Prostitution in the Gilded Age

by Kevin Murphy

  Though Wells Street seemed déclassé when the city’s soap-grease men lived and worked in the area, Bushnell Park’s improvements turned the whole area around. The nexus of Wells and Mulberry became a German neighborhood and was delightfully Teutonic in character and custom. As early as 1859, Andrew Heublein, born in Prussia, conducted his restaurant-saloon-hotel at Mulberry and Wells Streets, facing Bushnell Park. When the new Heublein Hotel rose in 1891—at the corner of Wells and Gold Streets—it sat just a few doors to the north of Jennie and Tom Hollister’s place. Andrew Heublein’s old venue at the corner of Mulberry and Wells Street became part of the new hotel, making it the only structure on the whole block between Gold and Mulberry Streets. The Heublein Hotel even had a carriageway directly into the heart of the building, delivering patrons to a huge indoor atrium on the first floor. The Heublein Hotel—due to the extraordinary good taste of Andrew Heublein and his sons, Gilbert and Lewis—stood as the most fashionable hostelry in Hartford. Guests, of course, loved the hotel’s fabulous view of Bushnell Park, and the Heublein family loved to boast that the hotel “had a window and an oriental carpet in each room.”[139]

  Closer to Main Street—at 27 Mulberry—Henry Ernst’s continental café earned a reputation for its sauerbraten and imported delicacies. George Pfeiffer’s German steamship agency, with the big North German Lloyd sign hanging outside, operated at 31 Mulberry Street. George Pfeiffer also sold German books and periodicals, and ran a rooming house for his fellow countrymen who were in the process of settling in America. His employment agency helped newly-arriving Germans find jobs quickly. In the rear of Pfeiffer’s place was the office and press of the weekly Hartforder Herold, established in 1883 and distributed as far as New Britain, Bristol, Rockville and Meriden. Later, the Schuetzen Haus, another oasis, blossomed forth at the southeast corner of Mulberry and Wells Streets. Even the Irish cop on the beat spoke fluent German.[140]

  While Jennie and Tom Hollister remodeled 76 Wells Street to meet their unusual needs, other madames and proprietors of bawdy houses were becoming permanent fixtures in the demimonde. When Tom Hollister moved from State Street in 1883, first Lizzie Cadwell, then “Billy West” and “Grace Howard,” and lastly, Billy West and his wife, Cora—tried to match the Hollisters’ remarkable success. Easier said than done. None of them had the special protection from the police that Jennie and Tom Hollister nurtured, and none of them had the good looks and poise of Jennie Hollister. Police and court reporters went so far as to call her “the stately Jennie Hollister” as she mulled around the station house after a faux-raid for a liquor violation in 1895. (The judge fined her $10.)[141]

  Another important point is that the demimonde of Hartford functioned as a divided club. The wild, young girls—who loved life in the fast lane— made up the core and gloried in the knowledge that they didn’t have to slave away as mill workers or dressmakers. They lived for the parties and friendships, completely oblivious to the future—or even if they had one. Apart from this group of fast fillies were madames who had been in the business long enough to know about its highs and lows. Jennie Hollister reigned at the very top of this collection of madames. Whenever there was trouble, Jennie posted bonds for other madames and their inmates as needed.

  Ada Leffingwell wasn’t a central figure in the demimonde because she was a meretricious strumpet without youth, beauty, grace or style. Despite these crushing handicaps, her sporting house on Arch Street did well financially.

  Adella “Ada” E. Leffingwell was born in Farmington, Connecticut to Oscar and Elizabeth Curtis, but the date remains a mystery. (In the middle of 1900, Ada claimed to be forty, but that hardly seems possible. Fifty might be closer to the mark.) “Broken-nosed Ada” emerged as the chubby proprietress of a well-known resort at 5 Arch Street, one door from Main. Besides being physically unattractive, Ada had a voice that irritated even as it offended. Her cleft-palate-style speech impediment grated so much that people said “she was a much better companion when she remained silent.”[142]

  Ada’s place presented nicely as a three-story brick structure, with white marble lintels above the windows and a front door that stood right on the sidewalk. Located in the most respectable portion of the city, guests at 5 Arch Street came and went freely. In 1891, Ada leased the house, and then bought it from the estate of Mary Warner in 1893 for $3,250. Ada had seen generations grow old, but like the brook, her business went on forever. Ada didn’t have the pull of the Hollisters, and she had been raided once in the summer of 1892. So said, the police usually left her alone.[143]

