Monroe Street

Perhaps second only to Wells St., Monroe St. was the home of vice in pre-Fire Chicago.

In the earliest years of Chicago's history, Monroe street was entirely rural, with many farmhouses. It may well have been Monroe that inspired one of the earliest town ordinances, passed in 1833, which imposed a fine of $2 on anyone allowing a pig to run loose in the city "without a yoke or a ring in its nose" (pigs were forbidden on the street entirely, nose ring or not, in 1842).

By the 1840s, Monroe was home to many fine mansions, primarily country-style homes. The architectural vogue in those days was a Chicago version of Palladian, mixing the classical Greco-Roman columns with aspects more familiar to southern plantation estates. The area near Wabash Ave. was known as "Garden City", likely inspired by the city seal ("Urbs in Horto"), but also indicative of the greenery that covered the Loop in those early years. Standing at Monroe and Wabash today, with the clash and clatter of the elevated train passing overhead and darkened by the hulking shadows of steel tracks and skyscrapers, it is difficult to picture the bucolic setting in which early Chicagoans once resided.

But while Wabash and Michigan Ave. retained their large estates up until the Fire, the 1850s saw Monroe St. in decline. Lumberyards sprouted at the west end of Monroe, near the river, and just on the other side of the river. 1850 saw the city's first gas works plant, the Chicago Gas Light and Coke Company, built at the corner of Monroe and Wacker Dr. (then known as Market St.). The presence of a big, dirty, industrial factory lowered surrounding property valuesSeptember 5, 1850 saw the city lit by gas for the first time, and by the end of the year, a series of pipes connected the factory to 112 street and bridge lamps around Chicago.

Another cause for Monroe street's diminishing reputation was the establishment, in 1856, of North's National Amphitheater, one of the city's first commercial venues for amusement, on the north side of Monroe, between Wells and Clark streets. The Amphitheater played host to traveling circuses, carnivals, and other troupes, and the characters who worked in these events were considered unsavory, and frequently stood accused of drunkenness, vice, as well as more serious crimes.

One 1850s newspaper review of a show indicated the precarious position Chicagoans were still in with respect to Native Americans on the plains:

"The Iroquois Indians are a novel feature, and go through their dances, and other aboriginal barbarities, with as much unction as their white brethren of the sawdust. It is also cheering to know that they entertain a high opinion of their audiences, and are invariably in favor of peace."

Levi J. North, the proprietor of the Amphitheater, was one of the 19th century's most famous horsemen. After performing in traveling shows up and down the East Coast, the Caribbean, and in Europe, where he was famed for an act involving galloping bareback, while holding aloft an infant child, North came to Chicago and built the Amphitheater.

(Advertisement of show at North's Amphitheater, Jan. 5, 1859).

Like most great riders, North was relatively small of stature, standing less than five and a half feet, and had long, flowing blond hair, which trailed behind him as he sped around the circus ring. In his later years, one commentator wrote that "He was born on a horse, has always lived on a horse, will die on a horse, and have a horse for a monument, and will rest uneasily if the monument is not trained." He was said to have been the first rider to ever turn a somersault on horseback.

While in Chicago, North also became involved in politics, running for and winning a seat as alderman of the third ward. The election was disputed, since North had only moved into the ward ten days before the election, but he was eventually allowed to keep his seat. After some years, however, misfortune befell the great rider when the theater burned, and the insurance company simultaneously went bankrupt. North rebuilt the circus ring and began performing again, earning $50 per night, which he continued in Chicago and in touring companies for over a decade before retiring in 1870 and moving to New York City. The Amphitheater was demolished in 1864 and the property rebuilt for commercial use.

With the poverty and criminality growing on the street, wealthy residents increasingly moved away from Monroe, lowering property values and attracting even more itinerant and criminal elements, perpetuating a vicious cycle. Cigar stores and houses of prostitution, including most famously Madam Lou Harper's "Mansion" between Wells and Franklin, and Francis Warren's troupe of streetwalkers, who resided between Clark and LaSalle.

The 1850s and 1860s saw masses of poor immigrants, primarily from Ireland, building a shantytown of low, tumble-down buildings centered around Monroe and Wells St., known as "Mrs. Conley's Patch". Longtime alderman and world-renowned dandy "Bathhouse" John Coughlin, was raised there. However, "the Patch" was also notorious in its day, not only for the decrepitude of its dwellings, but also for the depravity and dark crimes of some of its residents.

Chiefest among these was the city's first -- and perhaps greatest -- king of vice, Roger Plant. I have already covered Plant's exploits to some degree in this earlier post. A Yorkshire-born Englishman, Plant arrived in the city about 1857. Legend has grown around Plant, who was always tight-lipped about his personal history, such that it is impossible today to discern fact from exaggeration, but purportedly Plant had been convicted of a felony in England and was scheduled to be exiled to Australia when he escaped and made his way to Chicago.

By 1858, Plant had built "Roger's Barracks", a set of poorly-constructed shacks centered on the northeast corner of Wells and Monroe. The Barracks, later known as "Under the Willow", so named after a single sad willow tree which stood on the corner, was the center for all vice in the city up through the end of the Civil War. It was Plant who popularized the catchphrase "Why Not?", which was emblazoned on each of the blue window shades in the complex.

Plant himself was diminutive, at just over five feet tall and no more than 100 lbs, but he was apparently a vicious fighter, skillful with pistol, knife, and club, but especially with his fists and teeth. The only one who could ever whip him, it is said, was Mrs. Plant, a mountainous woman weighing at least 250 lbs. Plant kept order in the saloon on the premises, and operated as a fence and a bail bondsman, while his wife ran a brothel with no fewer than 80 inmates, rented out cubbies on the property for use by streetwalkers, and made a trade in "white slaves".

During the war, Under the Willow ("that shadowy haunt of sin", as the Tribune put it), played host to battalions of soldiers and was rarely empty at any hour. It was a fearsome place, however, with many men finding themselves robbed, beaten or knived, and discarded in the alleys (oftentimes by Mrs. Plant herself) after imbibing too much or falling asleep in one of the decrepit cribs.

Some of the permanent residents of the Plant complex included Mary Hodges, an apparently fantastically talented shoplifter, who it is said (again in tall tale fashion) would drive a cart into the shopping district several times a week to bring back her takings. Another was Mary Brennan ("an audacious old sinner", as the Tribune described her), who was herself a thief, but also the trainer of thieves and pickpockets. Mrs. Brennan's two daughters were caught breaking into a home whose owner was away on business one afternoon in 1866, and as punishment, were placed in the Catholic Asylum, separated from their mother until adulthood.

