Sin in the Second City (28 page)

B
efore it was called the First Ward Ball—or “the Derby,” in Bathhouse John’s terminology—the affair was known simply as “the party for Lame Jimmy,” the crippled pianist and fiddler hired by Madam Carrie Watson in the early 1880s. Officially, the event was a benefit to raise funds for the professor’s medical care; unofficially, it was an excuse for Chicago’s underworld to, as Madam Watson put it, “reign unrefined.” Held at Freiberg’s “Opera House” (Ike Bloom’s attempt, at the time, to cultivate a bit of class and confuse the reformers), it enabled police captains and patrolmen to mingle peacefully with dope fiends and pimps and cadets and thugs, who, bowing to Levee decorum, checked their brass knuckles and blackjacks at the door.

More than three hundred revelers encircled Lame Jimmy, who sat stoically, fiddle poised beneath his chin, and played his repertoire of maudlin ballads, culminating in a discordant rendition of “Auld Lang Syne.” Saloon keepers recited rambling toasts to the professor, swaying with glasses hoisted in the air, spilling as much champagne as they drank. Madams wiped away tears with gloved hands; it was the one night of the year when public displays of sentimentality were as chic as Gibson girls.

Lame Jimmy’s party carried on happily and without incident until 1894. On January 31, at 6:00 a.m., a Harrison Street policeman named Charles Arado challenged his brother, Louis, also a cop, to shoot down a ceiling chandelier. Louis, drunk out of his mind, obliged, whipping out his pistol and sending crystals crashing to the floor. The shots attracted the attention of another cop, Officer John Bacon, as he patrolled 22nd Street. Bacon ran into Freiberg’s and saw the smoke rising from Louis’s gun.

Bacon approached his fellow officer. “Give it to me,” he said, holding out his hand.

Louis laughed and shoved the gun back into his pocket. Brother Charles appeared beside him. “You’re looking for trouble,” Louis said. “I could lick a dozen like you.”

He swung and connected hard with Bacon’s chin. Charles followed with a punch on the shoulder.

Bacon stumbled out onto 22nd Street and wobbled toward the patrol box on Wabash Avenue. The footsteps of the Arado brothers grew louder behind him. “There he is,” Charles yelled, and fired his own gun. The bullet whizzed past Bacon, and he returned fire. Three, eight, ten shots launched across Wabash, and one of them found Charles Arado.

“He has killed me, Louis,” Charles said, and his body folded slowly, knees first, chest following, head coming to rest on the tracks.

The resulting civic protest was strident, and not even the intervention of Bathhouse John, a frequent presence at the festivities, could salvage the tradition.

Early the following winter, Bathhouse John was sitting in Hinky Dink’s saloon, the Workingman’s Exchange, lamenting the paucity of funds for the spring elections. The dependable gush of First Ward graft had abated, since gamblers were, at that moment, the main target of reformers’ wrath. The den owners paid reduced protection rates or shooed the Coughlin-Kenna collectors off their properties altogether. The conversation then drifted to talk of Lame Jimmy—a shame, wasn’t it, that the winter would have to pass without his party?

Then the idea struck Bathhouse John Coughlin. What if they sponsored a
real
ball, an opulent, fantastic, important ball, in a venue that could hold thousands?

“We take it over, Mike, we take it over!” he yelled, shaking Hinky Dink’s slight frame, the bar stool wobbling beneath him. “Why, done right, there’s thousands in it, tens of thousands!”

First Ward saloon keepers could be persuaded to donate booze, madams would come to show off their newest strumpets. Everyone was invited, from the classiest parlor houses to the lowest nickel cribs. Not merely invited, but expected.

T
he inaugural First Ward Ball took place at the First Regiment Armory, on Michigan Avenue and 16th Street, from 8:00 p.m. until the attendees were too drunk to tell time. Clergymen called it “a Saturnalian orgy,” a “vile, dissolute affair,” a “bawdy Dionysian festival,” a “black stain on the name of Chicago.” But Bathhouse John called it a success: $25,000 for the aldermen’s coffers and a new Levee tradition—one that must surpass itself, in both profits and depravity, with each successive year.

