The writer just here wishes to enter vigorous protest against houses of
prostitution in Chicago and in =America= furnishing the American girl or
her alien sister for the use of that class of alien men who are either
excluded from citizenship in our Country by law, or who without wife or
family, are here temporarily and simply to make all the money possible, in
as short a time and in any way possible.
At 2130 Armour Avenue, Chicago, stands an old tenement house filled with
girls--girls from all over the United States--a beautiful ruined girl from
Georgia, girls from Europe. Good girls they were a year or two ago, but
are now the chained, wrecked slaves of festering vice and habit. This
place is said to be operated by a dope-fiend by the name of W---- and is
exclusively for the use of a class of men debarred from the United States
by law, except for educational purposes and mercantile interests among
their own kind, a class of men with whom no white laborer will live or
work--the class of men who a year or two ago murdered Elsie Siegel in New
York--the lop-shouldered, smuggled-in, pig-tailed opium parched Chinese.
It is a crying shame to-day against our Churches, our Union Labor and our
Law that there is allowed to exist on a public street, in the second city
in the United States, a public stock-market for wrecked girlhood where the
filthy Chinese, in rows, wait their turn to rent for thirty minutes of
unparalleled Asiatic debauchery, the bruised, bleeding wreckage of our
American home or the girl who came to us a few months ago--to the greatest
Christian Republic the World has ever builded, from some European home and
a mother, asking only a chance to go to work with her bare hands and earn
a decent living.
The American citizen refuses to admit the Chinaman, refuses to work with
him, refuses him all rights accorded other aliens coming to us, and yet,
for the blood profits of vice and politics, allows to be placed to his
exclusive privilege that which a short time ago was our Nation's best and
cleanest womanhood.
* * * * *
For an American girl entering a life of public prostitution there is some
chance of salvation, for the immigrant girl there is indeed little. Two
years ago I had occasion to visit 21-- Armour Avenue, a "50-cent house" in
the infamous "bedbug row district." It was about three o'clock in the
afternoon, just before the beginning of regular business hours. In the
reception room of the place, around a rusty old stove, sat eight or ten
hopeless, lost girls; sick, smoking, cursing girls. Soon they would dress
up, dope up with whiskey, cocaine or opium, dash some bella donna in their
eyes and go on duty to meet all comers. Shivering by the stove sat a
little foreign girl. I asked her name, the girls told me it was Josie and
that she was an Italian. Speaking to her in that language, I soon learned
that she was a young Russian Jewess. The house seemed to possess
sufficient proof, as the law then required, that the girl had been in this
Country three years; so there was little I could do except give her my
card and tell her if she ever needed a friend to come to me. Less than a
year ago there came a ring at my door, and opening it, I found a lost
woman begging me to come at once into the West Side "levee" to see a girl
who was dying. I went with her, and there, in a mouldy, wretched cellar I
found "Josie" of the Armour Avenue resort, dying with syphilis. In that
awful underground place I listened to her story and give it to you as she
related it to me:
"I am nineteen years old and my name is Gezie Bruvatsky. I saw my
father bayonetted to the earth by Russian soldiers. I saw my mother
work over the washtub until her hands were bloody that I and my
little brother might have bread and my virtue be protected. One day a
man came to our house, who was either a Jew or a German, saying he
was agent for a steamship company and that he had good work in
America for many girls where they could earn as much in one month as
they could earn in two years in Russia. My heart leaped with joy. How
could we know he was lying. I packed my clothes. I left all--my
mother, my brother. I came to America. Soon I could send for them,
for I was strong and could work--work day and night. At New York a
man and woman met me and sent me on to Chicago. Here I was taken from
the Polk Street Station to Armour Avenue where by force I was ruined.
I was there many months, sick and starving, and finally got out and
crawled over to the West Side where there are many Jews; but now I am
dying and I want my mother."