Another long-time tenant was Lib Woods. Miss Woods arrived in Chicago in 1855, and was described in 1860 as "one of the gayest, prettiest, most fascinating creatures that could be found among her class in this city....with a splendid head of hair that made her rivals all despair. It hung down below her waist, in long, glassy ringlets."

Woods was girlfriend to Billy Meadows, a successful prizefighter. But when Meadows took sick and died in 1861, Miss Woods' decline into dissipation was quick. She took up residence at Under the Willow as a prostitute shortly after, and was then seized with smallpox, which disfigured her beautiful features. She was frequently drunk and became increasingly violent as she aged. She died a sad death in 1870, found in a gutter of Wells street.

Roger Plant was also notorious for paying off the police to keep the heat away from Under the Willow and his other nefarious doings. In October, 1866, he was arrested for robbing a man he had helped bail out of the bridewell of $25. A few days later, the police discharged him, much to the uproar of the city's more righteous denizens. Most likely, the increasingly wealthy Mr. Plant greased a few palms on his way out of the police house. In a later committee investigation before city council, Plant was directly asked whether he had every paid off the police, and, displaying honor among thieves, he refused to perjure himself -- he "took the fifth" and was eventually dismissed for being unwilling to answer questions.

Within a few years after the war, Plant had amassed such a fortune as allowed him to depart his vile surroundings for a country estate outside of Chicago, and by 1871, the Tribune reported that "Roger is now a member of the church in good standing, drives an elegant team, and lives like a Christian."

Plant had many children, by some counts as many as fifteen, and a number of them went on to establish their own houses of vice in the Custom House Place district during the 1880s and 1890s, including daughters Kitty and Daisy Plant, and son Roger Plant, Jr. Many other former tenants not related to Plant also went on to develop vice businesses as well. He is rightly known as the father of vice in Chicago.

By the time of Roger Plant's retirement, Under the Willow extended halfway down the block on both Monroe and Wells streets, and the centerpiece of the property, rebuilt after the Great Fire, was a four story building. Plant continued renting the property for large sums into the 1890s, until it passed out of the family's hands in 1908, purchased by the city's top sporting man, J.J. Corbett for the sum of $100,000.

After the Fire, most of the residents of Mrs. Conley's Patch, having had their homes destroyed, moved to the south side, where many of the neighborhoods to this day still have substantial Irish populations. The west end of Monroe street was redeveloped largely as a warehouse district, while business and commercial buildings arose closer to the Lake.

Leona Garrity's Brothel

In 1905, Mr. and Mrs. Lemuel E. Schlotter moved into a large home in the north shore village of Glencoe. He was a jeweler, and she appeared to be the scion of a wealthy family, though the family background was never fully clarified to the neighbors. Over the next year-and-a-half, the Schlotters and their 15-year old son, George, developed social ties among the moneyed clans of that suburb, and Mrs. Schlotter was well-known in the ladies’ clubs and community organizations. But on June 5, 1907, the truth finally came out. The Schlotter family wealth did not derive from Lemuel’s jewelry business, nor was it inherited from some patrician ancestor; it was the underworld that funded the big house on Green Bay Road. And Mrs. Schlotter was not a society woman, but a sex trafficker, with a vicious trade in young girls.

The spring of 1907 in Chicago portended a vigorous mayoral contest between the incumbent Democrat, Edward Dunne, and his Republican challenger, Fred Busse. Dunne’s administration was hopelessly corrupt, and the Tribune, the Daily News, and other Chicago broadsheets repeatedly hammered readers with stories of open vice conditions in the city. In February, a county grand jury returned a set of indictments against a wide range of underworld figures, including gambling king Mont Tennes and saloon-keeper and red-light district political figure, Andy Craig. The jury’s scathing pronouncements indicated that the police and politicians were doing little or nothing to “keep the lid on” vice in Chicago. Disorderly houses in the south side Levee district and west side slums advertised with partially or fully-nude women in the windows, handbooks offered sports gambling to women and children, and saloons remained open far past the city’s 1:00 a.m. “last call”.

John M. Collins, the Chief of Police, played dumb to reporters in an act that fooled no one:

There is exceedingly little gambling in Chicago now…as to saloons, there may be a few in the levee district where women come in, drink a glass of beer with a man, and perhaps do a little soliciting…If any saloons were keeping open after 1 o’clock my men would know it.

When public ire over vice conditions in the city bubbled over, Collins could always make a show of reassigning a few officers from this station to that one and busting a few high-profile resorts with newspapermen looking on until the uproar passed. But in the end, city Aldermen had almost full control over the appointment of police captains in their wards, and the political connections of some aldermen with the underworld meant that these periodic police “reforms” usually amounted to little.

However, Busse was running on a strong campaign to clean up the city and eliminate city hall corruption, and there was a palpable sense that public opinion was moving in his direction. In league with Mayor Dunne, Chief Collins ordered officers out to all the resorts in the skid row districts of Chicago. Get campaign contributions, he told them; if they won’t pay, make life difficult for them. And if you see any Fred Busse placards posted in or around your beat, make sure they find their way to the incinerator post haste.

Despite these desperate efforts, election day, April 4, 1907, saw Busse trounce Dunne, and after his inauguration, one of Mayor Busse’s first acts was to replace Chief Collins with his own man, George Shippy. In June, Chief Shippy ordered police into all of the city’s cheap brothels, looking for “white slaves”.

The concept of white slavery had been a bugbear for anti-crime and temperance groups since the 1890s, but the mid-1900s saw the concept gain widespread publicity. Black slavery, the rhetoric went, had disappeared with the Civil War, but now an even more vile form of human bondage was being practiced in the nation’s large cities. Teenage girls, some as young as 13, were being lured away from their homes by young men promising marriage or helpful girlfriends with news of profitable employment prospects. Once away from their families, the ingénues were taken to dance halls or saloons, frequently drugged, and then taken advantage of by their male companions. When these girls regained consciousness, they realized their honor and social reputations were gone, and with no way of going home, they submitted to a life of permanent prostitution. Houses of ill-repute throughout Chicago, it is said, were filled with these unwilling inmates, who though they saw scores of clients per week, had their wages garnished to an extreme degree by their keepers, never allowing them enough to pay for a train ticket home.

Or so the story went. No doubt some instances of white slavery existed, but in many other cases, it frequently turned out that the girls had left unhappy homes and willingly entered the sex trade. Prostitution, as much misery as it caused its purveyors, was better than the other options available to some women, including abusive family situations, impoverishment, imprisonment, or starvation. Nevertheless, as 1907 began, white slavery already had a hold on the popular imagination, and Chief Shippy’s investigations would propel it into a national obsession.

