Prostitution in the Gilded Age

by Kevin Murphy

  The city now had a high school, and its sons went to Yale, Trinity, or Wesleyan, depending on their religious persuasions. Right after mid-century, the city was a manufacturing colossus, but now banks and insurance companies were foremost in the pantheon of financially successful enterprises. By 1890, Hartford Fire, Aetna Fire, Phoenix, Connecticut Fire, National Fire, Orient Insurance, Hartford County Mutual Fire, and State Mutual Fire competed for business. In a period of just thirteen months—from October 1873 to November 1874—Aetna, Hartford and Phoenix were called upon to contribute to policyholders in Chicago and Boston more than $9 million, or 200 percent of their aggregate capital. This highlights an important point: Hartford did not become the insurance capitol because it had the most or the biggest companies, but because these firms paid their claims.[267]

  Besides fire insurance companies, Hartford had nine life insurance companies adding nicely to the city’s strong financial base. Additionally, the city had seventeen national and state banks with total deposits of more than $15 million. In short, wealth infused the Capitol City, which was poised for a powerful burst of growth fueled by its financial and manufacturing sectors. But had Hartford gotten past the growing pains that all successful cities must endure? Or was the Charter Oak City’s coming-of-age chapter yet unwritten?[268]

  Hartford had made huge strides in some areas, but hadn’t paid attention to problems in others. In 1860, there were only ten houses of ill fame—and the idea of a whole demimonde subculture didn’t seem possible. By 1900, there were thirty brothels and a demimonde spreading steadily across the city, influencing in a profound way, the young people. In a half century, vice had risen much faster than the population and taken on the inertia of a Cunard liner. How would Hartford continue its tremendous lunge forward when vice was growing so rapidly?

  On April 23, 1895, a group of boating enthusiasts assembled at the State Street blacksmith shop of Joel Alexander to form a yacht club. Thirty men joined together that night, and with a crude constitution, they adopted the name Hartford Yacht Club. In the weeks and months that followed, they elected officers and began the search for a permanent clubhouse.

  For their Commodore, they chose William Watrous, the president of William Rogers Manufacturing Company on Market Street. William Miner, the proprietor of the American Hotel, was chosen Vice-Commodore, while Ernest Way, a retired merchant, was appointed Rear-Commodore. Worthy candidates were also chosen for Fleet Captain, Secretary, Treasurer, and Fleet Surgeon. Two of the six directors worth mentioning were Charles Northam, the wealthy wholesale grain dealer and cofounder of Smith, Northam and Company, and John H. Hall, Vice-President of Colt Patent Fire-Arms. The group included clerks, blacksmiths, and successful businessmen across the spectrum. For many of them, the only thing they had in common was a love of boats.[269]

  They attracted fifty members the first year, including young men from wealthy Republican families on the west side of town. The members immediately began planning regattas and even Middletown and Old Saybrook stations of the Hartford Yacht Club. Thinking small wasn’t their game!

  Despite all the fun, the location appeared to be one of the biggest drawbacks of the Hartford Yacht Club. In order to get to the river, the members had to walk down State Street—right through the heart of the tenderloin. While the tenderloin did not necessarily intimidate the members, the whole East Side was a rough place. Every other building on the south side of State Street was a bordello, and the inmates, as a group, bored easily. For lack of better entertainment options, the girls hung out the windows of the different houses and kibitzed with one another—perhaps the way different species of birds chatter to one another in the wilderness.

  The old yellow block at the corner of State and Commerce Streets comprised the greatest collection of fallen women; and, they were of many ethnicities—French, Italian, German, and Irish. On the warmest nights, the doorsteps and windowsills were full of half-clothed prostitutes. It became common to hear one’s name called out when passing the window-sitting inmates, who spoke with a lilt that betokened acquaintance. Somehow or other, the girls found out the first names of the yacht club members. The prostitutes then teased the young men. A young prostitute might spot a banker’s son and say, “Same time Saturday night, Freddie?” Of course, if Freddie had his girlfriend with him, there might be some explaining to do![270]

  Let’s not kid ourselves, this was happening all over the country. In Sacramento, California, police arrested three madames—Genie, Julia, and Leone—for violating the ordinance prohibiting the occupants of houses of ill fame from posing in the windows and doorways. Talk about laws that are difficult to enforce![271]