And so it did, through the turn of the century and beyond. At the 1900 event, Bathhouse John, with great aplomb, welcomed the Levee’s newest and already foremost madams, the Everleigh sisters, and Hinky Dink confided to the
Tribune
that it “don’t never get good until about 3 in the morning.” Two years later, the aldermen were informed that hard liquor could no longer be served in the Armory, so they rented the Coliseum instead, promising the Ball would be a “screecher.” It was: Bathhouse John, clad in a “dream” of a vest, welcomed judges and congressmen and fifteen thousand First Ward constituents. “It is the best we have ever had,” Coughlin insisted. Hinky Dink waxed practical, itemizing the distribution of the Ball’s profits: “charity, education” (which consisted of hiring “good speakers to teach the people of the First Ward to vote the straight Democratic ticket”), and “burying the dead.”

R
eform groups had kept quiet tabs on the Ball over the years, but none cataloged its offenses as thoroughly as Arthur Burrage Farwell. The “dean” of Chicago reformers, as the
Tribune
called him, became serious about his mission work in 1888, when he returned home from a business trip to find his young son ill. That night, the boy died in a convulsion. Farwell’s wife had taught their son the bedtime prayer Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep, to which the child added a line of his own: “God bless all the little boys, and all the little girls, and all the ladies.”

Grief stricken, Farwell began devoting so much of his time to fighting the social evil and liquor—especially liquor—that his livelihood suffered. In June 1907, he finally quit his job as a shoe salesman to work full-time for the Law and Order League.

“Mr. Farwell,” the
Tribune
reported, “is the generally recognized type of the modern Chicago reformer. He is a convincing, forcible talker—a short gray haired man whose eyes grow misty as he speaks of others’ troubles.”

Bathhouse John and Hinky Dink scornfully called him “Arthur
Garbage
Farwell” but didn’t object when he purchased a ticket for the 1907 First Ward Ball. Let him come, get his kicks. Farwell took indignant note of the twenty thousand guests (a conservative estimate) guzzling ten thousand quarts of champagne and thirty thousand quarts of beer, the unconscious bodies piled like matchsticks in the aisles, a madam named French Annie stabbing her beau with a hat pin, a stampeding mob of men trampling one another to witness a circus act, and a thirty-five-foot bar collapsing to the floor during one of hundreds of fistfights. All but two aldermen, sick at home, were present.

“It’s a little of the bunk,” said Bathhouse, who found himself $40,000 richer the next morning. “You know.”

Farwell wasn’t so understanding. “The annual orgy forms a terrible commentary on the rule of the people of Chicago,” he argued. “Can anything be more terrible than this?”

It was terrible enough, he concluded, to warrant a trip to the mayor’s office as the 1908 gala approached. With less than two weeks to go, Farwell, Dean Sumner of Saints Peter and Paul, and several other reformers paid a visit to Mayor Fred Busse in City Hall.

“A real description of the 1907 ball is simply unprintable,” Farwell began. “You must stop them from putting another on this year. You must stop this disgrace to Chicago. You must stop it in the name of the young men who will be ruined there.”

The mayor squirmed in his chair, let his hands fall limply to his lap. “What do you want me to do, gentlemen?” he asked finally.

“You can refuse a liquor license. That will stop them.”

Mayor Busse blinked. Farwell tried a different approach, planted his hands on the desk, and leaned in.

“Mr. Busse, you cannot in good conscience issue the liquor license for this affair. Suppose you had a young friend whose character and life you prized highly. How would you like to have such scenes of debauchery as are allowed at this ball to bring degradation and perhaps destruction to your friend? Prevent a repetition of this vile orgy!”