The most prominent white slave case in Chicago that year was the Mona Marshall case, which I have already discussed here. But another story that received similar coverage opened on June 5, when a grand jury handed down an indictment for harboring a 15-year old girl in a disreputable house against one Leona Garrity, the owner of record for the flophouse at 75 Peoria street (pictured above, now numbered 14 S. Peoria), and Bessie Lee, the keeper of the house. The near west side at that time (and for many decades after) was a skid row where thrills came cheap: gentlemen callers paid $0.50 for the privilege of time with Garrity’s girls.

That there were call flats on the west side surprised no one, even ones that housed young girls. What was surprising, and what made the her trial the talk of the town that summer, was that the true identity of Leona Garrity was none other than Mrs. Lemuel E. Schlotter, the society maven of Glencoe. Twice a week, Mrs. Schlotter would board the train into Chicago, slip into the west side, and collect her profits from Ms. Lee before returning to the north shore. Stories like these are irresistible in the press, because they implicitly ask: "could your next-door neighbor also be a sex trafficker?"

After the indictment was made public, the Schlotter family began receiving anonymous letters, undoubtedly from her neighbors, kindly suggesting that her continued presence in Glencoe was besmirching the village's good name. On June 21, 1907, Mrs. Schlotter (Garrity), out on bail, took the hint.

Mrs. Schlotter, who has been keeping up appearances in Glencoe while at the same time proprietor of the Peoria street resort, came to Chicago in the morning and sold the furniture of her suburban residence to a second hand dealer. Then she returned, discharged her Japanese servant, packed her own belongings, and departed.

It would be difficult to believe that Mrs. Schlotter’s dark secret was completely unknown to her husband, but regardless, the marriage appeared to be over, as Mr. Schlotter and their son, George, decamped for California while his wife remained in Chicago to face trial and possible imprisonment.

(Pictured: the Schlotter residence in suburban Glencoe)

Glencoe in those days was the residence of many of Illinois’ wealthiest families, as it still is today. The most serious crime most village residents had witnessed was speeding. The “hobby” of automobile driving was new at the time, and Sheridan Rd. north of Evanston was a popular place for drivers to prove the mettle of their machines, which could often reach speeds in excess of 20 mph – considered extremely dangerous in a world unaccustomed to motor vehicles. Glencoe residents erected the first speed bumps seen on Northern Illinois roads, and turned their operation into the town’s chief amusement, as described in an August, 1908 article:

Amid the gleeful cheers of hundreds of Glencoe residents, scores of automobilists yesterday jolted and jarred over the first of the “bumps” erected by order of the authorities of the suburb as a check to “scorching.” Then many of them were arrested and fines shaken out of their pocketbooks.

The first of the “bumps” completed was across Sheridan road at Central avenue [now Beach Rd., just south of Dundee Rd.], and here the crowds gathered at noon and spent the afternoon and evening enjoying the result of the jolting on the speeding autoists. Although the obstruction is only a few inches high, the effect was plainly apparent, and many automobile caps, goggles, and hairpins were gathered up by the Glencoeites as souvenirs.

It was a gala day in the suburb. As each automobile approached the “bump” the crowd cheered and asked the occupants how they liked the experience. Although severely jolted, the autoists took the jeering good naturedly and waved their hands to the spectators.

The story of Leona Garrity did not fit in this world. The trial of Ms. "Garrity" and Bessie Lee began on July 8, 1907. Clifford Roe, an assistant state’s attorney who made a career out of prosecuting white slave cases in Chicago, described the two women vividly:

Hers [Garrity's] was not a vicious face. Her eyes were large and they looked at one openly and almost frankly. In a public place she would have been taken for a quiet matron, with love for her neighbors and scorn for acts that were immoral. She was dressed in a tailor-made suit of blue; her hat was modestly trimmed. No one would take her for an outcast who buys and sells girls. Bessie Lee, who sat beside her, looked the part of a procuress. She was thin lipped, cold featured, with a complexion the color of a faded straw hat, and eyes that were black enough to spot the wings of a crow. She flashed them too as she almost couched in the big armchair given her by the bailiff. In her countenance was written the story of days spent in sorrow and nights in utter shame.

On July 13, the underage girl in question, 15-year old Miss Belle Winters, was scheduled to testify against her slavers. Her story, while plausible, was hardly an open-and-shut case of malfeasance. She told investigators that a few months earlier, she and a school friend had run away from her South Shore home near 71st and Greenwood Ave., and boarded a lake boat bound for Benton Harbor, Michigan. While on the boat, she was befriended by a young man who gave his name as Harry Mansfield. Mansfield, she said, had convinced her to return to Chicago with him, but then had delivered her, in return for payment from Bessie Lee, to Schlotter’s brothel, where she was a prisoner to her keepers, under threat of violence.

The fact that she admitted running away from home, and that neither “Harry Mansfield” nor the young friend Miss Winters claimed had accompanied her on the boat, were ever found, casts a shadow of fabulousness over the story, and indeed, at trial, Schlotter and Lee’s counsel claimed that Winters had entered employment willingly and prevaricated about her age.

But by July, the public was in no mood for excuses on the issue of white slavery, and Schlotter and Lee faced the imminent prospect of lock-up at Joliet. Likely it was Schlotter who decided to make one last attempt to silence the state's chief witness. During the trial, Belle Winters was under the protection and purview of a minder from the state’s attorney’s office – likely, they realized Miss Winters’ potential to again run away from home, as well as her precarious status as a witness against a wealthy and desperate defendant. The day before her testimony, Winters and her guardian, a Mrs. Amigh, made a visit to Marshall Field’s downtown. When Mrs. Amigh turned away for a moment, Belle disappeared, and before the two found each other, a man approached the young girl, telling her he was from the State’s Attorney’s office, and that she was needed at trial immediately.

She went with him, but before reaching court, he suggested they duck into a nearby saloon for a quick drink. Realizing this was highly suspicious behavior for court-appointed personnel, she pulled away from her would-be kidnapper and ran through the streets of Chicago, finally begging her way onto a street car headed towards her family home, where the police caught up with her.

The next day, Belle Winters testified in open court against “Leona Garrity” and Bessie Lee, and her words clinched the case. On July 17, the jury returned a verdict of guilty against both women, and after appeals were exhausted, Mrs. Schlotter was sentenced to serve 1-5 years at Joliet in May, 1908. Bessie Lee, who had always argued that she was merely a pawn in Mrs. Schlotter’s sex trafficking ring, had her sentence commuted, and in December of 1908, the Illinois Supreme Court reversed the trial court verdict, making her a free woman.

