by Kevin Murphy
In the milieu of Gilded Age prostitution, the young girls, their boyfriends, and countless hangers-on made up the half-world. Sometimes a woman of the demimonde was said to be a demimondaine. Enjoying the fast life gave these young voluptuaries all the reason for living that their twisted souls needed. One day, they were working as clerks in a state or government office building, and the next, they were part of the demimonde. Laissez le bon temps roullez!
Even in the demimonde, there existed an established order. A Hartford man visiting New York in the mid-1880s saw a lovely young woman, walking with her maid. The woman wore a muted cotton suit with lovely gloves and boots. She wore her hair in a severely pulled back style, leading the man to think of her as prudish. When he mentioned the young woman to friend, he was stunned to find out that she was a queen of the demimonde. Apparently “it was the new order of things in the half-world, that the flaunting, loud style was left to those of the lower degree . . . the correct thing was to ‘assume a virtue if you have it not’ as the style most attractive.”[82]
In the years just following the Civil War, Jennie McQueeney had done her time as a prostitute and itched to open her own house. She had become friendly with one of Hartford’s native sons, Tom Hollister, who rented 165 State Street—the “old Bange mansion”—built in the early 1820s. While the building was no longer a virgin, it still maintained a proud façade, embellished with seven distinctive white pilasters. Beginning with Tom Hollister, a number of different proprietors ran bagnios on the upper floors. (Landlords often rented the first floor to shopkeepers or storeowners, while they let the upper floors to madames and proprietors of bordellos.)
Originally from Amsterdam, Frederick Bange was one of Hartford’s most successful West Indies traders in the first few decades of the nineteenth century. Like every other man in the West Indies trade, Bange shipped lumber, produce, and livestock to the islands and brought back sugar, molasses, rum, salt and other tropical cargoes. Bange became a partner in the firm of Wolcott, Kilbourn & Bange of 22 Ferry Street, but left Hartford around 1827 and died in New York four years later.
Tom Hollister ran a quiet, but very profitable house. On the south side of State Street, from the Old State House to the Connecticut River,
practically every other building did business as a house of ill fame. State Street—and all the streets leading off of it—comprised Hartford’s tenderloin. In and among these pleasure palaces, there were some places the police never raided—or so it seemed. Tom Hollister’s house figured high on that list. The Hartford police’s “hands off” policy was partly enlightened self-interest inasmuch as the city didn’t want streetwalkers—and the police didn’t want to deal with them. Keeping prostitution indoors and out of sight pleased the city fathers enormously.
In truth, Tom Hollister’s special treatment derived from another source. Hollister had astonishing pull because his father had been a New York City policeman. So said, Hollister received the treatment reserved for a member of the family, as opposed to that of men like Joe Weeks, Woodruff Cadwell, or Dorrance Cadwell—all notorious proprietors of houses of ill repute. Tom Hollister made the proper payments and gave generous gifts to all the officers at Christmastime. In short, he acted like a gentleman and was treated like one.
