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 and Mushmouth Work Side by Side in the Levee

Number 239 Twenty-second street (now numbered 41 W. 22nd) was a virtual who's who of the underworld in the first decade of the 1900s, an interracial mixing of Chicago's once and future vice kings in the midst of the Levee.

The building appears to have housed a first-floor saloon, with various gambling, billiards and off-track betting operations on the second floor. It was on the second floor that "Big Jim" Colosimo, future titan of the Levee and founder of the Chicago Outfit later run by Johnny Torrio and Al Capone, founded his first establishment, the Colosimo Billiard and Pool Room Parlor, sometime about 1904. The Parlor was connected by telephone, a sure sign in those days that a horse racing handbook was operating within, as race information needed to be distributed quickly to bookmakers (see, e.g., the Mont Tennes operations).

(pictured: James "Big Jim" Colosimo)

In his authoritative volume on Colosimo, Arthur Bilek claims that Big Jim hired two of his brothers-in-law, Joseph and John Moresco, to work at the Parlor (this was before Colosimo divorced his first wife, Victoria, for a new love interest), and that these two eventually took over the business while Colosimo concerned himself with his Cafe and various brothels.

The second floor was also the site of the Frontenac Club, a joint operation between three of the city's top gambling lords: policy (lotto) king John "Mushmouth" Johnson, dice-man Bill Lewis, and Tom McGinnis, who was at times an independent bookmaker and at other times associated with the Mont Tennes and Jim O'Leary syndicates. The Club opened May 1, 1906. Notably, though Johnson and Lewis were black, the Frontenac Club catered exclusively to white customers of means (a gambler had to flash at least $10 -- roughly a week's wages for a typical laborer -- in cash at the door to be admitted). The name of the Club evoked 17th Century Quebecois leader and Indian fighter Count Frontenac, and so symbolized old world wealth and aristocracy in a city short on both. Reports at the time indicated the Frontenac Club turned profits of $200 per day (nearly $5,000 in 2008 dollars), which was split in thirds between the owners.

The building's popularity among the Levee's elite kings of vice may have been due to its central location. 22nd and Dearborn was ground zero for the red light district, and some of the better establishments, catering to a higher class of sinner, such as the Everleigh Club, were just across the street.

After Mushmouth Johnson died in 1907, it's not clear what became of the Club. A report in 1908 indicates the police raided operations on the second floor of the building and discovered a big craps game run by Bill Lewis, with mostly black players, a fact which suggests the Frontenac had either closed or changed substantially in character, although it's possible the Lewis game took place in a separate room.

That the building was still a major gambling resort in 1909 is certain from the fact that it suffered a dynamite attack in the Gamblers' War that year. The owner of the first floor saloon, old-time Satan's Mile barkeep John Morris, claimed there was no gambling currently in the buildilng (highly unlikely), though he admitted the second floor housed poker rooms at some time in the past.

As late as 1920, Colosimo's old billiards room, apparently consolidated by Bill Lewis, was still in operation. After the closure of the Levee in the mid-1910s, most of the big names in vice had moved either into the suburbs or further south (for instance, Lewis was by that time headquartering at a notorious mixed-race craps game on 35th street), but many gambling and vice resorts were still operating surreptitiously at that date.

The buildling was demolished in the mid-1950s as the entire Levee district was slowly redeveloped by the Chicago Housing Authority for low-income residences. The CHA's headquarters building between 1961 and 1974 was located on the southwest corner of Dearborn and 22nd (by then renamed Cermak Rd.), right where the Colosimo-Johnson building once stood. Ironically, the CHA left in 1974 citing crime in the nearby Ickes and Hilliard projects they managed. Robert Loeffley, information director for the public housing agency, told reporters

Because the present office location is in the midst of a string of public housing developments, people have the idea, whether it's true or not, that the neighborhood is unsafe.

The site is now part of the campus of the "National Teacher's [sic] Academy," a public magnet school opened in 2002.

Harry Cullett Bribes Morals Squad Inspector Dannenberg

In early 1914, Second Deputy Superintendent Funkhouser and his Morals Inspection Bureau squad leader, William Dannenberg, were finally cleaning up Chicago's famed segregated vice district, the Levee. Between December of 1913 and February, 1914, Dannenberg's squad had made over 1,000 arrests and shut down scores of brothels, saloons, and call flats in the area surrounding 22nd and Dearborn. The leaders of the vice gangs who ran the Levee knew something had to be done. Their first approach was to bribe Dannenberg into keeping the heat off, and on February 26, 1914, their man, "Chicken" Harry Cullett, met Dannenberg in front of MacLean's Central Drug Store at 1000 W. Wilson (site pictured above), to hand over the money.

