The "Redlight" District.
The "Redlight" District--Houses of Infamy--The Life of a Prostitute--The
Blood Price--Hidden Tragedies--The Polluted Grave.
Chicago possesses four "redlight" districts: one on the South side, one on
the West side, one on the North side and the Strand of South Chicago.
For the sake of description we have taken the one situated on the South
side,--running from Eighteenth street on the north to Twenty-second street
on the south, and from Wabash avenue on the east to Armour avenue on the
west.
It came into existence in 1905 when Mayor Carter H. Harrison, the present
city executive, cleaned out old Custom House place, Plymouth court and
South Clark street, the nest of vice, bounding the south end of the
commercial district.
It established a new territory and flourishes as prosperously today as it
did in its old haunts.
Within the zone described 250 houses of ill fame house the unfortunate
women, lure men of all conditions in life, grow rich on sin and on the
practice of every form of bestial degeneracy.
[Illustration: SUGGESTED BY A PROMINENT NEWS STORY OF THE MOMENT
By Courtesy of The Chicago Daily Journal.]
There are 2,000 enslaved, scarlet women in these infectious prisons!
They are of every nation in the world!
They are young girls in their teens; women in mature years and hags who
have outlived their usefulness to the god of lust!
There is an army of 500 to 800 human vultures--"cadets" who live within
this district, prodding these women on in the paths of evil!
There are ramshackle hell-holes that are falling to pieces where diseased,
broken-down, forgotten women dispense deadly toxins to their customers for
fifty cents!
There are "one dollar," "two dollar," "three dollar," "five dollar" and
"ten dollar" houses. Those are the prices for some mother's precious
darling! Man buys and woman sells.
There are holes of infamy where white and colored persons mix and sin
together.
There are places where the sins that wiped Sodom and Gomorrah out of
existence are practiced nightly.
There are places where prostitutes outrival in the forms of obscene acting
anything to be found in the Monmartre and other deadly places within the
confines of Paris.
There are places of material filth, and uncleanliness and there are places
where thousands of dollars have been spent to make sepulchres appear as
places of delight and pleasure.
Think of it!
Two thousand women on the slave block of lust sold to the thousands of
bidders nightly, in this small district!
Lust, vice, crime and graft are the deities of Chicago's "redlight"
districts.
The "redlight" district gets its name because of the lurid, crimson signs
that hang above its entrances. The name "redlight" should signify a
burning, blazing warning to every man and woman who is tempted to set his
foot or hers on the crime-reeking thresholds!
Let us enter one of the houses and study the interior and the type of the
prostitutes corralled within.
The swinging doors admit us. As we appear, a dozen girls or women rush at
us like a flock of vultures, ravenous, hungering.
They use terms of meaningless endearment, fight among themselves for the
possible prey, coax us to purchase a bottle of beer or whiskey or a mixed
drink. They attempt to embrace us, to kiss us to arouse latent passions,
whose outburst means half the purchase price to them and half to the owner
of the place.
A "professor," half-crazed by drugs and drink, thumps the latest airs on a
piano, or a mechanical instrument furnishes the noise. You are asked to
give a dime to the "professor" and you do.
You are talking to a frail, blue-eyed, blonde girl. Across the room a
brunette, a red-haired girl and a girl with raven black hair and sparkling
eyes watch you, wondering as to the ultimate success of the woman who
captured you.
THE QUESTIONS UNANSWERED.
Where do these thousands of women come from?
What are their varied pasts?
Who are their mothers and fathers?
What strange circumstances brought them here?
Who is accountable to God for this wholesale slaughter in women's souls?
Those are questions that come to the mind when one enters any den of
infamy in any of the four "redlight" districts of Chicago.
Every one of these questions has a thousand answers. The solutions to
these social problems are as numerous as the women who create the
problems.
These women come from every city in the United States, from the farm
houses of God-fearing farmers, from the gabled cottage of little country
towns, from the hovels of the poor of the great city and from the palaces
of the rich of the same city.
They come from across the great ocean:--from England, Scotland, Ireland,
France, Germany, Italy, Austria and every nation you can name.
Thirty-three per cent of the women in the "redlight" districts of Chicago
are the victims of the most pernicious vice system known to history. They
are the victims of the much-talked of and much-discussed White Slave
Traffic.
It is not our purpose in this chapter to treat of this cancerous, moral
growth. It is of such vital importance in a story of crime and vice and
graft that we will dissect and analyze it in a distinct chapter. We are
obliged for the sake of our narrative to name it here.