Another iniquity loomed. While saloon owners had to pay $450 for their annual license, proprietors of bawdy houses didn’t pay a thing. The city couldn’t charge the proprietors of brothels a licensing fee because their businesses were illegal. Naturally, this inflamed the saloonkeepers—and may have accounted for a few backroom operations that otherwise might never have come into existence. In a couple of American cities, the common councils tried to skirt this dilemma by registering the prostitutes (and collecting fees). However, this created a messy system where the prostitutes developed a sense of entitlement and the initiatives eventually collapsed. Hartford, like the overwhelming majority of cities in the country, didn’t even attempt to register prostitutes, but used raids to gather “taxes” or “licensing fees.” Tom Hollister had good business sense and understood the nuances of the system completely. By paying for the privilege ahead of time, he managed to avoid any arrests for prostitution or keeping a house of ill repute during more than thirty years in the business.[83]
Meanwhile, Billy Prentice, died suddenly in 1873. Not given to excess sentimentality, Angeline quickly set her sights on the professional baseball player, Joe Start. In the early going, Angie exhausted her huge collection of wiles, but still couldn’t get Joe Start to the altar. He simply didn’t want to get married. As one of the biggest stars of baseball’s early years, Joe Start has always been considered the premier first baseman of the nineteenth century. This allowed him to bounce from team to team, postponing his retirement seemingly forever. Joe Start began his baseball career in 1871 with the New York Mutuals. When the National League was formed in 1876, Joe Start played only one year for the “New York Mutuals of the National League.” He played with the Hartford Dark Blues for the 1877 season and then joined the Chicago White Stockings in 1878. After a single year in Chicago, he played seven seasons for the Providence Grays and managed one final year with the Washington Senators in 1886. At the close of his career, he was a forty-three-year-old man who had been playing a little boy’s game since his days in short pants.[84]
Joe Start probably had some misgivings about Angeline’s past, but Angie came across as an “effervescent little woman.”[85] Angie could scheme with the best of them, but everyone always loved her in the end. Though contemporary accounts say that they married in 1885—Joe Start’s last season with the Providence Greys—the evidence is murky. In the 1900 census records, the Starts said they had been married for fifteen years, leading people to believe they tied the knot in 1885. That said, there is no 1885 marriage certificate for them anywhere. Deepening the mystery, there is an April 25, 1893 marriage license on file in Jersey City, New Jersey, recording the coupling of Joseph Start, born in 1845, and Angeline Creed, born in 1839. It is worthy of note that these are not common names and the birth dates on the New Jersey document are the ones the couple always used. Moreover, the birth dates maintain the six years age difference that Angeline preferred over the truth.
One suspects that the mysterious 1885 marriage never took place and Angeline finally won over her man in 1893—as they say, in one of Joe’s weaker moments. Despite all the drama, the marriage proved a good one. The Starts ran the Hilltop Hotel until the early 1920s and were together for fifty-eight years.[86] When they sold the Hilltop Hotel, the new owners quickly changed the sign to Lakewood Inn. The Starts moved into Providence, first renting an apartment on Tucker Avenue, then another one on Haskins Street. Bridget “Angeline” Creed Prentice Start died on February 27, 1927. Her death certificate says eighty-eight, but she had already hit ninety. Joe Start died a month later, on March 27, 1927. He was eighty-two.
It would be unfair not to recognize that Bridget Creed chose one of the toughest businesses on earth, but still managed to survive. History is replete with the stories of beautiful young girls who chose life in the demimonde because it offered them excitement and more money than they could make in any other industry. For a woman to work in the prostitution business, and make it to the age of ninety, must be deemed something of a miracle.
In early 1867, Tom Hollister began to invest his ill-gotten gains in real estate. His first piece of property rested at the foot of Kilbourn Street near the river. In several different purchases, he picked up 41 and 43 Kilbourn Street plus some adjoining property. The only places closer to the Connecticut River were shacks rented to the black families of town. Since the spring freshet usually flooded everything up to Front Street, real estate on Kilbourn Street attracted few takers. During the good months, the properties on Kilbourn Street were rented to marginal citizens who could barely hold a job. But Tom Hollister may have had some inside information. He may have heard about the new Fenwick Hall beach community at Old Saybrook and the Connecticut Valley Railroad, who
se tracks would run along the river beginning in 1871. The two projects would complement one another and the Valley road would need the land at the foot of Kilbourn Street. That said, with Tom Hollister’s contacts in the police department, a tip seems likely.[87]
In 1867, Jennie McQueeney began renting a house from Tom Hollister at 43 Kilbourn Street. Once upon a time, Kilbourn Street sat in the thriving business center of the city. In and among the ship’s chandleries and other maritime businesses, sailors, fishermen, ferrymen, raftsmen, and bargemen crowded Kilbourn, Ferry, Charles, and Commerce Streets from early morning until late at night. However, that was a half century ago. Now, individuals and families, who could barely meet society’s minimum requirements, rented places on these streets. Owing to the abysmal location, Jennie McQueeney hoped the police would choose to ignore her. She undoubtedly felt that since Tom Hollister owned the property, she might be able to ride his coattails with the authorities. But at twenty-five-years-old, Jennie Taylor still had a lot to learn about the police department and city government in general.[88]
On Wednesday night, May 13, 1868, the police raided a number of houses of ill fame on Kilbourn Street. They arrested Jennie Taylor for keeping a house of ill repute at 43 Kilbourn Street. Since the average madame at this time was over thirty and had eight years in the business, for Jennie Taylor to start her own house at twenty-six, with only four or five years experience, was astounding. Jennie had undoubtedly learned plenty under the tutelage of Angeline Prentice, but now she would learn even more through the school of hard knocks. In police court, Judge Monroe Merrill gave her a fine of $20 plus court costs. William Case, Jennie’s runner, was fined $40 plus court costs for frequenting a house of ill fame.[89] By 1868, the fines in police court for prostitution matters varied from paltry to crippling.
