That said, the bartender’s tattoos are Twist's most subversive decorative element. The walls are painted dark purple and little candles flicker romantically on low-slung tables. The requisite light shades of blown glass are suspended above the bar, like beacons to passing yuppies. The overall look is pseudo-classy minimalism. Some well-heeled professionals filter in and array themselves on the tasteful smattering of black leather couches.
It’s not a dive bar, that’s for sure. Which makes me a fish out of water. But I don’t care—I know this place’s secret. I know this building’s lascivious history. It’s like looking at the middle-aged woman sitting across the aisle of the bus and knowing that beneath the demure layer of fleece and denim she’s wearing red lace crotchless panties.
According to a 1935 investigation into vice and police corruption in Seattle, this building, 2113 1st Ave, housed one of 25 operating brothels in the downtown area. This particular location was known as the Model Rooms. Just down the street were the Ruby Apartments, the Dixie Rooms, the Rose Rooms, and, at 1st and Pike, just across the street from the Pike Place Market, the Paris Room. Although prostitution was illegal in Seattle at the time, brothels surreptitiously advertised by hanging red floor lamps or neon signs that said, simply, rooms. According to the horrified investigators who filed their report with the city council, “Many such places were operated openly, with window tapping, calling from windows and doors, and even shouting across the street.”
The end verdict of the investigation was that a large portion of the Seattle police force was corrupt. Cops were routinely accepting bribes to turn blind eyes on brothels, gambling rooms, and speakeasies. This is hardly a surprise.
The history of Seattle is a history of vice. The city was once famous for being a wide open town (think Vegas but better), and the battle between the forces of morality and the kingpins and queens of vice has frequently resulted in illicit compromises and unspoken rules.
One of these unspoken rules was the deadline, an old logging road. Early settlers used it to skid logs from the sawmill down the hill to the bay; old timers called it Skid Road. As the town’s population boomed and hookers and booze purveyors settled in to meet the needs of the loggers, mill workers, and railroad men, the founders established an unofficial rule: degenerate businesses stayed on or south of the deadline: Skid Road. The strip grew so famous for sin and degeneracy that the street’s name (shortened eventually to Skid Row) took on a life of its own, and became synonymous with flop hotels and boozers. LA’s famous Skid Row is but a shadow of the original, and the eponymous rock band, of equally questionable reputation, merely an inadequate tribute.
Discovering the city’s tangled history of sin and degeneracy adds spice to everyday life—yuppie martini bars begin to echo with the laughter of sultry women in cherry red negligees, and ghostly vixens catcall from the windows of Belltown’s toniest addresses. Walking by the seemingly respectable Washington Court building, I speculate how many blow jobs were given and received there. Educational voyeurism at its best.
Unfortunately, the history of ladies of the night really is a shadowy realm, a domain of ghosts and phantoms, hints and glimpses. Victorian prudery obscures our vision of Seattle’s seedy underworld. In the 19th century newspapers couldn’t refer to prostitution directly without risking the wrath of moral reformers. Anyone who wanted to talk about sex publicly had to do so in the guise of moral indignation. This was particularly true about prostitution. The most direct 19th century references to prostitution are generally found in religious pamphlets written by moral reformers decrying the practice of so-called white slavery and bemoaning the fate of fallen women and soiled doves. They must have seemed downright titillating at the time, which helps to explain their popularity.
Seattle’s ladies of the night definitely alluded to their profession in their habits and attire; the typical working girl advertized by wearing ‘paste jewels’ (costume jewelry), gaudy make-up, and skirts that were considered short at the time.
Unfortunately for lascivious history buffs, they weren’t exactly writing letters home to mom about the average workday. Because prostitution was often illegal and always considered shameful, women took great pains to cover their tracks, often coyly listing their occupation as ‘seamstress.’ We are left with allusions and hints, never to know exactly what these women were thinking. Was this the desperation trumpeted in the missionary pamphlets, or some more elusive reasoning? A boredom with conventional options or simple economics? The truth materializes in bits and pieces,; columns and numbers. Sifting through police reports and religious pamphlets makes one long to come across a steamy diary detailing little known Victorian sexual positions.
I do know this: before Seattle had a hospital or a library or a courthouse, it had a whorehouse. In 1861, the Illahee opened its doors to the residents of the muddy little logging town. Illahee means homeland in the native Chinook language. The city’s first ladies of the night were Native American girls who had traded their traditional garb for Western finery: hoop skirts, mutton-chop sleeves, calico and pearls.
The Illahee stood on the tide flats south of Skid Road and looked like a typical Western saloon. It was a big rough-hewn space with a bar and rooms in the back for business. Although some Seattle men may have considered the Illahee their ‘homeland’, the name never stuck, and the brothel became known as ‘The Madhouse’. Because the swampy land the whorehouse stood on had been filled in with sawdust from the mill, people also referred to it as ‘Down on the Sawdust’, and called the prostitutes ‘Sawdust Women.’
Doc Maynard, Seattle’s drunkest and most interesting founder, called his city the ‘The Queen of the Northwest’, but he might as well have called it ‘The Whore of the Northwest’ because it soon developed a red-hot reputation. The Madhouse was so popular that the owner was able to lure working girls from the bordellos of San Francisco. These bedecked and beribboned ladies arrived by steamer, causing quite a sensation in Seattle, which was still scarcely larger than a logging camp and had a largely male population. Men swarmed from the hillsides and mines to see the venerable professionals from the Barbary Coast. To quote an article on Seattle from a 1932 issue of American Mercury magazine,“The name of the town evoked an image of a girl in red stockings and a short skirt, with a sparkling glass in her hand, paint on her cheeks, and the divil [sic] in her eyes.”
