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The rise and fall of Chicago’s favorite pleasure palace.

April 17th, 2008 Katie H.

Ah, Chicago, the home of so many pleasurable pasttimes:  deep dish pizza, lazy afternoons at Wrigley Field, walks among gorgeous, massive skyscrapers.  A constantly bustling, exuberant place, Chicago has a long history of enjoying itself.  Journalist Karen Abbott’s Sin in the Second City:  Madams, Ministers, Playboys and the Battle for America’s Soul recounts the story of one of the city’s more famous indulgences, the Everleigh Club.  At the height of its fame in 1911, the Everleigh Club rivalled the White House as the best-known house in the nation–and as the most expensive bordello in the country, it often received more press attention than any political figues.

Boasting gourmet buffets, a golden piano and courtesan ‘butterflies’ well versed in Longfellow and Balzac, the Everleigh Club thrived at the heart of Chicago’s Levee vice district.  Bordered by the slaughterhouses that made Chicago’s wealth, the Levee functioned as its own sort of rough city, governed by politicians named Hinky Dink and Bathhouse John and presided over by the jewel-bedecked madam Vic Shaw.  When Ada and Minna Everleigh arrived in 1900, they wanted to set up their bordello on a higher level–including high wages, good medical care for their girls and attempts to keep criminals out of their club.  But the Everleigh manner of doing business was often at odds with the established hierarchy of Levee society.  It’s in this portrayal of the Levee’s denizens that Abbott’s history really shines.  The relationship between Ada, Minna and the Levee regulars reads like characters in historical fiction, especially since Abbott writes much of the book with dialogue and a novelist’s sense of pacing.  The halcyon days of the Everleigh Club wouldn’t last long, as religious and anti-vice forces banded together to shut down the Levee.  But it wasn’t until reformers seized on the plight of ‘white slaves,’ women who had either unwittingly or been forced into prostitution, that the Everleigh Club and its competitors faced a threat that would require more than a few greased palms to remedy.

Even though Sin in the Second City reads pretty breezily, Abbott’s solid research is never in doubt.  Her book opens the door to deeper topics: the Everleigh sisters’ choice of (and success with) their business, the double standards for men’s versus women’s sexuality, and the assumptions about who was running and frequenting the Levee’s brothels.  It’s a fascinating account of a time and place that won’t happen again, but whose whose effects still linger in today’s culture.

Entry Filed under: Nonfiction