movies offer the big night out. How much longer, in the face of TV
competition, remains to be seen. At the present time, attendance runs
100,000 a day. Most film houses in white neighborhoods are restricted
to whites. Negroes have their own. One of the most famous is the
Howard, in the NW colored section, which often augments its shows with
top-flight Negro stage shows. At such times the place is apt to draw
more white customers than black. Washington has its hep-cats. Many of
the younger social and diplomatic sets get a bang out of hot licks.
These people who willingly sit next to dark folks in the Howard refuse
to permit them in their own theatres or restaurants. That’s typical
Washington thinking.
The high-class shopping street--the Fifth Avenue--is Connecticut
Avenue, running from La Fayette Square, past the Mayflower Hotel,
and out into Cleveland Parkway, past residential hotels and swank
apartments.
There are plenty of first-grade shops here, with chic imports,
expensive antiques and other gewgaws to lure the feminine dollar.
Despite the great wealth of the District and the presence of an
international set, all is not pheasant for these merchants. New
York and the magnet of its style-conscious stores is too near. Even
Baltimore gets some of the trade which can’t find enough smart things
at home. But a curious reverse process has been taking place in recent
years. Whereas many Washingtonians travel to New York to shop and
to dine, a couple of Washington’s best-known institutions have been
reaching out and taking over some of the same places in New York which
Washingtonians travel 225 miles to patronize.
Garfinckel’s is Washington’s high-fashion department store. A couple of
years ago, its proprietors bought out the ancient and aristocratic New
York men’s furnishing house, Brooks Brothers. Within a few months, the
Garfinckel octopus reached out and gobbled up one of New York’s oldest
and best-known Fifth Avenue stores, de Pinna.
While this was going on, a couple of smart Swedes, who had made a
tremendous success at Olmsted’s Restaurant, a popular eatery with fine
food in the NW business section, bought New York’s oldest and most
famous restaurant, Luchow’s, on 14th Street, one of the last places
left in the country where dining is still a fine art.
Reference to the appendix will show many other Washington eating
places, some good, some bad and not all recommended, but most of them
are in NW.
One of the best-known and best is Harvey’s, on Connecticut Avenue, near
the Mayflower. This is J. Edgar Hoover’s nightly eating place when he
is in Washington. Like most Washington restaurants, Harvey’s has been
in business long. It specializes in sea food. The room does a sell-out
business and it’s almost impossible to get a table at the height of the
dining hour. Service by ancient Negro waiters is slow. Best time to
eat is after 9, because most Washingtonians dine early; 6 o’clock is
the standard time. Many start at 5. Those are the homely habits. Some
restaurants close at 8, and a few at 7.
Julius Lully, who owns Harvey’s, is the butt of J. Edgar’s robust sense
of humor. Once Hoover had a batch of wanted-fugitive-identification
“fliers” made up showing Lully in his World War I private’s uniform.
He had them nailed up on posts for miles around Lully’s country place.
When the hick sheriff locked up the restaurateur, who sputtered and
gave Hoover as a reference, J. Edgar said he had never heard of him.
On another occasion Hoover sent a letter, purporting to be from Oscar
of the Waldorf, threatening to sue Harvey’s for appropriating his
salad dressing. Lully hired a lawyer and told him to offer the Waldorf
$2,500, but J. Edgar advised him it wouldn’t be enough.
The Occidental is hoary with age and legend. Pictures of presidents,
cabinet officers and generals cover the walls. This was our favorite,
but the Occidental has succumbed to the new boom. An officious head
waiter, with a typical Prussian attitude toward customers, lined us up
like prisoners of war, then heaped contemptuous abuse when we dared
question his excellency about the possible chances of being seated
and served. Washingtonians take it. They are used to being kicked
around. Senators or cabinet officers they may be, but at heart most are
grass-rooters overawed by the big city. We didn’t take it. We walked
out. We are used to consideration and hospitality, spoiled by the good
manners of heartless Manhattan.
When Major L’Enfant plotted the city, he provided that the streets
should run in three directions, north and south, east and west, and
diagonal. Where the diagonal avenues, which are named after states,
cross the rectangular streets, generally numbered or alphabetically
lettered, there are wide circles or broad squares. One of those is
Lafayette Park, known to all Americans because it is the square in
front of the White House. Here, less than a hundred yards from the
President’s front door, is one of the most sordid spots in the world.
