Prostitution in the Gilded Age

by Kevin Murphy

  As if the city needed more trouble, critics were quick to criticize the bridge building efforts in Hartford. Simply put, there were five town—Hartford, East Hartford, Manchester, East Windsor and Glastonbury—who benefited the most from the bridge and were merged together to pay for it. It sounded fair, but Glastonbury argued that the Bridge and Highway Commission had not been legally created—and couldn’t force Glastonbury to pay a dime. A court challenge followed and Glastonbury lost in the Connecticut Supreme Court of Errors. Undeterred, Glastonbury took the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Almost three years later, the U. S. Supreme Court held that the state had the right to merge the five towns to build and maintain the Hartford Bridge. Therefore, the commission had indeed been legally created. During this three-year impasse, the commission did no work at all.[282]

  Owing to this legal delay, bids for the new bridge were not solicited from interested parties until late March 1899. [283]

  Meanwhile, in April 1896, the citizens of Hartford elected the Democratic Mayor Miles Preston, who did nothing to ameliorate the condition of vice in the Capitol City. By the time Preston finished his first term in March 1898, reporters wrote, “At the present time, there are 2,500 prostitutes within the confines of the Capitol. Over thirty houses of ill fame are running under the protection of the mayor, the police commissioners, and the police department . . . houses of assignation do a thriving business on every corner. The situation is appalling and no one questions but what a change is sadly needed.”[284]

  When the Bridgeport Sunday Herald adopted the cleaning up of Connecticut’s Capitol City as an intrastate drama, it didn’t seem to matter that the newspaper wrote in the florid style of the day, because its managing editor, Richard Howell, was respected among his peers as a first-rate journalist and editor. Howell started as a newspaper cartoonist and later became an editor. So said, Howell had a soft spot in his heart for good newspaper art and hired some of the best artists, caricaturists, and cartoonists in the business. The Bridgeport Sunday Herald and the Waterbury Sunday Herald—where Howell was also the managing editor—were newspapers that were great fun to read. Not surprisingly, the Bridgeport Sunday Herald had the highest readership in Connecticut, and that fact could not be ignored by the pompous Yale grads in Hartford.

  Therefore, when the Herald laid out the number of brothels and gambling joints in the Capitol City, the scandal was more than a first-rate public relations firm could handle. Naturally, the denizens of Hartford cried foul and slammed the Herald’s articles as “sensational journalism,” but the rank smell of low tide lingered.

  The Herald maintained that the fault lay with a “pool of influence” somewhere within the hierarchy of the city, for “it must require some influence to run a house of prostitution for years without molestation . . . . If a stranger . . . wishes to engage in this business, he must see some person who is on the inside, and then the business can be ‘fixed.’ How much money is required . . . has never been stated. . . . but this is the year of investigations and the incoming legislature should appoint a committee for the purpose of prying into a few facts, and their first tour of duty should commence in Hartford. They would not be in session very long before the taxpayers learned of . . . strange methods of business, which have been employed . . . for years.[285]

  A little while later, the Bridgeport newspaper bore down, “Hartford at present is a disgrace to the good old Nutmeg State, and unless the authorities . . . awaken to this fact, the deserved censure will soon come from all sides. The city is overrun with the lowest class of fallen women to be found in the country, and the streets after nightfall are lined with young and old specimens, who openly solicit on street corners . . . . These women dress as loud as possible and “prostitute” is plainly stamped all over their anatomy. Their actions are so bold that even the young libertines of the town turn from them in disgust.”[286]

  When pressed in the past, authorities in Hartford asserted that it would be impossible to drive these prostitutes from the streets. Though the statutes against streetwalking, soliciting, and prostitution were clearly on the books—and the fines and jail terms spelled out clearly—enforcement wasn’t easy. As the days and weeks passed, it became clear that the situation had been set in concrete by so many decades of indifference.