  Ada pulled stunts constantly in an attempt to increase her take. She used to give each of her four girls a little, personal strongbox to keep in their rooms. As inmates first met patrons downstairs, Ada gave the girls brass tokens. The girls, of course, dropped these brass tokens in their strongboxes. There would be an exchange on payday, but by that time, Ada had used her duplicate key to remove some of the tokens from the different strongboxes. The girls confronted Ada, who smoothed their feathers by explaining how lucky they were to be living in a house where they were loved and well treated. Ada mollified the girls nicely and then cheated them again the following week![144]

  Another of Ada’s gimmicks lowered the grocery bills. Ada told her girls they were gaining weight and this fact upset her terribly. Naturally, Ada’s altruistic and overarching concern was the girls’ health. A sample of Ada’s new diet follows: For breakfast, oatmeal, milk, and coffee; for dinner, barley soup, codfish, hash and apple pie; for supper, bread, butter, a doughnut and tea. The girls could not survive on this fare and threatened to strike. Ada relented, but the food never got much better. During weeks when the girls were good, they got their meals regularly, but were hungry all the time anyway.[145]

  Happily for Ada, her inmates were young women who always behaved themselves in public. This behavior, combined with Ada’s orderly manner in the operation of 5 Arch Street, kept the police at bay. For law enforcement, it was simple: Pay your fees, keep an orderly house, and we’ll look the other way.[146]

  Still, Ada loved to levy fines on her girls. If they stayed out late and were not in promptly in accordance with the hours laid down in this palatial establishment, they were fined $2.50. Besides the fine, the demimonde whispered in mock horror that the girls were sent to bed like little children without their supper! If they failed to return for the entire night, owing to something like a carriage ride with a friend, they were fined $5. For minor offenses, they were fined anywhere from $ .10 to $1. The girls complained, but Ada appeased the girls by pointing out what a happy home they had found with her.[147]

  More than anything, Ada dreamed of herself as a class act. Poor, fat Ada envied Jennie Hollister for this very trait. Ada’s place was sumptuous on the inside and she maintained a respectable client list, but she never attained the lofty spot in the business that Jennie Hollister enjoyed. Ada wanted her girls to be classy and she thought she could lead by example. One story illustrates this point nicely. A local hackman assumed that he could wait in Ada’s front parlor until his fare decided to leave. However, just as he plopped into an overstuffed chair, Miss Ada disabused him of his assumptions and escorted him to the “bicycle room”—a small storage room for trunks, boxes, luggage, and, of course, bicycles. With practiced haughtiness, Miss Ada drooled out, “You’ll have to wait here, hackman. I can’t have you in the parlor with the gentlemen and ladies.”

  If Jennie Hollister’s digs at 76 Wells Street glistened as the very model of a well-run sporting house—and Ada Leffingwell’s house of ill fame at 5 Arch Street sat either half-way up or half-way down the brothel ladder, depending on your point of view—then Mary Ann Atherton’s River House at the foot of Ferry Street was a cesspool.

  Mary Ann Atherton—a.k.a. Polly Ann Atherton—wasn’t a figure in the demimonde either. She never really had a chance to be one of those pretty young things in the diamonds and fancy clothes, because Mary Ann lived on the wrong side of town and ran bawdy houses where bedbugs r
efused to visit and her patrons were on twenty-four-hour passes from hell.

  Mary Ann Wright was born in England in 1836. Old documents make it clear that Mary Ann never even knew where her parents were born, suggesting a badly broken family. Eighteen years later, Mary Ann crossed the North Atlantic to New York with her two sisters and they settled first in New York and then Hartford. At nineteen, Mary Ann met Newton Chamberlain Atherton, a thirty-seven-year-old, illiterate blacksmith. Newton Atherton’s first wife, Harriet Hall of Hartford, gave him a daughter, Amy, but then died suddenly after fifteen years of marriage. In 1855, Newton C. Atherton married Mary Ann Wright. The couple settled at 47 Kilbourn Street and quickly had two boys, John and Joseph, neither of whom lived more than a few months. In March 1862, they had another boy, Edward, who, as an adult, went by the name E. Newton Atherton. Sadly, Mary Ann’s husband, Newton C. Atherton, died in 1863 at the age of forty-eight. Judging by the flimsy evidence extant, Newton Atherton’s life was volatile. For instance, his blacksmithing business operated from seven different locations in fifteen years, and when he wed Mary Ann Wright, he married a woman eighteen years his junior.[148]

  From 1863 forward, Mary Ann Atherton had a difficult time making ends meet. She had no skills worth mentioning and a young boy to rear. The death of her husband not only left her penniless, but also living in the worst part of town.

