BIG PALACES OF VICE.
The Everleigh Club, at Twenty-second and Dearborn streets, the richest and most gorgeously furnished house of prostitution in the United States, is a notable example. Another one is Georgie Spencer’s.
Honesty never cemented a single stone in the building. It was built and furnished out of the blood and flesh dollars of women. Its foundations reach down to hell and each chamber with its beautiful settings is filled with the ghosts of women who suffered untold agonies of mind and body to make it attractive to victims of the women who followed them. Thousands of dollars are harvested nightly there. Wealthy prominent men frequent this place.
Immorality is hideous; but there crimes are committed against nature that make men revolt at the thoughts of them, down in those pest holes. In the slang of the levee, it is called “putting on a show.”
It is bad enough to be obliged through binding circumstances to sell one’s virtue, but think of the horror, the humiliation, the degradation of committing acts for the sake of drunken, orgy-loving men that even the animal nature within us rebels against.
That is a hasty sketch of the “redlight” life as the visitor sees it. There is still another phase, a deeper phase, a commercial phase, a graft phase, and of that we shall speak later as it is our intention to show why these conditions exist without hindrance from the police and how this mighty army of Satan strives, struggles and dies for the earthly lords of hell.
There is no intention here to paint a lurid picture of Chicago’s ulcer spots that might arouse passions and do evil.
We are telling of the Great Curse that we may help destroy it. We have said that the wiping out of the prostitute will not cure the malady and we are soon to prove it. We have told of vice that we may show how it serves its masters.