The Barbary Coast - Chapter 10



Chapter 10. "Company, Girls!" 

The foundation upon which the Barbary Coast reared its fantastic structure 
of crime and debauchery was a system of commercialized prostitution that 
occupied a semi-lawful status in San Francisco for more than sixty years. 
Throughout that period the harlot was the divekeeper's greatest single 
asset and his most important attraction; whatever she did worked to his 
advantage, whether she labored as a streetwalker, as an inmate of the 
brothels, as a decoy in the deadfalls, or as a waiter girl and performer 
in the dance-halls, concert saloons, melodeons, and peepshows. Without the 
drawing power of the professional bawd it is doubtful if the Barbary Coast 
could have maintained, for more than a few years, a profitable existence 
as a so-called amusement center. In the final analysis a great majority of 
the men who visited the quarter did so because of the lewdness and 
depravity of the women who were to be found there; and when open 
prostitution was driven out of the shadow of the Golden Gate, the Barbary 
Coast soon followed it into oblivion. 

The first bagnios in San Francisco were the tents and slab shanties of the 
Chileno harlots who, during the early days of the city, plied their 
ancient trade on the slopes of Telegraph Hill and at various points along 
the waterfront. To a very large extent these shabby dens vanished with the 
filling in of Yerba Buena Cove and the development of the harbor, and 
during the final years of the gold rush the center of prostitution shifted 
to Portsmouth Square. From there the harlots were expelled by the 
encroachments of business--an unwilling exodus which was virtually 
completed by the late eighteen-fifties. Thereafter, until the pressure of 
public and journalistic opinion compelled the enforcement of laws which 
abolished the public bawdy-house, most of San Francisco's brothels were to 
be found in or adjacent to the Barbary Coast. The red-light district was 
thus more or less confined within an area bounded, roughly, on the north 
by Broadway, on the east by the waterfront, on the west by Powell Street, 
and on the south by Commercial Street, with a southwestward dip to Morton 
Street, later called Union Square Avenue and Manila Street and now, 
ironically enough, Maiden Lane. These boundaries encompassed portions of 
such main thoroughfares as Pacific, Kearny, Sacramento, Clay, California, 
Jackson, Washington, Montgomery, and Stockton streets and Grant Avenue, in 
all of which were many blocks containing nothing but saloons and houses of 
prostitution. Innumerable alleys and short passageways, among them Belden, 
Bacon, and Berry Places and Hinckley, Pinckley, and Virginia alleys, were 
almost entirely given over to vice. 

In later years, especially after the great conflagration of 1906, attempts 
were occasionally made to open bagnios in the Western Addition and other 
residential sections, but because of the strenuous opposition of indignant 
property-owners, only a few met with even temporary success. A woman known 
as Madame Labrodet opened a resort at Turk and Steiner streets and 
operated it successfully for several months in 1906, and long before that, 
for a few years in the middle eighteen-seventies, Johanna Schriffin 
considerably annoyed her neighbors and the police by the manner in which 
she conducted the House of Blazes, a large three-storey rookery in 
Chestnut Street between Mason and Powell streets. This aptly named 
establishment contained two or three open brothels, and many rooms which 
were always available to streetwalkers. It was a refuge for criminals of 
every description and was so tough and dangerous that if it could have 
been transferred to the Barbary Coast, it would have added luster to the 
reputation of even that celebrated quarter. A policeman once went alone to 
the House of Blazes to arrest a thief, and before he could escape, his 
handcuffs, pistol, cap, and blackjack had been stolen. The place was 
finally raided and closed in November 1878. 

About the beginning of the present century a comparatively small colony of 
prostitutes succeeded in gaining a foothold among the gambling houses, 
shady saloons, and cabarets of the Uptown Tenderloin--parts of Mason, 
Larkin, Eddy, Ellis, O'Farrell, Powell, Turk, and other streets leading 
northward or westward from Market Street, the principal business 
thoroughfare and traffic artery of San Francisco. In this region were also 
many important hotels and restaurants, and most of the theaters. It was 
the center of the city's more reputable night life, but was never a part 
of the Barbary Coast. The brothels of the Uptown Tenderloin were generally 
regarded as being of a higher class than those of the Barbary Coast, 
meaning that their prices were higher, that they were usually more 
elegantly furnished, and that as a rule they provided handsomer and more 
accomplished girls. The inmates of these resorts, too, considered 
themselves infinitely superior to the women who dragged out their 
miserable lives in the comparative squalor of the cheaper dives, a 
viewpoint in which the latter shared. The ambition of every Barbary Coast 
prostitute, unless she had sunk so far in sin and degradation that she no 
longer cared what happened to her, was to obtain a post in a fashionable 
uptown bordello; while the bagnio-keeper who had amassed sufficient money 
to abandon the Coast and open a place in the vicinity of Market Street 
felt that she had taken a distinct step upward. 

The differences between the brothels of the Barbary Coast and those of the 
Uptown Tenderloin, however, were more apparent than real; precisely the 
same profession was practiced in the latter as in the former, and in much 
the same fashion. But in one particular the Uptown Tenderloin reached 
heights of distinction never attained by the Barbary Coast--soon after the 
earthquake and fire of 1906 it harbored, in a two-storey building in Mason 
Street, a house of prostitution which catered to women and offered a dozen 
handsome, stalwart young men for their amusement. The price was ten 
dollars, half of which went to the male harlot, although it was common 
gossip at the time that several had refused to accept any payment for 
their services, feeling that the experience was in itself sufficient 
compensation. The active management of the establishment was entirely in 
the hands of an old Negro woman known as Aunt Josie, who operated it as a 
call house; that is, the members of the--well, staff--were not actually 
resident upon the premises, but were chosen from photographs, and from 
charts which furnished all needful information as to color of the eyes and 
hair and other physical details. Once selected, the male Magdalen was 
summoned by telephone or messenger. 

Aunt Josie took every possible precaution to prevent recognition of any 
women who might visit the house. All entrances and exits were so arranged 
that they might come and go with slight danger of detection, and the lower 
floor of the building was divided into small reception-rooms, hung with 
heavy curtains and opening into a darkened hallway, wherein the visitors 
inspected the photographs and selected their lovers. All the bedrooms were 
upstairs and could be securely bolted from the inside; and as an 
additional safeguard against any accidental disclosure of identity, Aunt 
Josie furnished her customers with silk masks, so that not even a woman's 
partner could see her face unless she so desired. These elaborate 
arrangements, however, were wasted, for it is doubtful if any woman ever 
entered the resort except a few professional prostitutes who were 
intrigued by the idea of paying instead of being paid, and so embarked 
upon a sort of busman's holiday. The bagnio was closed within a few 
months, partly because of lack of business, and partly because of threats 
made by the macks, or pimps, who flourished in large numbers throughout 
the city. These gentry complained that the harlots were spending their 
money foolishly. 

The name of the owner of this unique brothel was not generally known--even 
the police disclaimed knowledge of his, or her, identity--but the resort 
was popularly believed to be one of the many underworld properties of 
Jerome Bassity--his real name was Jere McGlane--who was once described by 
Pauline Jacobson in the San Francisco Bulletin as possessing a moral 
intelligence scarcely higher than that of a trained chimpanzee. Miss 
Jacobson also, in her article on Bassity, invited her readers to "look at 
the low, cunning lights in the small, rapacious, vulture-like eyes; look 
at that low, dull-comprehending brow; the small sensual mouth; the soft 
puffy fingers with the weak thumb, indicating how he seeks ever his own 
comfort before others, how his will works only in fits and starts."(*) 
Despite these undesirable characteristics, or rather, perhaps, because of 
them, Bassity was for more than a dozen years the veritable lord of the 
Barbary Coast and the red-light district--he probably owned more houses of 
prostitution than any other one person in San Francisco. He was by far the 
most powerful figure in the underworld during the three terms of Mayor 
Eugene Schmitz, from 1901 to 1907, when the city was at the mercy of the 
political machine created by Abe Ruef;(**) and again during the régime of 
Mayor P. H. McCarthy, one-time president of the Building Trades Council, 
who was elected in 1909 on a platform of "make San Francisco the Paris of 
America." To the realization of this more or less laudable ambition 
Bassity gave freely of his peculiar talents; he was manager of the 
McCarthy Non-Political Liberty League, and throughout McCarthy's 
administration he was one of a triumvirate which really ruled San 
Francisco. The others were Harry P. Flannery, Police Commissioner and 
owner of the Richelieu Bar, at the junction of Market, Kearny, and Geary 
streets; and, of course, McCarthy himself.(***)

(* Miss Jacobson's article was called "Jerome Bassity, a Study in 
Depravity," and appeared in the Bulletin of May 14, 1910)

(** Abe Ruef was a lawyer and originally a Republican. He was active in 
politics for several years, but his influence was slight until 1901, when 
he took advantage of labor disturbances and formed the Workingmen's party, 
which gave him control of the city by electing Mayor Schmitz and a new 
Board of Supervisors.)

(*** In 1917 Flannery was convicted of selling liquor to soldiers in 
uniform and was sentenced to a year in prison. Later he was adjudged 
incompetent, and his saloon fixtures were sold at auction. A mahogany bar 
for which he had paid ten thousand dollars sold for $127.)

