Prostitution in the Gilded Age

by Kevin Murphy

  According to John J. McCook, a Trinity College professor of the time, the houses of ill repute were not typically immigrant-run businesses. On the other hand, Irish saloonkeepers ran four out of five soliciting places, and seven out of eleven gambling houses. It could be fairly stated that Frank Russell’s saloon on State Street and Joe Cronin’s place on Front Street were the forerunners of the saloon-brothel business in Hartford. The number of saloons with backroom operations increased year by year until there were probably twenty or more. These businesses, along with the houses of ill fame, were finally closed in 1911.[157]

  Chapter 4

  The Demimonde

  Once Jennie and Tom Hollister teamed up at the Bange mansion on State Street, business activity edged up nicely. One big difference between the Hollisters and other proprietors was the way they treated their inmates. Unlike Ada Leffingwell and her crowd, they didn’t try to make money on the room and board expenses of their girls. Nor did they try to cheat them by playing games with the inmates’ brass tokens. By catering to the highest clientele in the city, Jennie and Tom made enough money so that everyone was compensated fairly. Not to make the Hollisters sound like saints among sinners, but they were at great variance when measured against many of the other madames. In the heart of the tenderloin, this was particularly the case with the proprietors of the dives down by the Connecticut River. The houses near the top of State Street were lavish by design and had a better clientele. Not surprisingly, the houses were operated in a more orderly fashion. The farther a patron went down State Street, the wilder—and more dangerous—were the houses of sin.

  From Front Street down to Commerce Street—with street numbers between 209 and 257—the houses of ill repute were considered notorious—even depraved. From Commerce Street to the Connecticut River—with street numbers between 259 and 287—the bagnios were life threatening. Knife fights were common, with unidentified bodies later found floating in downriver towns. The saloon-brothels situated on State, Front and Commerce Streets fell roughly into the same category in terms of depravity. Saloons with backroom operations were spread far and wide in the city by the turn of the twentieth century. On Temple Street alone, William C. Dwight, W. W. Hunter, Hibbert “Hub” Smith, and Mrs. Rudolph Davis were the most noted Temple Street barroom-backroom proprietors. By 1900, probably close to fifty hotels, rooming houses, saloons, restaurants, massage parlors, and cigar stores offered prostitution services to guests, customers, or clients.

  In the houses of ill fame, conditions inside these dens varied markedly. At the top end of Sate Street, the appointments were lavish and bad behavior almost non-existent. But on the lower part of the tenderloin, very little effort was expended making the “joints” sumptuous or even comfortable. Without belaboring the point, Jennie and Tom Hollister’s place was very classy compared to the competition and it was the public behavior of the madames that set the pace. When Jennie Hollister went out to an appointment or to do some shopping, she dressed in a refined manner, but very understated. Other madames flaunted their position in the demimonde and gathered as much attention as they could as they sashayed about the city. These women couldn’t help themselves, but the police frowned on this type of behavior. Leading impressionable young girls to think that prostitution was a soft path to a lucrative existence wasn’t anyone’s idea of how to run an orderly house.

  This point can be illustrated by two madames who were the antithesis of one another—Jennie Hollister and “Diamond Lucy” Chapman. As we have seen, Jennie Hollister learned the hard way how to get along in Hartford’s tenderloin. She finally acquiesced to “paying her registration fees,” and by personal experience and training, Jennie had learned to keep a low profile. Meanwhile, Diamond Lucy Chapman couldn’t help but put on an elaborate show as she walked about town. She hid her age well and resembled an eye-catching butterfly—perhaps a painted lady or a great spangled fritillary. Diamond Lucy loved every minute of her walking tours of the city, as young boys—and even not so young boys—followed her around. What woman wouldn’t love this?

  Lucy bathed in the attention, but her lack of self-restraint was precisely why the police—and maybe some other madames—sought to remove her from the scene. Diamond Lucy’s place on State Street got raided more than average, and as she tried to resolve an early arrest in 1878, Judge Arthur Eggleston even suggested—in a fatherly way—that Lucy get out of the business. But Lucy wasn’t about to give up the adulation and she rejected Judge Eggleston’s kindly advice, soldiering on with her sporting house.