  Before 1810, when Hartford got its first wooden covered bridge to East Hartford, Ferry Street figured as the most active area in town. The wharfs of the wealthiest merchants in town splayed like fingers out into the Connecticut River, a waterway with square rigged West India brigs, offloading rum and molasses. Coastal schooners, sloops, and fishing craft crowded the docks of the city from the wooden bridge to Dutch Point on the south. Because Hartford was the head of navigation on the river, it enjoyed more business than the size of the city warranted. The city also enjoyed a big salt provision export trade with the West Indies—salt beef, pork, and fish in barrels. These shipments went either directly to the West Indies or were shipped to commission houses in New York.

  The riverfront brimmed with cement and building supplies, piles of grain and lumber, and plenty of horses and oxen earmarked for the American South. Kilbourn, Front, Market, Ferry, and Charles Streets were filled with men who sounded like they were from Barbados, but cursed in a Yankee dialect when demanding dock space. Ship chandlers’ were plentiful, and cordage, spars, and other nautical items were in heavy demand.

  An old building at 25 Kilbourn Street housed the customs office. Bartlett’s tavern did a big business at 11 Ferry Street, while the Ferry Street Hotel at 32 Ferry Street, run by Calvin Sears, later became the first brothel of Mary Ann Atherton. At 28 Ferry Street, the Fifth Ward Hotel did a good trade, and the River Hotel on Charles Street welcomed rivermen and bargemen. On Charles Street, the Steamboat Hotel operated just south of the covered bridge. The Tremont House at 88 Front Street (later a saloon-brothel), like its competitors, did a robust maritime business.[149]

  As the wooden covered bridge shifted the business center of the city, Ferry Street declined steadily. When part of the covered bridge washed away in early 1818, the owners refused to rebuild until the state legislature forced the ferry to cease operations. The General Assembly discontinued the ferry company’s charter, which touched off a decade of legal battles. In the end, the ferry was doomed—along with the neighborhood. Historians universally hold that no improvements were made on any streets near the waterfront since the completion of the wooden bridge in 1810. More and more, the area served coal companies, lumberyards, warehouses, flophouses, flag taverns, bawdy houses, and a few grocery stores. For a century, the whole district felt like the day after the circus left town.

  One of the few businesses that flourished in such a dissolute part of town was prostitution. Just by living in the area, Mary Ann Atherton must surely have learned the rudiments of the trade. Unfortunately, she wasn’t an apt pupil. Mary Ann rented “a miserable old hovel” at 32 Ferry Street called the Bluebird, and she brought in some girls, spreading the word as best she could.[150]

  Mary Ann Atherton’s first arrest for keeping a house of ill repute occurred in November 1863, probably only a few months after her husband’s death. Twenty-month-old Edward probably wasn’t even walking yet and his mother had an appointment with Judge John Peters at the police court. Peters placed her under a $30 bond “to establish her character for six months.” The three prostitutes in her house were allowed to pay only court costs on their promises to leave town immediately. Judge Peters was obviously of the Judge Bulkeley school. A dozen years had passed since Judge Bulkeley reigned over the police court, but prostitutes and madames were still treated with extraordinary judicial restraint. The police and the courts availed themselves of every opportunity to discourage entrepreneurs from getting into the prostitution business.

  Mary Ann Atherton thought that she could set up a nice, quiet little business on Ferry Street without making any payments to the police. Since the payment of fines was considered by everyone to be simply a licensing fee—or payments made in lieu of licensing—proprietors of houses of ill repute had to make payments if they expected the police to look the other way.

  Regardless of what the court decided about Mary Ann Atherton’s character—or what she thought of the city’s quaint little payment system—she didn’t change a thing. As night follows day, the police arrested her again eight weeks later. This time, the judge fined her $20 and costs, plus a sentence of thirty days in jail.