The Morals squad was created in 1913 during a reorganization of the Chicago Police Department ordered by Mayor Carter Harrison, on the recommendation of the Civil Service Commission, which had led a major investigation of vice conditions in 1911 and 1912. The Commission's report detailed what almost everyone knew -- that the 22nd street police station, which held jurisdiction over the Levee district, was completely corrupt. The captain and all of the officers of the station were under direct orders from First Ward aldermen Michael "Hinky Dink" Kenna and "Bathhouse" John Coughlin to turn a blind eye to disorderly conditions in the district, in return for political patronage. So long as the 22nd street cops were in charge, the Levee would never close.

In order to break the hold of Kenna and Coughlin, Mayor Harrison created the special position of Second Deputy Superintendent, and appointed the thoroughly uncorruptible Maj. Metellium Funkhouser to the post. Funkhouser, in turn, created a citywide agency, the Morals Inspection Bureau, which would have authority to raid vice resorts when the 22nd street station police would not. Funkhouser appointed Inspector William Dannenberg to lead the Morals squad; Dannenberg was a vice veteran, having played a prominent role in the Maurice van Bever white slavery case in which van Bever was sent to prison, opening up a role in the Colosimo organization for Johnny Torrio.


(pictured: Inspector William C. Dannenberg)

Despite antagonism from the 22nd street station police, Dannenberg's men began closing the Levee district, ending the era of tolerated segregated vice in Chicago. Their raids put hundreds of prostitutes and their handlers in jail, and profits for the major vice rings plummeted. On January 8, 1914, the Morals squad shut down the Rhinegold Cafe, a saloon and house of ill-repute operated by the King of vice, "Big Jim" Colosimo.

Soon after, Colosimo called a meeting of major underworld figures at his Cafe to discuss strategy. Besides Colosimo, those present included Johnny Torrio, "Polak Ben" Zellen, owner of the Vestibule, an infamous resort that later was the site of an organized labor hit by "Mossy" Enright, "Beck" Moriarty, who owned a saloon at Harrison and State Streets, and the Marshall Brothers -- Joe and Bill -- who ran a call hotel at 21st and State. It was decided that a bribery attempt would be the first option, and if that failed, then violence. Even the possibility of murdering Inspector Dannenberg came up.

The man selected to approach Dannenberg with the money was a crooked cop from the 22nd street station named Harry Cullett. Cullett had been on the force for over a decade and had consistently been involved in high-profile cases, including a white slavery/murder case in 1910 and another case involving an international ring of thieves operating through the U.S. Navy. It was his fellow officers who gave him the playful nickname "Chicken Harry". In September 1913, Cullett left the police force after accusations of corruption surfaced, but he was still well-known and liked in the Department.

After leaving the police force, Cullett joined a private detective agency, the American Secret Service Bureau. From his days in the 22nd street station, he would have been familiar with the major characters of the Levee, and he apparently was willing to help them in their time of need.

(pictured: "Chicken" Harry Cullett)

On January 31, 1914, Cullett left a telephone message at the home of Dannenberg's second-in-command, Assistant Inspector for Moral Conditions Edward Altz, asking to meet that evening. At 7:00, Cullett and Altz met face-to-face at Perkins' Saloon at Monroe and Clark Streets. Cullett informed Altz that 11 Levee saloon-keepers were willing to put up $200 each in order to stop the raids on their establishments. As Dannenberg later described the deal,

To lull the public mind I was to raid a list of "fall houses," with which they provided me. Each night the divekeepers agreed to give me the name of a house to raid. From it I was to take two girls. The other places were to be immune.

Cullett asked Altz to liaise with Dannenberg to find out his attitude toward the possible deal.

The following Monday, February 2, Altz informed Dannenberg about the meeting, and Dannenberg immediately contacted his superior, Maj. Funkhouser. Dannenberg asked Funkhouser for permission to play along with the bribery scheme in order to find out who was behind it, and Maj. Funkhouser assented.