At night, under the heroic equestrian statue of Andrew Jackson and in
the shadow of the foliage of overhanging trees, there is a constant and
continuous soprano symphony of homosexual twittering.
The President knows about it; he reads the papers. The police
superintendent knows about it. Congress, which governs the District,
knows about it. Recently, the secretary of a Senator was arrested
there, charged with indescribable misbehavior. He was acquitted by a
jury. There are few convictions.
Lafayette Park is one of the showplaces of NW. Another is Thomas
Circle. Years ago, the circle and all the streets leading into it
were lined with mansions. Now you can pull up in your car in front of
a newsdealer there, at any hour, day or night, and place a bet on a
horse, buy a deck of junk or get a girl--$10 asking price, $5 if you
put up a struggle.
Another NW cynosure was Dupont Circle. It was social. There were the
homes of such as Princess Eleanor Patterson. Now they’ve been razed or
cut up because of taxes, death benefits, estate distributions and the
high cost of maintenance. Those that still stand have been turned into
embassies, headquarters of national organizations, and rooming-houses
in between. One triangular corner was torn down to make way for the
Dupont Plaza, a glassy and glossy apartment hotel, swell for lobbyists,
flashy girls and 5-percenters. What happened to Dupont Circle hit all
the way out the length of 16th Street, which runs off from the White
House, and Massachusetts Avenue. These two long, broad avenues run
through all NW. They are the “Ambassadors’ Rows.”
Of the sixty embassies, legations and chancelleries, almost all are
on one or the other. Both have a liberal sprinkling of organization
headquarters, such as unions, trade associations and eleemosynary
institutions, with the ever-present furnished-room coops and apartment
hotels.
The complexion of NW is changing, growing darker. The area always had
a large Negro section. There are no racial zoning laws. Restrictive
covenants cannot be enforced. There are no longer any racial boundary
lines and some people think that is dandy. They have been in the
driver’s seat since 1933.
You will find colored people living within a half a block of an embassy
or around the corner from a new luxury apartment house. There is no
reason why this should not be so, but the property-owners and the white
residents do not agree. As the process continues, NW grows less swank
and less desirable, while many of its rich residents move into Maryland
suburbs such as Chevy Chase and across the river into Virginia.
The Negroes and other specific phenomena of NW will be considered in
specialized chapters.
4. NOT-SO-TENDER TENDERLOIN
The District’s “red-light” region may be the largest on earth. That is
because almost all of it is such, neither restricted by law, custom nor
local habit to a particular part of town. But, more than any other, NW
is the Tenderloin, in some ways more blatantly open than ever was New
York’s infamous Satan’s Circus or Chicago’s 22nd Street.
Of all places, you would think Washington would be the last location a
practical, professional prostitute would pick to pitch her camp. With
so many more women than men, so many dames lonesome and far from home,
on the eager upbeat for a meal, a drink or even a kind word, you’d
figure mathematically, psychologically and pathologically that this
would be a ghost town for the trollops.
Part of such traffic is always supported by tourists and strays.
Washington has a large and constant visitation of these, but many
other places have more and have virtually expunged street-walkers and
entirely eradicated the sweatshops where such operators do homework.
Yet in Washington they flourish, though they are supposedly verboten,
and the Weary Winnies parade the pavements. It made a couple of graying
Chicago boys homesick for their childhood.
Lorelles--as the Parisians call them--are in the Washington tradition,
claim the capital by long-established squatters’ rights, almost by
right of discovery.
The same stagecoaches which carried the first Congressmen to Washington
150 years ago brought also the first whores. They and their descendants
have been here ever since, an integral, important segment of the
population.
For the first 113 years they were protected by law. Segregation in the
District was expunged by act of Congress in 1913, in the first year of
the presidency of the school-teacher from Princeton.
In the early days of the Republic, whoring flourished as an essential
and honorable trade. Transportation facilities were so primitive,
many Congressmen and officials from backwoods sections had trouble
getting to Washington themselves and would have found it impossible
to transport their women. Trollops became an adjunct to legislation.
