The exploitation of women in Chicago in the vast business of White Slavery and segregated vice, is carried on very openly and above board. Street walkers carry on their nefarious business of securing trade for the “house” almost entirely unmolested. Women stand in the doors of the West Side houses of ill-fame and solicit those who pass.
At 737 Washington boulevard, two doors west of the Chicago Rescue Mission, with which the writer is connected, a woman[1] stands in the door constantly soliciting each male passer-by; boys are invited to come in and take their first lesson in vice, and on this block are many, many children, boys and girls. One of the “girls” kept by this woman was a harlot known as “No-nose” whose whole face was so sunken with syphilis that her nose was almost gone. The writer remembers well when through the efforts of a fellow-worker “No-nose” was sent to the County Hospital for medical treatment, and considers this girl one of the greatest menaces to Chicago boyhood. No man would have touched the woman.
The blocks in this immediate vicinity are all thickly peopled by families with many children in them. The following group of little girls live in their alley-homes within a few doors of some of the worst sights and dives in Chicago.
Children of the Slums
They see no sights but vice, they hear no talk but filth. At the age of ten they are perfectly familiar with all the ins and outs of harlotry, know many prostitutes, many pimps.
Do you think these girls (each one is known to the writer personally) have any chance for virtue?
At 804 Washington Boulevard, almost across the street from the writer’s office, appears the following sign on the window of the cigar store located there.
