Prostitution in the Gilded Age

by Kevin Murphy

  —Bestor Auctioneers.[334]

  The Saengerbund, a German singing society, bought 76 Wells Street from Ada Leffingwell’s estate on October 12, 1902. The Saengerbund remodeled the building, adding a beautiful auditorium in 1910. The singing group used the old parlor house as a clubhouse until 1927 when they dedicated a new place at 266 Washington Street. The 76 Wells Street property was demolished a year later and the land added to a huge parcel—between Main, Gold and Wells Streets—cobbled together for Bushnell Towers and the Metropolitan District Commission’s new headquarters.[335]

  When the old Hollister place (Saengerbund Clubhaus) on Wells Street was purchased in 1928, the wrecking ball wasted no time reducing Hartford’s marquee pleasure palace to rubble. Eventually, every single building on Mulberry Street disappeared and the whole area became just another pleasant memory—with a German accent. The Heublein Hotel, Poli Theatre, and City Hotel also surrendered as progress coldly and cruelly marched on.[336]

  The business of running houses of ill fame threw off ancillary jobs and created new firms. In the years when the top of State Street represented the heart of the tenderloin—with its high-end collection of bordellos—there existed an immense need for laundry services. It tasks the imagination to think of a madame running a busy bawdy house and doing the laundry too. The sheets had to be changed after each session, not to mention the towels and linens that piled up endlessly in the course of a routine day. The Chinese residents of the city spotted this overarching need and started laundries in the area. They weren’t allowed to become citizens, but they could work as resident aliens. Based on the number of Chinese laundries in and around State Street, it should come as no surprise that, as organized prostitution went into a death spiral, the area became the center of Chinese life in Hartford. In fact, by 1908, that whole block—from Statehouse Square to Front Street—became the city’s Chinatown. The Shanghai Restaurant—the first, and best, eatery of its type opened on the second floor of 163 State Street, Frank Russell’s old saloon-brothel, and that building became the target of a long string of opium raids as one vice replaced another.[337]

  The biggest dilemma with prostitution was that the madames and their inmates were arrested regularly, but they merely paid their fines and returned to work. The women thought that if the court simply collected money in lieu of licensing fees, there was nothing to worry about. Once in a blue moon, one of the madames—feeling particularly abused by the police court—appealed her case in superior court. However, the expenses of lawyers and court costs were prohibitive; better to pay the fine in police court and go back to work.

  In 1904, Hartford’s Prosecuting Attorney J. Gilbert Calhoun made a few comments about the disappearance of the toughs from Hartford and he introduced some interesting points. Calhoun admitted that there was less crime now than at any time he could remember. He reminisced: “Ten years ago, there were many more [toughs] hanging out on the East Side . . . and they were frequently before the police court . . . for theft . . . for robbery . . . violence . . . .The police are more vigilant . . . . The interest in sailing and the Hartford riverfront has lessened the number of toughs. . . . Lastly, woman “rounders” began to disappear as, two or three years ago, county commissioners looked to eradicate saloons with backroom operations.”[338]

  Now the city concentrated on closing the houses of ill fame. It was as if, four decades after the Civil War, the public finally got its conscience back. However, for the moment, they let gambling and liquor violations slide. The gamblers conducted so many card and dice dens, the totality of the heap cannot be enumerated. If Chief of Police William Gunn got the word from the mayor, his forces would be busier than ever. Poker rooms were located on nearly every big block, and policy offices were more numerous than saloons. Chinamen love fan-tan and played it day and night right under the noses of the police. A book on the races was made every day in a centrally located saloon.

  Meanwhile, Pearl, Allyn, and Trumbull Streets were overflowing with streetwalkers. These women weren’t a bit shy; they hung onto a man like a prizefighter hung onto a foe. The women smelled of cheap wine and beer, and pestered every man until they could get one to buy them a drink of rum.

  Despite raids, and efforts to put legal pressure on the property owners, by 1905 the bordellos in the tenderloin were still doing a lively business. On State Street, the team of Grace Howard and Jessie Lansing were working well together at the Bange mansion while near carbon copies of their operation ran at 167 and 169.