It is impressive that Dannenberg was able to so quickly pass up Cullett's offer. $2,200 in 1914 would be roughly the equivalent of $48,900 worth of purchasing power in 2008. Essentially, Dannenberg gave up a $586,000 per year salary in order to enforce the law. The bribe was probably five or ten times Dannenberg's official salary at the time.

On Tuesday, Feb. 17, 1914, Cullett and Dannenberg met face-to-face for the first time, in the corridor outside the Morals squad leader's office at City Hall. The two ducked into a quiet room nearby, where Cullett laid out his plan directly to Inspector Dannenberg. The $2,200 was only a start: brothel owners who opened resorts in the future would also add to the payoffs. The revenue potential was endless. Dannenberg agreed to the plan, and Cullett said he would get in touch when the financial arrangements were in order.

It seems the vice kings of the Levee might have gotten cold feet, for during several subsequent meetings in the mezzanine of the Hotel Sherman, Cullett had to admit he had been unable to procure the agreed-upon sums. However, finally, on February 26, everyone was convinced that Dannenberg was ready to go on the take, and a meeting at Sheridan and Wilson was planned where Cullett would hand over a $500 down payment on the first month's payoff.

Before the designated meeting time, Inspector Dannenberg was thoroughly searched by four of his men to insure he had no money on his person before leaving, and two Chicago Tribune reporters were tipped off to the story. At 8:40 p.m. on Feb. 26, Dannenberg arrived at MacLean's Central Drug Store at 1000 W. Wilson Ave. to await the arrival of Cullett. His fellow officers and the reporters hid nearby in doors and entryways.

Five minutes later, a taxicab dropped off Harry Cullett on the opposite corner. Cullett told the driver to run the meter and wait for him, while he walked briskly across the street to where Dannenberg was standing in front of the drug store window. He touched the Inspector on the shoulder, and the two began walking north on Sheridan Rd. up to Leland Ave. Then they walked back towards Wilson. Four times, Cullett led Dannenberg back and forth on the block, checking to be sure no one was following or watching. Finally, Cullett and Dannenberg darted across Sheridan to an alley behind the Grasmere hotel across the street from the drug store.

Cullett handed the money over to Dannenberg, and the two reappeared and walked back toward the corner of Sheridan and Wilson. When they reached the corner, Dannenberg removed his hat, a predetermined signal, which brought the four Morals squad officers out into the street, surrounding the pair.

"What the hell?" gasped Cullett. "I don't know what this means."

What it meant was that Cullett was under arrest for bribery. A phone call was immediately put in to Maj. Funkhouser, informing him of the successful operation, and a press conference revealed the details of the scheme to the public.

Cullett posted $2,000 bail, and a trial date was set, but never came. With the support of his detective agency, as well as Aldermen Kenna and Coughlin, Cullett's attorneys successfully made the argument that since the ordinance that created Dannenberg's office did not fully specify the duties of the Morals Inspection Bureau, he was not amenable to bribery under the statute.

Cullett never served a jail term for his role in the scheme, nor were his financial backers prosecuted. Nevertheless, Dannenberg kept up the heat on the Levee, and kept it closed tight throughout 1914.

It appears that Harry Cullett continued in private detective work, and in that, he was joined in 1915 by Inspector Dannenberg himself. The latter became one of the nation's most famous "private dicks", making his name in divorce and election fraud cases until his death in 1955.

The Central Drug store at Sheridan and Wilson changed hands several times, becoming a Liggett's, then a Ford Hopkins, then a Rex-All Drug, until it was demolished in the 1960s. The location is now a McDonald's restaurant.

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.

Alderman John Coughlin's Basement Bathhouse

John J. Coughlin was the proprietor of a bathhouse in the basement of the Brevoort Hotel at this location, 143 W. Madison (now 118 W. Madison), in the 1880s. Just a few years later in 1892, with powerful backing from Chicago gambling king Mike McDonald, "Bathhouse" John became Alderman for the richest single district in the world, Chicago's First Ward, a position he held for 46 years until his death in 1938. During that time, he was not only the city's most famous politician, but presided over -- and profited from -- the greatest red light district in American history, the Chicago Levee.

