Carrie Watson - Come in, Gentlemen

UPDATE: In a previous post on the house at 441 S. Clark, I accidentally photographed the wrong side of the street. The photo above is correct.

Between 1868 and 1897, Carrie Watson ran one of the world's most famous houses of ill-repute here at 441 S. Clark (since the renumbering in 1909, this is now in the 800 block). Her most famous advertisement was a trained parrot at the door who repeated, "Carrie Watson - come in, gentlemen!".

Carrie Watson (neé Caroline V. Storm) was born in 1850 to a middle-class family in Buffalo, New York. Surveying the sad state of the labor market for women, she decided as a teenager to seek her fortune in sin. She moved to the center of all that was sinful in the world, Chicago, in 1866 and took a job as a prostitute at Lou Harper's Mansion. After two years learning the madame business at Harper's feet, she set out with her solid man, Al Smith, to buy the two-story brick building at 441 S. Clark from Annie Stewart, whose run-ins with the law made her persona non grata in Chicago society.

Watson's house usually had around 25 women, experienced, well-mannered, and well-dressed, along with a variety of diversions for the strictly upper-class gentlemen who frequented the home, including a bowling alley, five parlors, and a billiard room. A three-piece orchestra kept the guests entertained at all hours. The splendor of the house made it famous during the 1893 World's Fair.

One of Watson's long-time employees, a Swede who went by the name Annie Hall, illustrated the wealth of the house. She was in possession of a large diamond star necklace worth over $1,500 -- and of which she was robbed not once, but twice. The first time, in 1890, the star was stolen in an assault and robbery by a famous Nebraska desperado, Patrick Crowe, who tried to pawn the item the next day, but was caught by a policeman. Crowe shot the officer, then ran through the streets of the city, firing indiscriminately into crowds, until he was mobbed and nearly lynched. Crowe served five years at Joliet prison before continuing his career as a jewel thief and train robber.

In 1893, the star was stolen again by a customer, and this time for good. The Tribune reported:

She says that a young man who said his name was Robert N. Weatherill called on her Friday afternoon and that together they made a round of the theaters and other places of amusement. At 1:30 in the morning she says that Weatherill proposed she should go to the Grand Pacific Hotel. She registered and was assigned room 253. At 12:30 the next day, she says, Weatherill entered her room, and, seizing her by the throat, pressed a hankerchief saturated with chloroform to her nostrils until she became insensible. He then robbed her of her jewelry, among which was the celebrated star.

Though most of Carrie Watson's clients were society men, and comported themselves well (or at least as well as one can in a brothel), there were exceptions. In 1886, residents heard two gunshots from an upstairs bedroom. When the police arrived and broke down the door, they found a customer had murdered one of the women, then shot himself and fallen on top of her. In another case in 1888, a delirious drunk jumped out the second-story window, stark naked -- a fact which made it into the next day's papers.

Later in life, Carrie Watson began working with Sig Cohen, and then Christopher Columbus Crabb. In 1897, under pressure from the city, she retired from the business and moved to a farm in Kankakee County, where she died in 1904. Crabb then began underwriting Lizzie Allen, who built the Everleigh Club building on S. Dearborn.

Carrie Watson's brothel was destroyed in the first decade of the 1900s to make way for expanded tracks at Dearborn Station, and since the closing of the Station, the property has been redeveloped for residential purposes.

Minnie Shouse and Henry Foster

Minnie Shouse was the leader of a Southside gang of robbers, and one of Chicago's first great female criminals. Her practice was to lure men into an alley in Hell's Half-Acre, running longways between Polk and Taylor between State and Plymouth. This dirty alley, always piled high with offal, became infamously known as Dead Man's Alley, an estimate of the likelihood of emerging from it alive. The middle of Dead Man's Alley would have been about here (pictured looking north from 9th St. above, and south from 9th below).

