” Shaking a tambourine, Uncle Ned shouted again and again, “Let’s all go for an old-fashioned sleigh ride …wheee!”

  The harlots insisted they didn’t mind Uncle Ned, but Minna knew his antics grew tedious. “Entertaining most men at dinner or in any one of our parlors,” she pointed out to Ada, “is more tiring than what the girls lose their social standing over.”

  Stunners, all of them, but Minna chose only one, the current pick of the house, to ride beside her and Ada in the leading brougham, drawn by three pairs of matched bays, red tassels swishing by their ears (take that, Vic Shaw). The rest of the girls would follow in comparatively plain hansoms and hacks, and hurt feelings would be forgotten as soon as they pulled up to the Coliseum. They should be thankful, really, that the Levee’s annual fête was happening at all.

  Before it was called the First Ward Ball—or “the Derby,” in Bathhouse John’s terminology—the affair was known simply as “the party for Lame Jimmy,” the crippled pianist and fiddler hired by Madam Carrie Watson in the early 1880s. Officially, the event was a benefit to raise funds for the professor’s medical care; unofficially, it was an excuse for Chicago’s underworld to, as Madam Watson put it, “reign unrefined.” Held at Freiberg’s “Opera House” (Ike Bloom’s attempt, at the time, to cultivate a bit of class and confuse the reformers), it enabled police captains and patrolmen to mingle peacefully with dope fiends and pimps and cadets and thugs, who, bowing to Levee decorum, checked their brass knuckles and blackjacks at the door.

  More than three hundred revelers encircled Lame Jimmy, who sat stoically, fiddle poised beneath his chin, and played his repertoire of maudlin ballads, culminating in a discordant rendition of “Auld Lang Syne.” Saloon keepers recited rambling toasts to the professor, swaying with glasses hoisted in the air, spilling as much champagne as they drank. Madams wiped away tears with gloved hands; it was the one night of the year when public displays of sentimentality were as chic as Gibson girls.

  Lame Jimmy’s party carried on happily and without incident until 1894. On January 31, at 6:00 a.m., a Harrison Street policeman named Charles Arado challenged his brother, Louis, also a cop, to shoot down a ceiling chandelier. Louis, drunk out of his mind, obliged, whipping out his pistol and sending crystals crashing to the floor. The shots attracted the attention of another cop, Officer John Bacon, as he patrolled 22nd Street. Bacon ran into Freiberg’s and saw the smoke rising from Louis’s gun.

  Bacon approached his fellow officer. “Give it to me,” he said, holding out his hand.

  Louis laughed and shoved the gun back into his pocket. Brother Charles appeared beside him. “You’re looking for trouble,” Louis said. “I could lick a dozen like you.”

  He swung and connected hard with Bacon’s chin. Charles followed with a punch on the shoulder.

  Bacon stumbled out onto 22nd Street and wobbled toward the patrol box on Wabash Avenue. The footsteps of the Arado brothers grew louder behind him. “There he is,” Charles yelled, and fired his own gun. The bullet whizzed past Bacon, and he returned fire. Three, eight, ten shots launched across Wabash, and one of them found Charles Arado.

  “He has killed me, Louis,” Charles said, and his body folded slowly, knees first, chest following, head coming to rest on the tracks.

  The resulting civic protest was strident, and not even the intervention of Bathhouse John, a frequent presence at the festivities, could salvage the tradition.

  Early the following winter, Bathhouse John was sitting in Hinky Dink’s saloon, the Workingman’s Exchange, lamenting the paucity of funds for the spring elections. The dependable gush of First Ward graft had abated, since gamblers were, at that moment, the main target of reformers’ wrath. The den owners paid reduced protection rates or shooed the Coughlin-Kenna collectors off their properties altogether. The conversation then drifted to talk of Lame Jimmy—a shame, wasn’t it, that the winter would have to pass without his party?

  Then the idea struck Bathhouse John Coughlin. What if they sponsored a real ball, an opulent, fantastic, important ball, in a venue that could hold thousands?

  “We take it over, Mike, we take it over!” he yelled, shaking Hinky Dink’s slight frame, the bar stool wobbling beneath him. “Why, done right, there’s thousands in it, tens of thousands!”

  First Ward saloon keepers could be persuaded to donate booze, madams would come to show off their newest strumpets. Everyone was invited, from the classiest parlor houses to the lowest nickel cribs. Not merely invited, but expected.

  The inaugural First Ward Ball took place at the First Regiment Armory, on Michigan Avenue and 16th Street, from 8:00 p.m. until the attendees were too drunk to tell time. Clergymen called it “a Saturnalian orgy,” a “vile, dissolute affair,” a “bawdy Dionysian festival,” a “black stain on the name of Chicago.” But Bathhouse John called it a success: $25,000 for the aldermen’s coffers and a new Levee tradition—one that must surpass itself, in both profits and depravity, with each successive year.

