session of the City Council, he will not be forced to travel through
dark and deserted streets. For the immediate vicinity of his home
is the bright light section of Little Italy, where neon-lighted
restaurants run all night, and serve liquor in tea-cups, and some
openly in orthodox set-ups.
Kid Julian runs one such place nearby, a mob hangout.
It is interesting how Baltimore’s Mayor was chosen to head the
Conference on Crime over mob-fighting Mayors Bowron, of Los Angeles,
and Morrison, of New Orleans. We know the inside. We covered the
inaugural meeting in Washington at which all problems were solved in
two hours, after President Truman opened it with a pep talk in which
he said there’d be no crime if everyone read the Bible and stopped for
traffic lights.
“Look at me,” he said. “I am the most important man in the world. Yet I
instruct my chauffeur to stop at all red lights.”
That night the President’s car went through 17 en route to a banquet at
the Statler.
Mayor D’Alesandro’s honor came after he read an intelligent paper to
the delegates. It came as a surprise that D’Alesandro had such a fine
grasp on the subject. It came to him that way, too.
You see, when he read it, it was the first time he had seen it. It was
written for him by a Baltimore newspaperman.
The location of the deadfalls in Baltimore reminds us of Galveston,
where the gambling and red-light districts, controlled by
Syndicate-allied bosses Sam and Rosario Maceo, are also contiguous to
the offices of the law enforcement authorities.
The Miami Club is on the main floor of a building which advertises
“Rooms Upstairs.” It has some of the most disgusting acts we have ever
seen. Girls in the show will sit out with you on request. Every time
you pay for your round of drinks--they require you to pay after each
round--the sitter asks you for a dollar tip. The girls who work in the
show get no commission on these drinks. But if they don’t have a drink
in front of them all the time they risk being fired. Their base pay,
as “entertainers” runs from $20 to $35 a week. The rest they make from
the tips and from deals arranged for after work. Some of the girls in
the show aren’t bad lookers. We spoke to one young Puerto Rican, named
Aida, who could have gone places in New York if she had any spunk or
talent. Here all she did was walk around the floor without a stitch on.
Off her it looked good.
The m.c. at the Miami, when we got nauseated there, was a fairy. Some
of the older dames in the show are lesbians. Many fags frequent the
place. The girls told us all that freely, though not free.
The rest of the customers are servicemen, riffraff, sight-seers and
drunks. One seldom brings his wife or girl friend to this place. One
of the nights we were there we saw two policemen and a lieutenant in
uniform, sitting at a table drinking, surrounded by girls. At the
next table was a wizened little old fellow tossing dough away on the
broads. We figured him for a chump. But he turned out to be a retired
Baltimore police captain who quit so rich that he can afford to spend
$500 a night, that way.
Many of the lower-paid employes of the British and French embassies in
Washington hang out at the Miami. Occasionally some of these girls are
brought to Washington when low down high-jinks are wanted. The Miami
advertises regularly in the Washington dailies.
The waitresses at the Miami seem to be independent contractors. Tables
are not assigned. Customers are continuously solicited for orders by
dozens of different ones. Each carries a purse and you settle with
her after every round. She pays cash at the bar for it. It seems any
girl who wants to can come in and hustle drinks this way without being
hired. Some wear slacks, others street clothes, and a few sport cheap
evening gowns. They will sit with you with no coaxing. One of our
waitresses sat down and said, “My tables always buy me a drink.”
At the Miami Club we often saw men seated with girls from the show or
waitresses and making obscene passes--not in booths, right out on the
open floor.
But the ultimate in lowdown shows goes to Kay’s, on Frederick and
Baltimore Sts., across from the Oasis. There is nothing like Kay’s
anywhere, and we’ve seen them all. The dance-floor is about 15 feet
square, all tables on the floor. Practically every girl in the show
works naked and does raw routines within reaching distance of those at
ringside. The women, with words and motions that wouldn’t be allowed in
Fultah Fisher’s boarding-house, solicit men from the floor. One of the
most startling dirty acts we’ve ever seen was done by a woman billed as
Moana. She introduced it as her “Whore Dance.”
Here are some of the sights of East Baltimore Street:
At Number 116, a couple of doors from the Emerson Hotel, is an
amusement arcade where the kid pick-ups come. Those who like them so
can walk off with 13-year-olds.
