Prostitution in the Gilded Age

by Kevin Murphy

  But George Warren’s health began to fail. After an operation in Boston, he died. Clara tried to continue, but took sick herself. Then, about 1896, lawmen raided the house, along with six or seven other places, as Norwich’s tiny police force flexed its muscles. Only Clara and an attractive young girl were home. They rode to the police station and appeared in court as dignified as a grandmother and granddaughter out of a Norman Rockwell painting. A little over a year later, the city police raided Clara Warren’s house on Hardscrabble Hill again, as Norwich fell into the habit of collecting “license fees” once a year. After that, Clara gave up and moved to Boston.[250]

  Pretty Jennie Barlow of Bridgeport had the place for a time, but Jennie Barlow courted trouble by hiring girls who were far too sporty for a slow town like Norwich. Enter Billy West.[251]

  As stated previously, Billy West changed his name to William Emmons when he decided to resuscitate the old Warren mansion in Norwich. Billy ran the Warren place for almost a decade and then disappeared forever. In 1910, the house atop Hardscrabble Hill was taken over by Fanny Green Feuer, a woman known for her late hours and everlasting stable of lovers. The police raided Fanny Green’s bagnio in October 1913, and soon thereafter her husband, the long-suffering David Feuer of Bridgeport, was granted a divorce on the grounds that his wife was guilty of adultery, keeping a disorderly house in Norwich, and harboring females for purposes of prostitution.[252]

  Billy West was so typical of the men of the demimonde. As an only child, Billy grew up into an incredibly self-centered adult. As Grace Howard found out the hard way, Billy West had no loyalty at all. He shuffled the women in his life whenever it suited him and floated around Connecticut, making his living by the ruination of young girls. That didn’t bother West at all, but he changed his name regularly as if to launder his soul. No doubt, he changed his name for a final time just before he met Saint Peter.

  Though Billy West originally ran Jennie and Tom Hollister’s old place—a simple brothel noted for its luxurious appointments and prominent client list—big money was always at the heart of Billy’s scheming. West probably liked the Warren mansion in Norwich because it almost qualified as a New York-style parlor house and the distinction allowed him to charge exorbitant rates.

  When Billy West, Grace Howard, and a few other proprietors of bawdy houses received Chief of Police George Bill’s 1898 order to close their houses, Billy closed up the Bange mansion and began to follow the trotters with Gertie Camp. However, Grace Howard had a better idea.

  Talking with a reporter, Grace Howard said airily, “I’m going into the country to take a vacation now. Don’t you want to come? Just you wait until I get my new place and I’ll show Chief Bill. . . . He should go after the young girls, and the sporty ‘push,’ and the married women that have other women’s husbands hanging around . . . . We do an honest business and don’t disturb anyone. My house has been quiet. We’re a necessity. We’re here for the accommodation of unmarried men. It always makes us mad to see a married man with a nice home come here. Of course, we take his money, but we’re not here for such as he. . . . We’ll be back here in Hartford before long, just the same as ever. If we don’t, half of Hartford will be running after us. We are just as much a necessity as the Capitol. . . . I’ll bet that Thrasher has been around worse people, but I suppose he has to earn his bread and butter.”[253]

  With her lover, Harry Arnold, she rented the Hotel de Ryer on the Old Saybrook road in Rocky Hill, Connecticut, a no-license town. The previous owner, Lawrence Ryer, a German brewer, became discouraged after a long series of raids for selling liquor and gave up on the property. The Hotel de Ryer had been closed for two or three years before Grace Howard and Harry Arnold took the keys from Ryer. Not without justification, a townsman suspected Grace and Harry of selling liquor and filed a complaint. The local constable organized a raid, but no intoxicants were found. (Grace buried the liquor in the back yard.) Still and all, the authorities harassed Grace Howard endlessly and the Hotel de Ryer never really had a chance. In less than twelve months, Grace and Harry were back in Hartford.[254]

  Billy West was doing fine with the airy, old Warren place on Hardscrabble Hill, but down on Water Street, there were places where no self-respecting sport would venture. This brings up a grim problem of the times—venereal disease. It could be argued that the different diseases were spread evenly among the houses of ill fame throughout the United States, but the $0.50 hellholes catered to a much lower class of client and could be expected to see far more disease than the $5 New York-style parlor houses.