  Apparently, a chastened Mary Ann Atherton finally came to grips with the city’s “licensing system” and made her payments like everyone else. After she saw the light, Mary Ann Atherton—who ran the River House almost to the end of her life in 1901—was only arrested once more for keeping a house of ill fame; that came in 1899 when the city had already made the irreversible decision to close the brothels—as the new Hartford Bridge opened for business. Like many other madames, the police sometimes arrested Mary Ann for selling liquor without a license, but it was thirty-five years between her arrests for prostitution. Mary Ann Atherton stayed in the business so long that, in the 1890s, newspapers around the state referred to her as “decrepit.”[151]

  For her second husband, Mary Ann Atherton chose James Wilson, an illiterate machinist originally from Massachusetts. Recognizing the kind of money that could be made in prostitution, Mary Ann (Atherton) Wilson had no trouble talking James Wilson into building the River House.

  At the foot of Ferry Street sat a small grocery store run by “Old Uncle Billy Brown,” who lived in the nearby Fourth Ward with his Irish immigrant wife, May, a woman twenty years his junior. Uncle Billy’s grocery store made very little money and suddenly burned to the ground in 1870. The first man to sense an opportunity was George Robinson, a forty-year-old English plumber who partnered in Robinson & Nevers on Asylum Street. Robinson sensed that the property could continue making money as a grocery store. Clever with a dollar, Robinson probably knew in advance his return on investment, regardless of the future.

  Robinson bought the property and began the restoration process when James Wilson approached him. Wilson was a few years younger than Robinson and the two got on well. Somehow Wilson convinced Robinson to sell the fire-damaged structure so that it could be rebuilt as a four-story hotel on the river. Considering the neighborhood, Robinson probably thought Wilson had gone round the bend, but sold him the property anyway.

  By 1871, James Wilson completed the River House Hotel, a four-story, red-brick colossus with expansive porches on the second and third floors. Atop the third floor porch stood a simple asphalt roof. Adding a little panache, a large cupola towered over the whole structure. Owing to the inevitability of the spring freshet, sailboats, rowboats, shells, gigs, and canoes were stored on the first floor. The second floor had a kitchen, sitting rooms and parlors, while guest bedrooms filled the top two floors. Near the River House grew a monstrous sycamore tree, the biggest curiosity of the whole neighborh
ood. The tree “was probably the oldest tree in Hartford” . . . measuring “twenty-four feet in circumference at the base, and . . . believed to be 300 years old.”[152]

  By 1880, James Wilson and Mary Ann Atherton were no longer married. Mary Ann drank too much and wasn’t a stable helpmate. At some point after 1880, James Wilson gave the River House to Mary Ann Atherton and moved to New York, where he opened a dime museum, an entertainment oddity that flourished in large numbers from about 1840 to 1910.

  When the new Hartford Bridge came to fruition at the beginning of the twentieth century, all of the old brothels, flophouses, and saloons along the waterfront disappeared. Along with them went the sailors, drifters, and toughs, who populated the area. Arguably, the largest of these icons of vice was the River House. The Connecticut River Bridge and Highway Commission bought the River House from Mary Ann Atherton’s son, Edward, in 1904, and tore the building down in late 1907.[153]

  During the Gilded Age, almost every city in the United States had a tenderloin where sex was sold from hotels, tenements, houses of assignation, restaurants, saloons, and cigar stores—almost every place of business imaginable. In 1896, Hartford Mayor Miles Preston said “This city has thirty houses of ill fame—if not more.” Even such a sweeping comment did not include all of these disparate outlets. In short, the problem wasn’t the thirty houses of ill fame, it was the many other places where sex could be bought and young girls’ lives destroyed. More pointedly, no one really understood how big the problem had become.[154]

  The houses of ill fame were the pillars of the sex industry. The other outlets were far more difficult to categorize. During the peak of the saloon era—from the War of the Rebellion to about 1900—the number of saloons in the U.S. tripled.[155] In Hartford’s river wards—the Fifth and Sixth—the two biggest businesses during these years were grocery stores and saloons. These saloons were the social clubs for day laborers and workingmen. Immigrant entrepreneurs were rare, but immigrants ran many of these saloons. Front Street, alone, had 12-18 percent of all the saloons in the city. (Main Street was the only avenue where there were more.)[156]