The first thing you notice is the profusion of stores and shops and
stands selling “sanitary rubber goods” and other immediate accessories.
In the lobby of the Globe Burlesque Theatre is a sign reading,
“SALAMI--RUBBER GOODS.”
A sign in the window of 424 East Baltimore reads “TRY OUR
HAMBURGER--SANITARY RUBBER GOODS--SHOOTING GALLERY IN REAR.”
Most of these novelty stores and newsstands also sell dirty pictures,
including series of snaps showing strips. In one we recognized a New
York chorine we know. On sale are playing-cards with naked females on
the faces.
In the window of the Maryland Gift Shop, in addition to a lavish
display of “rubber goods” and salacious pictures, are switchblade
knives. The newsstand at Gay and Baltimore Streets has “rubber goods”
on display beside newspapers and the usual pictures. Gordon’s Novelty
Shop, at 428 East Baltimore Street, hands out a business card with a
drawing on the reverse side showing a short-skirted cutie standing next
to a young soldier in a rainstorm, with the caption: “Don’t forget your
rubbers.”
Though we saw “rubber goods” displayed in at least 40 store windows,
not only on Baltimore Street, but in other parts of town, we can’t
remember seeing so many pregnant women anywhere else. In New York one
seldom sees such displays, even on the streets.
Many Baltimore Street joints are pointedly pick-up bars. One is the
408. Another is the Midway Bar, where the local hoodlum hot-shots hang
out. Harry’s Bar has strippers and pick-ups. Katherine’s Bar goes in
for a couple of cheap teasers and a lot of cheap whores working the
tables. Next door to Katherine’s Bar is a sign, “Rooms one dollar a
night.”
Down a couple of blocks in the Victoria Hotel, a tawdry assignation
joint, is a dive called Bettye Mills Night Club. It was once known as
the Stork Club, but Sherman Billingsley brought suit. It has a couple
of long bars where soiled strippers work on platforms, above the
bartenders. While you sit on the stools, dames come over and ask you to
buy them drinks. This doesn’t surprise anyone, because they do it in
every low joint in town. Such places have female bartenders, and many
lean over and kiss customers. If not too busy, they come out and sit
with the trade.
One bartender at Bettye Mills is a character known as Mitzie, a plump
little broad, a retired stripper. She has a running line of patter. If
you give her a dollar tip she will pull up her skirt, pull down her
panties and stash the bill in full sight of the customer.
In the men’s room is an ad which reads: “Sanitubes for defense, protect
our Army and Navy.”
Bettye is the town’s chief call girl madame, operating through the
hotel switchboard.
The Village Bar, 12 Harrison Street, around the corner from Baltimore,
is a pick-up dump with B girls, hustlers and barmaids who go through
the customers, and we mean just that. Three of us saw a guy get rolled.
He was a good-looking, well-dressed young fellow, obviously plastered.
A whore in an evening gown sat next to him and pawed him with both her
hands. Then she got up, went to the women’s room for a minute, then
took a seat by herself at the far end of the bar. When the cluck woke
up, he frisked his pockets for his poke. It was gone. Still in a daze,
he wandered around the room looking for the dame. She didn’t give him a
glance. He wandered off, befuddled.
Even the better places have circular bars. We figured that out--they
are better for pick-ups. You can look at the girls from front, then
motion them. But in most places you don’t have to motion. They
practically attack you. Not even in Chicago are they so voracious. They
don’t ask you to buy a drink. They move right in and order.
Few Baltimore B girls work on commission. Most of them live on their
tips, which they solicit after they’ve bilked you for drinks. The
procedure is for a girl to move in next to you, order without asking,
then get ready to blow if not propositioned and demand a dollar tip for
her “company.”
Some saloons which specialize in better-looking ones give them $5 a
night and they keep their tips and anything they can make after hours.
Entertainers must cadge drinks to keep their jobs. No commissions.
Baltimore has a 2 A.M. closing, which except in Little Italy is
generally observed--one of the few laws that is. These easy hours give
the girls plenty of time to pick up money after work. A strange sight
is East Baltimore Street a few minutes before 2 A.M. It is lined with
walls of men waiting for the frails to come out of the bars, strip
dives and burlesque houses. These are not pimps or dates, but men on
the hunt who saved drink-money and put a ceiling on the commodity.
