Prostitution in Salt Lake City: The Good Old Days...

[_Corpsegrinder]

The dichotomy of organized, state-sanctioned prostitution in Salt Lake City has always fascinated me. Polygamy-era Mormons viewed SLC's prostitution as a gentile institution, and tolerated it in the hopes that local gentiles would tolerate Mormon polygamy. The arrangement seems to have worked, though it would be wrong to assume that only gentiles patronized SLC's official red light district...

Glitzy Gateway mall lies upon seedy, naughty past
Kristen Rogers-Iversen
The Salt Lake Tribune
08/05/2007

From 1908 to 1911 the block west of The Gateway was known as the Stockade, and it housed Salt Lake City's prostitutes.

Before the Stockade was built, brothels crowded Commercial Street (now Regent Street). But Salt Lake City was growing fast, and a new mayor, John Bransford, hated having prostitution right in the business district. So he visited other cities, researching solutions.

His conclusion: "I could see no other way out of it." Salt Lake must confine and control the ladies - far away from downtown.

Bransford visited Dora Topham (dba "Belle London"), Ogden's most accomplished madam, and asked her to build a special "tenderloin district." Topham was oh-so-altruistically willing. She later said she saw an opportunity to do good by confining the necessary evil of prostitution, decreasing diseases, and at the same time pulling a profit.

With a few partners she formed the Citizens' Investment Company to build the Stockade, but she herself paid most of the costs: reportedly around a half-million dollars. The Ogden Standard-Examiner wrote, "Former cottages and 'terraces' are being turned into brothels and dives" where "utter lawlessness will prevail." It was a "stupendous outlay of money for immoral purposes."

Belle built about 100 tiny "cribs" for the prostitutes, who paid $1 to $4 rent per day. She also created some "parlor houses," each run by a "landlady" and staffed by very friendly women.

Three entrances to the Stockade and three guards ensured that the immoral purposes were confined. More crucially, it ensured that when the police, out of political necessity, staged a raid, someone would set off the internal alarms. The police always found the Stockade dark and deserted.

Naturally, the Stockade engendered controversy. The governor and other high officials opposed it. Newspapers debated it. Some residents on the west side formed the West Side Citizens League to fight it. The Standard-Examiner supported their point of view: The mayor had foisted the prostitutes on a neighborhood, near "the front doors of the homes on the west side of Salt Lake . . . where people, without their consent, will be forced to live in juxtaposition to that which is highly offensive to their sense of decency."

It bears saying that it was immigrants and poor people who lived in these homes by the dirty, noisy railroad tracks and the Stockade. There had been, to be sure, no talk of building it on the east side.

The Stockade gained some distorted notoriety. Non-Mormon V.S. Peet, on trade mission of sorts to England, heard a street speaker describe the Stockade as a Mormon plot, saying "that the Mormons kept a big building or district in Salt Lake for prostitution; it was called a 'Mormon hospital'; that every month hundreds of English girls were lured to Utah by damnable, hellish, sneaking, shrewd, ignorant Mormon missionaries, and that those girls were placed in that hospital."

Commented Peet, "I think he must have heard of the American Party Stockade."

Apparently all the opposition overwhelmed the fledgling enterprise - not to mention that Topham was convicted of inducing a 16-year-old into the Stockade. After less than three years of business, she closed the Stockade. She was sentenced to 18 years in prison, but the Utah Supreme Court reversed the conviction.

The cribs were quickly demolished. Topham moved to California, where she reportedly reformed.
Perhaps altruism really was her true nature. After her sudden death in 1925, a business associate wrote that she had always aided the poor when she lived in Ogden. In California, she wanted to forget the past and raise her two daughters. She made an "honorable living."

While helping an employee with a car tow, she was crushed by the cars. She died of the injuries five days later.

In the meantime, prostitution continued without her in Salt Lake City. It just was not as well-organized.

History of the Stockade and Salt Lake's Red Light District
Jami Balls (http://historytogo.utah.gov/places/olym ... ckade.html)

Commonly referred to as "the oldest profession," prostitution holds a long and intriguing position in Utah history. The general feeling at the beginning of the 20th Century considered it as a "necessary" evil that could never be eliminated, but merely controlled. Laws existed mostly to satisfy middle-class morality, but normally, it was confined to a specific part of town called a "red-light" district where it could be observed and controlled.

Clearly, by the 1870s, Commercial Street, (today's Regent Street between Main and State Streets and 100 and 200 South) in downtown Salt Lake City was the center of the red-light district. Parlor houses along the street housed legitimate businesses; usually liquor or tobacco stores, and held "female boarders" in the upper parts of the houses. Miss Helen Blazes and Miss Ada Wilson were each madams of these types of establishments. Police regularly conducted raids of the establishments, fining, arresting, and even sometimes conducting physical examinations of the women. By 1908 a formal registration system existed where police kept track of the names and addresses of madams and their houses and in turn, the madams supplied current lists of their girls. Each month, the girls paid a ten-dollar fine which supplied much of the city's revenues.

