Perhaps no fringe character of Milwaukee’s history is as well known or as misunderstood as Katherine B. “Kittie” Williams, the so-called “grand Madame” of the city’s old red light district. Williams garners mention in most city histories and a representation of her brothel is even slyly placed within the “Streets of Old Milwaukee” exhibit at the Milwaukee Public Museum. The spirit of Miss Kittie was channeled by the museum in 1995 for their annual gala, which featured the event’s co-chairwoman as Kittie, acting as a “worldly” woman of the night. “The idea was cute,” she told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “It’s naughty, but nice.”
Most of what is down in print about her, however, is fluff and myth, a sadly lacking representation of a figure whose hard life was hardly “cute” and much too complex to be naughty or nice.
Williams was born October 2, 1861 in Sacramento, Calif., and grew up in the San Francisco Bay area. According to her testimony before a 1914 state commission on vice and prostitution, she worked for a lawyer in California in her late teens, but a cruel step-mother and unspecified “trouble” with the lawyer drove her to flee to Milwaukee around age 19. She spent two years in the city working straight jobs before she got into the “life.” Asked if she had any “connection” with men before the life, she replied “Oh, yes…I started out when I was young enough and old enough.”
By 1882, Williams had purchased a pair of unassuming three-story buildings on the present-day site of Red Arrow Park. There, she established herself as the proprietor of Milwaukee’s finest “sporting house.” In 1889, The Sporting and Club House Guide to Milwaukee gushed about her establishment—“the finest of the kind in the city”—writing that her side-by-side homes were “two splendid instruments, and with very talented professors, one can always enjoy the music.”
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In her heyday, Williams could charge $10-$20 per visit, tenfold what the city’s lesser houses could get. Men relaxed in the finely decorated rooms of her estate enjoying beer and wine and the jaunty tunes of the house band. “I catered to the very best people in the city, and all over the world in fact,” she said. Her clients were mostly married men, some with wives who were sick or lame or who did not want any more children. But some of the wives, Williams insisted, had simply gone frigid. “The wives,” she said, “were to blame a great many times.”
As for her celebrated “professors,” she usually had between eight and 12 women working in her house. Young women wrote to her from across the country, hoping to secure work. But in these women, a sad angle to the life emerges. Williams spoke of her girls in a motherly tone, equal parts boss and protector. “I have women come to my house and write me letters and ask what they will do,” she told the commission. “I wonder, myself, what can be done. It is really pitiful. They have no home.” And once a woman got into the life, it was hard to get out. “Most of them would work,” she said. “[But] they know they can’t do anything else.”
She also spoke with a tinge of pain about the way the city looked at Kittie and her kind after the party was over. Despite servicing the “very best” of the city, these men would just as soon ignore her and her girls when the sun came up. Williams said she had once donated $150 to the city zoo to purchase a bull. She said zoo took her money and bought the animal, but then told the papers that the city had donated the cash. She was never even thanked for the gift.
When an attempt to shutter the city’s red light district drove her underground in 1912, Williams added a fake lobby to her house and rebranded it as the Phoenix Hotel. The 1914 vice commission inspected her house with undercover investigators and found it was still “one of the finest [brothels] in the United States,” serving judges, lawyers and other high-ranking city officials. Williams confided to one of these undercover men that she had no fear about running her place. She said she had many friends in high authority and would certainly be tipped off in the event of a raid.
Kittie Williams died in 1943. The notices of her death proclaimed her the “Queen” of the old vice district and a nightlife “legend.” But it seems unlikely that Williams would have considered herself either legend or queen. She was a survivor who had built a refuge, not an empire. Interviewed in 1914, she spoke not of the wild nights, but of the poor girls she had given a home, the girls who had lived the hard life, but had—for a moment—found themselves able to get along in a society that wanted little to do with them. “If there is anything we can do [for these young women],” she said of herself and the city’s other madams, “I am willing to help.” When asked about her future in the city, she saw none. “I would like to sell my property and get away from the city,” she said. “I have never had any pleasure in [the business], and I have been working and working.”
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