  Farther down the street sat the French district, where “foreign places” brought vice to a whole new level. Robberies, fistfights, and knifings were standard fare for the truly wicked places down by the river. The women were of the lowest order, and their behavior shocked everyone; depravity became them.

  One of the brothel business’s foundations was the constant replenishment of young girls. The white slave traffic was at its worst in the degenerate area of the tenderloin around Front Street.

  In the middle of the Gilded Age, a Nashville newspaper editor did a creditable job delving into the white slavery business. Wrote the newspaperman, “A notorious landlady among the demimonde was among those who went from Nashville to witness the scene at Murfreesboro. The object was to replenish her establishment. . . . The large number of young girls from the country offered an attractive field for the procuress . . . . As long as humanity remains what it is . . . there will be found men and women whose hearts . . . unchecked by morality . . . will work the ruin of young girls . . . .[339]

  No matter what the clergy, the mayor, and the public thought of prostitution, the white slave trade was essential if the houses were to stay in business. Since the average length of service of a prostitute in a brothel was between two and four years, every place needed a steady supply of young prostitutes.

  In the 1840s, political demagogues used the term “white slavery” to win votes by suggesting that shiftless, uneducated whites should be sold into slavery. After the Civil War, the term white slavery surfaced in many ways, but rarely in reference to young girls sold into prostitution. White slavery was used to describe inhumane working conditions and the status of women in the home—unpaid, overworked, lonely, and hopeless. So said, true white slavery—underage girls forced into prostitution—appeared so ugly that newspapers shied away from it.

  In Norwalk, Connecticut, on Sunday, Novembers 14, 1842, two New Yorkers, David and Elizabeth Valentine, “did with force & arms willfully, maliciously, and feloniously entice & decoy away for the purposes of prostitution from & out of the lawful charge & custody of John Malloy . . . a certain female child of the name of Jane Day [sic] who was then under the age of twelve years &c. . . .” [340]

  The Valentines were members of a religious community in Kakiat, Rockland County, New York (near Ramapo). On February 2, 1842, the jury found David and Elizabeth Valentine guilty and they were sentenced to two- and five-year terms, respectively, in the Connecticut State Prison at Wethersfield. The warrants were signed on March 1, 1842 and they began serving their sentences immediately.

  But consider this—nothing about the arrest, trial, imprisonment, or release of the Valentines appeared in any newspaper in the United States! The first telegraph transmission wasn’t until 1844 so the information wasn’t available to the fourth estate. So said, even in the second half of the nineteenth century, cases of kidnapping for prostitution were rarely found in print. It wasn’t until the first decade of the twentieth century that white slavery became front-page news.

  In the West, citizens sometimes took a hands-on approach to white slavery. “In 1887, James Miller, from Volcano, California, came to [Los Angeles], bringing with him a bright girl, fifteen years of age, who he claimed to be his wife. . . . He attempted to place her in a bordello in Los Angeles. But from this place, she was temporarily rescued by the police. A party of indignant citizens, in disguise, waited upon Miller, escorted him to the bank of the river, and gave him a thorough coating of tar and feathers, as good a one
as mortal man has ever received before. He was then warned not to be seen in the city.”[341]

  The White Slave Traffic Act—better known as the Mann Act—is a federal law passed by Congress on June 25, 1910. A little-known fact is that Connecticut was the first state in the country to win a prosecution under the Mann Act. Connecticut’s pit bull State’s Attorney for Hartford County, Hugh “Mead” Alcorn, convicted a dozen people under the Mann Act, and some of the guilty got sentences as long as ten years. Alcorn also revived an old law—the Confirmed Criminal Statute (indeterminate sentence statute)—whereby sentences of up to thirty years could be given to three-time losers. This made Connecticut an especially uninviting place for criminals to do business. In March 1910, a two-bit robber, Timothy Sheedy, got a sentence from three to thirty years! “The news of the conviction . . . reached New York where the majority of the professional crooks . . . came from, and when it was [learned] what was being done . . . this section was concluded to be a good place to keep away from.”[342]

  Articles about the white slave traffic in connection with houses of ill repute simply were few and far between in the nineteenth century. It wasn’t until the early part of the twentieth century that stories appeared in newspapers castigating the social evil of enticing young girls into lives of prostitution.