  So emboldened were the streetwalkers that a respectable woman would not use the streets at night without a male escort. Even men could not walk the main thoroughfares without being accosted by the brazenfaced young women of the demimonde, who promised a memorable trip to a house of assignation. The police department’s seeming lack of interest had reached such an outrageous level that a stranger asked, “Do the police lay in with these women?”[287]

  In a way, it seemed almost humorous to hear uninformed people malign the police when talking about the freedom of the tenderloin. A great example of the kind of cop walking the beat in Hartford’s tenderloin was Officer James Francis Lally. Among the toughs, “Pud” Lally had a reputation as the most feared officer. James Lally, with his older brother John, ran away from home in County Westmeath, Ireland when he was fourteen. The brothers sailed to America and joined the navy, during the early part of the Civil War. Both of them were on the Monitor when it fought the Merrimac at Hampton Roads, Virginia in March 1862. Sadly, James Lally’s brother, John, was blown to bits during the battle and James eventually completed his service and mustered out. By working hard and saving his money, he brought his parents, brother, and sisters to America. Lally worked a number of different jobs on the railroad before becoming a Hartford policeman in August 1889. At the time, gang initiation included “trimming” a cop. But Lally never fell for that nonsense and managed to stay on his feet. He had a fabulous sweep with his right arm, a move that could deliver the force of another man’s best punch. Lally was probably the handiest man in the department with his fists and could deflect a “knockdown” better than anyone else.[288]

  One of the greatest standup fights in department history took place on State Street one afternoon and involved Sgt. John Butler—once the amateur heavyweight boxing champion of New England. Butler was so strong that he didn’t bother to take a “billy” with him on rounds. He once said, “I’m afraid to hit a man with a billy because I’m afraid I’ll kill him.” That afternoon, Butler worked near the corner of State and Market Streets and had a run-in with the Manion brothers—both of them the apotheosis of toughness. Sgt. Butler kept knocking them down, but they kept getting back up. He just couldn’t land a knockout blow on either of them. James Lally, strolling farther down State Street, saw the crowd gather and got to the scene as fast as he could. Lally raised his billy only twice, landing withering blows on the heads of the Manions, one by one. When they next saw daylight, the Manions were in separate cells at the police station.

  James Lally made good as the “subduer of toughs,” but he acted like a true gentleman with respectable people. When he died of heart trouble in 1906, his wife, Mary, and his five children held his funeral mass at St. Joseph’s Cathedral on Farmington Avenue.

  Here’s the point: Was James Francis Lally afraid to do his duty? Not hardly. Was he afraid of the characters of the demimonde? Laughable. A good businessman like Tom Hollister would never cause problems for a cop, but even if a self-centered sport like Billy West decided to make trouble, he wouldn’t stand a chance against James Lally. True, there were some tough foreign proprietors on the lower end of State Street, but nothing James Lally couldn’t handle.

  Lastly—at the end of the Gilded Age, killing a police officer was unthinkable. Even if a man killed a policeman by accident, the smartest thing he could do was take his own life. Cheating Connecticut’s traveling gallows was possible for a brief time, but realistically the killer’s life was over. A sample of the tenor of the times: Two wardens at the Connecticut State Prison at Wethersfield, Daniel Webster and William Willard, were killed by inmates in 1862 and 1870, respectively. Both assailants were tried and hanged within months of the murders. />
  For some, there existed great irony in Hartford’s uncontrollable vice. The Capitol produced all of Connecticut’s laws, but the Capitol City appeared to be the most lawless and immoral city of its size in the country. Many felt that there wasn’t another city of Hartford’s size in the United States that harbored such a large number of fallen women and allowed them to do as they pleased. Still, while the ruckus bothered the men in control of the Capitol City, there was a strange reluctance to make any changes. Wrongly, there were those who thought the catalyst should be the Hartford police. Many an argument erupted from the false premise that the police could simply arrest the scofflaws and close the brothels. Others felt that Judge Albert Bill of the police court should start using jail sentences to mete out justice. However, jail sentences had been doled out sparingly up to this time and had accomplished nothing. One final wrong-headed idea involved the state legislature. What if the General Assembly allowed cities and towns to license houses of ill fame? This one final legal maneuver suited some, but was clearly a step in the wrong direction.[289]