  As time went on, the members of the yacht club whose parents had summer places at Fenwick, decided to build a station at Folly Point within walking distance of their family’s baronial summer cottages. Morgan Bulkeley’s two sons—Morgan, Jr. and Houghton—had joined the Hartford Yacht Club, as had James Goodwin’s boys—Frankie and James—and a number of other members of the Fenwick community. In February of 1900, the Hartford Yacht Club raised $5,000 to build Fenwick Station. Morgan Bulkeley leased—probably in fee simple—several acres on Folly Point to the club; the members, of course, made ex-Gov. Morgan Bulkeley an honorary member. By July of 1900, the Fenwick Station was completed. Besides dockage, the Folly Point station had kitchen, bath, and bunk facilities for those who did not have cottages at Fenwick.

  From 1880 to 1888, Morgan Bulkeley had served as Hartford’s mayor and he loved taking long walks about town. While enjoying these reveries, he smoked big, black Havana cigars that became his trademark. Ambling along, he constantly stopped to talk with friends. Nothing happened in the city without his knowledge. In politics, one of his best friends, Republican Gideon Winslow, ran a butcher shop on the corner of State and Front streets—the true heart of the tenderloin. When Morgan Bulkeley served as governor, from 1889 to 1893, Bulkeley appointed Gideon Winslow his dairy commissioner—though Winslow didn’t want the job and rarely showed up for meetings. If Morgan Bulkeley wanted information about the tenderloin, he picked up the phone and talked to Gideon Winslow. Bulkeley knew all about the hotels and saloons with backroom operations, as well as the houses of ill repute—and they gave him pause.

  Bulkeley also knew about the gambling dens, but he couldn’t care less about gambling because he spent so much time betting on the trotters at Charter Oak Park in West Hartford. Bulkeley didn’t only bet the horses, he sat on the board of directors of Charter Oak Park and judged races when he could. He loved horses and participated in racing any way possible.

  Prostitution was different. The Bulkeleys were a religious family. When they first arrived in Hartford in 1847, the Bulkeleys walked from their rented rooms over the Aetna Fire Insurance building in Statehouse Square down to South Church at the corner of Buckingham Street. Later, their walk was cut in half when they joined the Pearl Street Congregational Church. Judge Bulkeley died in 1872 and Morgan took over his father’s house on Washington Street. At that time, he returned to the South Congregational Church. The Bulkeleys could trace their roots all the way back to Rev. Peter Bulkeley who establish the Town of Concord, Massachusetts, with the blessings of Boston’s Rev. John Cotton—credited with naming the faith “Congregationalism.”

  Beyond their religious status, the Bulkeleys were patriots. Throughout American history, the Bulkeleys always fought in the nation’s wars. Hartford native J. P. Morgan and his first cousin, James Goodwin, paid substitutes to take their places in the Civil War. Meanwhile, Frankie Goodwin entered Divinity School, securing a deferment just months before the shelling of Fort Sumter. Judge Bulkeley’s three sons—Charlie, Morgan, and Billy—served in the war. In 1864, Capt. Charles Bulkeley died on Battery Garesche, a heavy-artillery fortification defending Washington.

  In one last way, Morgan Bulkeley was quite different from the other captains of industry in Hartford and a truly admirable human being. Bulkeley had no prejudices of any kind toward other people. His home
swarmed with Irish immigrants, working as domestic servants, seamstresses, and cooks. His stable hands and coachmen were Irish immigrants. At Aetna Life, Morgan Bulkeley hired Pat McGovern, a genius with numbers. McGovern was born in County Cavan, Ireland and never got past sixth grade. Pat McGovern also became Morgan Bulkeley’s right-hand man in politics and his bagman as well.

  One of the Irish seamstresses in the Bulkeley home became so close to Morgan’s mother, Lydia Bulkeley, that the woman was buried next to Lydia in the family plot at Cedar Hill Cemetery. Bridget McCormick received the same lavish head stone as the rest of the family, which read: “Bridget McCormick, Born in Ireland; Friend And Confidante Of Lydia Bulkeley For Over Forty Years.” A visitor to Cedar Hill Cemetery would have to look long and hard to find such a thing in the family plots of other wealthy Hartford families. Morgan Bulkeley, Billy Bulkeley, and their sister, Mary Bulkeley Brainard, made these arrangements.[272]