I have found no record, in census or newspaper records, of Mrs. Schlotter or her family after the events of 1907. Her brothel on Peoria street was torn down in 1914 and replaced with a cheap lodging house for seasonal laborers and others with no other place to stay. Rates were 5-10c per night, with a 9c dinner available, and all guests were required to bathe before bed – a rare practice among such flops which was intended to prevent the spread of lice and disease. The house was the first of the Dawes Hotels, which later opened similar establishments in other cities, begun by Evanston resident and future U.S. Vice-President, Charles Dawes, in honor of his son, Rufus, who had drowned in a swimming accident in 1912.

The Dawes Hotel building continued serving the tough streets of the near west side into the 1970s, when it also housed an alcohol treatment center known as Haymarket House. As the neighborhood gentrified in the 1980s and 1990s, most of the old housing stock was removed, including the Dawes Hotel. On the site where Leona Garrity’s brothel once stood is today a condominium building (pictured at the top of this post).

Despite his initial attempts to find and prosecute white slavers, police Chief Shippy was ultimately no more successful in curbing vice in Chicago than his predecessor, Chief Collins. With his health fading, Shippy resigned his post in 1909. Nevertheless, the public clamor against vice was unstoppable, and the era of segregated vice (red light districts) ended in Chicago in the 1910s. Based largely on evidence introduced in white slave cases in Chicago – especially the Mona Marshall trial – the U.S. Congress passed the Mann Act (originally known as the White Slave Act) in 1910, which made it a federal crime to transport women across state lines for sexual purposes. Today the Mann Act is best known as a standard for prosecuting immoral – though not coercive – behavior, including African-American boxer Jack Johnson’s interracial affairs and marriage, and Charlie Chaplin’s supposed paternity of an out-of-wedlock child (and his left-wing politics).

First Ward Ball

There are few events in Chicago history about which more has been written by journalists, historians, and social reformers than the First Ward Ball, otherwise known as the "Grand Reception of the First Ward Democratic Club," the "Annual Masquerade and Fancy Ball," or simply "The Derby". Between 1896 and 1909, the annual fete took place at the Chicago Coliseum, which was located here at 15th and Wabash.

The raison d’etre of the First Ward Ball was campaign fundraising for those famous 1^st Ward alderman, Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna and “Bathhouse” John Coughlin. The 1^st Ward included the old Custom House Place vice district in the 1890s and early 1900s, and later, the infamous 22nd and Dearborn “Levee”. In order to remain open and advertising widely, the madams, gambling-house owners, and saloon-keepers needed protection from the police, and the First Ward Ball was one of the major means by which Kenna and Coughlin received these payments. Every employee of a house of ill-repute or gambling den, every robber, pickpocket, safe-cracker, and streetwalker, and every bartender, bawdy house entertainer, and low groggery proprietor, all were required to buy tickets, which cost between 50 cents and $1, if they wanted to maintain their livelihood.

The larger establishments bought hundreds of tickets each at the strong “suggestion” of the aldermen, with the number of tickets to be purchased rising with the lawlessness of the establishment and the degree of police protection required to remain open. If sales fell behind expectations, even the police were forced to “sell” tickets (the captains of police stations within the ward being political appointees). Officers would then resell these tickets to business-owners on their beats. The newspapers reported one such transaction:

"I see you're down to take three tickets from me, Pete," says the policeman.

"I don't see how that is, I've taken my tickets -- a whole bunch of them -- from the alderman," indignantly exclaims the saloon-keeper.

"Well, that's all right; but I've got to get rid of mine. Do you think I am the government mint or the First National bank? I don't want to use them to take my wife and children. Better come across with the coin. You know it's only a few you take from me."

So the saloon-keeper usually takes the tickets. The policeman protested that nothing was said about the matter of protection, or anything in the way of favors that were supposed to go with the tickets.

Every major underworld figure of the 1890s and 1900s attended, including Andy Craig (who was facetiously named “belle” of the 1903 ball), Ike Bloom, “Polack Ben” Zeller, “Big Jim” Colosimo, “Big Jim” O’Leary, the Everleigh Sisters, Vic Shaw, and many, many more. Over time, the Balls began to draw in more respectable elements of society as well, including the city’s top businessmen and political figures from Chicago and Washington. Mayor Carter Harrison attended, although he always claimed to leave long before the real mayhem began.

The annual take from the event, which accrued to the campaign fund of whichever alderman was running for re-election in the upcoming year (Chicago wards then having two aldermen each), ran upwards of $25,000 each year, with 10,000-15,000 attendees buying not only tickets, but also liquor (supplied at a discount by local breweries) in quantities that allowed them to show their loyalty to Kenna and Coughlin.

In order to receive a waiver of the city's midnight closing laws, by which alcohol could not be sold after 12:00 a.m., the First Ward Balls were officially "charity" events, not campaign fundraisers. An investigative reporter from the Tribune inquired of Kenna skeptically in 1906:

"Where does this money from the ball go?" the alderman was asked.

"Charity, education, burying the dead, and general ward benefits for the people. One or two consumptives will be sent down to Phoenix, Ariz. There is plenty of use for it. When anybody connected with the First Ward Democratic club needs help he applies to Ald. Coughlin or to me, and the money finally comes out of the fund by action of the executive committee of the club."

When pressed to define the “educational” aspects of the First Ward Ball, Kenna admitted:

"It consists of hiring good halls and good speakers to teach the people of the First ward to vote the straight democratic ticket."

The First Ward Ball had several predecessors. Carrie Watson, Chicago’s top madam after the Great Fire, ran an annual benefit ball at Frieberg's during the 1880s in support of her house’s famous “professor” (ragtime piano-player), known as “Lame” Jimmy. As with the later First Ward Balls, drunkenness and acts of wild debauchery were common (as Carrie Watson put it, “joy reigned unrefined”), and rival underworld characters competed to see who could purchase the most champagne -- although in this case it was merely an act of oneupsmanship, instead of an attempt to buy the favor of politicians. The Lame Jimmy benefits lasted until drunken policemen attending the 1894 ball became embroiled in a shootout, leading to public condemnation. A similar, but separate underworld event, the “Veiled Prophet Bal-Masque” was shut down as a consequence of the shooting as well. But it so happened that in 1894, John Coughlin was running for his first reelection campaign, and was opposed in the Democratic primary by Billy “The Clock” Skakel, a gambling-house proprietor from S. Clark St. Skakel had the bright idea to hold a fundraising ball for saloon-keepers in the district, at which he led a fabulous “grand march” of attendees. Late in the evening, a band of Coughlin supporters invaded the festivities and started a fist-fight melee, but the idea no doubt impressed Coughlin.

