At about ten o'clock on Saturday evening, September 19th, I boarded a West
Madison street car and, transferring north at Halsted street, alighted at
Lake and walked west to Lewinsky's saloon at the corner of Lake and Green
streets. Going around to the side entrance on Green street, I discovered
in the wine and back rooms of the wretched place a crowd of perhaps fifty
drunken, dirty, diseased men and women, most of them foul-smelling, young
white girls huddled in with the worst mob of negroes, whites and Chinese I
have seen in Chicago's slums, all cursing, drinking, singing and
blaspheming in plain view and hearing of the street. I stopped a moment to
make sure I was making no mistake in what I saw and then crossed the
street to interview the dark-eyed little foreign girl who at its door was
boldly soliciting trade for the saloon and its adjacent evils, just
opposite.