  And so it did, through the turn of the century and beyond. At the 1900 event,
Bathhouse John, with great aplomb, welcomed the Levee’s newest and already foremost madams, the Everleigh sisters, and Hinky Dink confided to the Tribune that it “don’t never get good until about 3 in the morning.” Two years later, the aldermen were informed that hard liquor could no longer be served in the Armory, so they rented the Coliseum instead, promising the Ball would be a “screecher.” It was: Bathhouse John, clad in a “dream” of a vest, welcomed judges and congressmen and fifteen thousand First Ward constituents. “It is the best we have ever had,” Coughlin insisted. Hinky Dink waxed practical, itemizing the distribution of the Ball’s profits: “charity, education” (which consisted of hiring “good speakers to teach the people of the First Ward to vote the straight Democratic ticket”), and “burying the dead.”

  Reform groups had kept quiet tabs on the Ball over the years, but none cataloged its offenses as thoroughly as Arthur Burrage Farwell. The “dean” of Chicago reformers, as the Tribune called him, became serious about his mission work in 1888, when he returned home from a business trip to find his young son ill. That night, the boy died in a convulsion. Farwell’s wife had taught their son the bedtime prayer Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep, to which the child added a line of his own: “God bless all the little boys, and all the little girls, and all the ladies.”

  Grief stricken, Farwell began devoting so much of his time to fighting the social evil and liquor—especially liquor—that his livelihood suffered. In June 1907, he finally quit his job as a shoe salesman to work full-time for the Law and Order League.

  “Mr. Farwell,” the Tribune reported, “is the generally recognized type of the modern Chicago reformer. He is a convincing, forcible talker—a short gray haired man whose eyes grow misty as he speaks of others’ troubles.”

  Bathhouse John and Hinky Dink scornfully called him “Arthur Garbage Farwell” but didn’t object when he purchased a ticket for the 1907 First Ward Ball. Let him come, get his kicks. Farwell took indignant note of the twenty thousand guests (a conservative estimate) guzzling ten thousand quarts of champagne and thirty thousand quarts of beer, the unconscious bodies piled like matchsticks in the aisles, a madam named French Annie stabbing her beau with a hat pin, a stampeding mob of men trampling one another to witness a circus act, and a thirty-five-foot bar collapsing to the floor during one of hundreds of fistfights. All but two aldermen, sick at home, were present.

  “It’s a little of the bunk,” said Bathhouse, who found himself $40,000 richer the next morning. “You know.”

  Farwell wasn’t so understanding. “The annual orgy forms a terrible commentary on the rule of the people of Chicago,” he argued. “Can anything be more terrible than this?”

  It was terrible enough, he concluded, to warrant a trip to the mayor’s office as the 1908 gala approached. With less than two weeks to go, Farwell, Dean Sumner of Saints Peter and Paul, and several other reformers paid a visit to Mayor Fred Busse in City Hall.

  “A real description of the 1907 ball is simply unprintable,” Farwell began. “You must stop them from putting another on this year. You must stop this disgrace to Chicago. You must stop it in the name of the young men who will be ruined there.”

  The mayor squirmed in his chair, let his hands fall limply to his lap. “What do you want me to do, gentlemen?” he asked finally.

  “You can refuse a liquor license. That will stop them.”

  Mayor Busse blinked. Farwell tried a different approach, planted his hands on the desk, and leaned in.

  “Mr. Busse, you cannot in good conscience issue the liquor license for this affair. Suppose you had a young friend whose character and life you prized highly. How would you like to have such scenes of debauchery as are allowed at this ball to bring degradation and perhaps destruction to your friend? Prevent a repetition of this vile orgy!”

  Farwell, perhaps, was unaware of Busse’s own fondness for drinking and debauchery, of how he’d once boasted to reporters, “They don’t need anyone sleuthing around after me. They can always get me any evening at J. C. Murphy’s saloon, Clark Street and North Avenue.” Perhaps he was unaware, too, of Madam Vic Shaw’s special offer during the previous year’s mayoral election—coupons featuring Busse’s picture and these words stenciled beneath:

