in any direction without seeing some evidence of it. Street walkers
parade the most prominent thoroughfares, dance houses and low concert
halls flaunt their gaudy signs in public, and houses of ill-fame are
conducted with a boldness unequalled anywhere in the world. The evil is
very great, and is assuming larger proportions every year, and I now
make the startling assertion, that the prostitutes of Chicago are as
numerous as the members of the largest denomination of the city. From
the most reliable information obtainable there are about six hundred
houses of prostitution and about two hundred and fifty assignation
houses in Chicago. The number of women known as prostitutes, and those
who “receive” privately, and associate with women whose character
is beyond reproach, is astounding. Of the number of women who resort
to prostitution as a means of securing money, or from other motives,
who yet manage to maintain positions of respectability in society, of
course no estimate can be made. They are, unfortunately, very numerous,
and are said by persons in position to speak with some degree of
accuracy to equal the professionals in numbers.
These things are sad to contemplate and disagreeable to write about.
The whole subject is unsavory; but no picture of Chicago would be
complete did it not include an account of this terrible feature of city
life, which meets the visitor at almost every turn; and it is believed
that some good may be accomplished by stripping the subject of all its
romance, and presenting it to the reader in its true and hideous colors.
The professional women of Chicago represent every grade of their
wretched life, from the hells of the fashionable houses of ill-fame to
the slowly dying inmates of a Dearborn street brothel. They begin their
career with the hope that they will always remain in the class into
which they enter, but find, when it is too late, they must go steadily
down into the depths, closing their lives with a horrible death and a
pauper’s grave.
The so-called first-class houses of Chicago are conducted with more or
less secrecy. It is the object of the proprietress to remain unknown
to the police as long as possible, but she finds at last that this is
impracticable. The sharp-eyed patrolmen soon discover suspicious signs
about the house and watch it until their suspicions are verified,
when the establishment is recorded as a house of ill-fame, and placed
under police surveillance. These houses are not numerous, however,
and not more than thirty in the entire city. Large rents are paid for
them, and they are generally hired furnished. They are located in some
quiet, respectable portion of the city, and outwardly appear to be
simply private dwellings. It often happens that the neighbors are in
ignorance of the true character of the house, long after it is known to
the police. It is a notorious fact that some of our finest avenues and
boulevards are infected with the infamous “houses.” The proprietress
is a woman of respectable appearance, and passes as a married woman,
some man generally living with her, and passing as her husband. This
enables her in case of trouble with the authorities, to show a legal
protector and insist upon her claim to be a married woman.
The inmates are women in the first flush of their charms. They are
handsome, well-dressed, generally refined in manner, and conduct
themselves with outward propriety; rude and boistrous conduct, improper
language, and indecent behavior are forbidden in the parlors of the
house, and a casual visitor passing through public rooms of the place
would see nothing out of the usual way.
It is difficult to learn the causes which induce these women to adopt
a life of shame. No reliance whatever can be placed upon the stories
they tell of themselves. It cannot be doubted, however, that they
are generally of respectable origin, and some of them are otherwise
fitted to adorn the best circles of society. Some are young women who
have been led astray by men who have failed to keep their promises
to them, and have drifted into sin to hide their shame, others are
wives who have left, or have been deserted by their husbands; others
still have deliberately chosen the life, gratifying their love for
money and dress; and others again appear to be influenced by motives
of pure licentiousness. Whatever the cause of adoption of such a
life, it is evident they have seen better days. They are still fresh
and attractive, and for a while pursue their gilded career of sin and
shame, hoping that they may be fortunate enough to retain their place
in the aristocracy of vice. The proprietress will have no others than
attractive women in her house; and as soon as the inmates begin to show
signs of the wretched life they lead, as soon as sickness falls upon
them, or they lose their beauty and freshness, she sends them away, and
fills their places with more attractive women. She has no difficulty
in doing this, for she has her agents on the watch for them all the
time, and unfortunately new women are always soliciting admission to
such places. Besides this, the proprietress knows that her patrons soon
grow tired of seeing the same women in her establishment. She must make
frequent changes to satisfy them, and she has no scruples about turning
a woman out of her doors to begin the descent of the ladder of shame.
