Sin in the Second City by Karen Abbott

you can’t say I didn’t do it up better than the Everleighs.”
    Their whole history was nauseating, all that talk about southern roots and debutante balls and their smashing success in Omaha and being related to that spooky “Raven” poet and some such nonsense. Well, Vic Shaw got where she was without the benefit of any pedigreed background—one of ten children, the daughter of an iron mine worker in Londonderry, Nova Scotia. She ran away from home at thirteen, still named Emma Elizabeth Fitzgerald but already an “apt pupil” who “knew the answers.” First she joined a troupe in Boston and then Sam T. Jack’s burlesque show on West Madison Street in Chicago. She’d come into some money, too, not through a fortuitous inheritance from a wealthy lawyer father like certain madams claimed, but by eloping with the son of a millionaire banker. When his family discovered he’d married a minor, they arranged a quick and discreet divorce. She kept her ex-husband’s nickname for her, “Vickie,” his surname, Shaw, and half of his fortune, and opened her brothel on South Dearborn Street.
    So what if the finer points and prissy etiquette of the trade eluded her at first? Could one blame her for being beautiful and “more interested in men than in business”? One of her early clients, a wealthy Chicago businessman, told her bluntly, “You’ll have to hire better girls if you want to stay in business.” Soon after, a railroad magnate lodged the same complaint, then pressed $1,000 into her hand with the suggestion that she go to New Orleans and bring back some “thorobreds.” Madam Shaw did just that. “And by 1900,” wrote the Tribune, “the year the Everleigh Sisters moved in, she was established as queen bee of the brothels.”
    Vic Shaw might not have that title anymore; certain overrated, insufferable madams might have sauntered in on their red-tasseled tallyho and snatched it from her as if it were their preordained right. But Vic Shaw had recourse, little hidden pockets of savvy. She was still beautiful, her bosom ornamenting her figure like the prow of a stately ship; no one noticed the years she discarded when she claimed to be twenty-two. She had Roy Jones, a Levee vice king, whom she planned to marry. She had a good rapport with Bathhouse John and Hinky Dink. She had “strip-whip” matches, during which whores stepped inside a makeshift ring, wearing corsets and boots or nothing at all, and lashed each other’s backs bloody; the Prairie Avenue set paid good money for these circuses.
    She had stunning inmates, especially Gladys Martin, who even sat for promotional photos, her blond head budding from a white fur cape. She had an enforcer named Lillie Kowalski—“Lill the Whipper”—who dressed like a missionary but brawled like a longshoreman, beating up, over the years, more than a thousand harlots. She had an open invitation to all Everleigh courtesans should they ever desire to quit the Club and work for Vic Shaw’s, the original.
    Most important, she knew how to deliver a threat.
    “Queer ducks, our neighbors,” Madam Shaw told a cop on the beat whom she knew had a taste for gossip and trouble and no qualms about spreading either around. There—those Everleigh snobs would get the message. “They’ve a pull somewhere,” she added, “but it won’t last.”

 

    GREAT IN RELIGION, GREAT IN SIN

    Members of the Purity Congress.

 

    We discovered that the scrupulously strict were
correspondently keen to discern suggestions of sex
where nobody else would think of looking for them.
    —M INNA E VERLEIGH

    C hicago’s turn to host the National Purity Congress came in the fall of 1901. That its red-light district had long been the wickedest in the country—a distinction recently underscored by the opening of a certain Dearborn Street brothel said to eclipse anything in Paris—only made it a more fitting locale for the reformers’ convention. The city’s myriad woes were finally matched