Sin in the Second City (46 page)

Madam Julia Van Bever, too, was carted away and let go, after Hinky Dink’s bondsman paid her fine. At Annie DeMuncy’s, 2004 South Dearborn Street, sixteen women were arrested—most of them teenagers—and twenty-five men; from Marie Blanchey’s, twenty women and thirty men; from Phyllis Adams’s, twenty-four women and twenty men; and from the brothel of Madam Aimee, otherwise known as “Mrs. Ed Weiss,” ten harlots in various stages of packing and hysteria. Ed Weiss, Roy Jones, and Big Jim Colosimo played along, gallantly permitting the police to haul them away, and were released in less time than it took to arrest them in the first place. Back in the Levee, they called for an emergency meeting, to convene the following morning.

O
ne by one, they arrived at Colosimo’s Café, 2126 Wabash Avenue. Roy Jones, Blubber Bob Gray, Ed Weiss, and Ike Bloom found Big Jim waiting at a secluded table in the corner. Opened two years earlier, the nightclub had become one of the most popular in the Levee, luring Chicago’s elite, on both sides of the law, to marvel at its gaudy splendor—the splashes of gilded paint, the mahogany-and-glass bar, the green velvet walls, and the ceiling, with its mural of a naked cherub frolicking amid woolly clouds.

“It is rather extraordinary,” wrote one Chicago historian, “that a murderer, a white slaver, Black Hand blackmailer such as Jim Colosimo could attract the best people in Chicago, famous visitors to the city, to his Colosimo’s Café. Not only the Potter Palmers, the Marshall Fields, but a late-supper group might have Al Jolson, John Barrymore, and Sophie Tucker.”

That morning, though, the Levee leaders had the café to themselves as they sipped coffee and debated strategy. They needed $40,000 more for their coffers, they decided, to augment the $50,000 slush fund that “One Who Knows” had leaked to the Committee of Fifteen. With enough cash, they could tip some of the state legislators in their favor and secure passage of some decent laws at Springfield. It wouldn’t be a bad idea, either, to get all of their respective whores in on this counterattack. Calling themselves the Committee of Fifteen in mock homage to Roe’s group, the vice lords disbanded, ready to implement their plan.

After rounding up their harlots, the men issued the following orders:

Get on your loudest clothes and more paint than usual and parade.

Go to residence districts. Ring doorbells and apply for lodgings.

Get rooms only in respectable neighborhoods.

Don’t accost men on the streets, but be out as much as possible.

Frequent respectable cafés and make a splash.

T
he invasion of the harlots began on October 5, 1912, at four in the afternoon. Two thousand of them formed a tawdry procession down Michigan Avenue, wearing high feathered hats and plummeting gowns, faces streaked in crimson rouge, bare legs goose-bumped in the cool fall air. They sidled up to society women and winked at their husbands, sweeping long painted nails along the blushing men’s backs.

At 35th and Michigan, six prostitutes coordinated the lighting of cigarettes with theatrical aplomb, moving one terrified passerby to call the police. Hers wasn’t the only complaint; scores of other respectable women reported being insulted by “undesirables.” Refugees from the lower dives, who had not glimpsed sunlight in months, wore bedraggled kimonos that showcased the track marks vining up their arms. Knocking on doors, they explained they had been driven from their homes. Were there any rooms available?

Invariably, there weren’t, so the Beulah Home, the Life Boat Home, the Florence Crittenden Home, and the American Vigilance Association all offered lodgings and help. “I’ll take care of any of them who come to me,” one missionary woman said, “or see that they are cared for in some way.”

But not one harlot applied. They didn’t want to go anywhere, except back to the Levee.

T
he ersatz Committee of Fifteen enjoyed unequivocal success. Mayor Harrison, who was still recommending segregation when anyone bothered to ask his opinion, distanced himself from Wayman’s actions, opening a tense schism between state and municipal forces. As soon as Chicago’s police drove prostitutes back into the Levee, the state’s attorney ordered raids and sent apologetic officers to toss them out again. The harlots climbed into the backs of the patrol cars, waving handkerchiefs at the same crowds of men who would be waiting in the district, cheering, upon their return.

This chaotic whiplash continued for a day and a half until both sides were weary and exhausted, and the dive keepers decided they could better see where the standoff was heading if they dimmed their lights for a while. The harlots—quietly, this time—said farewell to the Levee. They found private flats or left Chicago altogether, planning to reinvent themselves in Bloomington or Springfield or Peoria, the same small, bored towns they’d fled long ago. On October 7, the Levee, for the first time since the Great Fire, hushed its music and froze every movement.

“Fallen is Babylon!” Ernest Bell wrote the following day. “Or at least the vice district at Twenty-second is greatly shattered…. Within a week Chicago has ceased, at least in a substantial degree, to be a vice-protecting city…we must look earnestly to God to make plain His will and His way to continue to uphold the Cross in the night life of our city.”