Starting in 1903, calls to purge Commercial Street of its sordid establishments began, citing that it soiled the main business district and decreased property value. Salt Lake City mayor John Bransford along with the city council adopted a "stockade" policy in 1908, planning to build a sort of compound where the denizens could practice their inevitable trade freely, but discretely. Bransford said, "I propose to take these women from the business section of the city and put them in a district which will be one of the best, if not the very best, regulated districts in the country."

These men asked Mrs. Dora B. Topham, Utah's notorious "Belle London" of Ogden's "Electric Alley," to form a corporation, buy a block of land on Salt Lake's westside and establish a stockade. During the summer of 1908, she created the Citizen's Investment Company and purchased land where it would have, "as little negative effect as possible." They chose the area between 500 and 600 West and 100 and 200 South because the were railroads on three sides of it, it divided two school districts (so children wouldn't have to walk past it), and because, "the 'foreign element,' (Greek and Italian workers) had so destroyed the area that establishing prostitution there would not harm it any further and could even be rationalized as catering to the immoral foreigners.'"

The community reacted in many different ways. The West Side Citizen's League was formed to abolish it, but many also found it a very practical way to deal with prostitution. Soon after completion, on the evening of December 18 city police told prostitutes that they had until 4:00 a.m. the next morning to vacate the area. They basically were given three choices: leave town, go to jail, or reside in the stockade.

The stockade consisted of nearly 100 small brick "cribs" which were ten feet square with a door and window, and built in rows. A curtain divided the crib in two, with a washstand and chair in the front part and a white enameled bed in the back with the girls paying one to four dollars a day for their "residence." Within the stockade there were also larger parlor houses and storehouses for liquor--an essential component of the stockade operation. The stockade had three entrances, each guarded to both keep children and "undesirable" guests from entering as well as to warn of the periodic police raids. The installation of an elaborate alarm system proved to be very effective for whenever the police ventured out, they found the stockade dark and deserted.

The stockade operated for three years until on September 28, 1911, Belle London unexpectedly announced, "The stockade will be closed on Thursday and the same will not be reopened again." Although many theories exist, it is still questioned what her exact motivation for the closure was. Again some people expressed great relief while others felt very upset to "have the streets flooded with the scarlet ladies." Some of the former occupants accepted the offer of the Women's League, going to the Women's Rescue Station and leaving their lives of sin. While, others returned to Commercial Street which continued to be a red-light district until the 1930s, or remained near West 200 South, an area for prostitution until the 1970s.

[_Buffalo]

Prostitution actually doesn't look much different from the wife swapping that was going on in early Mormonism.

[_harmony]

The arrangement seems to have worked, though it would be wrong to assume that only gentiles patronized Salt Lake City's official red light district...

Nothing in those paragraphs suggests anything about the patrons of the prostitutes at all. Why would you assume gentiles weren't alone in their patronization?

[_DarkHelmet]

Now I see why my mom thinks the Salt Lake Tribune is an anti-mormon paper. Things that are true, aren't necessarily useful. How does printing this story bring a person closer to Christ? Nevermind that it's an interesting story. The purpose of a newspaper should be to build up the Kingdom of god and bring people unto Christ.

[_Corpsegrinder]

Nothing in those paragraphs suggests anything about the patrons of the prostitutes at all. Why would you assume gentiles weren't alone in their patronization?

No, neither article says much about the religious or social backgrounds of the Stockade’s patrons; for that you’d have to go to Prostitution, Polygamy, and Power: Salt Lake City, 1847-1918 by Jeffrey Nichols. However, contemporary Church leaders made it clear that they considered prostitution to be chiefly a gentile institution. Mormon polygamy, they claimed from the pulpit, was the only logical antidote to social vices like prostitution. George Q. Cannon (if memory serves) stridently claimed that polygamy rendered its male practitioners physically incapable of harlotry. (Yeah, right.)

I believe Mormons and gentiles frequented the Stockade in equal numbers.

[_Quasimodo]

I believe Mormons and gentiles frequented the Stockade in equal numbers.

I remember running across the story of the "Stockade" while searching for something unrelated (I love the internet).

I was blown away that the State of Utah subsidize the establishment of an official brothel.

It's interesting that prostitution continued on West Second South for so many years.

While I was still living in Utah a State Senator named Alan Howe (good Mormon) was arrested for soliciting a prostitute (undercover police lady) on West Second South. The joke at the time was that all the prostitutes were wearing buttons that said "I know Howe".



The "Stockade" under construction (great photo).

[_moksha]

While I was still living in Utah a State Senator named Alan Howe (good Mormon) was arrested for soliciting a prostitute (undercover police lady) on West Second South. The joke at the time was that all the prostitutes were wearing buttons that said "I know Howe".

Were any of these ladies heard to ask, "Howe's it coming"?