Shouse worked with a strongarm named Henry Foster, better known as the Black Bear, for his propensity to overwhelm his victims with his powerful grip. Shouse was arrested over 300 times in the early 1890s, but typically paid off the police to intimidate the victim, or else did it herself. The Tribune of Aug. 17, 1893, describes one such incident:

Officer Frank Kalb was dismissed from the police force by Chief Brennan yesterday. Kalb is charged with bribery. Minnie Shouse, a notorious woman whom the police have been desirous of lodging behind the bars, stole $42 and a revolver from Napoleon Barland of Kankakee County April 29. She was arrested and Barland appeared as prosecuting witness. The woman left the courtroom and the trial was postponed. At the next hearing, Kalb paid Barland $20 to leave the city and the case fell through.

Shouse finally went to prison in 1895. Later that year, Henry Foster was working alone to rob a man in Dead Man's Alley at 4:00 a.m. one morning when a local saloon-keeper, George W. Wells, ran out in an attempt to stop the crime. Foster shot Wells twice dead. The Black Bear was hanged in January, 1896.

Hinky Dink's Place

Michael "Hinky Dink" Kenna opened his first saloon at this location, 105 W. Van Buren (then 120 W. Van Buren) in 1881. He used the position to move into gambling, protection rackets, and politics. He was elected Alderman for the 1st Ward in 1897, a position he held until 1923, when he retired to become ward Committeeman, a position he kept until his death in 1946.

Kenna grew up on Chicago's west side, and earned the label "Hinky Dink" for his short stature -- he was only 5'1" tall, but tougher than most men a foot taller than him. After a adventure to the American West during the mining boom, Kenna earned enough money to buy a tiny, 5'x8' room here, which he operated as a crude saloon. He came to be known as a friend to those who needed cash for bail, an occupation that put him into contact with "a class of men who are extremely useful at primaries, in conventions, and at elections", as the Tribune put it.

Over time, Kenna opened up the second floor of his saloon as a gambling house, and despite some harassment from the police, his political power grew until he could operate unmolested. He expanded the bar, and started serving higher quality drinks, which attracted the patronage of some of the city's power elite. He changed the name of the saloon to the more rarefied "M. Kenna's Sample Room."

In 1895, he first ran for Alderman, losing to the Republican nominee, but he returned to win in 1897. Together with John "Bathhouse" Coughlin, he presided over Custom House Place, and later, the 22nd street Levee district, collecting protection money and allowing those businesses that paid to stay in business.

Upon Kenna's death, he left over $1,000,000 to his heirs.

The location of Hinky Dink's Place is still a bar, the Sky Ride Tap, which the Sun-Times describes as a "little-known but comfortable dive where day traders rub elbows with construction workers."

Hell's Half-Acre

"Hell's Half-Acre" was a common term for the slum neighborhoods in many cities (including a possibly more famous one in Honolulu which gave its name to a 1954 film noir hit). There were even Hell's Half-Acres in the Chicago suburbs, including one in the Northwest suburb of Niles.

But Chicago's Hell's Half-Acre was the block bounded between State St. and Third Ave. (later known as Plymouth Place, and even later known as Plymouth Court), and south of Polk, down to around Taylor. in the 1870s and 1880s, Hell's Half-Acre was one of the city's toughest blocks, adjacent to Custom House Place, and primarily serving the transient population that arrived at Dearborn Station, around the corner on Polk. "Serving" might not be the right word -- "robbing" was more accurate. It is said that there was not a single building on the block that was not a gambling den, a bordello, a saloon, a brothel, or some combination of these. Police never traveled into the area, except in pairs, so dangerous were the residents.

The name for the block is first noted in the Tribune in 1871, in a report about a group of drunken Swedes who were assaulted in a Hell's Half-Acre saloon by a gang of Know-Nothing nativists who resented the immigrants' revelry.

Another similar (and politically incorrect) report from 1877 described a common practice among the denizens of this depressed area -- seeking sympathy by claiming more children than they really had:

In a certain district on the South Side where the colored people, the Italian padrones, Polish Jews, and the mixed nationalities predominate, the custom of borrowing children is quite extensive as a means of eliciting the sympathy of the visitor. The trick has been quite successful among the Poles and colored people, who have repeatedly passed their offspring up and down the alleys in the rear of State street and Third and Fourth Avenues. It must be said that the Poles are the heaviest dealers in this kind of business. The art of concealment seems to have developed into a profession among these people.

