Chicago Whispers: A History of LGBT Chicago before Stonewall

7. Towertown

56 7 Towertown In fairy town, Chicago’s “Quartier Latin,” the “snugglepupping ” and radical goings-on at the Wind Blew Inn were too much for the police, as were the visiting men in corsets at the Green Mask Tearooms. But even the police couldn’t silence the hobos and hecklers at the Dil Pickle Club. In 1914 Margaret Anderson and Chicago-born poet Harriet Monroe ignited the flame of the Chicago Renaissance by launching two magazines that gave venues for writers and artists to publish their work: Anderson with the Little Review and Monroe with Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. Monroe lived in an artists’ colony called Towertown at 543 North Cass Street where she established her magazine, enticing gay author Henry Blake Fuller onto the Poetry Advisory Committee. The Cass Street salon buzzed with artists and poets, and Monroe’s poetry readings at the Petite Gourmet restaurant were a magnet for local writers and others passing through the city. Two regular readers were homosexual poet Witter Bryner and the “It Girl” of poetry, the bisexual Edna St. Vincent Millay. Author Harvey W. Zorbaugh, in his book The Gold Coast and the Slum (1929), writes: “If one gets off the bus at the water tower and rambles the streets within a half-mile radius of it one discovers, however, tucked away in dilapidated buildings, quaint restaurants, interesting art shops and book stalls, tearooms, stables and garrets with flower boxes, alley dwellings, cards in windows bearing the legend ‘Studio for Rent.’” Towertown was Towertown 57 Chicago’s equivalent of Paris’s Latin Quarter, and Zorbaugh described it as predominantly a “woman’s bohemia”: “In New York and Chicago, with changing mores and emancipation of the younger generation of America women, Greenwich Village and Towertown have become women’s bohemias . It is the young women who open most of the studios, run most of the tearooms and restaurants, most of the little art shops and book stalls, manage the exhibits and little theaters, dominate the life of the bohemias of American cities.” Harland Rohm wrote in his “Breezes from the Lake” column of February 6, 1927, in the Chicago Tribune: “Striding through Lincoln Park on almost any afternoon is a tall woman who swings along with a schoolboy’s wholehearted zest for life. She wears tightly fitting trousers and a jersey coat, and many are the amazed stares at her. The story is told that for years she was a hopeless invalid, condemned to be pushed around in a chair the rest of her life. Then a miraculous cure brought back the use of her legs and again she could walk. The regained sense of freedom was so great she never since has permitted her stride to be hampered by skirts.” Emma Goldman’s lover Ben Reitman, the anarchist, syphilis doctor, and “King of the Hoboes,” looked back on Towertown in an article in the Chicago Times on August 22, 1937: “In 1917 came war, high wages, prohibition , and a transition in the Near North Side. The girls in the neighborhood rose up in arms against the old landladies. They demanded the right to live their own lives and many of them established studios in the neighborhood.” At a time when respectable women didn’t smoke cigarettes, the women of Towertown strutted through alleys smoking cigars and openly advocating “free love.” In The Gold Coast and the Slum, Zorbaugh quotes from the diary of a student who visited Towertown: Distorted forms of sex behavior also find a harbor in the “village.” Many homosexuals are among the frequenters of “village” tearooms and studios. B L keeps a vermillion kitchenette apartment, with a four-poster bed hung with blue curtains and an electric moon over it. When he has his loves he gets violently domestic, tailors, mends and cooks. S was married, but indifferent to her husband, and lived in a “village” studio, posing as a homosexual and having a succession of violent affairs; when she finally “fell” for the blond lion of the “village” she went around and Towertown 58 bade her former “flames” dramatic farewells featured by long, passionate kisses and embraces. A number of times I have followed a cab through the “village,” the lights of my car revealing the occupants , two men or two girls, fondling each other. A nurse told me of being called on night duty in an apartment in the “village” and of being entertained...