  There has been a kidnapping law on the books in Connecticut since 1830, which has served well even in white slavery cases as early as 1842. It is curious that in all of the cases of white slavery—from 1842 to 1912—the prison terms matched those prescribed by this law—just as they did in the David and Elizabeth Valentine case described earlier. The law states—

  Every person who shall kidnap, or forcibly or fraudulently carry off, or decoy, out of the state, any free person or persons entitled to freedom, or shall arrest or imprison a free person, or persons entitled to freedom, or knowing such person to be free, or entitled to freedom, with the intent to have the person carried out of the state, or to be held in slavery or service against his will, shall suffer imprisonment in the Connecticut state prison for a term not less than two nor more than five years, and pay a fine not to exceed five hundred dollars. . . .

  People in the white slavery business knew how to be careful. At the first sign of trouble, they put their operation in mothballs. But for those who continued in the trade, the business of bringing young girls into the brothels became known as the “cadet system.” This term goes back to the Revenue Marine Service, better known as the Revenue Cutter Service, established in 1799 for the proper collection of import and tonnage dues, as well as to aid in the observance of navigation laws. In 1876, Congress adopted a measure to appoint cadets to fill vacancies that occurred in the line. The cadets’ pay sat below that of the third lieutenants.[343]

  Big city police and fire departments used a cadet system as well, but it fell out of favor. In New York, it proved unworkable as the pay of seasoned workers shot through the roof. The pay of cadets crippled everyone, so the cadet system was abandoned.

  In New York, the Herman brothers of Hartford, Albert and Jacob, were arrested for procuring young girls. Louise Tinkham, a Hartford girl, was a victim of the Herman brothers’ attempt to make some easy money. According to George Titus, New York’s Chief of Detectives, Albert and Jacob Herman had been extensively engaged in enticing girls from Hartford to New York, supplying the disorderly houses of the big city. In this case, Titus said that the brothers took the girl to New York on the Hartford boat Monday night [August 26, 1901] and sold her to the proprietor of a West Side bordello.

  Louise Tinkham was a tall, pretty girl, with black hair and black eyes, but only seventeen years old. Before she went away, Louise shared a room in a boarding house with a cousin. Additional dispatches from New York said that the Herman brothers were held on bail of $1,500 each and Louise Tinkham landed in the House of Detention.[344]

  During New York’s 1893 Lexow Committee hearings on police corruption, the information collected by Rev. Dr. Charles H. Parkhurst’s City Vigilance Committee was sensational and salacious, opening the public’s eyes as nothing else could. Parkhurst and other reformers worked tirelessly to end the cadet system. After the Lexow revelations, the public’s gentle sensibilities took a back seat to the exposure of vice and newspapers began to publish the facts.

  Whether it be a man, a woman, a couple, or a group, the business of gathering young girls for the houses of ill fame was highly lucrative and as secretive as any business on earth. A proprietor would happily boast about how much money his place made last year, but he wouldn’t say a word about the source of his young inmates. The subject was just too unsettling, except for the moral cripples who worked in this trade.

  The biggest of all the white slavers in Hartford was the Italian immigrant Pasquale “Patsy” Fusco. He owned a grimy saloon—with a backroom operation—at 70 Talcott Street (corner of Front Street) on the lower East Side. When arrested, Patsy Fusco stated that 135 girls—seventeen and up—were delivered from New York to Hartford each year. At the same time, nationwide 60,000 new prostitutes were needed annually. Patsy Fusco also said that the Mann Act (1910) cut into the number of New York girls that could be procured, but he could get all he wanted from Connecticut.[345]

  Under enormous pressure, Fusco admitted that he had a connection on New York’s Upper East Side—Morris and Lena Cohen—who furnished girls to brothels in Connecticut and a number of cities in New York State. Patsy Fusco, and another Hartford madame Jennie Luretta, went to New York as star witnesses against Morris and Lena Cohen, and the couple received two- and five-year sentences, respectively. Morris also paid a $5,000 fine. Patsy Fusco’s legal problems continued and he eventually disappeared—probably fleeing to Italy. For turning state’s evidence, Jennie Luretta received a suspended sentence.[346]