Coughlin was born in 1860 in Connelly's Patch, an Irish neighborhood on the west side of downtown, between Madison and Adams Streets. With only a few mediocre years of schooling, he began working at age 11 as a rubber in a Turkish bathhouse, learning the trade and saving fastidiously. By 1887, he had earned enough to buy the bathhouse in the basement of the recently-refurbished Brevoort House hotel on Madison Street. The Brevoort, one of Chicago's oldest inns and always one of the best-furnished (it was the first in Chicago to offer an elevator), was rebuilt after the Great Fire as an eight-story high premier European-style hotel, and offered its visitors what was at the time considered a true luxury -- the opportunity to take a bath. The Tribune reported:

The bath rooms occupy all of the basement of the hotel, and is divided into fifty rooms, well ventilated and provided with folding couches. It is under the proprietorship of John J. Coughlin, formerly at No. 169 Wabash avenue. He has secured artesian well water at considerable expense, and will give all of the popular baths, including the swimming baths, for which a large basin has been constructed in the centre of the apartments. This will prove a popular place for the general public as well as hotel guests, because of its central location and conveniences.

And who would want to take an unpopular bath? With his earnings from the Brevoort bathhouse, Coughlin purchased several other city bathhouses, opened the Silver Dollar saloon two doors down on Madison, and also developed business interests in insurance. His social star rising, but with a dirt-poor Irish background, he made an ideal political candidate for the McDonald syndicate, and in 1892, he became First Ward Alderman.

Though he never lost an election, Bathhouse John was not exactly the model of efficient politics, but he was a flamboyant character who knew how to get his name in the newspapers and endear himself to voters. There seems to have been no end to his eccentricities. Reading through newspaper reports, one learns of Coughlin at one time or another: running a baseball team, opening his own zoo and amusement park in Colorado, challenging his neighbors to a footrace, acting as his own attorney in defense of a charge of assault on a newspaper reporter, offering a $50 reward to the first Chicagoan to see a spring robin (with "incontestable proof"), learning to play the guitar, calling on the police to regulate the length of women's skirts, releasing a list of the city's top ten most handsome men (!), and running a stable of race horses in suburban St. Charles.

The photo below shows "The Bath" atop an elephant at his zoo in Colorado, alongside his wife.

Alderman Coughlin's most famous excesses, however, were probably his attire and his poetic license. Sartorially, the Bath was internationally famous for his colorful suits, which included at any one time, some combination of silk hat, pink gloves, yellow shoes, green coat, lavender pants, cream-colored vest, diamond studs, and floral embroidery. It was in such clothes that Coughlin led the grand parade of the annual First Ward Ball, an all-night saturnalian orgy attended chiefly by prostitutes and saloon denizens, which eventually brought about such rage from high-minded urban reformers that the mayor was forced to end the tradition.

The Alderman's literary sense was just about as finely tuned as his attire. As the author of a wide range of masterfully constructed verses, including "Ode to a Bathtub", "I Wish I was a Bird", "Ode to a Bowl of Soup", and the ever-popular "Why Did they Build Lake Michigan So Wide?", Bathhouse John was constantly the target of scorn from newspaper editors, who painted him as a buffoon. Coughlin made use of the criticism masterfully, however, cultivating an image as a man of the people, not the press.

In 1909, Coughlin threatened to publish a book of his poems, and he told reporters he would be dedicating it to his long-time colleague on the city council, and fellow Lord of the Levee, Michael "Hinky Dink" Kenna. The Tribune reported:

Ald. John J. Coughlin is going to publish a book of his poems. The title may be 'Ballads of the Bathhouse'....The book will be dedicated to his colleague, Ald. Michael Kenna. Kenna declared last night that if Coughlin dared to do any dedicating to him he would sue him for slander and libel...."If that book of poems was dedicated to me I'd never be able to live down the disgrace."

On another occasion, Ald. Coughlin waited patiently outside the Mayor's office for over an hour to pester him about adjourning a city council meeting early so that all the council members could see the premier of his newest poetic work, "Dear Midnight of Love," which was to be performed at the Chicago Operahouse that afternoon. "I've tried hard to get John to cut this out, but he won't and I can't hold him down," the Mayor told reporters.

Together with Ald. Kenna, he ruled the First Ward, selling protection to the brothels, gambling houses, drug dens, white slave operations, and saloons of the Levee for over forty years. He was part owner in Frieberg's Dance Hall, and employed his business partner, Ike Bloom, as the official collector of tribute. Later, Bloom's position was taken by "Big Jim" Colosimo, the founder of the Chicago Outfit, which Al Capone would later run. Nearly every famous Chicago criminal of the early 20th century got their start working under Coughlin and Kenna, including Capone, Johnny Torrio, Andy Craig, Jake and Harry Guzik, Mushmouth Johnson, and the Everleigh Sisters.