This portion of the vice population is the women who have been lured by a
thousand satanic means to a life of shame and sin, and once steeped in the
atmosphere give up all hope or attempt to regain a lost social standing, a
new moral conscience or a clean body.
THE FEEDERS OF THE "REDLIGHT" DISTRICTS.
The other portion of this crime colony reach the centers of vice through
the thousands of channels which serve such purposes in the city of
Chicago.
We have spoken of the cafe evil, the dance hall, the cheap theater and the
vicious hotel. These are the major channels. Yearly, hundreds of girls go
from one grade of badness to a lower, until there is nothing left but the
house of ill fame in which to hide their shame, feed their passions and
nourish their broken-down bodies.
The girl clerk in the department store tires of trying to live on her six
dollars a week salary; grows envious of the women who have pretty clothes
and costly jewelry, and sets about to sell her young body to buy the
luxuries of life. The end is inevitably the house of prostitution.
Or it may be, that some depraved man, possibly her employer, lusts for her
purity and with threats of discharge coerces her into sin. She never
stops, it is a succession of falls to the last level of degradation.
Another, three years ago may have visited a Bohemian cafe to see the
sights and taste the wine. She goes back again and again. Beyond her
confines are the forbidden sins, luring and coaxing. She will taste of
them, promising herself that she will go back to her former life and never
venture into the pathways of sin again. The step is taken and the barrier
erects itself behind her--she can never come back. Gradually she drifts
down to the hell haunts and with recklessness as to the future, becomes an
inmate of a dive.
There is no standing still in any phase of life--good or evil. There is no
stationary point in vice. The beginnings are eternally different; the
endings of the Scarlet Women are eternally the same.
These women just described, can scarcely be called White Slaves in the
proper sense of that term. They are "slaves," but they brought the slavery
upon themselves.
The Summer excursions on the lake in large pleasure boats where vice can
revel without fear and where young boys and girls without any restraint
fall into sins that lead to terrible social evils, are another primary
"feeder" for the "redlight" districts. The city asleep does not realize
the fact that the "moonlight" excursions on the waters of Lake Michigan
start a hundred girls on the road to ruin and the prostitute's grave in
one night!
And this is the first chapter of the women dressed in scarlet tonight.
Above these women like an ominous shadow is Man and His Lust! Man and his
insatiable passions! Man who reckons not the destruction he sows about
him, the homes he robs of precious ones, the broken-hearted mothers and
fathers sent to an early grave because he inoculated some innocent child
with his venom.
To fit our descriptions, somewhere, you can find in the "redlight"
districts a woman who will stand up and say:
"That is my story."
In one night in the South side "redlight" district in a visit to eight
houses, twenty-one girls were found who stated that soulless men, who made
capital of their ignorance of the world and its ways, robbed them of their
virtue while they were under the influence of their first drink, or stole
their virginity after they had promised to marry them.
THE DAILY LIFE OF A PROSTITUTE.
But to return to the scarlet woman as she is today. Here is the routine
life of the prostitute in the levee district:
The women in a house rise about two o'clock in the afternoon, dress and
eat their breakfast.
They are then sent by the "landlady" or keeper of the house to the
parlors, to wait for prospective customers.
When a customer comes in he is "sized up." If he appears to be a spender
and buys plenty of drinks, courtesy is extended to him and an effort made
to keep him as long as his money lasts. If he is "a dead one" he is forced
to pay his price and depart as speedily as possible.
These women entertain as many as thirty men in one night. That is the
record at least, that one girl declared she was forced to maintain.
At six o'clock, or near that hour, supper is served to these women; a
number of them in a house eat while the others stay "on watch."
Then the evening's work begins. By midnight a greater part of these lost
souls are maudlin drunk.
Their work continues until four o'clock in the morning when they are
allowed to seek rest.
Even then the evil does not sleep. There is the "dog watch." One or two
girls face a day of horror. They are kept ready for the lax hours of
business.
Many of these women do not live in the houses. They live in the flats
bordering on the "redlight" districts.
THE SLAVES OF THE "CADETS."
Ninety per cent of these open prostitutes have "cadets." These men
exercise the power of tyrants over them, urging them on to death, beating
them brutally when their tired out bodies drop from exhaustion, and
stealing their bodily earnings from them.
These women cannot purchase a single article without the consent of the
landlady. Two thirds of them have the bondage of debt hanging above them
and keeping them prisoners. The landlady buys their clothes and charges
them exorbitant prices and they are obliged to pay without a murmur.