Another madame caught in this raid, Mary Ann “Polly Ann” Atherton, kept a house of ill repute—the “Bluebird”—at 32 Ferry Street. The judge—at the urging of her attorney—adjourned her case until the following Monday, undoubtedly to give Mary Ann’s attorney time to jawbone the prosecuting attorney into a deal. Mary Ann Atherton, considered the most notorious madame in town, muddied up the police blotter badly—and for forty years![90]
Oddly enough, about a year before the Hartford police arrested Mary Ann Atherton in 1868, an out-of-town newspaper, The Marshall City Republican, of Plymouth, Indiana, writing an article about Mary Ann, claimed that “The oldest and most notorious keeper of houses of ill fame in Hartford, Connecticut has professed religion and now is a regular at church and an ardent Christian; and, as a consequence, one of the lowest sinks of iniquity . . . has been broken up.” This lovely story must have stiffened the spines of all the God-fearing people of Plymouth, Indiana, but it bears no resemblance to Mary Ann Atherton’s appalling police record or her future plans as a madame in Hartford.[91]
In 1870, Jennie McQueeney came up with a different plan. The arrest for keeping a house of ill repute clearly bothered her, so she incorporated some fancy footwork into her business model. She rented a house at 21 Sheldon Street, another of Hartford’s “old yellow blocks,” sporting a lousy reputation. Sheldon Street, part of the Third Ward, sat just south of the infamous Fifth Ward—alternatively called “The Ward” and “Pigville”—where she had been working. A couple of doors away, at 11 Sheldon Street, lived a pistolmaker, Joseph Bullock, with his wife, Mary, and his two-year-old son, John. Even as Jennie Taylor decorated 21 Sheldon Street, she realized that confusion could work to her advantage. If she called herself Josephine Bullock—“Jo” Bullock, for short—the police might raid the wrong house and leave the area scratching their heads. (Newspaper compositors sometimes set her name as “Joe;” other times, they went with “Jo.”)[92]
So now Jennie McQueeney—as Jo Bullock—had a new bawdy house on Sheldon Street—very close to Main Street—and, in theory, a new lease on life. As a twenty-eight-year old madame, she wasn’t much older than the girls who worked for her. The oldest, Janice Wheeler, pretended to be a twenty-four-year-old drape-maker from Massachusetts. The youngest was eighteen-year-old Estella Smith, a milliner from Massachusetts, and two years older was Minnie White, a milliner from New York. All the girls could read and write, and Minnie White’s parents were the only ones who were foreign born. When Hartford native, Dr. William W. Sanger, gathered the data for his groundbreaking study of the oldest profession in 1855, he found that 61 percent of the 2,000 prostitutes studied were foreign born. About six decades later, when George J. Kneeland repeated the study in 1912, he found that only 28 percent of the prostitutes were foreign born. Therefore, at the tail-end of the Gilded Age, it was perfectly in line with these numbers that Hartford prostitutes . . . “were typically young, native-born, white women from working- or lower-class backgrounds.”[93]
Though nothing tells the whole story, we must go further here. A number of studies of young prostitutes have shown that 26 percent were feeble-minded. Working from the opposite direction, only 16 percent of participants were shown to be normal, both mentally and physically. In the main, of all the prostitutes that had been studied at institutions up to the First World War, 33 percent appeared to be below par mentally.[94]