  OUR PAL

  IF HE WINS AND YOU

  FIND THIS CARD IN

  THE PARLOUR ~ BRING

  IT TO MADAME

  YOU GET $5.00 IN TRADE

  ~FREE~

  ELECTION NIGHT

  ~~~ONLY~~~

  And perhaps Farwell didn’t know what Busse knew about the First Ward’s voting power, which included even enfranchised Republicans. Besides, Busse figured, Farwell and his ilk had to be exaggerating the depravity of the Ball. Chicago had never cared much for the fainthearted or prudish; it was a city that kept one eye closed in a perpetual wink while the other looked away.

  Sorry, Mayor Busse told his visitors, but a liquor license had already been issued.

  The Bath and Hinky Dink continued preparations, and even encouraged Levee revelers to disregard any notion of a dress code (not that they needed any such prompting, but why pass up a chance to make a point?).

  “The gents with whiskers is going to holler anyway,” Bathhouse said. “If our ladies wore fur overcoats and black veils, somebody would roar, so let ’em go as far as they like. That’s me.”

  But the aldermen’s bravado was fleeting. On December 7, 1908, the Tribune published a warning in bold print:

  The Tribune desires to announce that it will print a list of the names of the “respectable” persons who attend the First Ward Ball next Monday night. Every effort will be made to make the “among those present were” as complete as possible.

  Now this, the First Ward leaders acknowledged, was a problem. True, Chicago’s rank-and-file press corps spent more time at the Everleigh Club than in their offices. Minna always recalled the morning a fire erupted in a warehouse near the Levee. Flames spread, trapping several inside. An alarm shrieked through the streets.

  An editor at the Tribune called for reporters. No one responded. Sighing, he picked up the phone and dialed the Everleigh Club’s phone number: Calumet 412.

  “There’s a 4-11 fire over at Wabash Avenue near Eighteenth Street,” he said. “Any Tribune men there?”

  “The house is overrun with ’em,” a maid replied. “Wait a minute, I’ll put one on.”

  But newspaper publishers and owners weren’t at liberty to indulge in such behavior. Any newspaper that profited from writing about the Levee had an obligation, at the same time, to editorialize against the district. The Tribune, as Chicago’s paper of record, had taken the lead on both fronts.

  Hinky Dink, now worried about sagging sales, assumed charge of the tickets himself and recruited Ike Bloom to help. First Ward henchmen again made the rounds, carrying rolls of tickets and lists, deciding who could be hit up and how hard:

  “Mercy, a hundred tickets!” moaned a madam on the list. “Why, it was only seventy-five last year—and my girls don’t go anymore, it is getting that common!”

  “You’ve got two more girls here than you had last winter, ain’t you,” the collector pointed out. “Well, then.”

  And the madam found a hundred tickets clenched in her fist.

  “Seventy-five tickets?” asked a businessman, sitting in his Loop office. “Your ball is getting pretty rough, and the newspapers—”

  “You got a permit for a sign last year,” the collector interrupted. “Didn’t you? Huh?”

  He did indeed, so seventy-five tickets now cluttered his desk.

  Ladies of the Levee, at the behest of Hinky Dink, circulated the Union Stock Yards, flashing legs and waving reams of tickets at meatpackers. One hundred more reported for “nightly duty” in the back room of a saloon owned by Jim O’Leary (son of Mrs. O’Leary of Great Fire fame) on South Halsted Street, advising cattlemen in town for the stock show that they really must stay just a bit longer, check out the fabulous Derby at the Coliseum on the fourt
eenth. Bundles of tickets were shipped to red-light districts across the country, where sympathetic madams doled them out to harlots and loyal clientele.

  And someone harassed the reverend of Garfield Boulevard Presbyterian Church, the latest reformer to join Farwell’s anti-Ball efforts, leaving two menacing telephone messages and mailing eight letters, each written in the same firm, bold hand:

  If you dare to go to the First Ward ball

  Or write a single lying word about it this year

  A bomb will be put under your house and you

  and your family will be blown up.

  Mark what we say; this means business.

  —Pro Bono Publico

  Five days later, on December 13, after Farwell failed to get a last minute court injunction, and after newly elected state’s attorney John Wayman pleaded with Bathhouse John to compromise with the reformers (“We won’t let parents bring their children,” was the alderman’s response. “Yah, even preachers can come—if they behave themselves and promise to stick by the rules”), a bomb did go off, not beneath the home of any clergyman, but at the building where every Chicago madam, whore, pimp, and degenerate would gather the following evening.

  At 8:20 on the evening of December 13, a dreadful boom rattled the Coliseum. The building’s night custodian and his crew of thirty men were cleaning up debris from the international dairy show, and several of them went hurtling to the floor. The custodian and a dozen others who were still standing ran from the Coliseum into its annex. No windows remained along the front wall, just jaws of glass gaping open inside the frames. The storeroom was a confusion of worthless scraps. Entire sheets of roofing steel were shorn off and tossed fifty feet.

  The men navigated the rubble and found that an adjacent junk shop was also demolished. The bomb had been planted in a narrow passageway separating the two structures, one hundred feet from where the cleaning crew, just a moment earlier, had been pushing mops and brooms. The explosion rocked the Oregon apartments and the Midland Hotel on Michigan Avenue, shattering every window in the rear of both buildings, as well as homes and storefronts along Wabash Avenue two hundred feet away. Pictures dropped from walls, vases slid from mantels. A man was catapulted from his kitchen chair. A ramshackle boardinghouse, across from the junk shop, rattled loose from its posts and now listed to one side.