These conditions exist in the cheapest and the most expensive houses in
the levee districts. There is an air of luxury about the big houses but
the scarlet prisoners within are all the same, all slaves, all subjects of
the great Vice Trust.
The women in the poorer houses have white men for "cadets." In the higher
priced places, we find that the women are in the bondage of negro
"cadets."
And all this infamy, seething, boiling and emitting its stench in the
center of the city of Chicago!
Standing out among the small hovels in the South side vice district are
several large and pretentious ones, whose interior furnishings are valued
at hundreds of thousands of dollars.
BIG PALACES OF VICE.
The Everleigh Club, at Twenty-second and Dearborn streets, the richest and
most gorgeously furnished house of prostitution in the United States, is a
notable example. Another one is Georgie Spencer's.
Honesty never cemented a single stone in the building. It was built and
furnished out of the blood and flesh dollars of women. Its foundations
reach down to hell and each chamber with its beautiful settings is filled
with the ghosts of women who suffered untold agonies of mind and body to
make it attractive to victims of the women who followed them. Thousands of
dollars are harvested nightly there. Wealthy prominent men frequent this
place.
Immorality is hideous; but there crimes are committed against nature that
make men revolt at the thoughts of them, down in those pest holes. In the
slang of the levee, it is called "putting on a show."
It is bad enough to be obliged through binding circumstances to sell one's
virtue, but think of the horror, the humiliation, the degradation of
committing acts for the sake of drunken, orgy-loving men that even the
animal nature within us rebels against.
That is a hasty sketch of the "redlight" life as the visitor sees it.
There is still another phase, a deeper phase, a commercial phase, a graft
phase, and of that we shall speak later as it is our intention to show why
these conditions exist without hindrance from the police and how this
mighty army of Satan strives, struggles and dies for the earthly lords of
hell.
There is no intention here to paint a lurid picture of Chicago's ulcer
spots that might arouse passions and do evil.
We are telling of the Great Curse that we may help destroy it. We have
said that the wiping out of the prostitute will not cure the malady and we
are soon to prove it. We have told of vice that we may show how it serves
its masters.
THE HIDDEN TRAGEDIES.
Who can depict the crying, aching hearts of these lost women of the
levees?
Who can tell of the agonies undergone in their short existences?
Who can know of the sleepless nights, of the hours of remorse and despair?
Who can imagine the physical pain of the eating, wasting diseases?
All the world's wretchedness, sorrow, hunger, thirst and suffering lies
behind the lurid lights of the "redlight" haunts. Behind the paint and
powder is the blue-white color of coming death.
Every year, a thousand of these women outlive their usefulness to their
brutal masters! This is the record for one city. Authorities say this
record for the country is 60,000!
WHAT BECOMES OF THEM?
We shudder as we answer that question.
Many of them seek the river as a last resting place and their bodies are
cast ashore to lie in the county morgue a week, and then to be buried in
the paupers' field.
Many of them go insane and are taken to state institutions where death
soon mercifully comes and wipes out their useless lives.
Many of them are cast forth from the dens where they have turned their
every drop of blood to gold for their masters, and are picked up dead in
the alleys and streets of the city.
Some are sent to other cities to die, and leave no reflections on the men
and women that turned them out.
God has destroyed cities for lesser evils, but Chicago lives on, fattening
on the dead bodies of these victims!
As the parade of lost women moves slowly to the grave the tributaries pour
more souls into the lake of infamy and there is no place left unfilled!
No woman going down there knows of the terrible possibilities until it is
too late. That is the secret of vice; its lying lips belch forth the truth
only when its shackles are welded about the limbs of its victims.
Lust beckons. The eternal woman answers and approaches the poisoned spring
and drinks. The eternal man is there. On and on he leads her, casts her
away when he has tired, and the Vice Trust with its directorate of
powerful politicians, debased men, takes her and reaps its awful profit
from her.
Vice first: then Graft. Graft formulated in the minds of men: Vice born in
the blood of women.
Death--dishonored death to the woman.
Wealth--overflowing wealth to the Grafter.
We have seen the city in many phases. We have not taken into consideration
the army of women who maintain superficial respectability, who live at
homes, some of them with husbands and children, and who yielding to
temptation are carrying on liaisons.
They are called "clandestine" women. They may be found in all walks of
life.
There are, normally estimated, 15,000 women of this type in the city of
Chicago!
Are you convinced that Chicago is the "wickedest city in the world"?