Coughlin won the election of 1894, and in 1896, he appropriated Skakel’s concept for a dance ball held at the Seventh Regiment Armory, even including a “grand march”, which Coughlin personally led starting at midnight. This was the original First Ward Ball.

The grand march was essentially a conga-line, twenty persons wide and including thousands of followers snaking their way back and forth around the dance floor, while thousands more sat in boxes above the floor, cheering and shouting. Like a Brazilian carnival, the marchers included a wild representation of the excesses of the underworld; women dressed scandalously in bathing suits, bloomers, and slit-cut dresses, men dressed as women, and everyone wore an elaborate and sometimes vile mask. All were on their way – if not already there – to a state of inebriation. Coughlin himself was always attired in one of his world-famous over-the-top suits; for the 1900 ball, he wore a green swallowtail coat and lavender trousers, a white silk waistcoat, brocaded with heliotrope rosebuds and saffron carnations, accompanied by pink gloves and a silk hat. As one Protestant minister and Ball critic later put it, Coughlin appeared "like Satan at the head of the hosts of the damned, leading the grand march of vice and degeneracy."

(Pictured: editorial cartoon in the Tribune depicting the First Ward Ball. The sign on the barrell in front reads, "Guests not contributing voluntarily will regret it!")

In 1899, the new Chicago Coliseum was built at 15^th and Wabash, and First Ward Balls between 1903 and 1909 were held there. The Coliseum was actually the third building by that name in Chicago, the first being a Loop beer-hall, and the second a Jackson Park convention center that burned down in 1897. The origin of the third Chicago Coliseum on Wabash was in 1887, when William H. Gray, one of the city’s top businessmen, toured the Libby Prison in Richmond, Virginia, on vacation. During the Civil War, the Libby Prison held over 45,000 union soldiers in the South, and Gray saw the opportunity to re-appropriate the building as a profitable museum in Chicago. He found a group of investors, and each brick of the old prison building was painstakingly shipped by rail to Chicago (except for a few that were lost in a train accident in Kentucky), where it was reassembled in replica. The Libby Prison opened in Chicago in 1889, and was a success for nearly a decade. By the end of the 1890s, however, interest had waned, and the building was sold to the Chicago Coliseum Company, which was looking to replace the burned second Coliseum. The new owners kept the surrounding wall of the old Libby Prison, but otherwise rebuilt from scratch.

(Pictured: Chicago Coliseum at 15th and Wabash)

Late nights at the First Ward Balls in the Coliseum were notorious. The grand march took place at midnight, but, as Kenna once explained to a reporter, the party “don't never get good until about three in the morning.” By that time, drunken men began to maul women, couples stole away to dark corners of basement or annex, and others with less capacity for strong drink began passing out on the floor. The increasing depravity of late nights at the First Ward Ball, and the increasing prominence of respectable members of society at the annual orgy began to generate a fervor of reform to shut down the event, where before only a bemused tut-tutting had prevailed. In 1907, Ald. Kenna invited a critical minister of the cloth to attend, who reported back to various pastoral conventions that year about the "scenes unmentionable among self-respecting men,” which were “undisguised and frequent," reminiscent of "pagan Rome in her most degenerate days".

Thus was the beginning of the end for the First Ward Ball. The battle over the 1908 Ball was vigorous, beginning in October of that year, when a Methodist conference passed a resolution condemning the Ball, and demanding that Mayor Fred Busse refuse a liquor permit to the Coliseum. A week later, the Federation of Women’s Clubs joined the chorus condemning the First Ward Ball.

These reformers were surprised on November 27, 1908, when advertisements were nevertheless posted around the 1^st Ward, declaring the annual “Derby” would take place that year on December 14. In response to the protests, Ald. Coughlin wrote one of his famous poems:

Strike up the march, professor, and I will lead the way;
We'll trip the light fantastic too until the break of day.
Who knows that ere another ball we'll be outside the city hall;
Be gay, but not too gay.

Ald. Kenna was more forthright in his criticism of the Ball’s detractors:

There has been so much talk about the First ward ball being disorderly, that this year we decided to invite a dozen ministers and let them see for themselves. If the ball ain't respectable alongside of some camp meetings I have been to I'll give each minister who attends a present of $100....

Preachers are a good deal like saloon-keepers. Most of them are jealous of everybody else in the business if a fellow is going along. If I've got a slot machine and the fellow across the street hasn't, because he ain't in right, he's going to knock. See what I mean?....But whenever you hear one of them fellows shouting that Hinky Dink is a menace to society and that he has horns, just keep your hand on your watch. Savvy?

The day after the advertisements went up, the city’s protestant ministers declared open war on the Ball, in concert with the Law and Order League, an anti-crime pressure group organized by Hyde Park-based reformer Arthur Burrage Farwell. Farwell pleaded with the mayor not to issue a liquor license for the event, arguing for government control to protect the city’s residents from their own ignorance:

Everybody knows that this gathering of criminals under the name of "Ball" permits them to mingle with some young men and women who do not realize the depths to which they are sinking. To prevent crime such a gathering of objectionable citizens should under no circumstances be tolerated…

You must stop this disgrace to Chicago. You must stop it in the name of the young men who will be ruined there. I put this matter up to you personally, Mr. Busse. Suppose you had a young friend whose character and life you prized highly. How would you like to have such scenes of debauchery as are allowed at this ball used to bring degradation and perhaps destruction to your friend?

One wonders how anyone in Chicago could “not realize” the lascivious nature of the First Ward Ball by 1908, but a subtler incentive of the reformers, as with alcohol temprance and Sunday closing laws, was to allow wives to socialize the cost of monitoring their husbands. By the 1910s, women held increased political power and the prospect of attaining the vote in just a few years’ time. Indeed the Women’s Christian Temperance Union joined in the chorus of boos associated with the Ball, saying that "it always engenders immorality and sends out a vicious influence for our young people."

Rev. William O. Walter, pastor of Grace Episcopal, filed a formal request for an injunction against the Ball, in which the prosecutor argued explicitly in favor of the monitoring motive: "We are not trying to correct public morals, but protect our property rights. Many of the old communicants of the church will not permit their daughters to attend after one of these balls." But it was all to no avail – the injunction was denied and the liquor license was approved. The Ball would take place on December 14th that year.