In his later years, while he continued to sit on the city council, Coughlin largely became a doddering figurehead for the Torrio-Capone syndicate, a kindly old gentleman who enjoying telling self-aggrandizing stories about days gone past. Bathhouse John passed in November, 1938. Having lost tens of thousands of dollars on his racehorse hobby during the last decades of his life, his will left only a meager $25,000 to his family.

The Brevoort House, where Coughlin first became a Chicago powerbroker, in later years became best known for its exceptionally smoky chimney, which caused endless complaints from nearby residents. Ironically, the hotel burned down in 1905. Today, the location where the Brevoort once stood is occupied by St. Peter's Church in the Loop, an imposing Franciscan Roman Catholic edifice built in 1953.

Despite his reputation as a blowhard, in 1898 John Coughlin spoke some of the truest words ever uttered by a politician regarding politics:

...he told the children of St. John's Roman Catholic parish that politics is a mockery and a sham, a beautiful fruit that turns to gall and ashes on being tasted. So sad did the lord of the First become in painting the woes and hardships attendant on being a politician that some of his loyal henchmen among the audience missed the rest of the speech in an eager discussion of the possible heir to the throne....No one doubted that he knew what he was talking about, though some wondered in a sort of hopeless way whether there was any chance of the preacher taking a small dose, just for one term say, of his own advice.

Gipsy Smith Rallies Against the Levee

"Gipsy" Smith was one of the world's great evangelists, the Billy Graham of his day. Born in Britain, he came to Chicago in October of 1909 for a month of revivals at the Seventh Regiment Armory, on Wentworth Ave., between 33rd and 35th, pictured above.


At the time, the Armory was the largest convention space in the city, with capacity above 15,000. Built in 1907 for $500,000 to house the heavily-Irish seventh regiment, it had hosted the 1908 Republican National Convention, where William Taft was nominated. His Democratic rival, William Jennings Bryan, and the Socialist candidate Eugene V. Debs, also spoke to large crowds at the Armory that year. The building sported a dome-shaped roof with no major supports or columns in the middle to interrupt the wide floor space. The Armory also had a sophisticated heating system that kept the cavernous space comfortable through Chicago winters.

Gipsy Smith's most famous sermon took place on the evening of October 18, 1909. On that night, after the sermon, the Methodist preacher led a force of over 2,000 Christians into the Levee, Chicago's segregated vice district, where they marched, prayed, and sang hymns to the interest and amusement of more than 30,000 onlookers.

Chicago police, politicians, and even other men of the cloth had warned Smith against the march, arguing that it would only raise interest in the red light district, and introduce its charms to those who otherwise would have no interest in visiting. Yet Gipsy persisted. In his sermon that night, he recalled the Savior's fearlessness in handling sin, his willingness to go to the sick at the pool of Bethesda, to touch the leper, and to speak with the Magdalene. He concluded with a pointed attack on his critics as modern-day Pharisees.

Then, his listeners poured out onto 34th Street, walked the mile and a half up State Street to 22nd, then turned up Dearborn. The march started poorly when Gipsy Smith realized he had left his Bible back at the Armory. The crowd slowed while a runner retrieved the book. When they arrived in the Levee, the crowd stopped at the Everleigh house and sang hymns, accompanied by the Salvation Army band. They recited the Lord's Prayer and the 91st Psalm in front of saloons, brothels, and gambling houses, all of which had dimmed their lights and shut their doors fast at the urging of the police.

The Tribune described the scene:

No stranger crowd ever assembled in Chicago than that which packed the South side levee last night....Quietly, orderly, singing plaintively, with and without the music of the Salvation Army bands, two or three thousand people in deadly earnest walked through the streets of shame lined by the darkened windows and closed doors of the brothels and the mansions of prostitution....Men and women were on top of buildings, in wagons and automobiles, leaning from windows, and occupying every possible position of vantage. But all were silent -- respectfully, or sardonically so.

Many slumming parties took the opportunity to visit the Levee for the first time.

In Dearborn street a group of four unescorted women, two of them carrying babies in their arms, walked slowly along and inspected the individual resorts with curious eyes. One of the babies fretted because it could not have the "pitty glass" in a doorway that glittered in the electric light. Automobiles filled with respectable appearing men and women chugged slowly through Dearborn street and Armour avenue by the dozen for hours before the parade.

