THE BORDERLAND OF HELL.
Down Michigan avenue, Wabash avenue, State street, Fifth avenue and many other prominent thoroughfares leading out of the loop district, are the “assignation hotels” of Chicago. These are the houses where men bring their victims at a cost of one dollar to five dollars a room, where street walkers “steer” their customers and where vice festers with the roar of the business world outside the windows.
Within the loop district alone there are fifty hotels of this vicious character. Their average earnings, according to a prominent investigator and reformer, are $600 a night. As we move southward we pass them at every step, little dreaming of the lives that have been ruined within and the tragedies that have begun and culminated there.
The part of the South side in which we have entered was at one time a fashionable neighborhood of wealthy and respectable residents. The Vice Trust drove them away by its encroachments. Today those same buildings are tenanted by lost women, living there and carrying on their nefarious trade in the district but a short distance away.
From Twentieth street south on Michigan avenue, in sections, and in Wabash avenue and State street, vice reigns openly and supreme. There is no pretense at respectability. Vice has thrown off its masks and flaunts its hideousness, its diseases and its crimes in our faces.
It is the Borderland of Hell,—it is the city’s death-spot. Similar borderlands are found on the West and North sides.
As you look farther south you can count the electric signs flaring over the haunts of vice—they spell saloon, cafe or hotel. They run into the hundreds.
The interiors of these cafes are similar to the loop cafe we have described, stripped of its air of hidden sin. Here sin stalks about as the fearless master.
The woman who a year ago reveled in the pleasures of a night at some fashionable restaurant with a “friend” may be found drunk and maudlin, vulgarly and cheaply clothed, dropping “dope” into her glass of whiskey to revive her tired brain and body to attract another victim and stave off the wolf of starvation a little while longer.
These are the “hangouts” of the women who are going down and down. They have ceased to attempt to appear respectable; they have tired of hiding their shame and infamy; they have torn off the mask and their faces peer leeringly at you and their blue-colored lips seem to cry out in hellish abandon:
“I am a damned, lost creature. I sold my birthright. I bartered the body my good mother gave me. I drank to the last lees the glass and I am accursed. Death has placed his seal upon me and I am struggling to cheat him of a few days longer. Life, life, more life!”
Here women smoke cigarettes openly, embrace the men they are with, expose their limbs in licentious manner to attract prospective customers. Here a sign is made, and a half drunken waiter brings a half crazed creature sitting alone in the shadows of a pillar, a white powder, which she snuffs. That is cocaine.
A majority of the women who live in and about the levee districts of the city, are the slaves of the opium, cocaine and morphine habit, and fourteen per cent, according to a conservative estimate, are yearly sent to the state insane institutions as hopeless victims of drugs.
In the “near-levee” cafes we come across a vice-creature, whose type we have not yet encountered in our night tour.
Watch that young man, dressed in a stylish, brown suit of clothes, who is talking to the painted unfortunate beside him. His voice rises as he shakes his finger at her. Her hand trembles as she reaches down in her stocking. He curses her and tells her to hurry. Then she gives him a number of bills.
“Damn you, you cheap cur; have you quit hustling or have you another man?” he yells at her above the jarring music of a tin-pan piano and the cigarette voice singing to it.
“Get out on the street and get some business!” he says to her hoarsely, striking her across the face.
Pale and trembling the pitiful creature rises and hurries out into the street to search for more prey.
That man is the woman’s “cadet.” That is the more polite word for the old word “pimp.” That is her master:—the man who takes from her the infamous earnings of her body.
Lower than the murderer, in the moral scale, are these debased creatures. They are men stripped of every instinct of honor, lost to every sense of shame. They are the lowest form of the human parasite.
In the borderland of the levee they live, breathe, eat and drink off the earnings of thousands of depraved women. From the earnings of their slaves they pay the police to grant their women immunity from prosecution.
These men are also termed “macks.” The name means nothing; it is the character of its bearing that is the horrible fact.
In the South side levee district, including the places that encircle the open houses of prostitution, there are 800 of these low vile creatures. We are but describing one of the levees of the city. Conditions are similar in the others.
We have seen them in the notorious cafes of the South side but they exist in swarms within the levee zone proper.
The hours are swiftly passing and our trip is by no means over. Let us leave the haunts we have just visited.
Let us go down to one lower level of crime and vice. We have reached Twenty-second street and Wabash avenue and we stand on the edge of the Great White Ulcer.