The night before the event, at 8:20 p.m., a bomb exploded in the passageway between the Coliseum Annex and an adjacent junk room on the grounds, blowing out windows of buildings 200 feet away on Michigan and Wabash Aves. Dynamite attacks were common in those years, mostly associated with the Gamblers’ War between Mont Tennes, “Big Jim” O’Leary, and others. But this bomb was more likely thrown by a frustrated reformer, for what kind of amateur could throw a stick of dynamite and miss the entire Coliseum entirely, only blowing a hole in an barely-used adjacent out-building?

A more serious problem for Kenna and Coughlin was the Tribune’s announcement that reporters would be in attendance and the following day’s paper would print the names of all respectable members of society who attended. These social leaders were a major source of revenue, purchasing thousands of dollars of champagne, and their money, if not their persons, would be seriously missed. In fact, the Tribune’s threats did keep many of Chicago’s elite away from the 1908 Ball; many of them contrived elaborate alibis, such as holding a big dinner party that night in which reporters were invited. A few others did attend, but masked their faces before entering.

By the evening of December 14, 1908, tens of thousands of curiosity-seekers and protesters flocked to Wabash Ave., joining the throng attempting to enter the event. The police admitted the first 12,000, but then shut the doors to prevent overcrowding. Thousands more attempted to break in through the exit doors, which the police then locked from the inside. The crowd was so enormous that when women fainted – a common occurrence – they had to be passed overhead from hand to hand towards the exits. Cigar smoke settled on the floor in such thick fogs that visibility was no greater than 30 feet in any direction. The noise of shuffling feet and murmuring overpowered the sound of the dance band, and fist-fights and shoving erupted in all quarters.

When Lyman Atwell, photographer for the Tribune, showed up outside and began setting up his flash and tripod, security notified Coughlin, who emerged from the Coliseum, personally jumping on Atwell, breaking his camera and knocking him to the ground. Coughlin had previously announced that no photography would be allowed (on the grounds that pictures of the poorly-dressed women at the Ball would be used as ammunition by the reformers). Later, defending himself in court, Coughlin claimed he thought Atwell's flash bulb would be perceived as another bomb, causing a riot and a stampede.

As usual, things started to get interesting at midnight, when the regiments of madams and their inmates showed up, led by the Everleigh Sisters. This caused another influx of thousands of men to attempt to enter the building, and everyone craned their necks to get a look at the scarlet women.

The most infamous party in Chicago history lasted until 5 a.m., when the last drunken revelers staggered out of the orgy.

In 1909, when the date of that year’s ball was announced for December 13, the forces of reform returned even stronger than the year before. The Law and Order League and the protestant ministers of Chicago were joined by Roman Catholic leaders, including the Young Men’s Association of SS. Peter and Paul Church, who passed a resolution that was read at city council, over the protests of Ald. Coughlin. While the resolution was read, Ald. Kenna (who was Catholic) hid under his desk. Again, note the argument that government intervention is required to protect "ignorant" citizens from themselves:

Whereas, The experience in past years, as testified to by persons who attended the saturnalia, has shown that unfortunate and vicious men and women of the so-called red light districts display their degradation in public to great injury to morals of others who go there because of ignorance, curiosity, and other reasons....The First ward ball is notoriously reported to be the means of collecting illegal tribute from the lowest and most unfortunate denizens of vicious resorts and is a disgrace to all who, pretending to be respectable, encourage the saturnalia by attending it....

Finally, on December 10, the city revoked the liquor license for the 1909 event, causing Ald. Coughlin to write the shortest of all his poems:

No Ball;
That’s All.

That wasn’t the end of his complaint, though:

Not until within the last two or three years has the press or clergy ever entered a word of protest against the holding of the ball. The reason, I suppose, is that what the people would stand for ten or twelve years ago won't be tolerated at present. Chicago is growing better. There's no mistake about it. And let me tell you I'm just as glad to see the change in social conditions as any man in the city.

On the date of the Ball, Coughlin and Kenna instead held a sober concert at the Coliseum, in which a classical orchestra plodded through the William Tell overture, then selections from popular musical comedies. Only 2,500 attended, and most of these only for a short while, until they could be sure they had been seen by one of the Aldermen. Instead of an enormous dance hall and a grand march, the Coliseum was filled with thousands of wooden chairs, nailed to the floor. The 1909 “Ball” ended at 11:00 p.m.

After the fizzle of the 1909 event, Kenna and Coughlin admitted defeat and did not attempt to hold any future Balls. However, the First Ward Ball became a perennial comparison for any hedonistic event in the city for decades to come. The closest thing to a modern First Ward Ball is the "Players Ball," held every year in the Chicago area as a nationwide convention of pimps, which, like the First Ward Ball, inevitably attracts wide public protest.

After its heyday in the era of the First Ward Ball, the Coliseum continued to hold major conventions, trade, automobile, and livestock shows, circuses, and sporting events until 1971. Each Republican National Convention between 1904 and 1920 was held there. During the 1920s, the fledgling Chicago Blackhawks held home ice at the Coliseum, and in 1935, the “sport” of roller derby was invented there. During WWII, the Coliseum was a training facility for Navy aircraft radio operators. By the 1960s, most major conventions were bypassing the Coliseum for the larger and more modern McCormick Place, but an NBA expansion team, the Chicago Zephyrs, played their home games there for several years before decamping for Baltimore (the successor of that team is the Washington Wizards, where Chicago basketball hero Michael Jordan played and coached during his declining days). Due to structural defects, after 1971 the city refused to issue permits for any further shows, and the Coliseum was shuttered until 1982, when it was sold for $375,000 and demolished.

The site of the Coliseum is now the parking lot for a Buddhist temple. A park commemorating the Coliseum stands across the street.

Colosimo's First Brothel

"Big Jim" James Colosimo started his first brothel at this location, 2001 S. Archer, known as "The New Brighton". Interestingly, at around the same time, Paul Kelly, the famed leader of New York City's Five Points gang, also opened his headquarters on the Lower East Side under the same name. Both men began long-lived criminal empires: the Five Pointers were later absorbed into the New York mafia, while Colosimo founded the Chicago Outfit, which would continue major crime operations in Chicago, Florida, and Las Vegas through the 1970s and into the 1980s.

Big Jim's career began in 1897, when he found a job working as a street sweeper, cleaning horse manure out of the alleys in pre-automobile Chicago. He quickly moved up from this lowly job to alley inspector in 1901, a position that gave him substantial ability to extort business and home owners. He also began unionizing the street sweepers, working together with Italian political power Tony D'Andrea and "Dago Mike" Carrozzo to create a powerful voting block of immigrant voters who could be purchased for the right price.