  Diamond Lucy Chapman strutted around Hartford for only ten years—from about 1877 to 1887—not as just another pretty madame, but as the “Queen of Bohemia.” During this small window of opportunity, Lucy became one of the best-known and most popular women of the Capitol City’s half-world.[158]

  When she first opened her house of ill fame on State Street, she was forty-seven, but looked more than a decade younger. She fascinated men. Lucy had luxurious clothing and sparkling diamonds that were as big as dwarf potatoes. One particular pear-shaped diamond pendant mesmerized those who adored great baubles. In her day, Lucy probably had the largest collection of stones owned by any Hartford woman—of the half- or the whole-world.[159]

  As the Queen of Bohemia, Lucy glided through life. The courtiers who worshiped at her shrine were only too willing to meet her every demand and she swayed life in the half-world for years. Some of the city’s most prominent men once considered themselves lucky to be counted among Diamond Lucy’s friends. Judges, jurors, lawyers, and businessmen in fair numbers were once on her visiting list. As young bucks, they were proud of the association. But time marched on. If asked about Lucy later in life, these same men would feign ignorance.

  As Lucy’s old admirers took their places in society, they married women from the finest backgrounds, raised large families, and bought houses “on the Hill.” Their friends and families would shudder to learn of the days when a certain pillar of the community followed Diamond Lucy around like a little puppy.

  Age caught up with Lucy, and others with youth—and the same deceptive beauty that Diamond Lucy brought to town—gathered up all the concupiscent imaginations of towheaded young boys and pimply-faced young men alike. Lucy stepped aside without remorse. Didn’t she have those days all to herself not so long ago? Spiritualism offered Lucy a new avenue of escape. She moved to Boston for a short time and held Bohemian séances. Unfortunately, the Boston police—many of them Irish Catholics—didn’t go in much for spirits and séances, and eyed Lucy as suspicious. One step ahead of serious jail time, Lucy returned to Hartford. Late in the 1880s—for reasons no historian has seen fit to record—Diamond Lucy relocated to New Haven.

  Diamond Lucy Chapman was born Lucy Ann Rich on March 2, 1830 on a sixty-five-acre farm in Ware, Massachusetts (twenty miles northeast of Springfield). Her father, Jonathan C. Rich, and her mother, Lucy Hardy Rich, were both reared in Ware and married in May, 1825, when they were in their late teens.

  The farm was small. Jonathan Rich, in his early forties, kept one horse, seven cows, two bulls, and a pair of oxen. Each year he managed to raise fifty bushels of Indian corn and twelve bushels of oats. The total value of the farm barely amounted to $1,250 and, as can be imagined, the family barely got by.

  Lucy Ann’s mother birthed three children—Jonathan C., Jr. in 1826; Otis in 1828; and Lucy Ann, the youngest, in 1830. For some reason, Lucy Ann was born eight miles to the southwest in Palmer, Massachusetts. (The family could have been visiting friends. Alternatively, there might have been a problem with Lucy Ann’s birth and her parents sought the help of a midwife or doctor in Palmer.) The youngest child in a family is often a handful—spoiled, wild, willful and manipulative—and that seems true in the case of Lucy Ann Rich. As we shall see, there were times in her later life when she just refused to go along when it would have served her purposes best; she could be pigheaded in matters of little importance.

  When Lucy was eighteen she fell in love with
Perry Cheever, a laborer from Princeton, Massachusetts (twelve miles to the northeast). The couple married on January 5, 1850, when the groom was twenty-one and the bride only nineteen.

  In heartrending fashion, sometime between the wedding and August 14, 1850, Lucy Ann (Rich) Cheever found herself confined to the State Lunatic Hospital at Worchester. Her new husband, Perry Cheever—also at the hospital—acted as Lucy Ann’s attendant. The hospital records have long since disappeared, but many physical and mental diseases surface in early adulthood. In view of her later life, schizophrenia seems unlikely, while some form of depressive or bipolar disorder fits the bill nicely. Incidents in Lucy Ann’s future behavior buttress this speculation.