Hundreds of pick-ups are made this way every night, openly in front of
the few cops there on patrol.
Streetwalkers pace in front of the filling-station at Baltimore and
Fallsway. They are very low-grade stuff. Asking prices start at five
bucks and waver to what they can get.
Parlor-houses have about disappeared from Baltimore, as from most
cities, but there is a line of them in the 600 block, on West North
Avenue. There’s one in the 1000 block of N. Charles, also one next door
to the Blue Mirror.
Most of the dives are on Baltimore St. and in the vicinity, but there
is no monopoly there. A store next to May’s department store, in the
retail shopping district, has a window display of “sanitary rubber
goods” and switch-blade knives. Ditto is a shop known as Blizzards,
on Eutaw Street, which advertises a bargain, “Three dozen latex, one
dollar.”
There’s a strip-dive, the Picadilly, around the corner from the Lord
Baltimore Hotel, in the midst of the financial and retail district. It
has pretty lowdown floor-shows and swarms with hustlers who work the
bars. We saw one cute bartender there, calling herself Val, about 18,
from some mountain town in Tennessee. For a dollar tip she’d let you
play around and never slap your hands.
The joints on East Baltimore are bad--but on the outskirts of town, on
the Pulaski Highway at Fayette Street, you find places not patronized
by tourists, bums or sailors, but by local kids. You see nude
floor-shows at the Ambassador, on Fayette, and at De Carlos, on the
Highway, that would make Baltimore Street bums blush.
The Big Mob operates or protects the dives. It owns many of the good
places, too. Every dump and purveyor of filthy pictures now has a sign
in the window: “Re-elect D’Alesandro.”
The better region is along Charles Street, where the more expensive
specialty and antique shops and the few better-class night clubs and
lounges are. Among them is the Club Charles, part of the circuit which
includes the Copacabana in New York, the Chez Paree in Chicago, and
clubs in Saratoga, Miami, Las Vegas and New Orleans, which play such
acts as Sophie Tucker and Joe E. Lewis. When the heat isn’t on, a game
runs in the back room of the Charles.
Less elaborate is the Chanticleer, but far above deadfalls in the other
part of town. It boasts good floor shows and “name strippers.” Among
the good cocktail lounges in this district are the Coronet and the
Blue Mirror. These are places where men take their own girls or their
business associates. They provide no entertainment, but usually have a
musical trio behind the bar.
As the 2 o’clock closing ordinance is generally obeyed, a problem in
Baltimore after hours is to find a place to drink on the premises.
But liquor package stores sell until 2 A.M., and most licensees are
permitted to sell for off-premise consumption, too--a procedure
practically unknown in other parts of the country. So, if you still
want a drink at 2, you buy a bottle and take it with you.
Ask a cab-driver where you can get a drink after hours and he will know
only of two spots--outside of Little Italy--Sue’s and Hector’s. Sue’s
is a lowdown dump. Unless you are known, all you can buy there after
the deadline is beer, which is also illegal. If they know you, they
will sell you rotgut liquor.
Hector’s is not quite so bad, but it closes Saturdays.
The night after we were given a courtesy card to the Press Club, 100
West Fayette Street, it was raided for selling liquor at 3:30 A.M. to
non-members.
There are many cheating private flats and remodeled homes, especially
on Charles St., where chumps are steered from the Club Charles and the
Chanticleer, for girls, booze and stud poker.
Bell-boys and hackies can steer you to anything. Baltimore cab-drivers
have to scrabble for a living. The legal rates are about the lowest in
the country. You can go almost anywhere in town for a quarter and tips
are meagre.
Gambling is plentiful and easy of access. There are horserooms on Eutaw
Street, across from the Public Market. Most of the rooms, however, are
in the outlying sections of South Baltimore and Northeast Baltimore. We
found three running in the 1900 block of Greenmount Avenue and others
in the 2400 block, the 2500, 2700, 2800, and 3300 blocks of Greenmount
Ave. There was wide open gambling in the 1800 block, the 2000, 4300,
and 5500 blocks of Hartford Road, as well as the 5200 block of Bel Air
Road.
Casinos and horserooms run openly across the County line in Anne
Arundel, and a regular scheduled limousine service is maintained to
transport suckers.