At least two hundred prostitutes shared their earnings with Bassity during 
the long period in which his star was in the ascendancy, and in addition 
he derived a considerable revenue from his interests in dance-halls and 
other dives; and from his saloon in Market Street, which had a tamale 
grotto in the basement, and a dance-hall and low variety theater upstairs. 
For a year or so before the conflagration of 1906 he also operated, very 
successfully, a Market Street deadfall called the Haymarket, which was so 
low that it was shunned even by the streetwalkers. For many years 
Bassity's income probably averaged from six thousand to ten thousand 
dollars a month, trifling sums when compared to the takings of modern 
racketeers, but a great deal in those days. He kept very little of it, 
however. As he often boasted, his living-expenses alone exceeded fifteen 
hundred dollars a month, and he spent enormous sums for jewelry and 
clothing, particularly for diamond rings and fancy waistcoats. Of the 
latter he possessed no fewer than half a hundred, all made to his order 
and decorated with embroidered flowers and hunting scenes. He wore three 
diamond rings on each hand, and a great gem glistened from his shirt-
front. It is also said, perhaps apocryphally, that when he retired for the 
night, a diamond ring encircled each of his big toes. Most of his jewelry, 
besides a great deal of his cash, eventually found its way into the hands 
of prostitutes, for he was an assiduous patron of the brothels as well as 
an owner. Curiously enough, he seldom looked with favor upon any of the 
women employed in his own bagnios, although he usually claimed seigniorial 
rights when one of his places acquired a virgin or a very young girl. In 
the main, however, he frequented the establishments of his competitors. In 
few of them was he welcome, despite his lavish spending and his gifts of 
jewelry, for he always carried a revolver and he was generally drunk. He 
customarily climaxed a night of debauchery by shooting out the lights, or 
by firing at the girls' toes to make them dance. 

Bassity's power and influence in San Francisco were never better shown 
than during the autumn of 1906. Although indictments had already been 
returned against Ruef and Mayor Schmitz, and the newspapers, particularly 
the Bulletin under the editorship of Fremont Older, were daily exposing 
the corruption of the Ruef machine, Bassity, in partnership with a woman 
known as Madame Marcelle, began the erection of a huge brothel in 
Commercial Street with accommodations for one hundred women, who were to 
be housed in small, box-like rooms. Another woman, named Peterson, was 
appointed resident manager of the bagnio and began scurrying busily about 
the Barbary Coast, recruiting girls and dickering with the procurers. The 
Grand Jury investigated Bassity's activities and recommended that the 
police prevent the opening of the resort, but Bassity publicly boasted 
that he had arranged everything with Abe Ruef and Mayor Schmitz. 

"I don't care a snap for the Grand Jury," he said. "I'm going to open, and 
they can't stop me." 

And open he did, on December 17, 1906, with a wild debauch at which 
everything, for that night only, was free. He operated the brothel 
profitably until September 1907, when it and several other places were 
closed by the reform administration, headed by Dr. Edward R. Taylor as 
Mayor, which had succeeded Mayor Schmitz and the Ruef machine. The 
closing, however, was only temporary. Bassity reopened some of his bagnios 
even before Mayor Taylor left office, and the remainder resumed operations 
as soon as McCarthy had been elected. Bassity continued to be an important 
underworld personage until 1916, although his political influence declined 
considerably with the election of Mayor James Rolph, Jr., now Governor of 
California, in 1911. About a year before the beginning of the crusade 
which finally closed the Barbary Coast, Bassity saw the handwriting on the 
wall and retired from business. He went to Mexico, where he spent several 
years trying unsuccessfully to wrest control of the Tia Juana race-track 
from J. W. Coffroth. His last public appearance in San Francisco was in 
January 1921, when he was arrested on a warrant which charged him with 
swindling the seventeen-year-old son of a New Orleans newspaper publisher 
out of seven hundred dollars at the Thirty-third Assembly District Club in 
Turk Street. Neither the boy nor his father appeared in court, however, 
and Bassity was released. He died in San Diego, California, on August 14, 
1929, leaving an estate of less than ten thousand dollars. 

* * * *

Only a few blocks from the extraordinary brothel managed by Aunt Josie, in 
O'Farrell Street, was the popular establishment presided over by Miss 
Tessie, otherwise Tessie Wall, a flamboyant, well-upholstered blonde who 
was a familiar figure in the Uptown Tenderloin for many years. She was 
particularly noted for her ability to consume enormous quantities of wine, 
and her resort was celebrated for the beauty of its inmates, all of whom 
were young, blonde, and plump. Tessie Wall's early career is more or less 
cloaked in mystery, although she is believed to have spent several years, 
in one capacity or another, on the Barbary Coast. She first began to 
attract attention in the Uptown Tenderloin during the early part of 1907, 
when she opened a place in Larkin Street, between Ellis and Eddy. A year 
or so later she removed to O'Farrell Street and established the house 
which was much frequented by college boys and other roisterers of the 
younger set. In 1909 Tessie Wall became acquainted with Frank Daroux, a 
gambler who was interested in several so-called sporting houses, and at 
their first dinner together she fascinated him by drinking twenty-two 
bottles of wine without once leaving the table. They were married soon 
afterwards and gave a historic wedding feast at which one hundred guests 
consumed eighty cases of champagne, or 960 bottles, or about 240 gallons. 
Daroux could see nothing wrong in himself owning houses of bad repute, but 
he didn't want his wife to be engaged in the same business. He tried 
repeatedly to induce her to sell her properties and make her home in the 
country, on an estate which he had purchased for her in San Mateo County. 
But Tessie Wall flatly refused to leave the bright lights. 

"I'd rather be an electric light pole on Powell Street," she said, "than 
own all the land in the sticks." 

After a few years of wedded bliss Daroux procured a divorce. He declined 
to return to Tessie Wall despite her anguished entreaties, whereupon that 
forthright lady armed herself with a twenty-two-caliber revolver and sent 
word to him that if she couldn't have him, she would fix him so no other 
woman would ever want him. Daroux laughed at her warning, but she did her 
best to carry out her threat. One day in the summer of 1916 she met him on 
the street and fired three bullets into his body. She stood weeping over 
him until the police came. When they arrested her, she cried: 

"I shot him because I love him--damn him!" 

Daroux recovered, although the shooting permanently affected his health. 
He refused to appear as a prosecuting witness, and Tessie Wall was 
promptly released from custody. A year or so later, during the uproar of 
reform that ended with the abolition of the Barbary Coast and the more 
sordid features of the Uptown Tenderloin, Daroux went to New York, where 
he remained. He died there in December 1928. Tessie Wall closed her resort 
about the same time and retired with a modest fortune to a flat in 
Eighteenth Street, taking with her the enormous gilded bed in which she 
had slept for many years, and many other garish pieces of furniture from 
the O'Farrell Street establishment. There she lived until her death in 
April 1932, at the age of sixty-seven.(*) During her latter years San 
Francisco journalists invested her with a glamour which was noticeably 
absent during the heyday of her career, and customarily referred to her as 
the one-time Queen of the Barbary Coast. As a matter of fact, Tessie Wall 
had very little, if any, connection with the Barbary Coast, and was never 
a figure of importance in that hive of vice and violence. Whatever 
prominence she enjoyed was achieved in the Uptown Tenderloin. 

(* Tessie Wall's effects were sold at auction soon after her death. The 
huge bed was bought for $105 by Sheriff Ellis W. Jones of Sacramento.)

* * * *

In that portion of the red-light district which formed a part of the 
Barbary Coast, there were three main types of brothel--the cow-yard, the 
crib, and the parlor house. The cow-yard was really just a group of cribs 
under one roof, usually a U-shaped structure or enclosure of from one to 
four storeys, divided into small cubicles on either side of long hallways. 
Some of these buildings provided accommodations for as many as three 
hundred women, and several were planned to accommodate even more, but all 
of the space was never rented. In addition to these establishments the 
Barbary Coast was crowded with call houses, and cheap hotels and lodging-
houses to which streetwalkers took their customers. There were also the 
dens above and below the dancehalls and concert saloons, which were 
maintained for the convenience of the pretty waiter girls and female 
performers employed in the resorts, to whom prostitution was more or less 
of a side-line. Of all the so-called sporting houses, the cow-yard was 
probably the most profitable, while the crib was the lowest and most 
disreputable. The parlor house generally made a considerable pretense at 
refinement and a certain gentility and professed to cater to a higher-
class clientele than did the others, although it is extremely doubtful if 
any man with money in his pockets was ever refused admittance. Prices in 
the cribs and cow-yards, over a long period of years, ranged from twenty-
five cents to a dollar, while the inmates of the parlor houses received 
from two to ten dollars for their favors. Very young and handsome girls 
were sometimes paid as much as twenty dollars for entertaining visitors 
for a half-hour or so, as were a few older women who made up in skill and 
simulated passion what they lacked in youth and beauty. Only in a parlor 
house could a man remain throughout the night and have, during that time, 
the exclusive company of a particular girl. For this privilege he paid 
from five to thirty dollars, depending upon his own generosity and the 
standing and popularity of the bagnio. 

The parlor-house girls were the aristocracy of San Francisco's red-light 
district--as a class they were much younger and handsomer than the 
streetwalkers or the inmates of the cribs and cow-yards. Many, perhaps a 
majority, were small-town girls, brought into the city by the procurers, 
who operated with great industry and success throughout California and up 
and down the Pacific Coast--prolific sources of supply were the villages 
and towns on the eastern shore of the Bay of San Francisco and in the 
southern part of the San Francisco peninsula. Sometimes these girls were 
sold to the brothel-keepers for cash, but more often the procurer received 
a small percentage of their earnings and so in time built up a regular and 
substantial income. Other parlor-house inmates were girls who had come to 
San Francisco to obtain jobs or otherwise to better their fortunes and had 
been forced into prostitution by economic stress. Still others were former 
dance-hall women who found life easier and more remunerative in the 
bagnios than in the dives of the Barbary Coast. And there were, of course, 
some who became harlots simply because they followed the line of least 
resistance, or surrendered to their natural inclinations, or fell in love 
with a man who seduced them and then set them to work earning money for 
him. Occasionally a girl of good family appeared in a brothel, but most of 
the inmates came from the middle and lower classes and were deficient in 
both education and intelligence. They held their places in the parlor 
houses only so long as they retained something of their youth and beauty, 
which was seldom more than half a dozen years. Then they became 
streetwalkers or went into the cribs or cow-yards--or committed suicide. A 
few--very few--abandoned the life entirely and either married or engaged 
in work upon which society looked with more respect. 