  Lucy Ann must have responded well to treatment, because she gave birth to her first child, Daniel W., in May 1851. From that date to 1869, Perry and Lucy Ann Cheever had six more children. Perry supported the family as a farmer in Ware, Massachusetts. There are no known signals of trouble, but in 1871, when Lucy Ann was forty-one, the marriage cratered. Much later, a newspaper reporter wrote, “She had diamonds and fine clothes, but in an evil moment, she did something wrong, and she never had the courage to face her people, and asked for one more chance. . . .”[160] Perhaps in a weak moment, Lucy took this reporter into her confidence? We’ll never know.

  Lucy Ann and Perry Cheever divorced in the early 1870s, and in 1879, Perry married a woman nineteen years his junior, Martha Gates of Barnard, Vermont. Between 1880 and 1889, Martha Cheever had six children. About the time that Martha Cheever birthed the couple’s last child, Perry Cheever turned sixty. He died nine years later.

  One supposes that the divorce left Lucy with a financial settlement; and soon thereafter the legend of Diamond Lucy Chapman sprung full- blown from the brow of Minerva. By the mid-1870s, when Lucy Chapman opened her first brothel, she was forty-five, but had aged very agreeably indeed. In some ways Lucy seemed like the woman who time forgot, as she aged but barely showed it. In 1904, when Lucy Ann died at seventy-four, a reporter ventured, “Her age has been variously estimated at from forty-five to nearly sixty years.”[161]

  Lucy hadn’t been in business long before trouble visited. Early on a Saturday evening in February 1878, a fight broke out between two brothers at her house. James Crosby got the worst of it, taking a vicious pummeling from his brother Edward Crosby. Chief of Police Walter Chamberlin interviewed the two men and told them to be in police court Monday morning. One of Lucy’s inmates, Belle Sherman, launched a complaint against Edward Crosby in an unsuccessful attempt to trim the case to a small-time dust up. In court, Lucy’s lawyer made a strong effort to quash the matter but to no avail. The judge saw the fight as something of such a “disgraceful character” that the law had to run its course.[162]

  On Saturday night, March 23, 1878, Edward Crosby returned to Lucy’s place looking for more trouble. Crosby broke down the front door and threatened everyone inside. Lucy stood in front of her house screaming until Officer Keegan—more than a block away—heard the racket and responded.

  Later at the station house, Lt. Cornelius Ryan, remembering the earlier fight at Lucy’s house, sent some officers to arrest everyone at the place. Four female inmates and two men were brought to the station house. Along with Lucy Chapman, they all spent the night in lock-up. Oddly, in all the commotion Edward Crosby disappeared. As there wasn’t any special complaint against him, the instigator of all the trouble escaped arrest entirely. On Monday, the judge released everyone on a promise to appear in police court on Wednesday, when the matter could be adjudicated.[163]

  One small item must be remembered. On State Street, in the heart of the red light district, the bawdy houses were exceedingly competitive. Since Lucy Chapman was attractive enough to eventually become the “Queen of Bohemia,” it’s most likely that another madame devised this little scheme to create a lasting rift between Lucy and the police. The Crosby brothers made an enormous amount of trouble in Lucy’s house from February to March 1878, but neither of them had trouble with the police before or after that time. Though the matter gave off a foul smell, the proprietors or madames behind the trouble kept their mouths shut.

  Three months later, a complaint lodged by seventy-six-year-old David Day of Canaan sparked another raid at Lucy’s house. David Day claimed that his overcoat and some money were stolen while on a recent romp at Lucy’s place. The newspaper reporters renamed David Day, the “Spirit of ’76,” and wondered in print how he could represent American manhood so nobly and then lose track of his overcoat and money! In any event, Lucy and two inmates were arrested and taken to the station house.

  In police court, Attorney Samuel F. Jones—mentioned earlier— represented Lucy on a charge of keeping a house of ill fame. Jones was a Hartford criminal attorney of the first water. In his prime, Jones’s name regularly accompanied the most important criminal cases in a fifty-mile radius of Hartford. When he passed away in October 1891, Attorney George Sill eulogized Samuel Jones, “He never attempted to mislead the court or defeat his adversaries by stratagem or ambuscade. He fought his battles in the open field. He was not cast down by defeat or elated by victory. The former he bore with equanimity; the latter with modesty. . . .”[164] It’s anyone’s guess how Lucy managed to retain such a prominent attorney, but ultimately Samuel Jones straightened out Lucy’s legal problems and kept her in business.