Therefore, about one or two years is the average term of the stay of a
woman in a fashionable house. A few do remain longer, but the number is
so small as to constitute scarcely an exception to the general rule.
As long as her “boarders” remain with her, the proprietress treats them
fairly enough, apart from the fact that she manages to get out of them
all the money she can. The women earn large amounts of money, but a
considerable portion of this goes for board and other expenses in the
house, and their extravagant habits and tastes exhaust the rest. They
save nothing, and if taken sick must go to the Charity Hospital for
treatment. Their dream of saving money lasts but a short time, and they
leave the fashionable houses penniless.
The visitors to these houses are men of means. No one without a
full pocket can afford such indulgence. Visitors are expected to
spend considerable money for wine, which is always furnished by
the proprietress at the most exhorbitant prices, and at a profit
of about 200 per cent. A large part of her revenue is derived from
such sales, and she looks sharply after this branch of the business.
The shamelessness with which men of standing and prominence, many
of whom are fathers of families, resort to these houses and display
themselves in the parlors is astounding. Indeed, the keeper of one of
the most fashionable houses boasts that married men are her principal
customers. Sometimes the visitor desires that his visits shall not be
known. For such persons there are private rooms, where they are sure
of seeing no one but the proprietress and the woman for whom their
visit is intended. These houses are largely attended by strangers
visiting Chicago; these, thinking themselves unknown in a large city,
care little for privacy, and boldly show themselves in the general
parlors. The proportion of married and middle-aged men among them is
very great. You will find among them lawyers, physicians, judges of the
courts, members of congress, and even ministers of the gospel, from
all parts of the country. This may seem a startling assertion, but the
police authorities will confirm it. If the secrets of these places as
regards their visitors could be made public there would be a terrible
rupture in many happy families throughout the land, as well as in the
metropolis. Men who at home are models of propriety, seem to lose all
sense of restraint when they come to Chicago. These same gentlemen
would be merciless towards any female member of their families who
should display a similar laxity.
To return to the women: the inmates of the first-class houses rarely
remain in them for more than two years. Their shameful and dissipated
lives render them by this time unfit for companionship with their
aristocratic associates. The proprietress quickly detects this and
remorselessly orders them from her house. She knows the fate that
awaits them; but her only care is to keep her house full of fresh and
attractive women.
The Next Step.
Having quitted the fashionable house, the wretched woman has no
recourse but to enter a second-class house, and then go down one grade
lower in vice. The proprietress is cruel and exacting, and boldly robs
her boarders whenever occasion offers. The visitors are more numerous,
but are a rougher and coarser set than those who patronized her in the
first stages of her career. Money is less plentiful, her life is harder
in every way, and she seeks relief from the reflections that will crowd
upon her in drink, and perhaps to drunkenness adds the vice of opium.
Her health breaks fast, what was left of her beauty when she entered
the house soon fades, and in two or three years she becomes unfit to
even remain in a second-class house. She is turned into the street by
the proprietress, who generally robs her of her money and jewelry, and
sometimes even of her clothing, save what she has on at the time. The
wretches who keep these houses do not hesitate to detain a woman’s
trunk, or other effects, upon some trumped-up charge of arrears or
debt, when they have no longer any use for her. The poor creature has
no redress, and is obliged to submit in silence to any wrong practiced
upon her.
The woman whose career opened so brilliantly is now a confirmed
prostitute and drunkard, bloated, sickly and perhaps diseased; she is
without hope, and there is nothing left. It is only four or five years,
perhaps less, since she entered the fashionable boulevard mansion,
beautiful and attractive in all the freshness of her charms, and little
dreaming of the fate in store for her. She is not an exception to
the rule, however. She has but followed the usual road, and met the
inevitable doom of her class.
Going Down Into the Depths.