Minna and Ada, too, monitored the Levee’s final, exhausting week, its tossing and turning, like a fitful child, before finally drifting to sleep. The sisters wondered how many of their former butterflies were among the Michigan Avenue invaders—girls who had left the Club years ago and forgotten, sadly, that they once looked choicer than the society women they were ordered to intimidate, that they could have moved into those elite neighborhoods without anyone raising a question. They wondered if Grace Monroe had healed, if those wrists, delicate as a swan’s neck, were now unbroken, if her back was free from scars. They wondered how the others, scattered across the country, were faring in their new lives, if they remembered Minna’s advice and stayed respectable by all means.

They began preparing for their own next act, telling Etta Wright, momentarily displaced from 2131–2133 South Dearborn Street, not to worry, that they would reinstate her as caretaker before too long. They debated where to live, just as they had during that winter after leaving Omaha, and decided on New York, somewhere on the Upper West Side, maybe, near Central Park. And they vowed to return to the Levee only in their minds, where their boys were always satisfied and foes kept their distance, and where soft light kissed Minna’s jewels each time she opened the mahogany door.

LITTLE
LOST SISTER

The Everleigh sisters at rest.

I suppose we all want to leave something behind.

—M
INNA
E
VERLEIGH

B
ut the Levee soon awakened from its nap.

When November came, despite Clifford Roe’s determination to “fight to the death against segregation” and the continuing agitation between State’s Attorney Wayman and Mayor Harrison, Ike Bloom showed up at the sisters’ West Side door. Luckily, he reminded the Everleighs, they had nothing to do with the current imbroglio—it was an ideal time for them to reenter the scene. C’mon, they could do it. Freiberg’s was enjoying brisk business, and so were the dives of Big Jim, Roy Jones, and Ed Weiss.

“We’ll make everything clean and respectable,” Bloom insisted. “We’ll give the whole line your treatment. How’s that?”

He reminded them that one Chicago reverend, a Dr. Frederick Hopkins, had come out strong against the “scattering of evil” across the city.

“Who is that guy, O, yes, Dr. Hopkins, the preacher?” he continued. “He’s on our side. We’re a necessary evil. We’ll line up a few more ministers. It’s a cinch.”

A thin sheen of sweat glossed Bloom’s face; it seemed he was trying, equally, to convince himself. The sisters shrugged.

“It can’t be done,” Minna said.

“The hell it can’t. We’ll give generously to the churches. We’ll make all the gals say their prayers and sit in them goddamn pews. Don’t tell me it can’t be done. Preachers got to be greased the same as bulls. What d’ya say? What the hell—you and I will go to church ourselves.”

Minna couldn’t help it—Bloom always made her laugh.

“Ike, you’re getting hot, but not hot enough,” she said. “To square the Bible brothers will take more cash than you’ll ever be able to subscribe. The idea is gorgeous, but the cost is prohibitive.”

Bloom sighed and turned to go. His gangly legs strode halfway across the lawn, then he turned around. It was worth one more shot.

“You sure you won’t fight it out?” he called.

“I’m through,” Minna hollered back, and Ada nodded. “I want trees in the backyard and sunshine—mostly sunshine. S’long, Ike.”

It was the last time the sisters ever saw him.

They were wise, as it turned out, to ignore his pleas. The pressure became so unbearable that even Mayor Harrison relented, and on November 20, more than a month after Wayman’s initial raids, he ordered his officers to cooperate with the state’s attorney and close every resort, no exceptions.

“Five minutes of real police activity, which gives a rough idea of how such matters can be handled when they want them handled,” the
Record Herald
reported, “wiped out the South Side Levee district in Chicago. It ceased to exist as if by magic, not because of the enforcement of the law, but because of the apprehension of it. A few minutes before six o’clock last evening policemen began nailing the doors of Tommy Owens’ café at 2033–35 Armour Avenue. They were acting on the orders of Mayor Harrison, delivered at last in an unmistakable manner. Echoes of the blows of their hammers had hardly died away before the entire district was deserted. By six o’clock not a woman was to be found in it.”

But the Levee limped on for two more years. Not until 1914 was Ike Bloom’s picture finally removed from its position of honor, on the wall of the 22nd Street police station. That year, too, Chief Justice Harry Olson called a reporter for the
Chicago Examiner.
He had a series of letters, he said, written some time ago by Minna Everleigh, the “former queen of Chicago’s underworld,” and it was time to release them “in the interest of public policy.”

Freiberg’s Dance Hall celebrated its last night on August 24, 1914, and hundreds of devotees—including two women who said they’d spent every evening there for the past ten years—came to pay their respects. Late in 1915, after Carter Harrison’s successor, “Big Bill” Thompson, declared that Chicago was once again a wide-open town, Bloom resumed his business, and the resort operated for several more years, calling itself the Midnight Frolics.

He fell from prominence during Prohibition and died on December 15, 1930, literally half the man he once was; diabetes had necessitated the amputation of both legs.