  While other presidents of large companies in town had white chiefs of staff, Morgan Bulkeley hired Charles Custis, a mountain of a black man from Norfolk, Virginia, who was born into slavery in 1859. Custis wandered to Hartford with a minstrel show and stayed because of a winter blizzard. Soon, he became the night elevator operator at Aetna Life on Main Street (corner of Atheneum Way). Morgan Bulkeley admired Charles’s courtly manners and sound judgment, so he made Custis his chief of staff. Custis stayed with Aetna Life for sixty-two years and worked directly for Morgan Bulkeley from 1888 until Bulkeley’s death in 1922. From 1922 to 1950, Custis served as chief of staff for Bulkeley’s nephew and successor, Morgan Bulkeley Brainard.[273]

  Meanwhile, Edward and Adelia Habenstein always catered Morgan and Fannie Bulkeley’s parties at their home on Washington Street. Edward Habenstein was a German immigrant, who with lightning speed became the most prominent confectioner in town. Habenstein threw the most lavish tasting parties at his shop on Pearl Street whenever he came up with a new medley of pastries, cookies, chocolates, tarts, cakes, pies, sweets, and other melt-in-your-mouth delights. He was a brilliant caterer, restaurateur, and impresario, as well as a gifted confectioner. Besides catering for the most prominent families in Hartford, the Habensteins catered the Governor’s Balls at Foot Guard Hall on High Street too.

  During the decade before it burned, the Hartford Bridge had become problematic. The bridge had seven spans resting on six piers, but the third span from the west had weakened so much that it bowed toward the south, showing a “deviation of two feet.”[274] There were two sets of trolley tracks traversing the bridge, but the sections were all in such poor condition that the bridge commissioners would not allow two trolley cars on the same span at one time.”[275]

  As the bridge burned, many people suspected arson, but it seemed far more probable that some cigar or cigarette started the blaze as smokers cast their butts away recklessly. Alternatively, it could have started from the sparks given off by the trolley tracks or the electric wires overhead. Had a persistent danger resulted in the complete destruction of the bridge?

  The loss of the bridge caused a great deal of inconvenience and business suffered to some degree. Besides the obvious vehicle and passenger traffic, the electric companies that strung their lines atop the bridge would suffer lost revenues.[276] The old bridge that had connected Hartford with eastern Connecticut since 1818 went up in a sheet of flames and the stone piers alone remained. All of electric service east of the river ended, and the Manchester, East Hartford, and Glastonbury trolley cars stood where they were when the wires broke. The electric lines were worthless until power could be restored.

  The city had bought out the owners of the bridge in 1889 and made the passage free. Now the bridge commissioners wasted no time addressing a myriad of problems. The first step was to have the Berlin Iron Bridge Company build a temporary bridge just north of the old piers. Scheduled to begin right after the fire, Atty. Charles Cole of the Berlin Iron Bridge Company called to say that the work would not be feasible “until the state paid what was already due.”[277]

  The excitement of the bridge fire didn’t last long. Soon, two ferries—the Schuylkill and the F. C. Fowler—were brought upriver and placed in service. At the same time, a new controlling authority was organized—The Connecticut River Bridge & Highway Commission. The work associated with building a new bridge and sculpting new approaches in two towns seemed so massive that it could never be done without a governing body. From the very start, it was understood that ex-Gov. Morgan Bulkeley would head the commission. Bulkeley, the President of Aetna Life Insurance Company, had enjoyed elective office, but he had also earned the reputation as a man who could get things done.

  On the flip side, Morgan Bulkeley had a nasty status in political circles. Throughout the United States, he had the notorious reputation as a vote buyer. That said, once he got into office, his administrations were notable for a complete lack of corruption. Bulkeley had to buy votes to get into office because of a weak resume. As a boy, he was a poor student and never even graduated from high school. His time in the Civil War appeared lackluster too, highlighted by three months of idleness in Suffolk, Virginia. He never smelled powder. When Judge Bulkeley died in 1872, Morgan Bulkeley ascended to the presidency of Aetna Life and developed into an excellent businessman and a gifted administrator.