After the city's dismantling of Custom House Place in 1903, Hell's Half-Acre's position as a vice district diminished, but it continued as a slum for another seventy years. The entire block is now filled by The Terraces, a townhome and condominium complex built in 1983.

Andy Craig's Life of Crime

Between 1880 and 1925, Andy Craig was consistently at the center of Chicago's underworld. While he owned many saloons, brothels, and gambling dens over the years, his most famous hang-out was the Tivoli, located at 383 S. State St. (in today's street numbering system, this would be 645 S. State), in the middle of this parking lot by the elevated tracks. The Tivoli was in operation between 1898 and 1903.

The Tivoli was known as the meeting place for most of the South side's pickpocket crew. In return for spending their money on the Tivoli's amenities, which besides the saloon included a sports book in the basement and prostitutes upstairs, Andy Craig served as the general bail bondsman for the group, always ready with a loan when one of them ended up in the Harrison Street police station. It was said that Craig, who became known as the "bail bond king", could be found serving bail at the police station every single day in the year, and for this reason the patrolmen came to refer to pickpockets as "Craig's people."

The Mayor ordered the Tivoli closed in 1903, after a sweep on Thanksgiving Day morning found the saloon open at 1:15 a.m., well past the midnight closing hour. The Tribune described the Tivoli at that time as home to all type of "disreputable persons," including "pickpockets, thieves, women, confidence men, and other law breakers." Not just thieves, but women!

This did not end Craig's career. Like hundreds of other Custom House Place and Whisky Row residents also swept out of business in 1903 by popular demand, he moved his operations south to the new Levee district centered around 22nd and Dearborn Streets, and continued operating as a pander, loan shark, saloon-keeper, and bookie for the rest of his life. Newspaper articles as late as 1925 name the old-time saloon keeper as a material witness in a case in which he loaned $2,500 to a known heroin addict, as the owner of the Northern Lights Cafe at Devon and Broadway, where a policeman shot a gangster in a firefight, and as a well-known book-maker operating out of Capone's Hawthorne Race Track.

Carrie Watson and Sig Cohen

After Annie Stewart's brush with the law, she retired from Madamhood and sold her interest in 441 S. Clark to Carrie Watson in 1868. In league with her boyfriend and financier, Sig Cohen, Watson upgraded the decor and quality of the women working within, and operated it as one of Chicago's finest brothels before and after the Fire, into the 1890s, during that time becoming one of the city's richest women. A businesswoman with an excellent eye for publicity, her house's supreme gimmick was a trained parrot who sat in a cage outside the door and constantly repeated, "Carrie Watson. Come in, gentlemen."

Sig Cohen's gambling operation, which provided the startup capital for Carrie Watson's business, operated at this location in the 120 block of S. Clark St., which at the time would have been 194 S. Clark. A sign above the casino read, "Diamond Broker -- Open Day and Evening".

Custom House Place

Custom House Place ran south from Jackson St., and between the Great Fire of 1871 and 1903, was the largest and most depraved red light district in Chicago. Home to a number of "panel houses," brothels in which secret doors in the walls allowed a thief in the next room to reach in and steal from a client's coat or pants when they were hung over a chair or in a closet, Custom House Place was located just across Polk St. from Dearborn Street Station, where most of the train traffic arriving into Chicago from St. Louis and other southern cities disembarked. Thus, Sears, Roebuck & Co. advised farmers arriving in the city to go immediately to their offices and not speak to anyone on the street. The wild stories of innocent girls arriving in Chicago, being romanced by a seductive stranger and shortly finding themselves drugged, beaten, and bound into forced prostitution were mostly exaggerated, but not totally.

Madame Mary Hastings said of her brothel that if a girl was good enough to be accepted at an ordinary brothel, then she was too good for her own. She also boasted that there was no act of perversion that could be imagined which her girls would not perform. In 1895, Madam Hastings was indicted on white slavery charges for holding girls aged 13 to 19 against their wills at 128 Custom House Place, and forcing them into brutal lives of prostitution. She managed to escape prostitution by fleeing to Canada until all of the witnesses against her had left Chicago or forgotten the details of her crimes.

