Chicago's Greatest Year, 1893: The White City and the Birth of a Modern Metropolis

13. Reforming Chicago

265 N13 O Reforming Chicago Anyone curious to see how much a city can change in a century can walk down South Federal Street just south of the Loop in Chicago. It’s in the heart of what’s now known as Printers Row, where condo conversion has been transforming this once commercial district into one of Chicago’s hotter neighborhoods. The street between Harrison and Polk is monotonous, with few storefronts, although it is distinguished by the Printers Square Apartments, a condo conversion of a handsome commercial building built in 1913. In 1893, however, the street was named Custom House Place, and it was probably the most scandalous red-light district in the United States. A map published in 1894 shows no fewer than twenty-nine brothels and ten saloons lining both sides of the street in the single block between Harrison and Polk.1 Nearby was “Hell’s Half Acre,” an area so rough that policemen would enter only in pairs, and “Whiskey Row,” where in 1896 a tavern owner named Mickey Finn would concoct his eponymous knockout drink. Another celebrated nearby vice neighborhood was “Little Cheyenne,” home to the black madam Hattie Briggs, who stood six feet tall and weighed 320 pounds. Historian Karen Abbott describes the city in the decades after the fire in this way: “The vice districts, slung like a tawdry necklace across the city’s South Side, were more brazen than ever. Junkies shot one another up with ‘guns’—hypodermic needles—in the middle 266 Reforming Chicago of drugstore aisles. Women lounged stark naked against doorways , calling out obscene suggestions to passersby. And the competition grew fiercer as hundreds of newcomers settled in the red-light district every week.”2 The famous “map of sin” was the work of William T. Stead, a celebrated British journalist. He came to Chicago in 1893 to study the city’s newspapers, but once he got a good look around, he changed his plans. Chicago, he concluded, was a city that needed cleaning up. The best-known vice district was the “Levee,” a loosely defined term that many used to describe the vice-ridden South Side in general, although after Mayor Carter Harrison II began cleaning up portions of the South Loop, the Levee district settled in the area between Eighteenth and Twenty -Second Streets. The Levee will forever be associated with “Bathhouse” John Coughlin and Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna, the aldermen of the First Ward, which included the Loop, the Levee, and the Prairie Avenue district (in that era, Chicago’s wards were represented by two aldermen). This notorious pair ruled the First Ward for nearly half a century—actually, they formed their political alliance in 1893—profiting mightily from payoffs, bribes, and “boodle” (the selling of votes by aldermen to entrepreneurs seeking city contracts). But such powerful evil provoked an equally powerful reaction . As Scribner’s Magazine put it in the 1880s, Chicago was a city of both “wickedness and piety.”3 And those on the side of piety, against considerable opposition, meant to purge the iniquity. These efforts did not achieve success until the 1910s, but much of the impetus can be traced to 1893. This chapter will look at two champions of moral improvement who set their sights on Chicago in that year. The success of one, who relied on traditional religious reform aimed at individual sinners, was initially electrifying but ultimately ephemeral. The other, whose Victorian reformist zeal meshed in the United States with the Progressive movement, did a great deal to motivate the reformers who would eventually succeed in eliminating the city’s unconcealed excesses. William T. Stead’s famous “Map of Sin” showed no fewer than twenty-nine brothels and ten saloons lining both sides of the street in a single block in Chicago. (Author’s collection) 268 Reforming Chicago Moody’s Crusade Before Billy Graham, Oral Roberts, and Pat Robertson, there was Dwight Lyman Moody, who is considered the precursor, if not the inventor, of modern large-scale evangelism. It was Moody who pioneered the mass merchandising of religion, the reach-out techniques, the welcoming ecumenicalism, the employment of slangy language,and the use of popular music.4 Moody became a tycoon of religion who followed a business model. Previous revival preachers tended to operate in rural areas or in smaller cities; Moody headed for the metropolises. An observer of his work in New York in 1876...