Sin in the Second City Read Online Free PDF

furnishings, piano professors, and harlots to transfer south, settling into the growing vice district around Dearborn and 22nd streets. This latter contingent constituted the sisters’ new neighbors and competitors, though none of them looked like much of a threat.
    The California, across the street from the Everleighs’ building, was one of the roughest resorts in the district. Operated by a three-hundred-pound bruiser named “Blubber” Bob Gray and his wife, the California offered thirty girls whose uniforms consisted of high-button shoes and sheer chemises that barely brushed their bottoms. Most nights, they appeared naked at windows or in the doorway, gyrating and pointing between their legs.
    “Pick a baby, boys!” the madam yelled at her clients. “Don’t get glued to your seats!”
    She charged a dollar, but 50 cents would do if a man could prove by turning out his pockets that he had nothing more. Here, as in other bordellos, harlots “rolled” their clients, slipping a dose of morphine into his wine or beer and robbing him while he was passed out cold. The sisters added additional rules to their list: no knockout powders, no thieving, no drugs of any kind.
    On Armour Avenue stood a notorious resort called the Bucket of Blood—the sisters shuddered to think what passed for entertainment behind its walls. Flogging, they supposed—all the rage in the lower dives and another activity they would not tolerate. Farther down the block, a brutal resort blithely called the Why Not? operated near Japanese and Chinese whorehouses that also catered only to white men. The sisters heard that the “Orientals,” unable to bear the frigid Chicago climate, practiced their profession during the winter months clad in long woolen underwear.
    Two brothers, Ed and Louis Weiss, both of whom seemed inordinately curious about what the sisters were up to, flanked the Everleighs’ place on either side. Finally, there was a tight clique of upscale brothel keepers, led by one Madam Vic Shaw, who considered their resorts the Levee’s finest attractions. True, their houses came closest to Everleigh standards—but in the sisters’ opinion, not nearly close enough.
    Amateurs, all of them, and not worth another moment of the Everleighs’ time.

 

    ANOTHER
UNCLE TOM’S CABIN

 

    Stead was a man we are sorry not to have known. He
was just a little before our time. So broad-minded.
    —M INNA E VERLEIGH

    B efore the Everleigh sisters so optimistically decided to improve their industry, and to apply a dignified sheen to its public image, a group of reformers in England embarked on a similar campaign of their own. Chief among them was William T. Stead, who, along with fellow activist Josephine Butler, wanted to raise England’s age of consent for girls from thirteen to sixteen. The campaign needed, as Stead put it, its own Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
    In 1885, nine years before he published If Christ Came to Chicago, Stead, prepared to assume the role of Harriet Beecher Stowe, descended upon London’s underworld. Recalling a letter Butler received from Victor Hugo—“The slavery of black women is abolished in America,” it read, “but the slavery of white women continues in Europe”—Stead set out to find a story so sensational that Parliament would be forced to act. A story that would redirect the debate over prostitution, shifting the focus from the courtesan to those who profited from her work. A story that would recast her role in society from that of necessary evil to exploited victim—a “white slave.”
    He found the story in the case of Eliza “Lily” Armstrong, a thirteen-year-old girl living in a west London slum with her alcoholic mother, Elizabeth. Destitute, Elizabeth agreed to sell Lily to a woman, working in concert with Stead, for the sum of £5—£3 down and £2 after her virginity had been professionally certified. Stead, meanwhile, acting the part of the “purchaser,” waited in a predetermined brothel for