Most of the bawdy houses in the area were shut down by the city in 1903-04, the road was renamed Federal St., and many of their proprietors and residents moved south to the Levee district between 18th and Cermak, which became the segregated vice district until the mid-1910s. The Dearborn Street Station continued in operation until 1976, when train traffic was consolidated into Union Station on the city's west side. The ticket house was converted into a retail shopping center and the rest of the train station was developed as a strangely suburb-like park area with white brick townhomes.

Satan's Mile

The most famous red-light district in late-19th century Chicago was Satan's Mile, stretching along State St., from Van Buren to 22nd St. The famous Levee segregated district was a part of Satan's Mile, as was "Coon Hollow," the two blocks south of 9th Street, where bawdy houses catering to black men congregated.

The most famous resident of Satan's Mile was Kitty Adams, a robber known as the "Terror of State Street," who operated during the 1880s and 1890s. Living in a brothel in Coon Hollow, she learned to cut men with a razor, and always carried one in her cleavage for protection. Police estimate that Kitty Adams committed on the order of 100 robberies each year between 1886 and 1893, when she was sent to prison at Joliet. Feigning tuberculosis by puncturing her gums with toothpicks until they bled, she received a pardon from the governor, and returned to Satan's Mile to continue her life of crime until 1898, when she was again sent to Joliet, where she died, of tuberculosis in fact.

The Bad Lands

The Bad Lands was an area adjacent to Little Cheyenne, on Clark Street north of what is now Roosevelt Rd. If anything, it was considered even more depraved and dangerous than Little Cheyenne. "Big Maud" ran an omnibus house of dissipation near Roosevelt Rd. called the Dark Secret during the 1880s, offering drink and women for $0.25. Another famous Bad Lands madam, Black Susan Winslow, ran a ramshackle house on the same block. When the police attempted to arrest her, they found that, at 449 lbs., Madam Winslow could not be removed through any of the doors or windows of her dive. Finally, the back door was removed from its hinges and the frame and wall sawed out. A heavy rope was fastened around the portly Madam's waist and she was forcibly dragged to the police station by horse.

Currently, the location is a Target.

Little Cheyenne

After the Great Fire, the South side of Chicago became known for its criminal elements. The area known as "Little Cheyenne" ran several block along S. Clark Street, south of Van Buren, and was described by one Chicago detective as "about as tough and vicious a place as there was on the face of the earth. Around the doors of these places could be seen gaudily-bedecked females, half-clad in flashy finery, dresses which never came below their knees, with many colored stockings and fancy shoes. Many of them wore bodices cut so low that they did not amount to much more than a belt."

Little Cheyenne was so called because it had all the lawlessness of the Old West and was lined with every sort of dive, saloon, gambing house, and house of ill-repute. In response, the residents of Cheyenne, Wyoming, referred to their own red light district as "Little Chicago."

This stretch of Clark Street, between Van Buren and Congress, may be all that's left of Little Cheyenne, the way it once was. A men-only SRO hotel, a pawn shop, a liquor shop, and a greasy spoon seem out of place in the shadow of the Sears Tower and Chicago financial district.

Annie Stewart and Carrie Watson

UPDATE: The photos previously displayed in this post were of the wrong side of the street. For accurate photos of the current location of 441 S. Clark St., see this post focusing on Carrie Watson.
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441 S. Clark St. was a brothel belonging to Annie Stewart from 1862-1868. Madam Stewart left her house in 1868 after one of the girls shot a local constable who had come to visit the resort and cheated at euchre. The girl was arrested, but exonerated after it came to light that the constable had tried to choke her first. The judge ruled that she "had not forfeited her rights to self-protection by resorting to the disreputable life of a cyprian." Nevertheless, Annie Stewart's career was over, and another madam, Carrie Watson, took over the lease. Madam Watson raised the standards of the house and catered only to men of success, continuing to operate the house into the 1890s, after which it was demolished for use as a train car yard.

Chicago's chaotic house numbering system was changed in 1909, so that this location would today be numbered in the 800 block of S. Clark.

In the 1890s, the arrival of electric trolley cars running down Clark St. caused commuters to put political pressure on the city government to clean up the area, and Carrie Watson retired.