  Many cities laid out red light districts in an effort to keep houses of prostitution separated from respectable neighborhoods. In 1882, a Los Angeles city ordinance made it “unlawful for any person to open, keep, maintain, or carry-on within the limits of the City of Los Angeles, any bawdy house, or place of ill fame, or prostitution, or to reside or live in any house of ill fame.” However, the population of Los Angeles between 1880 and 1900 skyrocketed from 11,000 to 102,000, and the explosion in the number of bordellos caught everyone flat-footed. In an effort to protect the business district, the Los Angeles Common Council forbade bordellos inside of the block bounded by Fort (Broadway), Los Angeles, First, and Fourth Streets. Eventually, the council fashioned a red light district that was essentially a square between Alameda Street on the east, Broadway on the west, and First and Third Streets on the north and south. So said, to the northeast of this red light district, about 200 prostitutes lived and worked on Schaefer Street near Union Station. Schaefer Street no longer exists as the city closed the disorderly houses and bulldozed the whole area in 1909, adding nicely to the valueless middens of history. Still, when archeologists unearthed a privy in this area in 2008, about 200 medicine bottles were found, including bottles of Darby’s Prophylactic Fluid, a common type of health formula used in houses of ill repute. At that time, Darby’s Prophylactic Fluid was manufactured by Z. H. Zeilin & Co. of Philadelphia. . . .The rubble also included douche formularies and gynecological paraphernalia.[290]

  The tenderloin district of San Francisco was in the North Beach and Embarcadero districts (Barbary Coast) near the water. The city fathers tried to keep prostitution between Larkin, Market, Church, and Eighteenth Streets—and also extending down to the waterfront. In the 1870s, they fashioned an even smaller red light district between Kearny, Stockton, Market, and Broadway Streets. This proved too tight an area since houses of ill fame kept popping up between this red light district and the waterfront.[291]

  “Storyville,” was New Orleans’s red light district from 1897 to 1917. Named after Alderman Sidney Story, who wrote the necessary guidelines and legislation to control prostitution within New Orleans, this sixteen-block district was bounded by North Robertson, Iberville, Basin, and St. Louis Streets. (Recent maps show the Storyville District to the east of the original red light zone—between the French Quarter and Interstate 10.)

  The red light district in Chicago was called The Levee because of its proximity to the wharves on Lake Michigan. The Levee District consisted of four blocks in Chicago’s south loop area, between 18th and 22nd streets. From 1880 to 1912, prostitution boomed in the Levee District, but police eventually closed it down in the wake of a blistering vice commission report.

  Every large city had a red light district and it isn’t necessary to identify all of them. Suffice it to say that, during the Gilded Age, prostitution was almost universally regarded as a necessary evil; and perhaps even uncontrollable. Once again, authorities in all cities came to the conclusion that, with prostitution, they could ignore it, embrace it, or seek some middle ground. The red light districts were an attempt to secure the middle ground.

  There were two notable attempts at licensing and legitimatising prostitution during the Gilded Age. The first was in Saint Paul, Minnesota, a city whose police force appeared ineffectual until after the Civil War. The second case was in St. Louis, Missouri, where prostitution was legalized in 1870.

  Saint Paul, Minnesota had attempted to register prostitutes, beginning in 1865. Though this system of regulating prostitutes collapsed in less than twenty years, the influence of the system continued in Saint Paul’s “under the hill” district well into the twentieth century. Though people are under the impression that Ordinance No. 10—the regulation of prostitutes in Saint Paul, Minnesota—ended in the early 1880s, the effects of the experiment lingered for decades thereafter.