Without them, it is doubtful whether a quorum could have been
maintained for transaction of public business, which might not have
been a bad idea sometimes.
The last compound of the trade was in what is now the Federal Triangle,
between Pennsylvania Avenue and the Mall, from 10th to 15th Streets.
The Willard Hotel, the Treasury and the White House are nearby--which
made it convenient for all concerned.
In the Civil War, General Joe Hooker’s division was encamped in
Washington to protect the President. It was bivouacked in what later
became the official restricted district. One story, accounting for
the term “hooker,” now worldwide, ascribes its origin to the habitat
of local prostitutes, who gathered near the camp to pick up soldiers
and remained after the soldiers left. When local blades went out for a
night of hell-raising they said, “Let’s go over to Hooker’s.”
Another version ascribes the origin of the word to the Hook, in
Baltimore, the town’s sailor section, where tarts picked up sea-faring
men.
In the absence of a determination by H. L. Mencken, we will remain
neutral as to the competing claims of the two neighboring cities,
except to say that the residents of either ought to know what they’re
talking about, because there are so many hookers in both.
Leaving out all occasionals in Washington who do it for fun or because
of temporary monetary embarrassment, and counting only pros--those
who have no other form of livelihood, some say there are at least ten
thousand floozies actively in full-time business at this moment. We
were solicited by half that number.
Most of these girls work as loners on the streets or in the cocktail
lounges and bring their earnings back to their pimps. Some function
through call services, via a headquarters phone-number, a cocktail
lounge bartender, or a switchboard operator in a cheap hotel.
Many are tough and predatory. A 20-year old youth was stabbed and
slashed after he turned down a street-corner proposition at Third and
E. He fled when the woman drew a knife, but two colored men caught up
to him and gave him the business.
Until recently, Washington was loaded with whore-houses, was in fact
the last large city where this ancient and storied institution existed.
That’s because it was necessary to take care of the transients and
the male government employes and officials away from their wives. The
war and the post-war housing shortage virtually put the final kibosh
on such dives here as it had done a few years earlier in other towns.
Property became so valuable, landlords could do better by running it
legitimately.
We spoke to a police captain who told us that obstacles were no longer
placed in the way of the vice squad when it came to raiding these
premises; but it is impossible to keep the girls off the streets
and out of the hotel lobbies and cocktail lounges where they had
transferred their business addresses.
Under the law of Washington, as well as all other municipalities,
vice-squad detectives are forbidden to partake personally of forbidden
wares while on raids. If they do, they have no case, for a prosecution
then becomes “entrapment” and they are agents provocateurs.
During a recent raid, an operational plan was drawn up in advance. One
of the cops, the handsomest, made the pick-up, and his confederates
were supposed to crash in five minutes after he entered the room, which
would give both time to disrobe, and that is enough evidence to make a
collar.
But the raiders were late. The honest, hardworking cop went through the
motions of undressing. Finally he had to get in bed with the wench; 15,
20, 30 minutes passed, and still no raiding party. He couldn’t stall
her off any more.
By the time the doors were busted in, the evidence was null and void.
The figures in this chapter refer solely to white tarts. The black
sisters are mentioned in another one.
Health records indicate that 50 percent of Washington’s white
street-walkers are infected with venereal disease. With the colored
ones, it goes up to 99 percent.
Many of the white women who solicit on the streets are young; it takes
some time for these girls, fresh off the farms, to get the nerve to
hustle in high-class hotels. Police have arrested girls 14, 15 and 16
hawking their bodies on the public highways. Many of these children,
who should be home doing their schoolwork, left the hills when they
were 12, after first having been raped by a local lout, usually a
relative.
This story is not apocryphal. A very young street-walker was formally
charged by the arresting officer with “practicing prostitution.”
“That’s not so, your honor,” she piped up. “I don’t practice any more.
I know how now.”
The going rate for whores, the pick-up kind, is $20 and down. Pretty
fair ones will take $10, and many will come along for $5. These prices
are low compared with the current tariffs in other large cities, the
reason being the extraordinary amateur competition.
Many of the girls roll their customers, mugg them or use knockout
drops and then go through their pockets. But Washington’s prostitutes
are not so hard-hearted as the street sirens in New York, where it is
commonplace for one to be taken to a hotel-room and wake up doped and
robbed, but never loved.
