The Vice Bondage of a Great City; or, the Wickedest City in the WorldHarland, Robert O.
History
The Vice Bondage of a Great City; or, the Wickedest City in the World
Harland, Robert O.
Chicago (Ill.) -- Moral conditions; Prostitution -- Illinois -- Chicago
The "Arena" is mentioned here as a type, again. Chicago is infested with
such places. They may be found in our best residence districts, near
fashionable churches and adjoining homes where purity is sacred.
To state more specific facts on such places we will name several more
similar "flats."
A "Mrs. Clouds" conducts a similar place on La Salle avenue near Erie
street. It is necessary to have a letter of introduction or be known
before entrance can be effected. Here, nightly, men of wealth and even of
prominence with wives and families, ignorant of their orgies, take young
girls.
The automobiles of the wealthy drive up to this place every evening and
their occupants seek their pleasure within.
Here many-course dinners with wine as a zest giver--usually champagne--are
served to the patrons for $12 a plate. It is the vice haunt of the
millionaires and their purchased women.
Then there is the place of Mrs. Mohr in Erie street, west of Rush street,
where the same luxuries are in evidence, where the same vices are
committed and where the range of prices eats deep into anything but a
plethoric bank account.
These places run without intervention. They are known to few outside the
patrons. They pay, as do all other forms of vice, for police toleration.
Reform movements have not attacked them because they are scarcely aware of
their existence. They are but a small part of the contributing elements of
graft and corruption.
We have digressed, but it was necessary to show the source and end of a
vice evil starting in the big hotels. In these "flats" of secrecy, girls
will be furnished in the same manner as they are furnished by "Miss
Harris" and her ilk of panderers.
But let us resume our trip in the underworld. From the hotels, we move
southward again.
THE BORDERLAND OF HELL.
Down Michigan avenue, Wabash avenue, State street, Fifth avenue and many
other prominent thoroughfares leading out of the loop district, are the
"assignation hotels" of Chicago. These are the houses where men bring
their victims at a cost of one dollar to five dollars a room, where street
walkers "steer" their customers and where vice festers with the roar of
the business world outside the windows.
Within the loop district alone there are fifty hotels of this vicious
character. Their average earnings, according to a prominent investigator
and reformer, are $600 a night. As we move southward we pass them at every
step, little dreaming of the lives that have been ruined within and the
tragedies that have begun and culminated there.
The part of the South side in which we have entered was at one time a
fashionable neighborhood of wealthy and respectable residents. The Vice
Trust drove them away by its encroachments. Today those same buildings are
tenanted by lost women, living there and carrying on their nefarious trade
in the district but a short distance away.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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