From the second-class house the lost woman passes into one of the
bagnios of the “red-light district” or some similar place. Here her
lot is infinitely more wretched. Her companions are the vilest of her
class, and the visitors are among the lowest order of men who cannot
gain admittance into places such as she has left. She finds herself a
slave to the keeper of the house, who is often a burly ruffian, and
even more brutal than a woman would be in the same position. She is
robbed of her earnings, is beaten, and often falls into the hands of
the police. She becomes familiar with the courts, the bridewell, and
whatever of womanly feeling remained to her is crushed out of her. She
is a brute simply. She remains in Green, Peoria or some other like
street for a year or two—human nature cannot bear up longer under such
a life—and is then unfit to remain even there. Would you seek her after
this you will find her in the terrible dens and living hells—even in
places of infamy and degredation that a former Mayor was compelled to
stamp out, so utterly repugnant was it to even the lowest instincts of
man. To the burning disgrace of Chicago, some of these pestiferous
vice-breeding places are allowed to exist by the “stink-pots” who
govern the city. These poor, vile, repulsive women, slowly dying from
their bodily ailments, and the effects of drink and drugs, have reached
the bottom of the ladder, and can go no lower. She knows it, and in a
sort of dumbly, desperate way, is glad it is so. Life is such a daily
torture to her, that death only offers her any relief. She is really a
living corpse. The end soon comes. Some die from the effects of their
terrible lives, and oh! such fearful deaths; and others are killed
or fatally injured in drunken brawls which so often occur in this
locality; and others still seek an end of their miserable existence in
the dark waters of Lake Michigan.
I draw no exaggerated picture of the gradual but inevitable descent of
a fallen woman in Chicago. Every detail is true to life. Seven years is
the average life of an abandoned woman in the great city. She may begin
her career with all the eclat possible, she may queen it by nature of
her beauty and charms in some fashionable house, at the beginning,
and may even outlast the average term at such places; it matters not;
her doom is certain. The time will come when she must leave the
aristocracy of shame, must take the second step in her terrible career.
Seven years for the majority of these women, then death in its most
horrible form. Some may, and do, anticipate the end of it by suicide;
few ever escape from it.
“The wages of sin is death.” Some cherish the hope that after a few
years of pleasure, they will reform; but alas, they find it impossible
to do so. A few, a very few, do escape, through the aid extended to
them by the “missions,” but they are so few that they but help to
emphasize the hopelessness of the effort. The doom of the fallen woman
is swift and sure! “The wages of sin is death.” Once entered upon a
career of shame, the whole world sets its face against her. Even the
men who associated with her in her palmy days would turn a deaf ear to
her appeals for aid after she has gone down into the depths. I would
to God that the women who are about to enter upon this terrible life
could walk through the purlieu of the “red-light” district and witness
the sights that I have seen there. I would they could see the awful,
despairing faces that look out from the bagnios of that terrible
neighborhood, and realize that, however brilliant the opening of their
career may be, this must be the end of it. It is idle for them to hope
to escape the doom of the fallen woman. “The wages of sin is death.”
Would anyone know what sort of death? Let her come to Chicago and see.
Many of the women of the town never pass through the various gradations
of vice that I have described.
Many never see the inside of a fashionable house of ill-fame, but begin
lower down the scale, as inmates of second-class houses, as waiter
girls in concert saloons, as inmates of dance houses—which were so
prevalent in Chicago years ago—or as street walkers. These meet their
inevitable doom all the more quickly, but not less surely.
The city is full of people, men and women, whose object is to lead
young girls into lives of shame. They watch the hotels, depots and
large stores and lure respectable girls away on various pretexts. Every
inducement is held out to working girls and women to adopt the vile
trade, and many fall willing victims. Hundreds of these women are from
rural districts of adjoining states. They come to the city seeking
work and are sometimes successful. Often, however, they can find
nothing to do, and when poverty and want stare them in the face, they
listen to the voice of the tempter, become street walkers or inmates
of houses of ill-fame. Sometimes, while they are in the first days
of their success, they will write home that they are pursuing honest
callings in the city and earning respectable livings, and will even
send money home to their deluded parents. After a while the letters
cease—the writer has gone into the depths; they are lost!