  After Dr. William Sanger conducted his study of 2,000 New York prostitutes in 1855, he advocated the regulation of prostitution in order to better prevent the spread of venereal disease. In Sanger’s 1855 questionnaire, 821 (41%) of the women were willing to admit to having had a venereal disease. The social stigma undoubtedly forced some of the women to lie, making the true number much higher.[255]

  Around 1910, 4.5 percent of all emergency room visits to Hartford Hospital were for venereal disease issues, though studies almost unanimously peg venereal diseases at 10-20 percent of the population during the Gilded Age. (In 2008, the CDC claimed that at any given time there were 110 million cases of STIs in the United States. Based on a 2008 U. S. population of 304 million, the number of Americans with a STI at any given time was around 36 percent. However, by subtracting children (fourteen and under) the number of adults caring STIs at any given time jumps to 45 percent. Taking into account multiple STIs per person, the percentage is obviously lower. A good guess as to the number of adults with a STI at any given time might be 40 percent.)[256]

  In the last half of the nineteenth century, syphilis and gonorrhea were the two biggest concerns. To begin, even the doctors who went to the very best medical schools were not well trained. It was much easier to get a medical degree than it was to get a medical education. For the bulk of the nineteenth century, doctors weren’t even licensed. Though licensing began in the first third of the 1800s, it proved so unpopular with the electorate that it was eliminated all over the United States by 1840. In Connecticut, licensing wasn’t restored until 1893.

  A physician knew that if he diagnosed a patient with syphilis or gonorrhea, that person would go to another doctor. Even though doctors—by today’s standards—were substandard, they weren’t stupid. Would it really endear him to a patient if he chased the etiology of the disease? This was especially true if the doctor couldn’t do a thing to cure it. By treating only the symptoms, doctors were able to keep their patients, hold families together—an important consideration during the Gilded Age—and keep patients from enormous mental anguish. Often, doctors were caught in an appalling ethical dilemma: A male patient had a venereal disease and still intended to marry and have children. Barring a miracle, he would infect his wife and she would infect the children. There was no easy solution and each doctor handled the problem in his own way.

  The makers of Bristol’s Sarsaparilla constantly ran ads in the New York Daily Tribune for a vegetable medicine that could relieve the symptoms of Dyspepsia, Gangrene, Leprosy, and Secondary Syphilis.[257] From the 1830s to 1900, there were dozens of snake oil medicines, each touting their ability to cure syphilis—Winer’s Arcanum Extract, Kidwell’s Compound Fluid Extract of Beech Drop or Cancer Root, Samaritan’s Root & Herb Juices, Dr. Mott’s French Powders, Cuticura’s Resolvent, Acker’s Blood Elixer, and Africana. One guesses that blacks favored Africana, although the marketing data is no longer extant.[258]

  As a result of the U. S. Public Health Service’s scandalous “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male” some truths about syphilis surfaced. The study ran for forty years, from 1932 until 1972 and involved 600 mostly illiterate black sharecroppers—399 with syphilis, 201 without.[259] By 1972, 28 of the 399 men died of syphilis and another 100 died of complications attributed to the disease. If we make an enormous leap and assume that the results in black and white populations—male and female—would be roughl
y comparable, we now know that if you were a young person with syphilis in 1932, you had a 68 percent chance of surviving until 1972.

  Of course, the outrageousness of the Tuskegee Study was that these men could have been cured with penicillin anytime after 1943. Instead, they were allowed to suffer and die. In 1973, as the result of a class action suit, the study participants and their families received $9 million, but the guilty parties were never prosecuted.

  The great breakthrough in the cure of syphilis came in 1909 when German scientist Dr. Paul Ehrlich discovered Salvarsan—an arsenic-based cure for the disease. Ehrlich served as chief of the German Government Institute at Frankfort. Dr. Ehrlich partnered in many scientific breakthroughs and shared in the 1908 Nobel Prize for Medicine. He died in 1915.[260]

  Gonorrhea differed greatly from syphilis. It crippled and incapacitated, but rarely caused early death. In 1848, one physician noted in a textbook on venereal diseases, “We do not know of any substance, which, taken into the system, is an antidote to the infection of gonorrheal matter. . . .”

