Charlottesville’s Landscape of Prostitution, 1880–1950

In 1912, building on established Jim Crow laws, the city council in Charlottesville, Virginia, unanimously passed its segregation ordinance. The ordinance made it illegal for whites to move onto blocks that were majority black. Similarly, African Americans were not permitted to move onto blocks that were majority white. Residences facing both sides of a street between intersecting cross-streets constituted a block. Transgressions were punishable by fines; persistent violators could be jailed for thirty to ninety days. Domestic servants could share the private homes and lots with their employers regardless of racial differences. The city council did not require immediate racial separation; the majority block segregation rule applied whenever an existing residence was sold to a new owner or leased to a new tenant. Developers had to declare the race of all new residential blocks in their building permit applications.¹ If the U.S. Supreme Court had not declared such laws unconstitutional in 1917, the segregation ordinance would have profoundly changed the neighborhood along South, Garrett, and Fifth Streets, immediately adjacent to Charlottesville’s downtown, just two blocks south of city hall. Here, single white women and African Americans had shared the neighborhood for decades. The white women were prostitutes. They lived in relatively substantial brothels surrounded by more modest houses, occupied by working-class blacks. Despite their illegality, these brothels operated relatively unfettered for over three quarters of a century before 1950. This essay will explore the architectural, urban, and social form of Charlottesville prostitution; in the course of these decades, city police, judiciary, political leaders, and university officials all played a role in maintaining Charlottesville’s red light district. In this neighborhood race and urban space intersected, transgressing the social mores codified by the segregation ordinance and underscoring the racial and gender dynamics that have often shaped American urbanism.²

Jefferson’s University and Its Vernacular Context

In 1910 Charlottesville had a population of 6,765 residents. The town had been founded in 1762 as the seat of the Albemarle County courts and government. It also served as the primary business center for the county, and in the mid-nineteenth century it became a railroad crossroads. The University of Virginia, founded by Thomas Jefferson in 1819, stood one mile west of the downtown, on a site where Jefferson hoped the all-male student body would be insulated from the temptations to dissoluteness offered by the town (Figure 1). Nevertheless, the university, with over eight hundred students in 1910, and the downtown red light district were linked, as students often sought out women and alcohol in downtown brothels.

The keeping, frequenting, and renting of “houses of ill fame” for the “purpose of prostitution or lewdness” was illegal; engaging in prostitution was punishable by fines or jail sentences.³ On October 29, 1912, in a single raid, police arrested twenty-five women on charges of prostitution in eight different brothels (Figure 2). No men were arrested. Some of the women had operated as prostitutes and madams in the district for decades, building their business with patronage from university students. Martha “Mattie” Thompson worked here for over forty years as a prostitute and madam, from the early 1880s until her death in 1925. Also arrested that night was Ada Miller, who built a large brothel in the mid-1890s, which she operated for over two decades. Annie Williams, who was also arrested, worked here from 1900 through the early 1920s. In 1922 Williams sold her brothel and left Charlottesville; Marguiretta L. Baccigalluppocrescioli, who had worked in the district as a prostitute since 1916, succeeded Williams as the brothel’s proprietor and continued in business until her death in 1951.⁴

Figure 1.

View of the University of Virginia from Lewis Mountain, Edward Sachse, painter, 1856, Casimir Bohn, lithographer, 1856. The cluster of buildings in the distance shows downtown Charlottesville.

Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Virginia Library.

Designed by Thomas Jefferson and now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the University of Virginia has been studied and celebrated for its architecture and landscape and the powerful images of in loco parentis...