Sin in the Second City Read Online Free PDF Page B

Lily to arrive.
    “The poor child,” Stead wrote, “was full of delight at going to her new situation, and clung affectionately to the keeper who was taking her away—where, she knew not. The first thing to be done after the child was fairly severed from home was to secure the certificate of virginity.”
    Stead’s cohort took Lily to a midwife, who confirmed the girl’s chastity and produced a small vial of chloroform to “dull the pain.”
    “This,” the midwife advised, “is the best. My clients find this much the most effective.”
    The brothel was the next stop. The madam admitted Lily without question, ordered the girl to undress, and injected chloroform into her arm. A few moments later, Stead entered the room.
    “And the child’s voice was heard crying, in accents of terror,” he later reported, “‘There’s a man’s in the room; oh, take me home!’”
    Stead crept away. Lily’s cries, he insisted, were proof he’d “had his way” with her. Police rescued the girl and placed her in the care of the Salvation Army.
    In July 1885, Stead’s “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” was published in the Pall Mall Gazette. Crowds gathered in front of the paper’s offices, clamoring for copies. One and a half million unauthorized reprints were circulated. Thousands rioted. Virgins clad in white marched through Hyde Park, demanding passage of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, which proposed to raise the age of consent. It was passed in August. Stead kept his triumph—and himself—in the public eye when, in October, he was sent to prison for three months on a procuring charge. He relished his martyrdom, even publishing a pamphlet titled “My First Imprisonment.”
    Across the Atlantic, American reformers took careful note.

 

    GETTING EVERLEIGHED

    The alcove of the Blue Bedroom at the Everleigh Club.

 

    They tell me you are wicked and I believe them,
for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps
luring the farm boys.
    —C ARL S ANDBURG , “Chicago”

    T he Everleigh sisters were perhaps the first cathouse proprietors to apply the inverse formula for success: The more difficult it is to gain entry to an establishment, the greater the number of people who vie to do so. Minna told no one about their grand opening, planned for February 1, 1900. No free passes for critics, no advertisements in newspapers, no engraved invitations to Mayor Carter Harrison II or members of the city council, no klieg lights sweeping garish streaks across Dearborn Street. Their notoriety would come gracefully, like a red carpet slowly unfurled—leave the fireworks for those who cast no spark of their own.
    Besides, Minna knew Chicago was preoccupied with other news, especially the brutal temperature, eight below zero. Telephone operators for the city’s police stations experienced difficulty transmitting or receiving messages over the wires. Batteries in the patrol boxes had iced over, making communication almost impossible. Forget trying to take a streetcar anywhere. Horse carcasses turned up on corners, sometimes in pairs or groups, like capsized carousels. Several homeless people froze, splayed in rag doll poses across the slush and ice.
    But inside the double mansion on South Dearborn Street, Minna and Ada bustled about, warm beneath their gowns, silk whispering with each step. It was a cataclysmic night in their lives—more important than their success in Omaha, more gratifying than leaving their pasts in the South. The past few months had been grueling and frantic; they’d had to dispose of Madam Hankins’s tacky old furnishings and even shabbier girls.
    Ada had taken charge of recruiting. She notified the harlots who worked their brothel in Omaha, and word spread quickly through the underworld pipeline. A few theater acquaintances expressed interest, too—after all, acting and whoring drew from that same facet of the psyche that allowed the body to be in one place, and the mind another.
    She soon