It is, indeed, strange to see how these women will cherish the memory
of their homes even in the midst of their shame. They will speak
at the pleasant home, or their aged father and mother, in accents
full of despair. Often these memories will cause them to burst into
uncontrollable weeping. If one should try to take advantage of this
moment of tenderness, and urge them to make an effort to reform, they
are met with but one answer: “It is too late.”
The keepers of the bagnios of the city use every means to lure young
women into their power. Some years since, a girl who had managed to
escape from a notorious brothel, told the following story:
“I watched the advertisements in the papers to see something that would
suit me. I learned that a Mrs. G—— of —— street wanted two girls to
do light chamber work, and I hastened there, with a friend, in quest
of the position. We were received by Mrs. G——, who began to explain
to us the nature of the duties we were expected to perform. It was an
awful proposition. She kept a house of ill-fame. We fled. I was much
discouraged. Not so my friend, who told me there was another lady down
the street, who was really in want of a girl to help her. We went to
her house. It was another of the same sort; but after I got in there
my clothes were taken from me, and the woman furnished me with some
sort of silk, trimmed with fur, and tried to make me act like the
other girls in her establishment. I remained there from Saturday to
Wednesday night, because I could not get away. I had no clothes to
wear in the streets, even if I should succeed in reaching them, which
was impossible, and the woman who kept the house was angry with me,
brutally so, because I would not comply with her wishes. I and another
young girl tried to escape by the back yard. The other girl got away,
but I was discovered by the keeper, who drove me back into the house
with curses. On Wednesday evening I was made to sit at a window and
call a man, who was passing, into the house. He turned out to be a
detective, and arrested me, and was the means of my freedom!”
The police are often called upon by relatives of abandoned women to
assist them in finding them and rescuing them from their lives of
shame. Sometimes, in the cases of very young girls, these efforts are
successful, and the poor creature gladly goes with friends. Others
again refuse to leave their wretched haunts; they prefer to lead their
lives of infamy.
One night a young man called at the “Apollo,” a theatre and dance-house
on Third Avenue—now Plymouth Place—and inquired for his sister Dora,
who, he had learned, was in that place. The young lady came out,
while he was speaking, in company with a well-dressed man. Instead of
complying with her brother’s entreaties, she entered a carriage, with
her escort, and drove to a nearby police station to seek relief from
her brother’s importunities. The brother followed, told the sergeant
the story of his sister’s shame, and asked him to keep her there until
he could summon the father. The sergeant complied with the request and
the father soon appeared. He was a respectable oil manufacturer and had
lavished wealth and fine dress upon the wayward child. He confirmed
his son’s statements, and appealed to his daughter to go home with
him. She answered him flippantly, and the indignant father cursed her
for her sin, and would have attacked the man with her had not officers
prevented him. The woman was locked up for the night in the station
house, and brought before court the next morning. The father urged
that she should be sent to some reformatory establishment, but the
woman met him with the statement that she was twenty-three years old,
beyond legal control, and therefore entitled to choose her own mode of
life. Her plea was valid, and the magistrate was unwillingly compelled
to discharge her from custody, though he endeavored to persuade her
to return to her family. She then left the court room, was joined
by several flashily-dressed women, and departed in high spirits,
completely ignoring her relatives.
One of the worst classes of abandoned women consists of street walkers.
On any of the business streets and even in outlying districts these
women are very numerous. They are generally well-dressed, and, as a
rule, are young. They pursue certain regular routes, rarely pausing,
unless they “pick-up” a companion, when they dart off with him to some
side street. On the brilliantly lighted thoroughfares the police do
not allow them to stop and accost men, but they manage to do so. The
neighborhoods of the “hotels” and the places of “amusement” are their
principal cruising grounds, and their victims are mainly strangers to
the city. Many of them have regular employment during the day, and ply
their wretched trade at night to increase their gains. They accompany
their victims to the “bed-houses” which are conveniently at hand, and
if an opportunity occurs will rob him. They frequent the dance halls
and concert saloons; in fact, every place to which they can obtain
admission, and lure men into their company. As a rule they are vicious
in the extreme, drink heavily, and in some cases are fearfully diseased.
