Minneapolis Madams: The Lost History of Prostitution on the Riverfront

Preface

ix 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 address’s 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.1 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 women’s 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. During my decade-plus search, I assembled a narrative of the city’s history of prostitution from land records, court documents, probate files, and newspaper accounts scattered over six decades. The revelations led me to reassess my understanding of Minneapolis history. Illuminating the lives of these entrepreneurial women added new dimensions to accounts of local reform movements and politics. The riverfront madams were an important component of the complex sexual ecology of nineteenth-century Minneapolis. Usually written off as deviants, the madams were actually crucial components of a larger system of social control and regulation. One seemingly small detail would often open up an entirely different venue of investigation. For example, at the close of 1880, several newspapers vaguely alluded to a petition being circulated in regard to the madams. A little more digging led me to a box at the municipal archives that contained a pe- xi Preface tition, signed by the city’s leading citizens, urging the release of three madams from the state penitentiary. Interestingly, some of those same signers had been instrumental in putting the madams into their prison cells. Slowly, it became clear that city officials both tolerated and suppressed this subculture, depending on the direction of the political winds at any given time. This study...