The cars leave at frequent intervals from Redwood and South Sts., and
the Biltmore Hotel, Fayette and Paca.
Some of these suburban gaming hells are guarded by armed men stationed
in pill boxes commanding the gates.
There are thousands of one-armed bandits and gambling devices in the
city, where they are illegal even by local option. At this writing, the
city itself was in the gambling business with a game room in the new
Friendship International Airport, eight miles south of the city, in
Anne Arundel County, where slot-machines are tolerated by illegal local
option. But the airport is owned by the City of Baltimore, which is
officially on record against slot-machines.
Into the game-room of the airport came something new in the way of
trying your luck. It is a combination cigaret-vender and slot-machine.
You can buy cigarets at the usual price, 20 cents. But if you want
“action” you put in a nickel instead of the 20 cents, and hope to
get up to 20 packages of your favorite brand--or nothing. The Frank
Costello enterprises are giving the machine its first tryout under this
blessing of legality.
The gambling payoff in Baltimore is made through the police. North Side
cops get $10 a week for their services, those on the South Side only
$7.50.
Sergeants rate $25 and lieutenants $50, with higher officers greased
accordingly.
The cops collect the take from the numbers men and bookmakers and
deliver it to their higher-ups, who then transmit the “documents” to
the gang collector.
One reason for this complicated business is a shrewd point of law
to get around the income tax laws. The government will not allow a
deduction for graft to public officials but if the payoff is taken off
the top before the mobsters get theirs, then all they need to pay on is
what they receive, the net.
Baltimore is a way-station on the international underground railroad
that transports narcotics. Considerable foreign stuff comes in through
the port. It is also brought down from New York in quantity and stored
in the Italian and Negro sections, awaiting transportation in smaller
packages to the District of Columbia.
Local street sales of narcotics are concentrated on Pennsylvania Avenue
in the Negro district, where individual caps of heroin, morphine and
reefers are available cheap. Puerto Rican and Italian peddlers work
the white dives in East Baltimore Street, where they sell to whores,
strippers and B girls, many of whom use it and others sell it.
Baltimore’s Little Harlem--Pennsylvania Avenue--is more peaceful than
the Negro section of any other large town we ever gandered.
The cops don’t let the colored places get away with anywhere near what
they act blind to in the white spots on East Baltimore. Some of the
cleanest and best night clubs in town are the black-and-tan resorts
in the Pennsylvania Avenue district. Though whites are welcome, they
seldom visit them.
Gamby’s is an orderly colored night club with fine Negro entertainment
and a small but excellent line of tan chorines. There was no stripping
here, though one pretty wench, billed as an exotic dancer, shook
swiveled hips but took off nothing. It occurred to us that we had
never seen a Negro stripper anywhere. The girls of that race refuse to
vulgarize themselves in public to the extent that many white girls do.
Not only was Gamby’s show clean and entertaining, but the customers,
all colored, behaved well and were better dressed than the social
sewage we saw in most of the white dives.
We saw no soliciting here. But there was a one-armed bandit in the bar.
Willie Adams is the numbers boss of Darktown.
The Negro joints close on the dot, and then the streets fill up with
thousands of laughing, shouting, usually sober merrymakers. White
policemen patrol the streets in pairs, but at ease. We saw one buck
pull a razor on his sugar in front of Gamby’s. Two white cops in a
squad car drove off.
Baltimore has a large homosexual population, which is swelled by
visiting fairies from Washington. On mild nights you can find them in
Mt. Vernon Place, under the Washington monument, where they pick each
other up and make liaisons. A favorite gathering place is the Plaza
Bar, formerly Longfellows, at Madison and Charles. They also patronize
Ball’s and the Harem, the latter a corny night club with two entrances,
one leading to a stag bar with a sign on the door, “For Men Only,” and
a place on Mulberry near Howard. The lesbians hang out at the Earl Club.
Baltimore follows the trend of most large cities, other than New York,
in that its best people never go to cafes in town. When they feel the
need of night life they come to New York. When they want to drink and
dance in Baltimore, they do it at house parties or at country clubs.
So most of the patrons of Baltimore liquor dispensaries are the lowest
classes. The few better rooms, like the Club Charles, cater to the
sporty set, big spenders, gamblers, buyers and salesmen and trippers
up for the night from Washington.