  In 1900, the Saint Paul Globe wrote, “This plan [of regulating prostitutes] was to apply not only to known houses of ill fame, but to the . . . lost creatures of the street. This subject is not a palatable one for newspaper discussion . . . and the city papers informally agreed to avoid mention of the plan while it was being experimented upon. It soon became manifest that it was an intolerable nuisance, and under the protection, afforded the number of immoral women to increase until nearly 200 were registered as “rumors” alone—not counting the inmates of recognized houses of ill fame. But this was not the worst of it. Protected by their licenses, these creatures became bolder and bolder, until they actually came to solicit in the very doorways of respectable businesses, and defied the police to restrain them. The system is still involved, and its evils unabated, notwithstanding the complaints that have been made.”[292]

  St. Louis, Missouri broke with the rest of the United States on July 5, 1870 when its common council passed the Social Evil Ordinance, legalizing prostitution. Half-a-dozen doctors were recruited to examine prostitutes, hopefully screening out the diseased women and admitting them to the Social Evil Hospital. The plan envisioned funds for this hospital coming from the registration fees and fines collected during the routine business of legalized prostitution. At first blush, St. Louis seemed well on its way to becoming a prostitution utopia. Sadly, historians will never know whether or not St. Louis’s plan was good or bad because, in 1874, the Missouri General Assembly nullified the ordinance. Folks said, “the law received almost unanimous endorsement of the doctors of medicine in the state, but quite as unanimously the condemnation of the doctors of divinity.”[293]

  No matter what experiments were tried in the Gilded Age, during the period from 1907 to 1917, houses of ill repute came under a great deal of pressure to close. “Of forty cities investigated in the spring and summer of 1917, four had never established limits within which prostitutes were permitted to openly conduct their business, twenty-six had closed their red light districts, and ten cities still had them.”[294]

  As out-of-town newspapers grew bolder in their quest to expose and stamp out the immoral houses in the Charter Oak City, they sent sketch artists to Hartford in an effort to produce renderings of these houses “in which debauchery and crime were carried on during every hour of the passing days.” They howled, “Where are the church people who claim to be anxious to save men’s souls? What are city officials doing after they took an oath to suppress crime and bring offenders to the bar of justice? The capital needs cleansing and needs it badly.” [295]

  “To Chief of Police Bill, it is hard to say anything. . . . He has been chief of police for some years and has almost absolute control of the seventy or eighty patrolmen . . . . No man can question Chief Bill’s honesty or integrity. . . . Are his hands tied by the click of politicians who are in power?”[296]

  “At Wells Street, within a stone’s throw of the finest capitol in New England, stands a house built on modern architectural lines. The building is well maintained . . . .The red blinds and the well-kept lawns and flower
gardens, would attract the eye of a stranger; they would ask what well-to-do citizen resides in that domicile? In front of the house flows . . . the Park River. . . . And still further to the westward stands the capitol.”[297]

  “This house is so centrally located and so well patronized by the aristocrats, that it could not do business without the knowledge of the entire police department . . . .The artist who wished to get a sketch of the house and grounds, stopped a blue-coated guardian of the peace and quietly asked him where it was. The officer said, ‘First house off of Mulberry Street on Wells Street. I think the number is seventy-six.’ Then the policeman smiled and went on his way.”[298]

  Hartford wasn’t the only city where the police knew every house of ill repute—and probably availed themselves of the inmates’ services. In 1892, Salt Lake City’s Chief of Police Arthur Pratt organized an “onslaught on the dives of vice . . . arresting keepers of houses of ill fame, inmates, and their patrons until the register at the police station recorded the names of fifteen keepers of houses of prostitution, forty-one inmates, and twenty-four visitors. . . . Among the latter was Capt. John J. Donovan, arrested at Lillie Evans’s resort on East Third South Street.”[299] (Pratt and Donovan didn’t get along, and Chief Pratt used this little scheme to humiliate Donovan.)

  The argument . . . by some well-known officials remained “let it run. It’s a respectable place, and places of this sort are a necessity and they cannot be licensed, so let respectable houses go for the good of the community.”[300]