ANTE ROOMS OF HELL.
Let us follow the crowd of men and women into that large building on Twenty-second street.
A novel sight greets us as we enter. Our hats and coats are checked and we walk out from behind a mirror used as a screen into a large hall on the floor of which several hundred couples are dancing to the strains of an orchestra in a balcony above.
Some of the faces which we saw earlier in the evening within the loop district have also “come south,” as the expression is. They are here to revel until dawn. There is no letup until the bright sun drives vice blinking and blinded back into its holes.
Every type of woman, from the woman who is simply “slumming” to the most depraved and degenerate creature can be seen in this notorious levee dance hall. As the music dies down, the couples with unsteady steps, caused by the whirling about the floor and the drinks which have been freely imbibed, seek rest at the dirty, wet chairs and tables which encompass the room. Drinks are served in profusion, regardless of the state of inebriety of the patrons and regardless of the one o’clock closing law, which the police declare is in effect.
Women, rendered senseless by drink, are dragged from the place nightly and carted away—God knows where!
Let us get away from the reeking atmosphere, from the smell of stale beer and sickly, perspiring women.
Before we enter the biggest cesspool of all, let us stop at Buxbaum’s Cafe at Twenty-second and State streets,—the most notorious outside-levee dive in the city of Chicago.
Its habitues, with few exceptions, are the overflow, the outcasts of the levee, or the women who seek a few moments of so-called relaxation from their labors of sin.
All night this place reeks with infamy; all night orgies impossible to portray are carried on; all night the saturnalia of vice wrings the blood from women’s hearts and crushes life in its ever grinding mill.