  Apparently, the aggrieved sport, David Day, came to Hartford looking for work, but mysteriously turned up in Lucy Chapman’s house. After losing his coat and money—or thinking that he had—Day returned in March to search the place again. He became an incredible pest when he returned on Friday and Saturday, June 21 and 22, to search even more. Lucy denied that the old guy ever had a coat when he visited her house in January 1878. David Day sounded honest, and even claimed that he had seen several girls in the place. Lucy denied this charge fiercely, saying that since Judge Arthur Eggleston suggested in March that she give up the business, she had no girls in the house. . . . Lucy said that she saw Day and he saw her, but the only other person in the house was a sick girl upstairs.

  The judge fined Lucy $50 and costs, plus a four-month jail sentence. No sooner were these words out of the judge’s mouth than Samuel Jones announced he would tender an appeal. The prosecuting attorney, Joseph Barbour then sought to reword the indictment from “keeping a house of ill fame,” to “reputed to be a house of ill fame.” Jones objected to changing the charge after the court proceedings were completed, but Judge Eggleston disagreed, saying that the law allowed it. A couple of Lucy’s (past) inmates, appearing as witnesses, were released. The judge forced one of the girls to leave town at the earliest opportunity.[165]

  These incidents represent Lucy Chapman’s early days in Hartford, and by the existing record, she seems to have gotten things under control without any unnecessary folderol. Lucy, with the help of Samuel F. Jones, managed to run her State Street place for about a decade and then relocated to New Haven.

  When Lucy Chapman arrived in the Elm City, the police were in full combat mode against the houses of ill fame. During the Gilded Age, these crackdowns were predictable and they all ran out of steam—just as this one did. About 1890, the Federation of Churches, the Law and Order League of New Haven, and the Bridgeport Sunday Herald began attacking the New Haven police for sleeping on the job. Well and good, but these assaults on vice were ill timed. By 1897, sinks of iniquity could be found everywhere. The bagnios were so numerous that respectable neighborhoods from downtown to the harbor were hard to find. Worse still, the proprietors had little fear of the police.

  On Worcester Street—near Union Street—sat the London House, featuring the most elaborate furnishings and appointments. The London House had the reputation as the finest sporting house in New Haven. Madame Hattie Goodman wasn’t only the queen of the London House, but rumored to be one of the wealthiest women in the state. Men of the highest caliber visited Hattie’s place. A reporter asked a conservatively dressed businessman about the London House, an
d he replied, “It is a respectable place and run in a very clean manner; it is better to let a place of this kind run than some of the others.”[166]

  Diamond Lucy Chapman found a new home at 10 Prindle Street in New Haven’s most deplorable neighborhood. Lucy kept three inmates in her house, and the six or seven disorderly houses on Prindle Street were all run in the same manner. The lower floor served as a waiting room and the upper rooms acted as sleeping apartments.

  Soon enough, the reporters from the Herald focused on Lucy Chapman’s place at 10 Prindle Street. Lucy had set up business with a sometime boyfriend, Johnny Fellows, in 1889. Prindle Street ran off of Fair Street and it was tucked nicely out of the way, even though it was less than a ten-minute walk from the center of the city. Local reporters insisted that Lucy Chapman’s house had a reputation as one of the lowest resorts in New Haven.

  As public opprobrium built, the raids began. When the trouble began, the madames of New Haven considered the matter a one-time, money-raising effort. Moreover, the men and women who ran the houses of ill fame had been unmolested for so long that they had come to believe that their businesses were in perfect accord with the law and spirit of the times. After one such raid, Judge Julius Cable of the police court fined Lucy $30 plus costs. The fine was paid immediately and Lucy went right back to work.[167]

  Lucy Chapman’s partner, Johnny Fellows, struck everyone as a strange character. He sported a diamond stud, valued at $600, and a diamond ring worth $300. His entire collection added up to $2000. People thought Fellows independently well off. In truth, he got a monthly stipend from his wealthy father. By 1892, Lucy and Johnny had purchased 16 Prindle Street and continued the same circus. The property remained in Lucy’s name to protect Fellows’s interest from his wife’s legal assaults.[168]