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.
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.