A woman who practiced the arts of harlotry in a crib or a cow-yard kept 
for her own--or rather, in most cases, gave to her pimp--all the money she 
earned, and paid a nightly rental of from two to five dollars for the 
space she occupied. In the parlor houses, however, various methods of 
dividing the revenue of the establishments were employed. In some the 
girls paid from twenty to forty dollars a week for board, lodging, and 
laundry and retained for themselves whatever they earned above that 
amount. In others the inmates were paid from one-fourth to one-half of 
their total earnings, and in still others they received a weekly wage, 
ranging from twenty to sixty dollars, and no other remuneration. They 
usually paid nothing for board and lodging or for the scanty raiment which 
they wore during their working hours. The girl who was employed on a 
percentage basis was compelled to depend upon her mistress for the proper 
determination of the amount due her at the end of each week, and it is 
doubtful if she ever received a correct accounting until the cash register 
came into general use. Thereafter in many houses the brothel-keeper or a 
trusted servant sat enthroned behind a cash register at the foot of the 
stairs which led to the bedrooms. When a visitor had selected the harlot 
who most pleased him, he paid the regular fee to the mistress of the 
bagnio, for payment in advance was an unalterable rule in all except a 
very few of the houses. The amount was rung up on the cash register, and 
the girl received a brass check, which she kept until pay-day. 

The number of girls in a parlor house varied, of course, according to the 
brothel's size and popularity, but it was seldom less than five or more 
than twenty. They were expected to be ready for work by noon of each day 
and remained on duty until dawn the following morning, unless excused for 
illness or other cause. Each girl had one day off a week, which she 
usually spent with her lover or drinking in the dives of the Barbary 
Coast. The income of a parlorhouse prostitute was sometimes considerable; 
an occasional girl, if employed in a popular bagnio, earned as much as two 
hundred dollars a week, the greater part of which went to her pimp. As a 
rule the owners of the resorts made enormous sums; many retired with 
fortunes. 

The parlor houses also derived a considerable income from the sale of beer 
in bottles and hard liquor by the half-pint and from music. Practically 
every resort was equipped with some sort of automatic--and in later years 
electrical--musical instrument, which played only when fed with nickels or 
quarters. A great deal of the revenue from the music and sale of liquor 
went to the police and politicians as graft, in addition to the regular 
payments, which were usually based on the number of girls in a house. 
Sometimes besides taking most of the coins which had been dropped into the 
machine, the greedy grafters levied a special unofficial tax upon each 
musical instrument; or ordered all music stopped and then permitted its 
resumption upon payment of another so-called tax or license fee. Again, 
they used a method similar to that which proved so successful in 1911. In 
the late spring of that year the police forbade all music in houses of 
prostitution and ordered the removal and destruction of every musical 
instrument in the red-light district. A month later, in July, the 
proprietors of the houses were told that they might provide music for the 
entertainment of their guests, but that it must be the music of the 
automatic harp. There wasn't such an instrument in the Barbary Coast, but 
the lack was soon remedied. A few days after the bagnio-keepers had been 
notified, a salesman for a Cincinnati piano house appeared in the district 
and offered automatic harps for sale at $750 each, about four times what 
they could have been bought for in the open market. But he bore references 
from important politicians and experienced no difficulty in making sales. 

The location of every brothel on the Barbary Coast, whether crib, cow-
yard, or parlor house, was indicated at night by a red light which burned 
before its door from dusk to dawn, and during the day by a red shade 
behind at least one of the front windows. From some of the parlor houses 
also flapped signs, gaudily painted on wood or metal, which bore the name 
of the establishment and, sometimes, pertinent information about its 
inmates. Madame Gabrielle's bagnio in Dupont Street (Grant Avenue), which 
she rebuilt in Commercial Street after the fire of 1906, displayed an 
ornate sign which depicted a huge insect lying at ease in a bed of 
fragrant flowers, surrounded by sweet-faced, simpering Cupids. Her place 
was called the Lively Flea. Near-by, another and an equally flamboyant 
sign ornamented the entrance of the Parisian Mansion, which was owned by 
Jerome Bassity and Madame Marcelle. Also on Commercial Street, during the 
first year or so of the present century, was a very popular French bawdy-
house before which swung the cast-iron figure of a rooster, painted a 
brilliant scarlet and with a red light burning in its beak. The talons of 
the metal bird clutched a placard on which was painted the legend: "At the 
Sign of the Red Rooster." In the hallway of this brothel was a smaller 
replica of the figure, and a sign similar to that outside except that it 
bore a shorter synonym for "rooster." The Red Rooster was the property of 
Madame Lazarene, who also owned several other resorts, some of which were 
in the name of her husband, Labrodet. Instead of using signs, some of the 
parlor-house proprietors in Commercial and other streets affixed to their 
front doors or walls brass or copper plates, on each of which was stamped 
the street number of the resort and the first name of the woman who 
operated it. One brothel-keeper in Sacramento Street, who had formerly 
conducted a tea-room, achieved undying fame in the middle eighteen-
nineties by nailing to her door a copper plate on which had been engraved 
this startling  announcement:
MADAME LUCY 
YE OLDE WHORE SHOPPE.
 
Not unnaturally, this sign attracted a great deal of attention, but Madame 
Lucy removed it within a few days at the request of the police. 

* * * *

A few of the Barbary Coast parlor houses were managed by men, who, for 
some reason which never was quite clear, invariably wore pink or canary-
colored silk shirts embellished with huge diamond studs. Most of the 
bagnios of this type, however, were operated by women, the great majority 
of whom were fat and--or had been--blonde. The mistress of such an 
establishment was always called Miss by the inmates, but the customers 
addressed her--and with considerable respect, too--as Madame. In time this 
title became generally used as a common noun to designate any brothel-
keeper. When, as occasionally happened, one of these women was arrested 
and asked her occupation, for the purpose of the police record, she 
replied simply and with pride: "I am a madame." Practically all of the 
parlor houses were in two- or three-storey buildings which had once been 
private residences. When they were transformed into bagnios, the interior 
arrangements were usually altered to provide additional bedrooms, and, if 
possible, the living-room or parlor was enlarged. The sleeping-chambers 
were each equipped with a dresser, a chair or two, and a strong iron or 
brass bed, while the parlor was a potpourri of gaudy rugs, erotic 
paintings or photographs, garish couches and divans, and heavily gilded 
chairs and tables. In one corner was the omnipresent automatic or 
electrical musical instrument, and in some places a small section of the 
floor was cleared for dancing. 

When a man stepped across the threshold of a parlor house, the subsequent 
procedure was much the same as if he had gone into a store to buy a spool 
of thread. A Negro maid escorted him into the parlor, where he was greeted 
by the madame and immediately asked what type of girl he desired. If he 
intimated, as he usually did, that he preferred to look at the stock 
before buying, the madame summoned her harlots, who trooped into the 
parlor and were paraded for inspection. Whether or not the visitor made 
his selection immediately, he was importuned to purchase liquor or provide 
coins for the music. The dress of the prostitutes on these important 
occasions varied with changing fashions, but was always extremely scanty. 
In some houses they wore flannel or cotton night-gowns; in others the 
parade costume was a thin house-dress with nothing underneath; in still 
others the prostitutes were clad only in flimsy underwear. In a few 
resorts the girls wore no clothing whatever except slippers and stockings. 
The traditional call by which the harlots have been summoned into the 
parlors of American houses of prostitution for more than fifty years is 
said to have originated in a Sacramento Street bagnio kept by Madame 
Bertha Kahn. When visitors entered her brothel, Madame Bertha, who was a 
huge woman with a tremendous contralto voice, strode to the foot of the 
stairs and shouted: "Company, girls!" 

Madame Bertha employed thirty girls, and dressed them in red sandals, 
long, white night-gowns lavishly trimmed with lace, and red velvet caps 
which perched precariously atop short, frizzed hair. During the middle 
eighteen-seventies this bagnio was one of the most famous houses in San 
Francisco and was especially popular with the so-called higher classes 
because of the refined and genteel manner in which it was conducted. 
Madame Bertha sold no liquor, permitted no obscene talk or ruffianly 
conduct, and sternly forbade the punching and prodding and public 
caressing with which the girls of other houses were greeted. When her 
harlots were summoned to parade, they came into the parlor like ladies and 
were formally introduced to the gentlemen present, after which they sat 
demurely in a row on a long couch, across the room from the men who 
desired to purchase their favors. If one of the latter fancied a girl, he 
indicated the object of his desire to Madame Bertha, who made the 
necessary arrangements and informed the prostitute that the gentleman 
wished to speak to her in private. No money was paid until the pair had 
ascended the stairs, and sometimes not even then, for many of Madame 
Bertha's regular customers had charge accounts. Besides the automatic 
instrument which required nickels and quarters to burst forth into melody, 
Madame Bertha's house boasted an organ, upon which the mistress of the 
bagnio performed with rare skill. On Sunday afternoons she closed the 
resort for an hour or two, except to specially invited guests, and during 
that time, becomingly attired in black silk, she played sentimental airs 
on the organ, while the harlots and the guests sang. At these functions 
tea and cake were served. The policy of this unusual brothel was aptly 
expressed by the signs which were prominently posted in the parlor and in 
every bedroom:
NO VULGARITY 
ALLOWED 
IN THIS ESTABLISHMENT. 