Before long, Seattle had an entire vice district known as the Lava Beds.
Although saloons, theatres, opium dens, and giant gambling houses flourished, the Lava Beds were most famous for sex. The district was divided into Blackchapel, where one could find girls of various ethnicities, and Whitechapel, which was the city’s French quarter, and predominantly featured white women. “Pink” brothels were staffed by Chinese and Japanese girls. Meanwhile, the House of All Nations advertized six hundred women from 75 nations.
Working girls turned tricks in desolate rows of single story rooms called cribs, in the booths of burlesque theatres called box houses, and in high-class bordellos. Mary Thompson, the African American owner of Blackchapel’s Minnehaha Saloon and brothel, was one of the city’s wealthiest women. According to author Bill Speidel, a black-haired German immigrant named Lou Graham, set up shop across the street from the Catholic Church, appropriately named Our Lady of Good Help. Lou had a penchant for plumed hats and flashy jewels, and her four-story palace was lavishly adorned with gold wallpaper and sultry oil paintings. Graham’s ladies were skilled in the art of intelligent conversation, among other things.
In 1889 a fire raged through Seattle, fueled by exploding whiskey barrels. 30 blocks of prime real estate burned. For once, the Lava Beds were smoking for real. After the fire, residents wandered through spectral, blackened ruins. The city’s reformers saw the fire as a purifying act of God, a chance to build a puritan paradise on the ruins of Gomorrah. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer famously stated, “Never again need this section be used for despicable purposes.”
Despite the reformers’ zeal, within days, saloons and brothels began rising from the ashes. In the meantime the ladies, like the city’s other business people, operated out of tents. Reconstruction created thousands of new jobs, and construction workers flocked to the city. What had once been wooden was rebuilt in stone and brick, and Lou Graham and her ladies were there to capitalize on new markets.
When a steamship bursting at the seams with two tons of gold from the newly discovered Klondike fields docked in Seattle in 1897, every Madame's eyes must have glittered at the thought of boundless opportunity. As the self-proclaimed gateway to Alaska, Seattle was poised to profit from the thousands of prospectors heading north. And profit she did. The streets were noisy with the barking of sled dogs, wagons loaded with provisions, honky-tonk piano, and barkers advertizing everything from practical items, such as long underwear, to 'miracle products' that were most often too good to be true. "Seemingly all men are liars in this town of Seattle," a prospector, Alfred G. Mc Michael, dejectedly wrote home.
But it wasn't just the men who were out to fleece greenhorn prospectors. Seattle's ladies of the night were ready and waiting to employ every trick in the book, including, as legend has it, pretending to admire a miner's stash of gold dust only to surreptitiously dust her heavily greased hair with gold; at the end of the evening she would rinse her hair and then filter the water, ending up with a fine sediment of gold. These moneymaking opportunities lured girls from around the country. After the gold rush, a government report listed Seattle as having the third largest prostitution ‘problem’ in the country. The Queen of the Northwest, indeed.
If Mary Thompson and Lou Graham reigned as queens of the city’s vice district in the 1880’s and 1890’s, the 20th century would see the crown pass to an even more scandalous king: the mayor.
A skinny man who hid his thinning hair beneath a white Stetson and his Eastern, educated background beneath folksy 'man of the people' colloquialisms, Hiram Gill promised Seattle a regulated, segregated vice district. In his excellent book, Skid Road, historian Murray Morgan writes, “Gill believed in letting people alone. If a man wanted to go to hell, Hi was unwilling to set up roadblocks. He didn’t believe morality could be enforced by legislation and he didn’t believe it was healthy to try to keep a town closed, especially a seaport town on the frontier.”
Seattle voted for vice and it got vice. Gill’s chief of police, Charles Wappenstein, set up an arrangement with two vice lords, Clarence Gerald and Giddeon Tupper, wherein he collected $10 a month for each operating prostitute and $50 for each gambling table. With 500 prostitutes on the rolls, Wappenstein and Gill were sitting pretty. According to Morgan, Wappenstein encouraged Gerald and Tupper to open new brothels, even going so far as to suggest locations and make a reassuring call to a potential lender. Encouraged, Gerald and Tupper established the hilariously named Hillside Improvement Company and began seeking investors for their new project: a giant pleasure resort on Beacon Hill, replete with a 500-room brothel. The building was so huge that the company petitioned the city council, asking for permission to build across a city street. They were given a 15-year lease on the land. (Incidentally, the building was destroyed in 1951 when it was hit by a B-50 “Superfortress” bomber that careened out of the sky due to engine trouble.)
The project was actually doomed from the start. A 500-room brothel was a little more than most Seattle voters envisioned when they voted for Gill. A number of people began to reconsider their decision, and reformers successfully pushed for a recall election. Losing popular support in respectable society, Gill fell back on his natural allies, the town harlots, even providing chauffeured service from the Lava Beds to the polls. As the Seattle Star reported on Feb. 7, 1911, “Occasionally a woman, richly dressed, with gold and silver mounted chatelaire bag and a Mexican hairless terrier yipping at her side, drove to the polls and was helped out.”
Evidently early 20th century Seattle prostitutes were quite the trendsetters. But despite his army of gold-spangled voters, Gill lost the election and the city returned to another (very) brief interlude of high-mindedness. But then, as now, vice lurked beneath the city’s veneer of respectability, waiting for its chance to rise again.