  At mid-century, the two most popular “cures” for gonorrhea were cubebs, an Indonesian variety of pepper of which the dried, powdered unripe fruit was used, and balsam of copaiba, extracted from a South American tree. Though many publications, even into the 1890s, supported these two botanicals, they were worthless. Vaccines against gonorrhea began to appear in the early part of the twentieth century, but with mixed results.[261]

  The search for anti-bacterial drugs began in the 1890s and most of the drugs that surfaced were metallic compounds of arsenic, antimony, gold, and mercury. However, it wasn’t until 1937 that sulfanilamide surfaced as an effective treatment. One researcher noted, “The advent of sulfanilamide has established . . . that effective chemotherapy of microbial diseases is attainable. Data from the U.S. Army showed that the sulfanilamide drugs had cut hospital stays in half, but lasting results did not materialize and cardiovascular problems made the sulfanilamide drugs problematic.

  In 1943, the U.S. military hospitals began testing penicillin. Impurities in the available penicillin dictated small doses. Typically, patients were given 80,000 to 160,000 units of the drug in divided doses in twelve hours, delivering a 96 percent cure rate. A second dose cured the other 4 percent. This, of course, represented the most satisfactory treatment to date. (Penicillin G is natural penicillin, and 1 mg is equal to 1,440-1,680 USP units. Therefore, the 80,000 to 160,000 units mentioned above figures roughly the same as 56 mgs to 96 mgs, though there are many factors—among them purity—that make this calculation uncertain.)

  Modern medicine isn’t static. From penicillin, the preferred drug became aureomycin in 1949. Then in 1966, tetracycline took center stage. A year later, spectinomycin captured the lion’s share of the market. Fortunately, pharmacological research continues, and futurists would not be reckless in suggesting that all sexually transmitted diseases will eventually be eradicated.

  As for protection, nothing existed for women in the Gilded Age. Conversely, men had options. Before the twentieth century, men experimented with chemically-treated linen and animal tissue (bladder and intestine). The earliest condoms were found in an excavation in England and dated to 1642. Goodyear manufactured the first rubber (reusable) condom in 1855, probably originating the expression, “A battlement against pleasure; a fishnet against infection.” Latex came along in 1920, and the first latex condom came from Young’s Rubber Company in the United States. Polyurethane condoms were introduced in 1994 and polyisoprene in 2008.

  The Hartford Bridge—glacially slow to achieve erection—indeed acted as the biggest catalyst behind the crackdown on vice in the Capitol City. Nevertheless, changes in the center of Connecticut should not be viewed in isolation.

  Consider other cities in the Nutmeg State. New Haven has always been the largest city in the state. During the Gilded Age, the Elm City had 35 percent more people than Hartford. (By 2012, this gap had closed to 5 percent.)[262] Perhaps owing to Yale University and the hegemony of the First Ecclesiastical Society, New Haven—unlike Hartford—never got the reputation as a wide-open city. At different times, there were houses of ill fame on Chapel, Crown, State, Fair, Prindle, Union, Worcester, and Main Streets. When James Bryan ran the Sterling House at 674 Chapel Street, it was a notorious place. The London House on Goodwin Street sunk pretty low, but the shrewd madame, Hattie Goodwin, always made her payments on time and raids at her place were rare. In 1899, the New Haven police salivated at the idea of running Kittie Reilly out of town, and if they could include Agnes Scollard—whose depraved bagnio was at 65 Union Street— so much the better. Unfortunately, both women had staying power.[263]

  Prindle Street had become an especially well known fixture of New Haven’s tenderloin. By November 1899, Captain James Brewer’s “Flying Squadron” had done a fairly meticulous job of reducing the city to only a few dens of iniquity. As noted in print, “The local tenderloin is a disintegrated collection of fragments today. Its former glory is gone. . . .‘Mother Mary’ Moran, a twenty-year fixture of the demimonde, was visited by . . .[the police] at her residence at 63 Fair Street, resulting in a fine of $100 and costs, the biggest fine New Haven has ever seen.” (“Mother Mary” Moran was no financial cretin, as she owned the Tremont Hotel in Bridgeport as well.) Humorously, the New Haven police had a secret respect for “Mother Mary” Moran, for when they brought her in, the officers sang “The Harp That Once Through Tara’s Halls” to the melody of “I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls” from Michael William Balfe’s 1844 Opera The Bohemian Girl.[264]