Madame Bertha's most important rival in the parlor-house field was Madame 
Johanna Werner, who also kept a place in Sacramento Street and prospered 
for some ten or fifteen years. The popularity of her resort began to 
decline in the late eighteen-seventies, however, when the police arrested 
the procurer who had kept her supplied with girls, and imprisoned him for 
sending a fourteen-year-old girl to a crib in Portland, Oregon. This human 
vulture was appropriately named Johnny Lawless. Madame Johanna specialized 
in girls between fourteen and seventeen years of age, and frequently 
offered her clients children whom she said were even younger. The services 
of the very young girls who fell into her hands were sometimes sold at 
auction, at which the bidding was usually very brisk. Besides these sales, 
the brothel was noted, about 1875, for the erotic exhibitions which were 
given there at regular intervals by three French girls known as the Three 
Lively Fleas, who also performed at other peep-shows on the Barbary Coast. 
A frequent spectator of these shows, and a customer of the bagnio on other 
occasions also, was Jeanne Bonnet, better known as the Little Frog 
Catcher, who wore men's clothing and for a few years earned an honest 
living catching frogs in the marshes of San Mateo County. Early in 1876, 
however, she abandoned the ways of integrity and organized a criminal 
gang, the membership of which comprised a dozen young girls whom Jeanne 
Bonnet had induced to leave Madame Johanna's and other brothels. They 
eschewed prostitution, had nothing to do with men, and eked out an 
uncertain living through shop-lifting and other forms of thievery. Their 
headquarters was a shack on an unfrequented part of the waterfront, south 
of Market Street. The life of the gang was short, for within a few months 
the Little Frog Catcher, then only twenty-five years old, was found dead 
with a bullet in her heart. She was believed by the police to have been 
murdered by the pimps whose girls she had taken. 

Madame Johanna had still another claim to fame as the first bagnio-keeper 
who seriously attempted to publicize her resort outside of San Francisco, 
a practice which was soon adopted by other madames. The ordinary channels 
of advertising, of course, were closed to them, but they procured mailing-
lists from various sources and sent to towns and cities throughout the 
West, and particularly to those along the Pacific Coast, circulars 
describing their girls and dwelling lyrically upon the delights of the 
brothel. Many offered reduced rates to parties from out of town. At first 
some of the circulars were extremely frank, and the illustrations were 
photographs of naked girls in various poses, but in later years both text 
and pictures were considerably changed to avoid prosecution by the Federal 
authorities under the laws which prohibited the sending of obscene 
literature through the mails. 

Logical developments of this system of advertising were the custom of 
using business cards and the extensive use of wall mottoes and signs. From 
about the middle eighteen-eighties until the closing of the Barbary Coast, 
practically every prostitute in San Francisco, even those who occupied the 
lowest cribs and cow-yards, kept a supply of business cards on hand and 
distributed them whenever an opportunity offered. On most of them nothing 
more was printed than the name of the girl and the address of the bagnio 
to which she was attached, but some were more fanciful in design and 
offered information which, to say the least, was likely to be a bit 
startling. Few, however, aroused as much favorable comment as the card of 
a gigantic Negress who lived in a Hinckley Alley cow-yard. It was designed 
and written for her by a San Francisco newspaper reporter, and bore this 
inscription within a border of forget-me-nots:
BIG MATILDA 
THREE HUNDRED POUNDS OF BLACK PASSION. 
HOURS: ALL HOURS. 
RATES: 50C EACH: THREE FOR ONE DOLLAR. 

The wall mottoes and signs were particularly prevalent during the eighteen-
nineties. Most of the former were handsomely done in embroidery, and many 
were the work of the prostitutes, who made them in their hours of leisure. 
Others were burned in wood or leather, for in those days the art of 
pyrography was highly regarded in all strata of society. All were 
extremely sentimental in character; they extolled the virtues of home and 
mother, set forth highly moral precepts, or advised whole-hearted 
participation in various aspects of the good life. In each room of a 
Pacific Street brothel was a framed motto saying: "God Bless Our Home," 
while in another place, in California Street, was a great profusion of 
burnt leather masterpieces asking: "What Is Home Without Mother?" A great 
favorite, found in many parlors, offered this good advice: "If At First 
You Don't Succeed, Try, Try Again." In some of the brothels hung printed 
signs offering to refund whatever money a man had spent in the event that 
illness resulted from the visit, while in others this was prominently 
displayed:
SATISFACTION GUARANTEED 
OR 
MONEY REFUNDED. 

The man who asked for his money back on the ground of dissatisfaction, 
however, did not receive actual cash. Instead he was given a sort of due 
bill--a metal disk on which had been stamped: "Good for One." Attached to 
the disk by a fine wire was a pointed, flat-topped sliver of steel in 
which circular threads had been cut. 

A few years before the abolition of open prostitution in San Francisco a 
bitter price war raged among the cheaper parlor houses, and in most of the 
establishments which had previously maintained a standard fee of two 
dollars appeared this sign:
UNION HOUSE 
PRICE: $1.50. 

The French parlor houses in Commercial Street and Grant Avenue (Dupont 
Street) were at the height of their prosperity and popularity during the 
late eighteen-nineties and for some ten or twelve years after the turn of 
the present century. They were by far the lowest brothels of this type in 
San Francisco; it is doubtful, indeed, if viler dens were ever operated 
anywhere in the United States than Madame Gabrielle's Lively Flea, Madame 
Lazarene's Red Rooster, and the Parisian Mansion, owned by Madame Marcelle 
and Jerome Bassity. In each of these places, and in other Commercial 
Street bagnios as well, was a special chamber called the Virgin's Room, 
the walls and ceiling of which were covered with mirrors, while the 
furniture, except for a huge brass bed decorated with rosettes and 
streamers of ribbon, was upholstered in gaudy plush and velvet. Between 
the mirrors were cleverly concealed peep-holes. Whenever a visitor entered 
who seemed to be sufficiently gullible--usually a countryman or a sailor 
with his wages in his pocket--he was offered a virgin at double or triple 
the usual fee. If he accepted, he was escorted into the Virgin's Room, and 
places at the peep-holes were sold at from five to ten dollars each. 
Occasionally a real virgin was available, but more often this rara avis 
was impersonated by an inmate of the brothel who had retained, despite the 
ravages of her profession, an appearance of youth and demureness and who 
was enough of an actress to simulate fright and bewilderment. In every 
bagnio there was always at least one such girl, and as the official virgin 
of the establishment she was usually paid slightly more than the customary 
percentage of her earnings. 

The Virgin's Room was also the scene of most of the erotic exhibitions, 
called circuses, for which the Commercial Street resorts were particularly 
celebrated, although in some resorts they were staged in a large cabinet 
which was wheeled into the parlor. Both men and women participated in 
these shows, and sometimes, instead of men, dogs, goats, and other animals 
were used. Perhaps the most extraordinary performance of this character 
ever seen in San Francisco, or, for that matter, anywhere else, was that 
given about 1900 in Madame Gabrielle's Lively Flea, then in Dupont Street 
[Grant Avenue]--an exhibition in which a woman and a Shetland pony took 
part.(*) This spectacle was shown every ten days or two weeks for several 
months, and the admission charge was twenty-five dollars. In another 
bagnio owned by Madame Gabrielle, at Geary and Stockton streets, a weekly 
show was presented in which the actors were Negro men and white women. The 
Commercial Street houses were much frequented by degenerates, largely 
because of the so-called circuses, and also because they were encouraged 
to do whatever their erotic fancies might dictate. Perhaps the most noted 
of these was Theodore Durrant, San Francisco's most celebrated murderer, 
who in his saner moments was a medical student and an assistant 
superintendent of a Sunday school, prominent in the work of the Christian 
Endeavor Society. For a year or so during the early eighteen-nineties 
Durrant visited the brothels in Commercial Street several times a week. He 
always brought with him, in a sack or a small crate, a pigeon or a 
chicken, and at a certain time during the evening's debauch he cut the 
bird's throat and let the blood trickle over his body.(**) Another 
Commercial Street character of this period, about whom there was 
considerable mystery, was a middle-aged man who appeared each morning at 
the Parisian Mansion, carrying a bundle which contained a complete outfit 
of women's clothing. These garments he donned, and then he swept and 
dusted the brothel from cellar to garret. His work completed, he resumed 
his proper attire and departed, leaving a silver dollar on the parlor 
table. No one but Madame Marcelle knew his name, and she kept the secret. 

(* This exhibition is said to have been first seen in the United States on 
the Midway at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893)

(** In April 1895 Durrant murdered and mutilated two young girls--Minnie 
Williams and Blanche Lamont--and hid their bodies in the library and 
belfry of Emanuel Baptist Church. He was hanged January 7, 1898.)