  In spite of Morgan Bulkeley’s complete lack of racial or religious prejudices, he harbored a quiet bias against the demimonde. During his years as mayor, he watched the number of brothels grow yearly. The city’s biggest and most important commercial strip, State Street, had become overrun with headstrong madames, preening young prostitutes, and sporting houses that ran the gamut from lavishly-appointed pleasure palaces to repugnant sinks of iniquity. Bulkeley knew all about the girls hanging out the windows of the houses, embarrassing his sons and their friends as they walked through the tenderloin to the Hartford Yacht Club. While mayor, he saw brazen madames wage war on good police officers. In his first year as mayor, Morgan Bulkeley watched as the perfidious Carrie Farnham brought charges against Officer Lawrence Keegan after a legitimate raid on her State Street bordello. Since Carrie Farnham intended to call respectable family men to the stand—men who could never show their faces in court—the matter embarrassed everyone and put Mayor Bulkeley in an ugly bind. Ultimately, the council had to dismiss Lawrence Keegan from the police force. Yes, Morgan Bulkeley had a bias against the half-world.[278]

  On July 3, 1895, the new Bridge & Highway Commission met in Morgan Bulkeley’s office at Aetna Life on Main Street. Among other things, the commissioners drew lots to determine each member’s length of service and officially elected Morgan Bulkeley president of the new body. The following Tuesday, Bulkeley and three of his fellow commissioners got in his carriage and drove down Morgan Street to inspect the remains of the old bridge. From the start, there were two camps, headed in opposite directions. One group wanted to investigate the fire and attach some kind of responsibility for the destruction, while a second cluster wanted to skip the post mortem and move forward. Since Morgan Bulkeley headed this latter group, there never was an investigation of the fire. Instead, the commissioners spent all of their time building a temporary bridge.

  On June 11, 1895—twenty-five days after the bridge fire—the temporary bridge opened for electric trolley cars, teams of horses, and pedestrians. With a little luck, maybe the temporary bridge would last until the new Hartford Bridge was finished. Wishful thinking aside, this temporary bridge carried the seeds of its own destruction. Obviously, a temporary bridge had to be built, but the commission erroneously decided to use as little money as possible on the temporary bridge, saving the lion’s share of their funds for the permanent bridge. As a result, the first temporary bridge lasted a scant seven months.

  By December 1895, the Connecticut River was completely clogged with ice, jeopardizing the peers of the temporary bridge. By December 12, the safety of the temporary bridge turned so questionable that the Berlin Iron Bridge Company had to put “defenders” up on t
he pilings to protect them from the ice blocks. Teams were not allowed to use the bridge, only passengers.

  Just before Christmas, 1895, a 200-foot section at the middle of the bridge gave way. Weakened by high water and the awful pressure of the ice flow, the compromised pilings collapsed. With much creaking and groaning, the large center span wrenched itself away from its supports and toppled into the river. All traffic between Hartford and East Hartford stopped.[279]

  At this point, the Bridge & Highway Commission voted not to build another temporary bridge, but to put everything into a permanent bridge; hopefully, it could be built in record time. As if to punctuate this decision, in March 1896, heavy rains and warm weather swelled the rivers and streams in the state to a fifty-year high and the remainder of the temporary bridge disappeared downstream.[280]

  Good arguments were probably made for the grand push directly to the permanent bridge, but the public would have none of it. They rounded on Morgan Bulkeley like jackals. Bulkeley and his commissioners had to reconsider. After chasing bids for a month, the contract for a new temporary bridge went to the Berlin Iron Bridge Company for $37,000.

  Work on the second temporary bridge began on May 1, and the bridge opened for use on June 12, 1896. Some guardrails were yet to come, and the piers were still to be ballasted with stone, but the bridge could withstand traffic. The structure consisted of nine spans erected on eight piers, plus two abutments.[281]

  People were in carriages, on foot, bicycles, carts, and trolley cars, moving east with great delight. The crowd bubbled in a jubilant mood, since it had been thirteen months since fire swept away the old bridge. Alternatively, there existed a dreary emptiness at the base of Ferry Street, where the ferryboats Nellie, Schuykill, Fowler, and Cora had worked doggedly to meet the needs of people. At 2:35 p.m., Morgan Bulkeley and the city’s elected officials participated in a grand ceremony. With no little fanfare, they cut a ribbon at the approach of the temporary bridge. Histrionics and hoopla aside, the ceremony was shot through with irony: all this pomp and circumstance for a temporary bridge that the public expected to be needed for less than a year? Of course, only in a perfect world would that have been the case, but such were the expectations.