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
From Twentieth street south on Michigan avenue, in sections, and in Wabash
avenue and State street, vice reigns openly and supreme. There is no
pretense at respectability. Vice has thrown off its masks and flaunts its
hideousness, its diseases and its crimes in our faces.
It is the Borderland of Hell,--it is the city's death-spot. Similar
borderlands are found on the West and North sides.
As you look farther south you can count the electric signs flaring over
the haunts of vice--they spell saloon, cafe or hotel. They run into the
hundreds.
The interiors of these cafes are similar to the loop cafe we have
described, stripped of its air of hidden sin. Here sin stalks about as the
fearless master.
The woman who a year ago reveled in the pleasures of a night at some
fashionable restaurant with a "friend" may be found drunk and maudlin,
vulgarly and cheaply clothed, dropping "dope" into her glass of whiskey to
revive her tired brain and body to attract another victim and stave off
the wolf of starvation a little while longer.
These are the "hangouts" of the women who are going down and down. They
have ceased to attempt to appear respectable; they have tired of hiding
their shame and infamy; they have torn off the mask and their faces peer
leeringly at you and their blue-colored lips seem to cry out in hellish
abandon:
"I am a damned, lost creature. I sold my birthright. I bartered the body
my good mother gave me. I drank to the last lees the glass and I am
accursed. Death has placed his seal upon me and I am struggling to cheat
him of a few days longer. Life, life, more life!"
Here women smoke cigarettes openly, embrace the men they are with, expose
their limbs in licentious manner to attract prospective customers. Here a
sign is made, and a half drunken waiter brings a half crazed creature
sitting alone in the shadows of a pillar, a white powder, which she
snuffs. That is cocaine.
A majority of the women who live in and about the levee districts of the
city, are the slaves of the opium, cocaine and morphine habit, and
fourteen per cent, according to a conservative estimate, are yearly sent
to the state insane institutions as hopeless victims of drugs.
In the "near-levee" cafes we come across a vice-creature, whose type we
have not yet encountered in our night tour.
Watch that young man, dressed in a stylish, brown suit of clothes, who is
talking to the painted unfortunate beside him. His voice rises as he
shakes his finger at her. Her hand trembles as she reaches down in her
stocking. He curses her and tells her to hurry. Then she gives him a
number of bills.
"Damn you, you cheap cur; have you quit hustling or have you another man?"
he yells at her above the jarring music of a tin-pan piano and the
cigarette voice singing to it.
"Get out on the street and get some business!" he says to her hoarsely,
striking her across the face.
Pale and trembling the pitiful creature rises and hurries out into the
street to search for more prey.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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