Farwell, perhaps, was unaware of Busse’s own fondness for drinking and debauchery, of how he’d once boasted to reporters, “They don’t need anyone sleuthing around after me. They can always get me any evening at J. C. Murphy’s saloon, Clark Street and North Avenue.” Perhaps he was unaware, too, of Madam Vic Shaw’s special offer during the previous year’s mayoral election—coupons featuring Busse’s picture and these words stenciled beneath:

OUR PAL

IF HE WINS AND YOU

FIND THIS CARD IN

THE PARLOUR ~ BRING

IT TO MADAME

YOU GET $5.00 IN TRADE

~FREE~

ELECTION NIGHT

~~~ONLY~~~

And perhaps Farwell didn’t know what Busse knew about the First Ward’s voting power, which included even enfranchised Republicans. Besides, Busse figured, Farwell and his ilk had to be exaggerating the depravity of the Ball. Chicago had never cared much for the fainthearted or prudish; it was a city that kept one eye closed in a perpetual wink while the other looked away.

Sorry, Mayor Busse told his visitors, but a liquor license had already been issued.

T
he Bath and Hinky Dink continued preparations, and even encouraged Levee revelers to disregard any notion of a dress code (not that they needed any such prompting, but why pass up a chance to make a point?).

“The gents with whiskers is going to holler anyway,” Bathhouse said. “If our ladies wore fur overcoats and black veils, somebody would roar, so let ’em go as far as they like. That’s me.”

But the aldermen’s bravado was fleeting. On December 7, 1908, the
Tribune
published a warning in bold print:

The Tribune desires to announce that it will print a list of the names of the “respectable” persons who attend the First Ward Ball next Monday night. Every effort will be made to make the “among those present were” as complete as possible.

Now this, the First Ward leaders acknowledged, was a problem. True, Chicago’s rank-and-file press corps spent more time at the Everleigh Club than in their offices. Minna always recalled the morning a fire erupted in a warehouse near the Levee. Flames spread, trapping several inside. An alarm shrieked through the streets.

An editor at the
Tribune
called for reporters. No one responded. Sighing, he picked up the phone and dialed the Everleigh Club’s phone number: Calumet 412.

“There’s a 4-11 fire over at Wabash Avenue near Eighteenth Street,” he said. “Any
Tribune
men there?”

“The house is overrun with ’em,” a maid replied. “Wait a minute, I’ll put one on.”

But newspaper publishers and owners weren’t at liberty to indulge in such behavior. Any newspaper that profited from writing about the Levee had an obligation, at the same time, to editorialize against the district. The
Tribune,
as Chicago’s paper of record, had taken the lead on both fronts.

Hinky Dink, now worried about sagging sales, assumed charge of the tickets himself and recruited Ike Bloom to help. First Ward henchmen again made the rounds, carrying rolls of tickets and lists, deciding who could be hit up and how hard:

“Mercy, a hundred tickets!” moaned a madam on the list. “Why, it was only seventy-five last year—and my girls don’t go anymore, it is getting that common!”

“You’ve got two more girls here than you had last winter, ain’t you,” the collector pointed out. “Well, then.”

And the madam found a hundred tickets clenched in her fist.

“Seventy-five tickets?” asked a businessman, sitting in his Loop office. “Your ball is getting pretty rough, and the newspapers—”

“You got a permit for a sign last year,” the collector interrupted. “Didn’t you? Huh?”

He did indeed, so seventy-five tickets now cluttered his desk.

Ladies of the Levee, at the behest of Hinky Dink, circulated the Union Stock Yards, flashing legs and waving reams of tickets at meatpackers. One hundred more reported for “nightly duty” in the back room of a saloon owned by Jim O’Leary (son of Mrs. O’Leary of Great Fire fame) on South Halsted Street, advising cattlemen in town for the stock show that they really must stay just a bit longer, check out the fabulous Derby at the Coliseum on the fourteenth. Bundles of tickets were shipped to red-light districts across the country, where sympathetic madams doled them out to harlots and loyal clientele.

And someone harassed the reverend of Garfield Boulevard Presbyterian Church, the latest reformer to join Farwell’s anti-Ball efforts, leaving two menacing telephone messages and mailing eight letters, each written in the same firm, bold hand:

If you dare to go to the First Ward ball
Or write a single lying word about it this year
A bomb will be put under your house and you
and your family will be blown up.
Mark what we say; this means business.