Colosimo had always dabbled in the underworld, working briefly in the business of writing Black Hand extortion letters, and pimping a group of streetwalkers in the old Custom House Place red light district. By 1902, however, he had left low-level criminality behind and was charting a path to becoming the city's first king of vice. He opened a pool room with gambling apparatus, renting space above one of "Mushmouth" Johnson's later resorts, the Frontenac, on 22nd and Dearborn. He also met and married a young madam in the Levee named Victoria Morseco.

Moresco grew up in the Northside Italian conclave known as Little Hell or Little Sicily, but as a teenager became involved in prostitution, and rose quickly to the position of madam at the brothel at 2001 S. Archer. In 1902, at age 20, she married Colosimo, who was three years her elder, and taught him the business of running a "disorderly hotel". He quickly took over the management of his wife's brothel, renaming it "The New Brighton".

Later, he opened a second brothel next door on Armour, which he named in honor of his wife, who operated the business for the remaining years of their marriage, "The Victoria" (Armour Ave. was vacated south of 20th St. to make way for the Hilliard Towers housing project in the 1960s; also, the rest of Armour was renamed Federal Street). He also opened a restaurant, the Brighton Cafe, on the first floor of the New Brighton.

By 1909, Colosimo had convinced Johnny Torrio (coincidentally, a member of Paul Kelly's gang) to move to Chicago from New York and take charge of his prostitution operations, headquartered at the New Brighton. Upon Colosimo's death in 1920, Torrio took over the entire organization, leading it into the Prohibition era.

Thus, it was Torrio who was cited as the proprietor for the New Brighton in 1914, when Chicago mayor Carter Harrison, Jr., was finally forced by public acclaim into closing down the Levee, and on May 30, 1914, the New Brighton's business license was revoked. The Tribune noted that Harrison's reason for shutting down the brothel "was not so much the activities of women as the character of the man habitues," an indication that the New Brighton was no peer of the Everleigh Club in class or amenities.

Through Colosimo's deep influence with aldermen Michael "Hinky Dink" Kenna and "Bathhouse" John Coughlin, he was finally able to reopen the New Brighton, though most of his other gambling houses, drug dens, and brothels were closed as public pressure on the police forced the end of open vice in Chicago, forcing him to expand further into the suburbs, a process which Torrio and Al Capone continued in the 1920s.

The spot where the New Brighton stood -- and where most of the major Levee institutions stood -- has been completely vacated and turned into parkland surrounding the Hilliard Towers apartment buildings.

Harry Guzik's Brothel

Harry Guzik was a top lieutenant in the Capone organization, and he was chiefly in charge of prostitution operations. His was one of Chicago's great crime families: his brother Jake ("Greasy Thumb") was also a Capone man, and his father, Max, was a Levee saloon-owner and political affiliate of Alderman Michael "Hinky Dink" Kenna.

One of Guzik's major brothels was the disorderly hotel here at 516 S. Wabash. According to a report in the Chicago Daily News, aggressive "ropers" on the street in front of the hotel would ballyhoo customers inside, promoting its offerings "like barkers at a street carnival."

Besides the female employees, the hotel also was home to a few small-time crooks and street enforcers for the Capone syndicate. David Bullock, a 19 year old thief, was a resident at the time of his arrest, when he confessed to robbing five Englewood candy stores (who knew there were five candy stores in Englewood?).

Interestingly, this wasn't the first brothel at this address. In 1908 and 1910, a brothel run by Grace Graves was raided by the police here. The lot was subdivided in 1890 from that just north of it, where the Congress Bank building sits, both of which were originally owned by the McCormick family. The hotel was built in the mid-1890s, and substantially renovated in 1918, before it was purchased by Capone in the early 1920s.

The hotel has since been demolished and all that remains is a parking lot.

El Rukn "Temple"

The El Rukns were a gang of ruthless drug dealers and pimps operative between 1977 and 1990, who attempted to shield themselves from federal inquiry under the facade of a religious organization. Between 1985 and 1987, the gang even dabbled in international terrorism, allegedly traveling to Libya and meeting with agents of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi to offer their services as domestic terrorists in return for money and weapons.

Jeff Fort founded the El Rukns upon his release from prison in 1977. Most of the gang leadership were comprised of select members of the gang Fort led during the 1960s, before his stint in prison, the Black P. Stones. The name "Rukn" refers to stones or rocks in Arabic. In 1977, Fort purchased a building at this location, 3947 S. Drexel, to serve as the new gang's headquarters, which he rechristened the "El Rukn Grand Major Temple". Here is a contemporary photo of the building during its Rukn heyday:


The building was originally constructed as a theater in 1915, and was one of the city's first film-only venues, as well as one of the city's largest theaters, offering over 1,000 seats. The Oakland Square Theater remained in business until the late 1960s, when the decline of the movie theater industry, plus the changing demographics of the neighborhood, forced its closure. Ironically, one factor in the owner's decision to close was the continuing extortion attempts by the Black P. Stones.

For a few years, the "Affro-Arts Theater" took its place, and served as a major community center, offering African-themed productions to the largely Black residents of the neighborhood. The Theater offered some major attractions; Mohammed Ali and Gwendolyn Brooks both appeared there at various times. The radical politics of the Theater's ownership (for example, Stokely Carmichael spoke there in 1968) created recurring clashes with Chicago police, who shut down the Theater several times for trumped-up building code violations, and eventually the Affro-Arts closed in 1971.

The building sat empty for several years, until it was seized by the county and sold at auction to the Rukns, who referred to it informally as "the fort". The Rukns wore fur coats and flashy hats, changed their names to include the word "el," and offered public fealty to their leader, Jeff Fort, who they called "Prince Malik". In fact, however, the Rukns were not really a religious organization at all (a federal judge ruled so in 1986, clearing the way for RICO indictments of its leadership), but a ruthless drug-selling gang with enormous ambitions. With about 250 members, the Rukns' core business was the marketing of various inexpensive pharmaceutical substitutes for heroin, and they controlled big portions of the South side as their sales district. Prostitution, protection, and labor unions were subsidiary operations.

As their success grew, they branched out into real estate, forming a subsidiary business, the "El Pyramid Corporation," to manage their property holdings, which they usually acquired by intimidating the owners into selling below market value. The Rukns also opened their own private security service, which they offered for use at major events. They even started their own non-accredited "law" school, by which gang associates could receive degrees; these "attorneys" could then privately visit gang members in jail to transmit orders from leadership on the outside.