Gipsy Smith (pictured below) ended his tour at the Alhambra theater on State at Archer, where a burlesque show had ended not an hour earlier. His crowd of Christian "missionaries" held a midnight revival there before dispersing.



As soon as the parade ended, the red light district opened up, and the thousands of onlookers indulged. It was the biggest night in the history of the Levee. The Tribune reported,

After the parade was over the district awakened to find the biggest business of its recent history waiting at the doors clamoring for admission. Even before the last of Gipsy Smith's followers had marched sturdily out of Armour Avenue the doors of the resorts were flung open and the crowds began to pour in where the lights were bright and where music -- not sacred -- was abundant.

The resort keepers themselves were astonished at the rush of business that almost swept them from their feet. They had prepared for some additional trade. They had stocked up their ice boxes with more beer and had put in an extra piano player or two. But all of these preparations were inadequate. The crowd simply swamped the resorts, and for a time the scene resembled a country fair in full blast.

Despite the apparent short-term failure of the march, it was the first strike against segregated vice in Chicago, and it raised awareness of the ongoings on the South side. Chicago churches kept up the political pressure on the Mayor to shut down the Levee even after Smith left in November, 1909. By 1911, the Everleigh Club was closed by the city, and within a few years, open vice was at an end in Chicago.

The Armory continued to host major sporting events, auto shows, and conventions. It was the base for thousands of Illinois guardsmen during the 1919 race riots. Today, the site where Gipsy Smith began the public crusade against the Levee is the north parking lot for U.S. Cellular Field (also known as New Comiskey), home of the American League's Chicago White Sox.

Maj. Funkhouser and Inspector Dannenberg Put the Lid on the Levee

The Victorian concept of vice accepted that men were imperfect creatures and that gambling, prostitution, and liquor could never fully be eliminated from society. Therefore, it was best that these "social evils" be segregated into a restricted area of the city, where they could operate outside and apart from decent society.

This doctrine was implemented in Chicago throughout the 19th and early 20th century. Although prostitution and gambling were de jure illegal under city and Cook county ordinances, their practice in segregated vice districts was de facto tolerated. Major attacks on vice districts only occurred when city boundaries or neighborhoods changed, as was the case with the Custom House Place vice district when streetcars began bringing residents into downtown along Clark Street in 1903.

The Third Great Awakening upended the Victorian view of vice, and ended forever Chicago's toleration of its open practice. This upswing in religious fervor started after the Civil War, and included a strong paternalistic impulse, in which the poor and downtrodden were thought to be uplifted by driving saloons and pimps out of their neighborhoods by force of law.

By 1910, social and religious pressure had mounted to a degree that even Chicago's relatively lax politicians felt impelled to eliminate the open vice districts. Attention naturally focused on the 22nd street Levee, the wildest and most open segregated vice district the world had ever seen. The federal Mann Act was passed in 1910, based on a purported case of white slavery in the Levee. Even the Levee's lords and protectors, the first ward aldermen, Michael Kenna and John Coughlin, played along, feigning outrage at police indifference to unlawful saloons and brothels, and promising to act. At the same time, they convinced former Mayor and "wet", Carter Harrison Jr., to return from California to again seek the city's mayorship, which he did.

But even Mayor Harrison was eventually forced to accept the will of the city's moral majority. He forced the closure of the Everleigh Club in 1911, and in 1913, formed the city's first specialty police vice squad, led by Major Metellium Funkhouser and Inspector William Dannenberg.

These two incorruptible crusaders for the public weal aggressively pursued vice in the Levee throughout 1913 and 1914, forcing the final end of open vice districts in Chicago. First, old-time saloon keeper Andy Craig and his gang of pickpockets were rounded up. Then, in January, 1914, raids on a wide variety of Levee bars and hotels began, including one on Jan. 8 at the Rhinegold Saloon and Cafe, a bar and house of ill repute at 1939 S. Dearborn (pictured above) owned by vice king "Big Jim" Colosimo, was raided by Funkhouser and Dannenberg's morals unit. Twelve women were arrested for vagrancy, plus the saloon's keeper, Johnny "the Fox" Torrio (or "John Turio", as the newspapers called him) -- who was later to take over the gang from Colosimo and lead it into the bootlegging era of Prohibition.