Many Washington nymphs conscientiously give value received.
In other cities the cops take stern measures against the untrustworthy
whores. It is considered the lowest form of larceny to take advantage
of a man with his pants down. New York police recently sent a young
married woman to the penitentiary for five years for just such an
outrage, but in Washington the appointed judges, many unrealistic
and some downright dishonest, condone and encourage such unethical
practices.
David L. Miller, 43, a resident of the Soldiers’ Home, picked up
Alma Lee Dugent and took her to a 16th Street, NW, room. He said the
33-year-old woman robbed him of $2 in bills and a $30 wrist watch while
he lay asleep. The woman pleaded guilty of petty theft.
“This man is as guilty as the woman,” thundered the judge. He ordered
Miller to pay half of Mrs. Dugent’s $25 fine.
At this writing there are few really big madames operating in
Washington. One of the last big operators was Carmen Beach, deported to
Spain. But Nancy Pressler, who figured prominently in the conviction
of Charles “Lucky” Luciano, international Mafia overlord now in Italy,
when she turned state’s evidence against him in New York, is in
business in the capital.
Though many of the girls work as independent contractors, except for
the inevitable pimp, they are loosely organized for emergency purposes
in the event of arrest, through bail-bond brokers and lawyers who
specialize in underworld cases. The law staff of Charles Ford is
frequently in court defending intercepted prostitutes, who usually get
off with a small fine or a warning.
Many singed doves get their weekly check-ups from a physician in the
1700 block of K Street, who charges them $5 a visit. They learn about
him through their community of interests.
We have studied commercial vice in most large cities. It is as a
rule confined by public tolerance to certain streets or sections.
When we wrote about New York and Chicago we were able to name these
thoroughfares and state exactly what kind of merchandise was for sale
in each. That is not so in Washington, where the city seems to be one
huge red-light range, with tramps falling over themselves trying to
grab unattached men.
We made a contact on the southeast corner of 14th and New York Avenue,
NW, in front of the cigar store, with a young pedestrian who told
us her name was Sue. She came originally from Florida and had been
hustling in Washington for four years. We asked how to get in touch
with her again and she said, “Just call the Astoria Hotel and ask the
operator for Sue.” When we inquired her last name she said she was the
only Sue there. The Astoria is a cheap hotel on 14th Street.
About two weeks later we were walking through the plush lobby of the
new Statler Hotel and saw Sue ensconced in one of the comfortable
armchairs. We stopped to watch. The slender blonde leaned over to a
gent in another chair and asked for a light. In a couple of minutes
they struck up a deal and walked into the elevator together. When she
came down half an hour later we asked her how much she got.
“Ten bucks,” she exclaimed, “and the tight-wad stiffed me out of luck
money.”
When we first came to Washington to work on this book almost everyone
we spoke to, except cops who knew better, said we wouldn’t find any
professional whores, because why should anyone pay when so many
government girls are easy?
We took some of these friends--government officials, members of
Congress, newspapermen and others, on our tours. And this is what we
showed them:
We were solicited by two girls at Jack’s Grill, 3rd and G Sts. Three
broads came up to us at 4th and G NW and asked us if we wanted company.
We also saw girls bracing strange men at the Purity Lunch and Grill,
3rd and G NW, and at Mitchell Grill on the same corner. Mitchell’s is
the hangout for precinct cops who saved its license after charges.
A white prostitute tried to date us at the Mai Fong restaurant, in
Chinatown, and two other girls spoke to us at the China Clipper on 14th.
We could have made pick-ups--$10 asked, $5 bid--at the corner of 14th
and R. We were approached by girls at the Casablanca Tavern, 421 11th
St., NW, and the Covered Wagon, 14th and Rhode Island. The manager
of an all-night diner back of the Statler offered to get us a bed
companion for $15 if we bought a bottle of Seagrams for $8.50--cheap
when you consider it was after hours and he didn’t have a license.
Few if any restaurants and bars employ B-girls. These are women who in
Chicago circulate from table to table and hustle drinks on commission.
They are illegal in the District, though quite common in Maryland, near
the border and in Baltimore.