  The Hartford police had nothing to do with the biggest decisions regarding vice. This can be said with one caveat—to a man, the Hartford police knew about, and hated, the cadet system and the work of the white slave traffickers. It was a conundrum; while the police liked Jennie and Tom Hollister, accepted their Christmas presents—and probably even frequented their parlor house—the same officers hated the very foundation of the Hollisters’ business. That said, a madame like Ethel Graves of the New England House was always treated like a leper because she openly tried to advance the cadet system.[347]

  As Morgan Bulkeley and the rest of the bishops decided the best course for the city, there were a few key institutions of city government where they needed help. The mayor and the common council were no problem and the police would do what the mayor said. The real progress, or lack thereof, lay with the court system. A legal challenge to the Bridge Commission’s authority had already set the project back three years and the last thing they wanted was a reprise of that mess.

  The Hartford Police Court was where all the petty crime of the city reached a resolution. When Chief of Police Walter Chamberlin gave his first annual report to the common council, the city only had a population of 29,152—yet there were 435 arrests for drunkenness, 80 for breach of peace, 47 for assault, 22 for theft, and 1 for keeping a house of ill fame. By 1900, the city had a population of 80,000, and all of these numbers had more than tripled.

  Easily one of the toughest jobs in the court system was that of judge of police court. While a judge’s tenure could be rewarding and even inspiring, police court was pure hell. Not only did the judge have to deal with the dregs of society—drunks, brawlers, prostitutes and thieves—but now the judge of police court had to close thirty brothels. This last piece of business would force more than 200 madames and prostitutes out on the street.

  What happens to old prostitutes? What happens when a prostitute’s youth, beauty, skills, and stamina have abandoned her? In a Baltimore study of 256 aged prostitutes, it was found that only 30 percent of old prostitutes married, lived with men, or worked some legitimate job. The rest died or disappeared. Since this data is fairly intuitive, the judges who closed down the bawdy houses kn
ew that suffering would follow. The job of police court judge was one of the nastiest jobs in town and about to get worse.[348]

  Judge Albert C. Bill of the police court was an honest and capable man, but he had been in the job since 1895 and would turn forty soon. If he stayed on the bench in 1903, he would complete eight continuous years at the head of the Hartford police court. It should be remembered that the original police court statute of 1851 envisioned judges serving just a single year. The bishops felt it was time for a change. They needed someone younger to do the gut-wrenching work needed to turn the city around as the Hartford Bridge came on line in early 1908.

  Edward J. Garvan was born in East Hartford on May 17, 1871 to state Senator Patrick Garvan. Edward attended Hartford Public High School, Yale University, and graduated from Yale Law School in 1896. He was a Catholic, but a Republican. When he had completed his education, Judge Arthur Eggleston took a shine to Edward Garvan and made sure that he met the right people, including Attorney J. Gilbert Calhoun, who partnered with young Edward Garvan for ten years. The two maintained offices on Main Street.[349]

  Garvan was exactly what the bishops wanted, and in March 1893, Judge Edward J. Garvan took over the police court. He was thirty-one.

  When Judge Garvan took the bench at the police court, behind the scenes he made it clear to the new Chief of Police, William Gunn, exactly what he wanted. The job required both men to work closely together, so Gunn wasted no time getting down to business. Chief Gunn and his men put together a raid of six houses of ill fame. On a Sunday night in December 1903, between 7 and 8 o’clock, the police swooped down on six houses of ill repute and arrested thirty-four women and two men, bringing them to the station house in carriages, sleighs, and a patrol wagon. They were all released on bonds. The madames arrested included Grace Howard, Lena Wooley, Grace Morton, Anna Castaybert, and Clara and Minnie Simmons. (Since this case did not make it to superior court, one assumes the cases were dismissed or settled for an undisclosed amount in fines.)[350]