Penny A. Petersen - Minneapolis Madams: The Lost History of Prostitution on the Riverfront

Minneapolis Madams

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Minneapolis Madams

The Lost History of Prostitution on the Riverfront

PENNY A. PETERSEN

M

IN

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University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis London

Copyright 2013 by Penny A. Petersen

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Petersen, Penny A.

Minneapolis madams : the lost history of prostitution on the riverfront / Penny A. Petersen.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8166-6523-5 (hc : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-8166-6524-2 (pb : alk. paper)

1. ProstitutionMinnesotaMinneapolis. 2. BrothelsMinnesota Minneapolis. I. Title.

HQ146.M5P48 2013 306.7409776'579dc23

2013010354

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13

10 987654321

To Ted Tucker and Erin Vasseur

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CONTENTS

the Reform Movement /

Make Their Move /

End of an Era /

The building permit index card for 212 Eleventh Avenue South. The fifth line notes a Sporting House and the sixth line a House of Ill Fame, evincing the degree of prostitutions visibility with city officials. Similar permit cards used terms such as pleasure resort or boarding house-saloon, all common euphemisms for brothels. Photograph courtesy of the Minneapolis Collection, Hennepin County Central Library.

PREFACE

This book began as a bike ride. One morning, instead of staying on the usual course along West River Parkway, which parallels the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, I veered off to nearby Eleventh Avenue South. There I noticed a handsome, three-story, Richardsonian Romanesque building. It appeared to be the residence of a wealthy family or an elegant apartment house dating from the 1890s, but its proximity to the west bank flour milling district was disconcerting, as the Minneapolis elite had long abandoned the central riverfront as a residential neighborhood when this building was erected. It was in the wrong place, to my way of thinking. I decided to visit the Minneapolis inspections department and check the building records for the address.

The simple phrases for the addresss building permit index card read: Elec. Sporting Hse. and Elec. Hse. of Ill Fame, meaning two permits for electrical work had been knowingly issued by the municipal authorities to a brothel.I looked at permits for adjacent buildings and found others in the same vein. In time I began searching for municipal and district court records but learned that these had mostly disappeared. Fortunately an index of criminal cases at the district level had survived, and as I reviewed it I wrote down the date and name of everyone who had been charged with keeping a house of ill fame, almost all of whom were women. I started reading period newspapers and over time discovered that madams and prostitutes regularly entered guilty pleas to the charge of prostitution, paid fines to the municipal court, and then returned to their usual business. Occasionally

x Preface

a madam would be charged at the district court level and face the possibility of higher fines or even a prison sentence.

This new knowledge was bewildering, as I thought I was very familiar with Minneapolis history. For the past twenty-some years, I had studied and written about the downtown riverfront. I was certainly aware that prostitution existed in nineteenth-century Minneapolis, as it did (and does) in every urban center across America. I had read the annual reports of the Sisterhood of Bethany, a womens group devoted to rescuing fallen women. Yet I had never heard of the names I was running across in the newspapers and property records: Nettie Conley, Ida Dorsey, Jennie Jones, Edna Hamilton, and Mary E. Allen, to name a few. None of these names appears in the Sisterhood of Bethany reports, where I might expect these women to be listed as bad examples, if nothing else.

Each tiny fact I discovered whetted my curiosity to know more. Further searches into building and property records suggested a vanished urban landscape. The building on Eleventh Avenue was not a lone aberration but one of many bordellos that existed along the central riverfront. City directories revealed that madams often operated out of the same location for years. Everyone knew their names and where to find them. Some madams built up extensive real estate holdings, both inside and outside the established sex districts. The madams and the sex trade were deeply entrenched in the city.