When the Charles has a first-rate attraction it advertises in the
Washington papers. For a couple of years the ancient Ford’s Theatre
in Baltimore was the only house within 150 miles of the District
offering legitimate shows. Ford’s gets top road companies and attracts
show-lovers from Washington, who drive up for a sea-food dinner, for
which Baltimore is famous, an evening at the theatre, then take in the
cabaret at the Club Charles.
Baltimore’s big night life season begins when the races at Maryland’s
famed tracks bring in loose money from all over the country. Then
the town is brilliant, gambling is rampant and the whores cash in on
bonanza.
The city is the center of the so-called “Minor League” racing circuit.
There are five half-mile tracks in Maryland, which run almost all
year, with unknown plugs and has-beens, raced by “Gypsy” horsemen.
These are a unique breed. They own one or maybe two nags, which they
may have picked up for dog-meat money. They train them themselves and
often are their own jockeys. It is not uncommon for them to live in the
stables with their horses and even travel from track to track on the
horses’ backs. The entry fees at these tracks are as low as $10 and a
$100 purse is something to shoot at. The shenanigans at these tracks,
controlled by the gamblers in Baltimore, are atrocious.
This smudgy picture of the Baltimore that embraces the visitor brings
up the question: How Come?
This city of H. L. Mencken has long prided itself upon rebellion
against what most of its citizens believe to be an invasion of their
private rights. Prudery was never profitable in Baltimore. The
Prohibition Amendment was deported as an undesirable alien.
One old-timer said, “You think this is something? You should have been
here 50 years ago!”
Baltimore, the mid-Continent seaport, is one of the most provincial
of Eastern cities. In some of its set ways it is a backwash to the
colonial days and the cavaliers.
Yet Baltimore is the “big city” to thousands of hillbillies from the
nearby mountains of Western Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia, and
the poor white trash of Maryland’s Eastern shore counties on the
seaboard, and Delaware. They are the folk who trade and settle in
Baltimore.
It took us some time to figure out why there were so many pretty young
girls whoring in Baltimore. If they left home to sell it, why didn’t
they go on to New York? Research showed they came from the nearby hills
and farms; even those with roots deeper in the South or in the reaches
of West Virginia came to Baltimore because that was as far as their
small savings or imagination could get them. Some planned to make the
major league when they saved up a roll, but they were the exceptions.
One girl put it up to us frankly. All she had to offer was all she had.
New York, the word has spread, is closed to hustling hucksters. New
York’s market trades through switchboards for smartly turned-out call
gals, models, chorines, pent-house patooties. A rosy-cheeked milkmaid
in gingham dress, with no capital, would be pinched and jugged if she
winked to a Sand Street sailor.
The hungry harlots on Baltimore’s streets and in its stinking saloons
come there because the whisper back home is that it’s the place to go
to. Often procurers have brought them and started them, or they are
beckoned by bims who are there. “Bread of infamy” has more raisins than
home-baked loaves.
After soliciting at the bars a while, some get ambition. They see
strippers don’t even know how to walk across a stage, a requisite in
even repellent Chicago. They need only take off clothes, and all gals
know how to do that.
Few, if any strippers, except at a couple of places that import
semi-names, were ever in show business before. Pretty soon they’re
local celebrities, with a special following. These nude numbers are
heart-breaking to Broadway-wise guys who’ve known the best. Few have
looks, none have wit, and at $35 a week most of these stag-show
strumpets are overpaid.
Like New York, New Orleans and San Francisco have flavor, Baltimore
exceeds both as a ship port, yet it has little appeal for travelers.
Seafaring folk whose vessels bring them into Baltimore’s fine harbor
are an unromantic lot. No important passenger ships call. Those that do
carry steerage. Its freighters are cattle-ships and oil-tankers.
In the thousands of uniform flat-front red brick homes with the
balustradeless white stoops, unique to Baltimore, live good, solid
people, white and Negro.
The department of political skulduggery, though, in the Free State
metropolis, is a streamlined model, oiled up and with all the gadgets.
Baltimore is exceeded in population only by New York, Chicago,
Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Detroit. It has passed Boston, St. Louis
and Cleveland, and is growing. It is a combination of an anachronism
and a boom town. Labor is flocking in to work its mushrooming airplane
factories, huge wholesale trading houses, needle-trade shops and ship
works. These are mostly people without roots.