We love a good book about sex. So we can’t wait to see Karen Abott at Malaprop’s on Aug. 25, when she’ll be reading from her new book, Sin in The Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys and the Battle for America’s Soul.
This review from the Hartford Courant gives you the set-up:
In the first decade of the 1900s, Ada and Minna Everleigh ran the nation’s swankiest whorehouse. Each of 30 boudoirs, Abbott writes, had “a mirrored ceiling and marble inlaid brass bed, a private bathroom with a tub laced in gold detailing, imported oil paintings, and hidden buttons that rang for Champagne.”
The Everleigh Club offered red, rose, green, blue and gold rooms; ethnic lust nests such as the Moorish Room, with “overstuffed couches and rich, sweeping draperies;” and the ultimate in reflective fantasy, the Room of 1,000 Mirrors, whose entire floor was shimmering glass.
The Virginia-born sisters, in their 30s and freed from bad marriages to brothers named Lester, had run a successful bordello in Omaha, Neb., but were looking to step up to a bigger scene with limited competition. Broad-shouldered, sprawling Chicago was the place.
When they opened their club in 1900, Minna and Ada figured they had to impress. So amid carved mahogany and lush carpets were 18-karat gold spittoons costing $650 each and a fountain that, Abbott writes, “at regular intervals, fired a jet of perfume into the thickly incensed air.” They hired a full kitchen staff, and the buffet was top-tier — deviled crabs, caviar, broiled squab and spinach cups with creamed peas.
Their courtesans had to be worthy of their elegant surroundings. The sisters wanted only the prettiest girls with the most voluptuous figures. No dopers, boozers or thieves. All the “Everleigh Butterflies,” as they were called, had to dress in full-length gowns.
The Everleighs, Abbott writes, also were demanding on the other side of the sex-for-money exchange. They wanted customers who would freely spend $50 for dinner and more on Champagne and frolics. Minna told her courtesans that, “The Everleigh Club has no time for the rough element, the clerk on a holiday or a man without a checkbook.”
The most well-heeled swells of the Gilded Age — including European royalty and the sons of Chicago’s top industrialists — came to dance around the Everleighs’ electric piano and drink Champagne from harlots’ shoes.
But while the Everleighs considered themselves the aristocrats of the red light district, reformers would not separate them from the sleaziest street walkers in the city’s “Bed Bug Row.” Prostitution spread disease, drug abuse and alcoholism, and most disturbing, many hookers had been baited by smooth-talking pimps and “panders.” American girls from small towns and European girls fresh off the boat were initiated by gang rape and held virtual prisoners while servicing dozens of men a day.
Among the most strident reformers was the Rev. Ernest Albert Bell, who founded Chicago’s Midnight Mission and recruited helpers called “Saints” to march through the streets and shame all who kept the red lights burning.
“Good women are a thousand times safer where no such hells exist to manufacture degenerates,” Bell told supporters. “Men who consort with vile women lose their respect for all women.”Abbott also writes about city aldermen Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna and “Bathouse” John Coughlin, who pocketed protection money from the bordellos and ran their own annual bacchanal called the First Ward Ball.
Most reviews of the book we’ve seen have been positive. Sounds like a whale of a story.