Colosimo and other vice entrepreneurs attempted to bribe Funkhouser and Dannenberg, they tried to obstruct their work, they even brought a lawsuit against them -- all to no avail. By the end of 1914, all major vice operations either moved into the suburbs or underground, where they remain to this day. The closure of the Levee eliminated advertisement of liquor, drugs and prostitution, but of course, did not eliminate these evils. Outside the realm of the courts, vice entrepreneurs turned to violence to settle disputes and enforce contracts -- thus, the murderous 1920s under the leadership of Torrio and Al Capone.

Most of the Levee is gone today, with even the streets vacated. The South Loop School's Early Childhood Center, a Chicago Public School, sits on the spot where the Rhinegold once stood.

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.

Black Hand Gang Eliminated -- by Johnny Torrio?

Late in the evening on November 22, 1911, three men were shot in the Rock Island Railroad underpass at Archer Street. Two died at the scene, the other was seriously injured and sent to the hospital. Why? There appear to be two theories.

The dead men were Pasquale Damico and Francisco Denello. According to the next day's Tribune, Damico was shot at close range nine times in the back, while Francisco Denello was shot twice, once in the head and the other through his left side. Denello's brother, Stephano, who was also shot, was discovered by a policeman dragging himself down the sidewalk a block away, and rushed to the hospital.

Under police questioning, Stephano refused to reveal any clues about his attackers. He did, however, ask that Levee big shot and Chicago Outfit founder "Big" Jim Colosimo be brought to his bedside. When Colosimo showed up, however, Stephano refused to talk with him.

Police identified the Damico and the Denellos as a Black Hand gang, sending extortion threats to prominent Italian businessmen in the neighborhood. The police captain interviewed by the Tribune said,

The city is rid of a bad gang. It is my belief that the three men were lured to the scene of the shooting by men whom they have blackmailed or were attempting to obtain money from through Black Hand letters. The Denello brothers and Damico have done most of the black hand work in this police district. We have known for a long time that they were black handers, but it has been impossible to get their victims to rap against them. Fear of death has kept them from giving the police information that might have sent the gang to the penitentiary.

As an important Italian businessmen, Colosimo was likely the frequent target of Black Hand gangs. Some historians believe that the fact that practically nothing was left of Colosimo's fortune upon his assassination indicates that he paid heavily to the Black Hand, although as the gangster king of the city, it is difficult to imagine that he would have suffered such indignities.

Instead of paying up, Colosimo may have dispatched his right-hand man (and his successor in leadership of the Outfit), Johnny Torrio, to "bump off" any would-be extortioners. The extreme manner in which Damico was riddled with bullets may have been a warning to other hoodlums that Big Jim was not to be taken advantage of.

Two weeks later, however, the Tribune advanced an alternative theory of the killings: they were part of a classic Italian love triangle. Police theorized that Mary Palaggi, a Levee saloon-keeper's daughter, was engaged to one man, but desired by another. The Denello brothers, it is claimed, were friends of the fiance (though he denied it), and Damico was an associate of the would-be paramour. The shootout under the railroad tracks, then, arose from a dispute among the parties, not an attack from assassins. The question of why the surviving Denello would have called for Colosimo in the hospital is left unanswered.

The underpass separates the Levee area, now dominated by the Hilliard Towers apartments and the Harold Ickes Homes housing project, from Chinatown, visible at the end of the road in the photo below.

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.

White Slavery in Chicago

The most famous white slavery case in Chicago history took place here, at 2252 S. Wabash, now the site of a collision repair shop and an empty lot where train cars are stacked.

Mona Marshall worked at the ribbon counter of Marshall Field's department store, One day in the spring of 1907, a handsome man named Harry Balding approached her affectionately, and asked her to join him for a show at a theatre. Instead, he took her to the Prima Dance Hall on 35th St., drugged her, and the next day she awoke here, at the Follansbee Flats on Wabash. After being brutally "broken in," Mona was sold to a brothel called the Casino on Dearborn St.which was run by Vic Shaw's husband, for $30.

One night, Mona wrote "I am a white slave" on a scrap of paper and threw it from her window, where it was found and brought to the attention of the police, who rescued Mona and arrested Harry Balding and the others who had conspired to enslave her.

At least, that was Mona's story, which was used to convict Harry Balding, despite a number of inconsistencies which came out at trial. The case brought the practice of white slavery to the public's eye and began the outrage which led to the passage of the Mann Act in 1910 and eventually led to the closure of the Levee's restricted prostitution district in 1911.