 * * * *

The cribs and cow-yard cubicles occupied by white women and Negresses were 
very similar, in design and general construction, to the dens in which the 
Chinese slave girls were imprisoned. The single crib was simply a shanty 
with a narrow door, on one side of which were small double casement-
windows, usually with padded ledges. It was divided into two small 
chambers, one of which, about six feet square, was used as a reception-
room, while the other was known as the "workshop." In the former there was 
seldom any furniture except a built-in window-seat and a chair or a couch, 
although the Mexican and Spanish harlots usually added a small altar with 
a figure of the Holy Virgin and other religious images. The "workshop" was 
just large enough for a three-quarter-size iron bed, a wash-stand with a 
marble top, and a kerosene stove on which always bubbled a kettle of hot 
water. Otherwise the room contained a tin wash-basin, a large bottle of 
lysol or carbolic acid, and a small chest or trunk, in which the 
prostitute kept her street attire. During her hours in the crib she wore 
nothing but a white night-gown, a gaudy kimono, or a short skirt. The 
walls of both the reception-room and the "workshop " were decorated with 
sentimental mottoes, calendars, and chromos, while above the bed hung a 
framed placard on which had been painted or printed, usually within a 
border of flowers, a woman's name, supposed to be that of the occupant of 
the crib. If these identifications were accurate, however, the cribs of 
San Francisco must have been largely populated by girls named Rose, Daisy, 
Martha, or Leah. The bed itself was always dirty and usually rickety and 
dilapidated. It was covered by coarse sheets and a bright-colored spread, 
and across the foot was thrown a piece of red or brown oilcloth. This was 
to prevent the spread's being soiled by the boots or shoes of the 
customers, for in the twenty-five- and fifty-cent cribs, and in the others 
on busy nights, a man was not permitted to remove his foot-wear, or, for 
that matter, any of his garments except his hat. He was always requested 
to take off his hat. No self-respecting prostitute would entertain a man 
while he had his hat on. 

The only exceptions to the rule which forbade the removal of clothing were 
to be found in a type of crib known as a "creep joint." In the "workshops" 
of these places were small closets, the back walls of which were really 
doors which could be opened from the outside. A visitor was encouraged to 
hang his clothing, particularly his coat, waistcoat, and trousers, in the 
closet, and when his attention was otherwise engaged, as it usually was, 
an accomplice of the harlot opened the door and removed all money and 
valuables from the garments, leaving in their stead a shiny new dime. The 
origin of the custom of putting a dime in a pocket of the rifled raiment 
is unknown in present-day San Francisco, although the coin was obviously 
meant for car-fare home. Men who had been robbed in these places seldom 
made a complaint, for it was widely known that most of the cribs were 
connected by push-button with the nearest barroom. When trouble arose, the 
alarm was answered by the saloon bouncer, and a man who demanded the 
return of his stolen property was fortunate if he managed to keep the 
dime. Many of the cribs and other brothels were also protected by special 
watchmen, who received five dollars a month from each inmate. 

The cribs were not confined to any particular section of the Barbary 
Coast, but were scattered throughout the red-light district. From the 
early eighteen-seventies until the abolition of open prostitution they 
were to be found in large numbers in Pacific, Jackson, Washington, Kearny, 
Montgomery, Stockton, Commercial and many other streets, in Broadway and 
Grant Avenue, and in scores of alleys which opened into these 
thoroughfares. In Hinckley and Pinckley alleys, and in Broadway between 
Grant Avenue and Stockton Street, were most of the Negro cribs, as well as 
many such dens filled with Spanish and Mexican women. French harlots 
occupied a row of cribs in Commercial Street, and in order to meet the 
competition offered by the Parisian Mansion and other parlor houses many 
of them employed barkers, who stood before their doors and cried: "Only 
fifty cents for a French girl, gents!" Some of the women did their own 
ballyhooing, leaning from their windows and shrilly enumerating the 
variety of amorous entertainment which was to be found within. French 
women also predominated in the cribs of Bacon and Belden Places, in the 
southwestern part of the Barbary Coast, each of which was entered through 
heavy iron gates which stretched across the street. During the eighteen-
nineties and for some three years of the present century both of these 
thoroughfares were entirely devoted to prostitution. In Bacon Place alone 
there were fifty-four cribs, for each of which the owner of the property 
received a daily rental of four dollars, and almost as many in Belden 
Place. A crusade against these dens was begun early in 1898 by the 
Reverend Father Otis of the Paulist Community and the Reverend R. C. Foute 
of the Grace Episcopal Church. They were soon joined by the Society for 
the Prevention of Vice and the St. Mary's Square Association, and in 
December 1898 the embattled crusaders made a mass attack against Bacon 
Place, tearing down the iron gates and wrecking several cribs. A similar 
onslaught was made upon Belden Place, and the prostitutes were driven out 
of both thoroughfares. They soon returned, and were again expelled in 
1903. Once more they came back to their old haunts, however, and were not 
finally dispersed until the cribs were destroyed by fire in 1906. 

The worst cribs in San Francisco were probably those which lined both 
sides of Morton Street (Maiden Lane), a short thoroughfare of only two 
blocks running from Union Square at Stockton Street across Grant Avenue to 
Kearny Street, and now in the heart of the retail shopping district. These 
dens were occupied by women of all colors and nationalities; there were 
even a few Chinese and Japanese girls. And not only were the Morton Street 
cribs the lowest in San Francisco's red-light district; they were also the 
most popular, partly because of the great variety and extraordinary 
depravity of the women to be found there, and partly because the police 
seldom entered the street unless compelled to do so by a murder or a 
serious shooting or stabbing affray. Ordinary fights and assaults were 
ignored. Occasionally a respectable woman came through Morton Street on a 
slumming tour, but she seldom made a second visit, for the prostitutes 
greeted her with ribald jeers and curses, and cries of "Look out, girls, 
here's some charity competition! " and "Get some sense and quit giving it 
away!" 

Every night, and especially every Saturday night, this dismal bedlam of 
obscenity, lighted only by the red lamps above the doors of the cribs, was 
thronged by a tumultuous mob of half-drunken men, who stumbled from crib 
to crib, greedily inspecting the women as if they had been so many wild 
animals in cages. From the casement-windows leaned the harlots, naked to 
the waist, adding their shrill cries of invitation to the uproar, while 
their pimps haggled with passing men and tried to drag them inside the 
dens. If business was dull, the pimps sold the privilege of touching the 
breasts of the prostitutes at the standard rate of ten cents each or two 
for fifteen cents. But on Saturday nights some of the more popular women, 
who had built up a more or less regular clientele, remained in their 
"workshops" from dusk to dawn, while the pimps kept the men standing in 
line outside, their hats in one hand and money in the other. It was not 
uncommon for a Morton Street prostitute to entertain as many as eighty to 
a hundred men in one night. 

Prices in Morton Street ranged from twenty-five cents for a Mexican woman 
to one dollar for an American girl. The regular rate in the cribs occupied 
by Negresses or by Chinese or Japanese girls was fifty cents, while the 
Frenchwomen sold their favors for seventy-five cents. Even higher prices 
than any of these, however, were sometimes obtained by prostitutes of 
unusual youth and attractiveness, and particularly by red-haired girls. It 
was a popular superstition in San Francisco for many years that a woman 
with auburn tresses was exceedingly amorous, and that a red-haired Jewess 
was the most passionate of all. A pimp who owned two or three such girls 
was on the highroad to fortune. Curiously enough, the principal owner of 
red-haired Jewish girls in San Francisco's red-light district was an 
extraordinary woman known as Iodoform Kate, who flourished in the eighteen-
nineties. She was herself a prostitute for several years, during which 
time she gained considerable renown by refusing to have any dealings with 
the pimps. Instead Iodoform Kate saved her money, and about 1895 she was 
able to purchase a dozen or more Morton Street cribs. In each of them she 
installed a red-haired Jewess, and after a few years she retired with a 
comfortable fortune. 

Another noted Morton Street prostitute was a young woman known as Rotary 
Rosie, an appellation which perhaps sufficiently described her. Rotary 
Rosie, like Iodoform Kate, maintained no pimp and was also distinguished 
among the crib women for her erudition; she read books and appeared to 
have the rudiments of an education. A year or so before the fire of 1906 
she fell in love with a student at the University of California, and he 
introduced her to several of his fraternity brothers. For a few months 
thereafter she entertained these young gentlemen without expense to them, 
requiring only that they read poetry to her for half an hour. Her ambition 
was to quit the brothel and attend college, but after a few years she 
became discouraged and committed suicide. 

Except for a brief period in 1892, when they were closed as a result of a 
crusade by the Civic Federation, the unholy dens in Morton Street 
maintained a continuous existence for more than forty years. They were 
finally destroyed in the conflagration of 1906 and were not rebuilt, 
principally because the land on which they had stood was too valuable for 
business purposes. 

 * * * *

For at least forty of the more than sixty years in which open prostitution 
flourished in San Francisco, cow-yards were to be found in all parts of 
the Barbary Coast and the red-light district; they were probably as 
numerous as the parlor houses and the single cribs. Three of these 
monstrous kennels stood out among the others like veritable sore thumbs 
upon the hands of the body politic--the Nymphia, in Pacific Street near 
Stockton; the Marsicania, in Dupont Street (Grant Avenue) near Broadway; 
and the celebrated Municipal Brothel, also called the Municipal Crib, in 
Jackson Street near Kearny. The last-named lingered for several years 
under the protection of the politicians and city officials and finally 
died a more or less natural death; but the Nymphia and the Marsicania 
succumbed, after comparatively brief periods of prosperity, to the 
crusading prowess of the Reverend Terence Caraher, pastor of the Roman 
Catholic Church of St. Francis and chairman of the Committee on Morals of 
the North Beach Promotion Association. Father Caraher was an Irishman who 
came to the United States in 1873. After nine months at the Mission San 
Rafael he was sent to the Church of St. Francis, and except for fifteen 
years at the Mission San Jose--from about 1885 to 1900--he remained in San 
Francisco until a few months before his death, which occurred in October 
1914, at a sanatorium in San Jose. 