The femmes fatale who frequent Washington joints usually do so in
free-handed reciprocity. The management steers lonesome men to the gals
who hang around regularly. They, in turn, bring their customers in for
drinks or tell them that’s where they can find them. A saloon which
gets a reputation as the hangout for the best-looking dames finds its
gross up.
When a girl closes a pitch, she usually has a place to take the guy,
if he can’t or won’t bring her to his own room. Most Washington
hotels, including the largest, are very broadminded about this, and if
you don’t make noise they don’t make trouble. But this situation is
changing as the hotels are getting more crowded and more independent.
Few small hotels, even if so inclined, properly police their guests.
Some of the girls take their clients to the New Colonial and the Fox.
A former madame named Jackie is now running a rooming-house at 703 Mt.
Vernon, where some of the girls steer their customers. You can usually
find seven or eight girls hanging around Ivy House Inn, on New York
Avenue.
Among the most active hookers are Kay Saunders and Peggy Proctor, both
29, who were once arrested while entertaining 15 male customers. At
this writing they are still in business on the second floor of a house
in the 2300 block, Lincoln Road, NE.
One of Washington’s most famous characters is a toothless old hag known
only as Diane. She hangs around 14th and Florida. Diane reminds old New
Yorkers of the fabulous Broadway Rose, who used to panhandle in front
of Lindy’s until she was carted to the bug house.
But, unlike Rose, Diane is an out-and-out hustler. Once upon a time,
they say, she was a good-looker. But her main trouble seemed to be that
she liked her work too much to commercialize it.
We spoke to a man in his late 30’s who remembered her when he was a
school boy. He said the kids used to pick her up because she would take
“small change.” Now some of her old customers, matured and prosperous
men of the world, occasionally drive by her corner to stake her to a
hand-out.
All she can get now are colored men, “winos” and dregs. But she refuses
to retire.
We picked up a girl by the name of Doris who had just been discharged
from the Federal Hospital for narcotic addicts in Lexington, Kentucky.
The story she told us illustrates how girls are recruited for
prostitution in the District.
Doris said she lived in a small town in West Virginia. She and a girl
high-school mate occasionally did a little free-lance whoring on
Saturday nights, on call of a bell-boy in the local hotel. Once he sent
them to a room occupied by two men. One, whose name was Grigsby, tried
to sell the girls on coming to Washington. He said he’d put them in a
swell house. The teenagers were afraid of the big city. Grigsby told
them the landlady of the house was in the next room and called her in.
She was a motherly sort. They consented to come with her.
They found themselves in the house of a madame named Billie Cooper,
on 7th St., in the 1000 block. Doris told us she was an instantaneous
success in the Cooper menage. She was only 17, fresh, buxom and
bucolic. Madame Cooper’s clients were charmed. After she’d been in
the house a few weeks, the madame asked Doris if she’d like to get a
“kick.” She produced a hypodermic needle and gave the child a shot
in the arm. Doris liked the sensation, wanted more. This went on for
several weeks, Doris said, and every day Billie Cooper increased the
frequency of the shots.
One day Doris woke up, nauseated and ill.
Billie Cooper exclaimed, “You’re hooked!”
She informed Doris she had become a dope fiend, that henceforth Doris
must pay for the shots.
The girl went into debt, though she was taking in up to $50 a day and,
no matter how much she made, the dope always cost more. She knew no
one else who sold it. She was truly hooked, which was Billie Cooper’s
original purpose, to keep the young girl in her joint and take her
money away from her.
Billie Cooper’s clientele was mostly Chinese. When U. S. narcotics
agents raided her establishment at 5 A.M., gaining entrance with a
ladder borrowed from a fire-house, so two T-men would get into Billie’s
bedroom before she had a chance to flush the narcotics down the drain,
they found several Chinese customers in the place. While the search was
still on, 15 more came to the door and were admitted; of these two were
officials of the Chinese embassy.
In the trial it developed that Billie Cooper, who was sentenced for
violation of the narcotics laws, was charging Doris $7 a deck for
heroin, which she bought at half that price from Chinese peddlers. The
F.B.I. proceeded against Grigsby for white slavery violation and he,
too, was convicted.
Doris swore to us that she was off the stuff now. She said she was
living with a Chinaman who worked in a gambling house in Chinatown.