Unfortunately, Jo Bullock’s exquisite planning did little more than waste time. One of the little covenants associated with the police allowing the brothels to operate openly was the understanding that the keepers of the houses would be scrutinized endlessly. Regardless of understandings and unwritten laws, on August 25, 1870, Grand Juror Thomas McManus issued a complaint against four proprietors of houses of ill fame. Jo Bullock was not exactly rising in her chosen field, as her three co-defendants were considered very low-class operators indeed—Joe Weeks, Clarinda Crowell and Kate Lamphere. Clarinda Crowell and Kate Lamphere, though not nearly as bad as Joe Weeks, were embarrassments to the other madames.[95] They both worked out of State Street “joints” and both had been in trouble with the law before, principally for violations of the liquor laws.[96]
Luckily, all parties involved caught a break because Attorney Samuel Jones appeared out of nowhere. Jones was a high-priced criminal attorney who appeared regularly in cases involving prostitution—perhaps because he thought it lunacy to blame only the women. Jones asked the court, “Why are these girls here? Who has gotten them into lives of shame? There are merchants, merchants’ clerks, and men holding respectable positions in the community who, in a measure at least, give support to these places. It is not the unfortunate women themselves that are alone to blame; men have a responsibility in this matter. And if the court is to expand the law, let the frequenters of these houses understand the punishment they may receive as well as the girls visited.”
To which Grand Juror Thomas McManus replied, “Let brother Jones and myself be included with the rest” (laughter). Attorney Samuel Jones could be an aggressive advocate, but he also had a good sense of humor.[97]
Jo Bullock wasn’t the only person having trouble. The Hartford police had their own problems. On May 30, 1871, the police commissioners voted to suspend Chief of Police Walter Chamberlin, without pay, for writing scandalous and indecent letters, for publishing a libel, and for conduct unbecoming the chief of police. Captain Charles Nott took over Chamberlin’s duties temporarily.[98]
The allegations against Chief Chamberlin were nonsense. Chamberlin knew his correspondent was a prostitute, so naturally he wanted everything in writing. In the letters, he simply tried to arrange with this woman from New Britain a convenient time for her to reclaim a gold watch that she had left at the police station in a complicated collateral arrangement for a friend. One newspaper jokingly wrote later that Chamberlin “made indecent proposals to an indecent woman.”[99] Chamberlin, a Democrat, should have been among friends, because the police board was top-heavy with Democrats, including Mayor Charles R. Chapman—one of the most partisan mayors ever elected to the top job in Hartford. Unfortunately, even Chamberlin’s fellow Democrats on the board felt that the chief deserved suspension, pending s
ome sort of investigation.[100]
While the police board dawdled in dealing with Chief Chamberlin’s suspension—and how the whole matter would be resolved—on September 1, 1872, they were forced to suspend Captain Nott, a Republican. Now Lt. Packard, a Democrat, was running the police department![101]
Captain Charles Nott’s problems were potentially more serious than those of Chief Walter Chamberlin. Attorney Henry Selling, acting for a Market Street madame, Hannah Coogan, leveled the charges against Captain Nott. Henry Selling’s complaint respectfully submitted—
That Charles D. Nott, captain of police and acting chief of police, has in the execution of his office been guilty of improper, immoral, illegal, and tyrannical conduct in that Nott did, for purposes of personal revenge, on or about the fifth day of June 1871, enter into a conspiracy . . . to charge Mrs. Hannah Coogan of the crime of keeping a house of ill fame, of which offense Coogan is innocent . . . and for that purpose did pressure [Elias Kohn] . . . to commit the crime of fornication with a woman whose name is unknown to your petitioner, upon the premises occupied by Coogan.
The charges were spurious. Even Hannah Coogan’s attorney later admitted that he had been hoodwinked and didn’t know that his client was a madame. Be that as it may, the complaint called for Captain Nott’s suspension until a hearing could be held.