In former years many of the street walkers were in the regular employ
of the “panel-houses,” which were numerous at that time. These houses
were kept by men, who were among the most desperate roughs in Chicago.
The woman is either mistress of one of these men, or in his pay. The
method pursued was as follows: The street walker secures her victim on
the street, or at some concert hall, or dance-house. He is generally
a stranger, and ignorant of the localities of the city. She takes
him to her room, which is an apartment provided with a partition in
which there is a sliding door or panel. The confederate of the woman
is concealed behind the partition, and at a favorable moment slides
back the panel, enters the room and strips the clothing of the victim
of the money and valuables contained in it. If discovered, the panel
thief endeavors to disable the victim. The latter is no match for
his assailant, and is from the first at a disadvantage. The thief is
desperate, and is generally armed. He does not hesitate at anything,
and, if necessary, will murder the victim, the woman assisting him in
the fearful work. Then the body is left until near morning, when it is
placed in a wagon engaged by the thief, carried to the river or lake,
and then thrown into the water. Generally the robbery is accomplished
without the necessity of resorting to violence. The victim either puts
up with his loss in silence, or reports it to the police. The records
at headquarters contain reports of numerous robberies of this kind.
So the evil went on. Strangers in this city incur terrible risk in
accompanying street walkers, and women whom they meet on the street,
at concert and dance halls to their homes. In nine cases out of ten,
robbery is certain. Murder is too often the result of such adventure.
Truly, Solomon was wise indeed when he wrote: “He hath taken a bag of
money with him—with her much fair speech she caused him to yield, with
flattering of her lips she forced him—he goeth after her straightway,
as an ox goeth to the slaughter, or as a fool to the correction of the
stocks; till a dart strike through his liver; as a bird hastened to the
snare, and knoweth not it is for his life—her house is the way to hell
going down to the chambers of death.”
Chicago’s Crowning Curse
The curse of Chicago is the vile, repugnant saloon. No one can realize
the picture of its rottenness all at once; everything is deceptive
about it, and it takes time to grasp the magnitude of this hydra-headed
monster. But by degrees the immensity and appalling environments
assert themselves, and the beholder, while visiting these pest holes,
feels and knows that he is in close proximity to the devil. The very
atmosphere seems laden with his satanic majesty’s presence, which
permeates every nook and corner of the iniquitous place. Here, above
all other places, the devil’s work is supreme. Awful, indeed, is the
anguish of the mother as she looks upon the face of her ruined son or
daughter.
Oh! Chicago! big, bustling Chicago! Storms and tempests may rage
around, and the sun’s fierce rays descend upon your brow; you may be
victorious in commercial conflict, but sink into insignificance when
facing the greatest of social evils.
There are, however, no rivals among these dangerous dives, which stand
out like projecting rocks as pitfalls for the weak.
There are about 7,000 saloons in Chicago. At each of these places
liquors are sold by the single glass or drink. They represent every
grade of drinking establishments, from the magnificent Buffet to the
“Barrel-houses.” All these places enjoy a greater or less degree of
prosperity, and the proprietors grow rich, unless they cut short their
lives by becoming their own best customers. For alcoholic and malt
liquors served over the bar hundreds of thousands of dollars are spent
daily. It is estimated that in the vicinity of the board of trade
7,500 drinks are disposed of every day. The “bulls and bears” require
heavy stimulants to keep them up to their exciting work, and their
daily expenditure for such purposes is about $2,500. Probably this may
account for some of the queer scenes to be witnessed in the pit.
The quantity of beer consumed in the city is about twelve times
that of whisky, and is the most common of the alcoholic drinks. The
true-blooded German beer drinker will consume from one to two dozen
glasses of his favorite beverage in twenty-four hours and his American
and other imitators follow closely in his footsteps.