  Superintendent of Police Eugene Birmingham in Bridgeport seemed different from other police chiefs. He operated as a quietly competent man who refused to have anything to do with politics, which says a lot in a city like Bridgeport. Nevertheless, the people of Bridgeport loved and respected Chief Birmingham and he did his job exactly as his personal code dictated. As a result, by the turn of the twentieth century, the Park City had only five or six houses of ill fame. Chief among them were the Piedmont House on Tulip Street, the Golden Valley Hotel on Water Street, and the Tremont House on Middle Street.

  Moreover, in East Bridgeport, there were a few brothels—mostly frequented by blacks—on Pierpont Street, near the corner of Pembroke. All of these disappeared early in the twentieth century.

  Danbury’s tenacious Captain Edward Ginty had eliminated every last house of ill fame by 1894. This despite Ginty’s belief that prostitution was a necessary evil and that the houses of ill repute should be licensed by the city and confined to a red light district. As seriously as Ginty took his job, there were still a dozen women keeping furnished rooms as places of assignation.

  Waterbury and Meriden were a lot like Danbury in that there were no houses of ill fame within city limits. Waterbury had a half dozen roadhouses operating just outside of town, but authorities were loath to work outside their jurisdiction.

  New London had several houses operating in the town’s eighty-year-old red light district—Bradley, Potter, Bank, and Water Streets. For all of its long history in prostitution, New London learned very little. Bradley Street remained as vile as ever and always witnessed some of the ugliest business in the state. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the local police arrested Rena Smith (a.k.a. Rene Thornton), a madame at 93 Bradley Street, for detaining fifteen-year-old Viola Peters. Almost concurrently, the police arrested Addie Burns, a madame at 41 Bradley Street, for raping fifteen-year-old Mary Burns (no relation).

  Norwich had half a dozen houses near the waterfront around Water, River, and Ferry Streets. Of course, George and Clara Warren’s old mansion on Hardscrabble Hill always figured in the mix. Norwich seemed like such a quiet town, but the city fathers met fire with fire. As long as the businesses ran in an orderly manner, they didn’t interfere much.[265]

  One ironic feature of the old red light districts was that they were usually located within shouting distance of the main police station. The police wanted to watch them carefully and re
act quickly when trouble broke out. Also, since these houses were raided for revenue on a regular basis, it made sense to keep them close by.

  Chapter 7

  Two Random Events

  In 1895, two seemingly unrelated events converged to trumpet huge changes for Hartford. The first was the organization of the Hartford Yacht Club; the second was a fire, on the night of May 17, 1895, that destroyed the Morgan Street covered bridge over the Connecticut River. There were 20,000 people watching while the bridge delivered a red-white-orange, fiery extravaganza—as one by one the individual spans gave up all utility and promise, and collapsed into the river. In the end, the only vestiges of the bridge, that had served the Nutmeg State for eighty-five years, were the six stone piers sitting in the river. A fair guess is that not a single spectator realized the full import of the fire.[266]

  Consider for a moment the progress of the city. Hartford had telephones, electric lights, and there were sewing machines in all the finest homes. The new electric trolleys had replaced all the old horse-drawn cars, with the exception of a single line on Blue Hills Avenue. (The Blue Hills driver, Patrick Hagarty, drank a bit, and executives at the Hartford Street Railway Company decided to let him retire in 1896 before they electrified the Blue Hills branch of the system.) In 1895, the busiest street in the city, State Street, was paved with asphalt; Main Street received a coating of asphalt the following year. Speaking of electricity, all the major streets of the city had electric streetlights and battery powered automobiles had just burst on the scene.

  In America, all cities of size had a water works in place, which meant toilets in homes and fire hydrants on street corners. The great conflagrations of the 1860s and 1870s were over and simple household sanitation had never been better. Thanks to cleaner water, common waterborne diseases like typhus and cholera had become rare. It truly was the dawn of a new age.