THE RICH MAN’S GIRL TRAP.
We have crossed over to Michigan avenue—to one of the main boulevards of the world. It is the promenade of men of millions and women of blood. It is the location of some of the most exclusive, most fashionable and most expensive hotels in the world.
Surely, you say, these hotels do not figure in the great vice plot which exists in Chicago?
They do! They figure in a way that will make every father and mother who reads this narration, tremble with fear and horror.
These hotels are infested with men of wealth and time, men of dead consciences, men of diseased moral senses, who are always in search of young, innocent, pretty prey for their decaying passions.
Under the pretense of respectability, and with the false counsel that they are safe and protected from harm, these parasites bring their young victims to these hotels, dazzle them with the beauty and luxury about them, rob them of their senses with new and intoxicating delights, and then steal the only priceless gift that God gave them.
That is one phase of the hotel evil, as we see it from a superficial glance. There are a score of others.
In one of the leading hotels of the world, there is a great crime center. Let us enter it.
Down the corridors we walk until we enter the portals of a new vice palace. It is a cafe scene but not of the character witnessed at the place first visited. Everything bespeaks luxury. The music is subtly and softly sensuous. Obsequious waiters tread softly from table to table, taking their orders from rich patrons.
The men sitting about bear the marks of wealth and prosperity. They are money lords, feasting at the table of life and toying away the moments with women who are ready to be purchased for pretty clothes, suppers with wines, and hard, cold dollars and cents.
In the majority, the women we see, are dressed in the latest fashions, brilliant with delicately rouged faces and penciled eyebrows, set off by large and attractive picture hats.
If you study the majority of the faces you will see that they are cut as if of stone. They are faces of women who have lived through tragedies, have thrust those tragedies aside and have reduced life to a mere living from day to day, prepared every hour to barter flesh and blood for cash. But, as in the less pretentious cafe, we find here also the type of girls and women who are just beginning to stray into the broad path of destruction.
Money buys a false air of respectability. It has purchased that pharasaical atmosphere for the big hotels.
It is in these fashionable hotel cafes and restaurants that sin is suggested and the road to ruin prepared. Of course, we must not lose sight of the fact that the vast majority of the women who enter such places, have long since drunk the first glass of poison and eaten the first piece of forbidden fruit.
Into these places, nightly, thousands of men and women bent on shameful missions come and depart, inebriated by wines and liquors and forgetful of respect to each other. There are, however, hundreds who enter and depart without being contaminated by the vice that haunts the handsomely furnished apartments.
Out in the lobby of the hotel, we notice a nattily-dressed man of mature years with the gray showing in his hair, holding a conversation with one of the hotel attaches. We are curious. We notice he is being given directions.
We follow him to a room in one of the hotels adjoining the one we have just visited. He is taken to a certain room and is admitted by a rather flashingly dressed woman of about forty-five years, of florid complexion and sharp, raucous voice.
She smiles at the man. He speaks to her in a low voice. We might overhear this conversation or one similar to it in import:
“I am Mr. Edwards from Cincinnati. I am a business man and the evening is boring. Mr. ... the hotel clerk, tells me you can find me a companion?” queries the caller.
The woman smiles knowingly, stops and thinks and then says in a half jesting manner:
“Why, certainly, Mr. Edwards. I can make the evening agreeable. I can find you the best little partner in the world.
“But”—and she smiles some more—“what do you want, something rather young and new to the game, or a ‘woman of some experience?’ I can certainly produce a choice assortment.” Then she laughs that meaningless laugh again.
Mr. Edwards hesitates a moment, laughs off a possible embarrassment and then answers in assumed flippancy:
“Oh, as long as they are numerous, serve me up a young blonde chicken of about seventeen summers, one that will go the limit and not try to put mucilage on her fingers to stick to the long green. I’ll pay her right for her trouble.”
Then he makes his first flesh payment at that moment to the mistress of a dozen women’s bodies. He strolls down to the lobby and waits. A few moments later he is “paged” by a bellboy and a note is given him. If we should follow him we would find that the note named the rendezvous and that the purchased woman waited for him there to do his bidding during the night of shame.
This is not fiction but shuddering fact.
In a Jackson boulevard hotel, there is a “Miss Harris,” who is the procuress of girls of every description, character, temperament and physical type, for men of wealth.
There are a dozen of such women with headquarters in Chicago’s big hotels. They are the fashionable panderers for the rich human beasts, who live or stop at the hotels or who go there to find their victims.
These places in the criminal world have a name. They are named “Houses of Call.” They are employment agencies for young and old prostitutes. If a man is willing to pay the price demanded, the woman, “Miss Harris,” or other such women, will produce for his pleasure, a young virgin and turn her over to the merciless, insane lust of human Satan.
These places are the fashionable flesh-markets, the slave blocks where women are sold to men of wealth.
That is another phase of the great Vice Trust, for those women panderers, and those girl slaves pay tribute to carry on their traffic to the great kings of the underworld. Of the relation of these classes of criminals to their protectors we shall speak later.
“Miss Harris”—we shall use her as a type—has a secret directory to the covert, hidden but expensive haunts of vice.
After Mr. Edwards departs, we might see another caller on a similar mission. He is not a new customer. He is an old one. He makes his demand without hesitation. He wants a young girl of innocence. He wants a girl in the first flush of maturity, a girl who fears the things of sin, but who, paradoxically, craves for the cloying sweet things of life.
The girl is found for the monster. His crime must be committed in the dark, in a secure and safe place, in a place where no one shall see him committing his soul-murder.
Again “Miss Harris” comes to the front. She directs her customer with the trembling, wondering and frightened girl, to the “Arena,” a pretentious residence in Michigan avenue near Fifteenth street.
His coming is known before his arrival. “Miss Harris” has informed the “Madam” that a “live wire with a young kid” is on the way to the place. The man and his victim are received politely and ushered into a luxuriously furnished room, delicately scented with perfume and stripped of any suggestion that it is a crime-chamber where sin is intangibly present, waiting for the next victim.
The desecration of soul and body begins and ends in that room. If the man wishes it, supper with delicate morsels of food and wines of choice and expensive brands are served. The atmosphere wooes to sleep the last moral rebellion and all is lost.
The “Arena” is mentioned here as a type, again. Chicago is infested with such places. They may be found in our best residence districts, near fashionable churches and adjoining homes where purity is sacred.
To state more specific facts on such places we will name several more similar “flats.”
A “Mrs. Clouds” conducts a similar place on La Salle avenue near Erie street. It is necessary to have a letter of introduction or be known before entrance can be effected. Here, nightly, men of wealth and even of prominence with wives and families, ignorant of their orgies, take young girls.
The automobiles of the wealthy drive up to this place every evening and their occupants seek their pleasure within.
Here many-course dinners with wine as a zest giver—usually champagne—are served to the patrons for $12 a plate. It is the vice haunt of the millionaires and their purchased women.
Then there is the place of Mrs. Mohr in Erie street, west of Rush street, where the same luxuries are in evidence, where the same vices are committed and where the range of prices eats deep into anything but a plethoric bank account.
These places run without intervention. They are known to few outside the patrons. They pay, as do all other forms of vice, for police toleration. Reform movements have not attacked them because they are scarcely aware of their existence. They are but a small part of the contributing elements of graft and corruption.
We have digressed, but it was necessary to show the source and end of a vice evil starting in the big hotels. In these “flats” of secrecy, girls will be furnished in the same manner as they are furnished by “Miss Harris” and her ilk of panderers.
But let us resume our trip in the underworld. From the hotels, we move southward again.