Throughout his San Francisco pastorate Father Caraher waged incessant 
warfare against the red-light district and the Barbary Coast. He blockaded 
the brothels and the dives, particularly the former, with volunteer 
pickets; he exerted religious and political pressure upon the real owners 
of the property used for prostitution; he hauled the operators and inmates 
of the bagnios into court and otherwise harried them in every possible 
fashion. In common with most reformers, however, he was not long content 
to confine his activities to the special field in which the value of his 
work was unquestioned and in which he had the support of every right-
thinking citizen; he was soon heavily engaged in what might best be 
described as a general denouncing business. Scarcely a week passed in 
which the newspapers did not contain at least one statement of violent 
protest signed by him, and scarcely a sermon did he deliver in which 
something or someone was not denounced in language which left no doubt as 
to his meaning. He inveighed against public dancing as vicious and immoral 
and against the nickelodeons as possessing the same undesirable 
attributes; he condemned most of San Francisco's trolley cars, and 
especially those which traversed Kearny Street, as "dance halls on wheels
. . .full of lewd women and beastly men"; and during his latter years he 
fell into the habit of fulminating against practically every public 
amusement and pastime which threatened to obtain a foothold in San 
Francisco. At mass on January 27, 1907 he delivered this typical attack 
upon roller-skating rinks, which were then becoming popular throughout the 
city: 

"While I approve of athletic sports and games in general, I have only 
words of condemnation to utter against skating rinks. I condemn public 
skating because it is dangerous both to body and soul. Many receive 
injuries at the skating rinks from which they never recover. In skating 
the bones are oftentimes broken, limbs are twisted, and the body severely 
bruised. While the danger to the body in the skating rink is great, the 
danger to the soul is greater. Skating rinks are frequented by the worst 
elements of society. Some of the male skaters speak to one another 
afterwards of their experiences and their conquests of young women in the 
rinks, and where do the skaters go after they leave the rinks? I answer, 
some of them go to perdition. Skating is not only a foolish, silly 
exercise, but it is most dangerous to body and soul. I request you to 
avoid the skating rinks and thereby show a good example to the rest of the 
community."(*)

(* The San Francisco Call, January 19, 1907. So great was Father Caraher's 
influence that the Board of Supervisors promptly adopted an ordinance 
prohibiting anyone under sixteen years of age to enter a skating rink.) 

The Nymphia, the first important brothel to feel the weight of Father 
Caraher's wrathful hand, was a flimsy U-shaped building, three storeys in 
height, with about a hundred and fifty cubicles on each floor. It was 
erected early in 1899 by the Twinkling Star Corporation and soon after its 
completion was leased to a syndicate composed of four gifted impresarios 
of vice--Emil and Valentine Kehrlein, Sam Blumenberg, and a man known on 
the Barbary Coast only as Mr. Frey. It was opened about the middle of the 
summer of 1899, with three hundred cubicles occupied by as many women, 
each of whom paid a daily rental of five dollars. Had everything gone well 
with this enterprise, it would within a short time have become by far the 
largest brothel on the Pacific Coast, for the syndicate planned not only 
to fill the remaining cubicles with girls, but to erect an annex with 
accommodations for five hundred more. The original intention of the 
Kehrlein brothers and their associates was to call their cow-yard the 
Hotel Nymphomania and to people it with women suffering from that 
condition. The police, however, refused to permit the use of the name, so 
the syndicate compromised by calling it the Nymphia and filling the 
cubicles of only one floor with nymphomaniacs, or, at any rate, with 
harlots who were advertised as such. Each inmate of the Nymphia was 
required to remain naked all the time she was in her crib; she was obliged 
to entertain every man who applied, regardless of race or color, or lose 
her place in the brothel; and she was subject to constant inspection 
through a long, narrow window cut in the door. A shade covered each of 
these windows, but it was automatically raised for a few moments by a dime 
dropped into a slot outside the door, so that anyone with the necessary 
coin could see what was taking place in any of the cubicles at any time. 
This novel feature was immensely popular, but it was abandoned after a few 
months. Instead of dimes, too many customers used slugs, which were sold 
for a few cents each by venders on the Barbary Coast. 

The Nymphia had been in operation only a short time when Father Caraher 
returned to San Francisco from his fifteen-year sojourn at the Mission San 
Jose. He found the cow-yard running full blast, with two uniformed 
policemen mounting guard at the entrance. They were there to maintain a 
semblance of order, however, and not to interfere with the operation of 
the resort. After a Saturday-night inspection of the brothel, when he 
found the hallways swarming with drunken men and saw things which he had 
supposed went out of fashion with the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, 
Father Caraher immediately launched a vigorous offensive. He found the 
heads of the police department and other city officials in a somewhat 
sympathetic mood, for the blatant depravity on exhibition at the Nymphia 
had caused considerable talk even among the hardened debauchees of the 
Barbary Coast. The priest finally succeeded in enlisting active police 
support, and in January 1900 the Nymphia was raided. Thirty-three women 
were arrested, and the four members of the operating syndicate. Some of 
the women were convicted in police court and fined, and others were 
released, while the Kehrleins, Blumenberg, and Frey were found guilty of 
maintaining a nuisance and operating an immoral resort. Each was sentenced 
to six months in prison, but on appeal a higher court reduced the penalty 
and directed their release on payment of a fine of two hundred and fifty 
dollars. 

One of the prostitutes arrested in this raid was a nineteen-year-old girl 
named Polly Knight, who called herself Reine Adams. She was released, but 
was again arrested on August 25, 1900, for shooting Billy Abbott, who 
owned a brothel in Grant Avenue and a small cow-yard and saloon in Pacific 
Street, in the rear of which was a garden in which erotic exhibitions were 
staged. The girl told the police that when she was eighteen years old, 
Billy Abbott had induced her to leave her parents and live with him, and 
that after a few months he had compelled her to become a streetwalker. But 
she was too shy to be successful in this exacting profession, and Abbott 
put her in his brothel in Grant Avenue, which catered principally to 
Chinamen. When the Nymphia was opened, he sent her there with several 
other girls whom he had sold to the Nymphia operating syndicate. The Adams 
girl finally realized that Abbott's treatment of her had not been of the 
best, and she determined to kill him. She shot him with a twenty-two-
caliber revolver, but he was not seriously wounded, and soon recovered. He 
refused to prosecute her, however, and she was released. What became of 
her afterwards the police never knew. When she was brought into police 
court for dismissal from custody, Judge Conlan remarked: "This case 
resembles that of Kitty Turner, who stabbed a member of the same class of 
men recently. . . .It is to be regretted that in neither instance was the 
wound fatal." 

The Nymphia syndicate reopened the cow-yard as soon as its members had 
paid their fines, but Father Caraher and the police harassed them so 
successfully that they abandoned it in disgust early in 1901. It was again 
in operation, under new management, in August 1902, and the police 
immediately began to arrest the inmates, all of whom demanded jury trials. 
One or two convictions were obtained and promptly appealed to higher 
courts, and for the next year or so, pending the final outcome of these 
cases, the police contented themselves with blockading the resort. 
Uniformed police were once again stationed at the entrance, but they now 
had orders to take the name of every man who entered, and to keep him out 
if possible to do so without using force. Judging from the lists of names 
these policemen turned in to their superior officers, no one except John 
Smith ever visited the Nymphia. In the early spring of 1903 Judge J. C. B. 
Hebard of the Superior Court, who had heard one of the appeals in an early 
case against the Nymphia, handed down a decision in which he said that 
Chief of Police George Wittman could send policemen into the Nymphia to 
make arrests if he had reason to believe that the law was being violated, 
but that he could not legally blockade the resort. Chief Wittman thereupon 
began a series of raids, and within a few weeks the doors of the Nymphia 
once more were closed. They never opened again, although in July 1903 B. 
Ferner and F. J. Drake announced that they had leased the place for five 
years at a rental of $18,000 for the fIrst year, $36,000 for the second 
year, and $48,000 for each of the next three years and would operate it as 
a "high-class" bagnio, whatever that might mean. But Chief Wittman told 
them that he would raid the brothel the moment it reopened, and when the 
Superior Court refused to grant an injunction against the police, Ferner 
and Drake abandoned the project. 

Much the same plan of campaign that had proved so successful against the 
Nymphia was followed by Father Caraher in his attack upon the Marsicania, 
which the San Francisco Call described as "one of the vilest dens ever 
operated in San Francisco." This was a smaller cow-yard than the Nymphia, 
with only thirty-three cribs, in a stable-like enclosure at the end of a 
long passageway which opened into Grant Avenue less than two blocks from 
Father Caraher's church. Some of the cribs were larger than ordinary dens 
of the sort, however, and were occupied by from two to five women, so that 
the population of the brothel was usually about one hundred prostitutes. 
Each paid five dollars nightly rental. While the Marsicania appears to 
have been a resort of singular depravity, catering especially to the riff-
raff of the Barbary Coast, it possessed none of the special features which 
distinguished the Nymphia and other bagnios of the same type. It was 
opened about the middle of 1902, while Father Caraher was in Europe on a 
vacation, on property owned by P. Marsicano, but leased to P. Vincent and 
subleased to George Sellinger. According to the Call, the brothel was 
actually operated by Auguste Houges and Emil Kehrlein, the latter of whom 
had been one of the owners of the Nymphia, with Sellinger as manager and 
figure-head. 