El Rukns were also active in politics. In 1982, election commissioners were surprised to see a group of Rukns bring in thousands of new voter registrations -- acting like the community organization they claimed to be, instead of the predatory criminals the police said they were. However, the fact is that an Illinois State Representative from the Temple's district, Larry Bullock, had paid the Rukns $70,000 to campaign throughout the South side for incumbent Chicago mayor Jane Byrne in the Democratic primary. When the newspapers published the fact that a known criminal organization was supporting Byrne, her campaign disowned the Rukns, but the publicity damage was substantial, and Byrne lost in the primary to Harold Washington.

The Temple was continually raided by police throughout the 1980s, who usually had to use battering rams and acetylene torches to break through the thick steel doors the Rukns had installed, and in June, 1982, Jeff Fort and several other top Rukn leaders were arrested for drug distribution charges. Fort, with his previous convictions, was sent to lockdown at a federal prison in Bastrop, Texas, for a 13 year sentence. Fort's telephone privileges in prison were not, however, curtailed, and he continued to lead the gang throughout the 1980s, using a sophisticated system of secret codes by which he communicated back to the Temple.

By 1985, the government managed to turn a top El Rukn into a prosecution witness, which led to a major RICO investigation. In the next year, they cracked Fort's codes, in which the Rukns' five fundamental "principles," love, truth, peace, justice, and freedom, could be combined in various ways to form numbers.

What they found in those codes astounded them. As Fort's indictment stated, "the conspirators proposed to perform...violent acts in the United States on behalf of or at the direction of the government of Libya," although these proposals had not been carried particularly far. In 1987, Jeff Fort was sentenced to another 80 years for the Libyan plot. In addition, he was also moved to a SuperMax prison in Colorado from which he was unable to communicate with the Rukns in Chicago.

Without Fort, the gang suffered a serious lack of business acumen and leadership. Rukn leaders began using drugs (Fort had strictly prohibited the use of any substance stronger than marijuana), and infighting between rival factions led to bloody confrontations. The Rukns had always been vastly outnumbered by their major rival organization, the Gangster Disciples, and without Fort's leadership, the paucity of street-level manpower showed.

The police seized the Temple in 1989 and razed it to the ground in 1990. With the demolition of the Temple, the "El Rukn" name fell out of use and the gang split into several "stones" gangs, each of which controlled a small amount of territory. There were attempts in the 1990s by Jeff Fort's two sons to reconstitute the Rukns, but neither had anything like the leadership skill of their father, and these attempts failed.

The lot on which the El Rukn Temple stood remained empty for a decade, until a large, attractive private home was built on the site.

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.

Johnny Torrio and Al Capone's Accounts Receivable Department

The Torrio-Capone Outfit could have been entirely rolled up in 1924, if not for some behind-the-scenes legal wrangling and judicial payoffs.

After Chicago mayor William "Decent" Dever, the "dry" Democrat, shut down Capone's headquarters at the Four Deuces, the gang moved all their accounting operations to the second floor of a nondescript brick shopping center on the northwest corner of 22nd and Michigan, at 2146 S. Michigan. The photo above shows the location today (taken from the perspective of Michigan Ave.); see below for a newspaper photo of the scene at the time of Capone's residence (taken from the perspective of 22nd St.).

The shopping center was busy most of the time, and featured restaurants, offices, and dry goods, so for awhile, no one noticed the unusual activities in the physician's office on the second floor, where hung a sign reading "Dr. Frank Ryan" (some accounts claim the sign used Capone's favorite pseudonym, A. Brown, but this seems unlikely, given the gang's expertise at discretion) . A peak inside Dr. Ryan's office revealed an ordinary waiting room, furnished with various vials of medicines.

But beyond the waiting room were file cabinets upon file cabinets, containing the gang's accounts receivable records. There, Jake "Greasy Thumb" Guzik, the Outfit's chief accountant, kept ledgers detailing the assets, income and trade secrets of the largest bootlegging and prostitution ring in the world.

When Chicago police raided the doctor's office in April, 1924, and arrested Guzik, Frank Nitti, and Johnny Patton (the latter two were top lieutenants in the gang), they found ledgers showing major beer customers, locations of all speakeasies under Torrio-Capone control, details of the gang's liquor supply chain from Canada and the Carribean, corporate control documents for breweries owned and operated, and detailed T-charts for the suburban brothels in Stickney and Burnham. Embarrassingly, they also uncovered a list of police officers and federal agents receiving hush money.

The incredible findings were enough to shut down Torrio and Capone for good. As Mayor Dever told the newspapers, "We've got the goods now." Not only Chicago and Cook County authorities, but the Bureau of Investigation and the IRS in Washington prepared to examine the seized documents. William McSwiggin, the county attorney, was ready to empanel a grand jury.

Capone's men worked furiously behind the scenes. In Judge Howard Hayes, they found their man. Shortly after the raid, he summoned all seized records to his courtroom. The following day, without notifying McSwiggin, he returned all of these documents to Capone's attorneys, on the basis that the police had no search warrant for the accounting records, only for illegal liquor. A few weeks later, he dismissed all charges against the arrested men.

McSwiggin and the feds were infuriated at being outmaneuvered by Capone and undercut by Judge Hayes, but Capone remained a free man until 1931. After the raid, he relocated his headquarters to the Hotel Metropole across 22nd street.

Marshall Field, Jr., Shot

Marshall Field, Jr., heir to the department store fortune and holder of the most famous name in Chicago history, died here at his home of a gunshot wound on November 22, 1905. Who fired the shot? There are three theories.

The official inquest concluded that Field had accidentally shot himself while cleaning his gun. Practically everyone saw this as an unlikely story from the start.

A number of witnesses claim that Field was a guest of the famous Everleigh Club brothel that evening, and was shot during foreplay with one of the residents. Fearing public embarrassment, he asked to be driven home, where his wounds proved more serious than expected. However, some of these supposed witnesses cannot be considered reliable, as they stood to benefit from selling their stories to the press.

A third theory -- and possibly the most likely -- is that, regardless of whether Field was at the Everleigh Club that evening or not, he was severely depressed and committed suicide in his bedroom. On the other hand, no suicide note was ever discovered, although it is possible that a note may have been suppressed by his powerful family to avoid embarrassment.

Field's mansion on S. Prairie Avenue still stands, and is currently being renovated into a six-flat condominium. It's not clear whether buyers would find Field's history a positive attribute in a home, but the developer certainly seems to be making it a keystone of the advertising campaign.

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.