Also, while Father Caraher was away, several parlor houses had been 
established in the immediate vicinity of his church. A blockade by 
volunteer pickets soon compelled these bagnios to close their doors, but 
this sort of systematic annoyance failed to daunt the frequenters of the 
Marsicania; on the contrary, they seemed delighted to divulge their names 
to whoever asked for them, and many even insisted upon giving the names of 
their friends. They became frightened, however, when the priest induced 
Chief of Police George Wittman to post uniformed policemen before the 
brothel as pickets, and the operators of the Marsicania appealed to the 
courts, many of which had already shown a friendly attitude toward various 
brothels. In February 1903 George D. Collins, attorney for Sellinger, 
obtained a temporary injunction from Judge Carroll Cook of the Superior 
Court, restraining the police from blockading the Marsicania or from 
entering the premises except in serious emergencies. The brothel thus 
operated under judicial protection and enjoyed a period of great 
prosperity until May 28, 1903, when Judge Cook, having heard arguments and 
testimony in April, dissolved the injunction. He held that Sellinger had 
not come into court with clean hands and so was not entitled to relief. 
Attorney Collins at once filed notice of appeal, whereupon Judge Cook 
issued an interlocutory injunction pending a decision by the California 
Supreme Court. It imposed the same restrictions upon the police as had the 
temporary writ. 

The Marsicania was now safe from molestation, either by the police or by 
Father Caraher, for at least two years, for a decision by the Supreme 
Court could not be expected in less than that time. The night the 
injunction was granted, there was a great celebration at the Marsicania, 
and several women were badly beaten by drunken customers. Next day Emil 
Kehrlein and his associates began the erection of additional cribs. But 
such a storm of protest arose, not only from Father Caraher and clergymen 
of other denominations, but from the newspapers and various civic 
societies as well, that Attorney Collins arranged another series of legal 
shenanigans. Jean Pon, who was cook and housekeeper for the inmates of the 
Marsicania, installed a stove, a dozen chairs, and two or three tables in 
the passageway leading to the brothel, and set himself up as a restaurant-
keeper. Then Attorney Collins appeared before Judge Cook on behalf of Pon, 
and in June 1903, without publicity, obtained an injunction restraining 
the police from interfering with the business of Pon's restaurant. The 
court held that any sort of surveillance over the Marsicania would have 
that effect. Judge Cook then dissolved the interlocutory injunction, 
whereupon Chief of Police Wittman, knowing nothing of the writ which had 
been granted to Pon, ordered a raid upon the brothel. Twenty-eight women 
were arrested. They were all released upon arraignment in police court, 
and Chief Wittman and Father Caraher, who was accused of being responsible 
for the raid, were cited to appear before Judge Cook on charges of 
contempt of court. 

The priest was purged of contempt when he said that he had no knowledge of 
the raid, but Chief Wittman was found guilty. An appeal was immediately 
taken, and in July 1905, after two years in which the Marsicania was the 
most thoroughly protected brothel in San Francisco, the Supreme Court 
handed down a decision reversing Judge Cook and dissolving Pon's 
injunction. Justice Lorigan, who wrote the opinion, said: "It would be 
preposterous to say that where the public may freely enter to violate the 
law a police officer is excluded from entering to enforce it." The 
decision also characterized the Marsicania as "the scene of bestial and 
unnatural crimes" and found that Pon and his so-called restaurant were 
being used as a subterfuge to prevent police interference. With the way 
thus cleared, Chief Wittman began a vigorous offensive which soon closed 
the bagnio and so added another scalp to Father Caraher's collection of 
trophies. 

* * * *

The famous cow-yard in Jackson Street, variously called the Municipal 
Brothel and the Municipal Crib, was erected in 1904 on the site of an 
underground Chinese tenement known as the Devil's Kitchen and the Palace 
Hotel, which was condemned by the Board of Health. When originally opened, 
the Municipal Crib was a three-storey structure with ninety cubicles, but 
it was destroyed by the earthquake and fire of 1906 and was replaced by a 
four-storey building and basement, containing 133 cribs and a saloon. The 
basement cubicles were occupied by Mexican prostitutes, and those on the 
fourth floor by Negresses, while on the other floors were representatives 
of various nationalities, with American and French girls predominating. 
The women were more or less graded by floors and sections according to 
their youth and beauty, and prices varied accordingly. The standard rates 
were twenty-five cents in the Mexican basement cribs, fifty cents on the 
first floor, seventy-five on the second, and one dollar on the third, 
which was occupied entirely by French prostitutes. The Negresses on the 
top floor charged fifty cents, with the customary reduction for parties of 
two or more. 

Billy Finnegan, a well-known character in the Barbary Coast dives, 
recruited for the original crib, and promised immunity from arrest to all 
harlots who rented space in the building, at from two to five dollars a 
day for each crib. The brothel was then known simply as 620 Jackson 
Street, but within a short time it was popularly called the Municipal 
Crib, for it was soon common knowledge that most if not all of the profits 
flowed into the pockets of city officials and prominent politicians. 
Saloon-keepers and others who wished to curry favor with the political 
powers advertised the brothel whenever possible; strangers who asked 
policemen where women could be found were directed to it, and it was a 
regular stop for the Jackson Street cars. If there were no women on the 
trolleys, the conductors usually shouted: "All out for the whore house!" 
Several parlor houses and cow-yards in the immediate neighborhood were 
closed because they attracted men who might otherwise have gone to the 
Municipal Crib. Among them was a cow-yard in Pacific Street near Grant 
Avenue, which was operated by A. Andrien, Jerry Driscoll, Dick Creighton, 
and three others. Driscoll was a cousin by marriage of Mayor Eugene 
Schmitz and had been a lieutenant of Christopher A. Buckley's during the 
height of the latter's power as the political boss of the city. Each of 
the six men interested in the project had invested twenty-five hundred 
dollars, and the Pacific Street brothel was opened a few weeks after the 
fire of 1906, with forty-eight women in as many cribs. Some seven months 
later Andrien testified before the Grand Jury that he had regularly paid a 
city official $440 a week for protection, and Creighton told the jurors 
that Abe Ruef had personally received $250 a week. 

As Billy Finnegan had promised, the Municipal Crib was protected for more 
than two years, until the Grand Jury began its inquiry into the corruption 
of the Ruef political machine and Mayor Schmitz's administration. The crib 
was investigated by the Grand Jury and was frequently in the limelight 
during the graft prosecution that followed the indictment of Ruef, Mayor 
Schmitz, and several members of the Board of Supervisors, who were 
described by Ruef himself as "being so greedy for plunder that they'd eat 
the paint off a house."(*) On December 4, 1906, while the Grand Jury was 
trying to determine the source of the unusual protection accorded the 
Municipal Crib, one Paul Hendiara testified that the profits of the 
brothel since the fire had averaged $3,830 a week, and that Herbert 
Schmitz, the Mayor's brother, owned a one-quarter interest in the place 
and received one-fourth of the earnings. According to Hendiara, the other 
owners were James Finnegan, Emilio Lastreto, and Joseph Michel. Herbert 
Schmitz denied Hendiara's testimony in toto, and Mayor Schmitz and Abe 
Ruef likewise disclaimed any connection with the bagnio. In November 1906 
the members of the Grand Jury visited the crib and were greeted by the 
inmates with jeers and curses. The jurors were told by the manager, Louis 
Peterson, that the real owner of the cow-yard was Joseph Alexander, a 
traveling salesman who had no permanent address and whom Peterson admitted 
he had never seen. A few days later, on November 23, the first raid was 
made upon the resort, and six women were arrested. They were immediately 
released when arraigned in police court. On January 28, 1907 the police 
again invaded the crib and locked the doors. They were reopened in 
February, and the place was raided once more on February 20 by order of 
the Grand Jury. Eighty-two women were driven from the cubicles, but no 
arrests were made. In March the crib resumed operations, and five raids 
during that month, upon this and another brothel in Pacific Street, 
resulted in the arrest of fifty-seven women. They were all released on 
bail of twenty dollars each, which they forfeited. Despite these frequent 
attacks by the police and the Grand Jury, the cubicles of the Municipal 
Crib were again filled with prostitutes during the summer of 1907. It was 
finally closed in September of that year, a few days after Chief of Police 
William J. Biggy had visited the resort and found the halls and cribs 
swarming with boys from fourteen to eighteen years of age. During the 
summer of 1910 Louis Michel attempted to open the place as a brothel, but 
the police compelled him to close after the crib had been in operation for 
less than a week. About a year after his visit of inspection Chief of 
Police Biggy was ordered removed from office for reasons which were not 
divulged. He refused to accept dismissal and on the night of November 30, 
1908 crossed the Bay of San Francisco in a police launch for a conference 
with Hugo Keil, a member of the Board of Police Commissioners and one of 
his supporters. He left Keil's residence in a cheerful mood and was seen 
by several people to embark in the launch for the return trip to the city. 
But when the boat reached San Francisco, Chief Biggy had disappeared. His 
body, with no marks of violence upon it, was found floating in the Bay 
about a week later. What happened to him was never known, although it was 
common gossip in San Francisco for several years--the story is still heard 
occasionally--that the truth about the tragedy was contained in a police 
report which was suppressed by the authorities. In June 1911, three years 
after Chief Biggy's death, the engineer of the launch, William Murphy, 
went insane, and in his ravings frequently cried: "I don't know who did 
it, but I swear to God I didn't!"

(* The Grand Jury returned 383 indictments, of which 129 were against Ruef 
and 47 against Mayor Schmitt. Most of the others were against various 
members of the Board of Supervisors. Few of the indictments were tried, 
and only one conviction was obtained, that of Ruef, who in December 1908 
was found guilty of bribing Supervisor John J. Furey to vote for a trolley 
franchise. Ruef was sentenced to fourteen years in San Quentin Prison. 
When he was released, he returned to San Francisco, where he is now 
engaged in the real-estate business.)

The Municipal Crib was the last cow-yard of any considerable size to 
operate openly in San Francisco, although only the interference of Father 
Caraher and the San Francisco Globe, the unsympathetic attitude of Chief 
of Police Jesse B. Cook,(*) and the unusual position assumed by a property-
owner prevented the opening of one in Pacific Street, near Montgomery 
Street, in the early spring of 1909. The men who conceived this project 
were Tom Magee and Ed Pincus, both of whom were widely known in red-light 
and Barbary Coast circles. Magee had been a blacksmith, a pugilist, and a 
saloon-keeper; Pincus had been about everything that it was possible for 
one man to be on the Barbary Coast. Both had at various times owned 
interests in brothels and deadfalls, and in partnership with Billy 
Harrington had operated the Seattle Dance Hall in Pacific Street for a 
year or so after the fire. Pincus was also renowned as a very dangerous 
man in a rough-and-tumble fight. One of his eyes was gouged out in a 
saloon brawl in Vancouver, B. C., whither he had gone after being expelled 
from Los Angeles and Seattle by the police of those cities. When he came 
to San Francisco, he was asked what had happened to his opponent. Pincus 
replied: "He'll never blow his nose again." 

(* Before Chief Cook became a policeman, he was a tumbler and an acrobat, 
with the troupe of Renaldo, Cook, and Orr. He also played in the first 
road company of The Black Crook, in 1875.)

Early in 1909 Pincus and Magee obtained a sub-lease on a brick building in 
Pacific Street which had housed, successively, a brothel and a low variety 
theater, and began remodeling it into a cow-yard at an estimated cost of 
thirty-five hundred dollars. They installed sixty cubicles--tiny plastered 
cells some six feet wide and eight feet long--and rented them to 
prostitutes at thirty-five dollars a week each. By the first of April 1909 
the brothel was almost ready for occupancy, and Pincus and Magee let it be 
known that they would open for business within two weeks. Up to this time 
their plans had attracted little or no attention, but they now made two 
serious mistakes, which brought the wrath of the entire city down upon 
them. Next door to the proposed cow-yard was a branch of the Whosoever-
Will Mission, of which J. C. Westenberg was secretary. Pincus brazenly 
offered to pay Westenberg fifteen hundred dollars in cash if he would move 
the mission to another part of the Barbary Coast, and promised to send him 
enough fallen women to keep the mission busy. Then Pincus called on Father 
Caraher and tried to enlist the aid of the priest in a campaign to move 
all brothels and deadfalls east of Montgomery Street and concentrate them 
in a comparatively small area. He mentioned casually that he planned to 
open a little place of his own, which he hoped would start the exodus. 
Father Caraher not only refused to have anything to do with Pincus's 
transparent scheme, but both he and Westenberg complained to Chief Cook, 
who sent for Pincus and Magee and told them that so long as he was head of 
the Police Department the cow-yard would not be permitted to open. Father 
Caraher also obtained the support of the San Francisco Globe in his 
campaign against the brothel, and the newspaper at once began a vigorous 
crusade, with editorials, front-page articles, and streamer headlines. The 
great clerical and journalistic uproar which ensued was increased when Tom 
Magee slugged S. Fred Hogue, publisher of the Globe, in a corridor of the 
Hall of Justice. Next day work on the new crib stopped, and the site 
swarmed with souvenir-hunters, who carried away everything that was loose 
or that they could detach from the building. Pincus and Magee were 
compelled to abandon their project entirely when they were informed by 
Henry C. Breeden, manager of the Butler estate, which owned the building, 
that all leases and subleases had been voided by their attempt to use the 
property for immoral purposes. 

Both Pincus and Magee left San Francisco soon afterwards, but Pincus 
returned in about four months and approached William Maxwell, manager of 
the Zelle estate, with a scheme to erect a cow-yard on a vacant lot in 
Pacific Street near Sansome Street, which the estate owned. Maxwell 
refused to listen, and Pincus began following him about the streets, 
cursing and berating him. On August 20, 1909 the two men met at Market and 
Mason streets, and Pincus's attitude became so threatening that Maxwell 
drew a revolver and killed him. Maxwell's statement that he had acted in 
self-defense was accepted by the police. 

* * * *

While San Francisco's reformers tolerated the red-light district and the 
Barbary Coast for almost three-quarters of a century, with only sporadic 
and usually ineffectual outbursts of opposition, they fiercely combated 
every effort to control or prevent the spread of diseases that are always 
rampant in a city which permits open but unregulated prostitution. For 
many years the reform element, particularly the clergy, successfully 
advanced the curious argument that since the brothels could not be 
abolished, fear of disease would keep men from frequenting them; they 
never seemed capable of realizing that vice regulated, even to a slight 
extent, is vice in retreat. They ignored the frequent warnings of 
reputable physicians and medical societies that venereal diseases were 
becoming alarmingly prevalent in all classes of San Francisco's 
population. With equal obtuseness, they greeted with frenzied trumpetings 
of righteous denunciation and unbelief the publication of such unpleasant 
facts as were brought to light during the survey of Chinatown by the Board 
of Supervisors in 1885, when a member of the Board of Health and other 
physicians testified that they had found young boys, scarcely in their 
teens, suffering from diseases contracted in the Chinese cribs, and that 
they knew of no city in the world which harbored as many diseased children 
as San Francisco. 

It was not until 1911, more than sixty years after the first Chileno 
harlot had set up her tent on the southern slope of Telegraph Hill, that a 
proper agency was formed to deal with a situation which competent medical 
men believed to be a serious menace to the health of the city. In March of 
that year, under the authority of ordinances adopted by the Board of 
Supervisors, the Municipal Clinic was established by the Board of Health 
and an auxiliary committee of physicians and business men. It was 
empowered to compel every prostitute in the city to submit to examination 
and, if necessary, treatment; and the police were instructed to enforce 
its regulations. No woman was permitted to enter a brothel without a 
medical certificate, and all harlots were required to report at the clinic 
every fourth day for medical inspection, which included a blood test. For 
this they paid fifty cents, but treatment in case of disease was free. 
Each prostitute received a booklet containing her photograph and a record 
of her examinations, and if she failed to produce this identification upon 
demand of a policeman or a member of the clinic's staff, she was liable to 
arrest for vagrancy. If a girl was found to be diseased, her booklet was 
surrendered to the clinic, and she was ordered to refrain from 
prostitution until she had been cured. Not all obeyed this last 
regulation, of course, but those who didn't ran a considerable risk of 
imprisonment. 

The clinic opened its doors on March 21, 1911, with Dr. O. B. Spalding as 
supervising inspector, and existed for two years and one month. In that 
brief time it succeeded in reducing the prevalence of venereal disease in 
the red-light district sixty-six per cent, or from 148 per thousand 
prostitutes to about 40 a thousand. In the first month of its operation 
14.69 per cent of the women examined were diseased; in its last month, May 
1913, the percentage was 4.66. The daily average of women who reported for 
inspection was 125. In addition to this work, the clinic staff 
rehabilitated at least two hundred harlots and found respectable jobs for 
140. Fifty girls who asked for permits to enter brothels were persuaded to 
abandon their intentions and seek other means of livelihood. Many minors 
were rescued from the bagnios and turned over to the Juvenile Court, and 
convicting evidence was furnished to the police in twenty-five white-slave 
cases.(*)

(* A full account of the work of the clinic may be found in Our Nation's 
Health; the Protective Work of the Municipal Clinic of San Francisco and 
Its Fight for Existence; by Dr. Julius Rosenstirn (San Francisco, 1913)) 

Despite this record, the Municipal Clinic had to fight for its existence 
from the day of its establishment. Practically every clergyman of 
prominence in San Francisco, with the notable exception of the Reverend 
Dr. Charles F. Aked of the First Congregational Church, was violently 
opposed to it; the Reverend Terence Caraher denounced it as "a blow at 
marriage," although the logic by which he reached this extraordinary 
conclusion was not divulged. Early in 1913 a large number of ministers 
held a meeting and demanded that Mayor James Rolph, Jr., abolish the 
clinic, and a little later a committee of preachers issued a long and 
violent attack in which they charged the clinic with operating a cow-yard 
containing one hundred women. At the conclusion of its statement the 
committee admitted that it had no proof whatever to support the 
accusation, which was immediately denied by Dr. George L. Eaton, president 
of the Board of Health. 

The clergymen next brought political pressure to bear, and on February 13, 
1913 the Board of Supervisors adopted a resolution forbidding the further 
use of the word "Municipal," although nothing was said about the Municipal 
Bar, some fifty yards from the Hall of Justice. On May 20, 1913 the Board 
of Police Commissioners ordered police protection withdrawn from the 
clinic. Later the commissioners admitted that the order had been issued at 
the command of Mayor Rolph, who had previously been quoted as favoring the 
continuance of the clinic's work. But, whoever was responsible, the order 
effectually destroyed the clinic's usefulness; it retained the authority 
to compel prostitutes to report for examination and treatment, but lacked 
the means of enforcing its regulations. Soon thereafter it was closed and 
the work abandoned. Thus the clergymen were victorious--and disease again 
raged unchecked throughout the red-light district.