Ghosts of the Red Light District Part II: There Used to Be a Brothel

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The Republican House on Third and Cedar (now Kilbourn) and just a few hundred yards from some Milwaukee ’s busiest brothels. 

A month ago, I brought you stories from some of the long-forgotten brothels of Milwaukee ’s old downtown red light district and connected their long-ago locations with the modern-day city. Since the article proved to be one of my more popular posts, I thought I’d present another round, the details once again brought to us via the 1913 State Commission on Vice and Prostitution. And away we go…

The Depot Girls

Just north of the old Everett Street railroad depot, the well-furnished flat of madam Rose Miller was a regular “welcoming pad” for businessmen and conventioneers arriving in Milwaukee . Like many higher-end houses (a typical visit ran as high as $5, or $120 in 2015 money), Mother Miller’s house did its best business during the day. It was illegal in 1913 for brewers to sell beer to houses of ill-repute, but testimony from a delivery wagon driver for the Miller Brewery suggested the law was not rigidly enforced. Mother Miller received weekly shipments of High Life beer, which she sold for fifty cents a glass. Old Crow whiskey also flowed at her bar, sold by the shot to her well-heeled patrons. Miller told investigators that she was glad that police had begun a more aggressive stance on prostitution in downtown. Their actions had driven many lower-rung houses out of business, while she could afford to make sure the beat cops near the depot were “friendly” to her sporting women. Miller’s apartment stood at 411 North Fourth Street , an area now on the grounds of the high-end The Buckler apartment complex.

With Child

Further north on Fourth Street was the flat of Mary Chewoski, a Polish madam who kept a modest four-room brothel located roughly at the present-day entrance to the Milwaukee Panther Arena. Chewoski had two live-in women, one of whom shared her room with her seven-month-old baby. The house was decidedly of a lower caste than Miller’s. The neighborhood was pocked with small factories and mills where her customers, largely Polish and Greek immigrants, toiled daily. Like Miller, Chewoski had recently experienced trouble with raids and arrests. Unlike Miller, Chewoski herself had been arrested and convicted a number of times in the previous year. In a six-month period in 1913, she was arrested, convicted, and fined $50 on three different occasions. She blamed the arrests on a detective who had it out for her after she refused his solicitation of a bribe. She also suspected nosey neighbors of complaining to police.

Luckless May

May Collins claimed to have been driven into the life by rotten men. She became a prostitute as a young woman after her “sweetheart” got her pregnant and then left her for another woman. She eventually married out of the trade, but her husband turned out to be just as much a louse as the sweetheart and could not support her. She returned to the sporting life as a keeper of a brothel located in a small single-family house at 182 North 7th Street . The place was in a residential area, two stories tall with a small front yard. She had two live-in women, both 22 years old and “nice-looking.” Despite the modest set-up, Collins made a good living from her share of the $3-5 her women earned per trick and the beer and whiskey (like Rose Miller, High Life and Old Crow) she sold from the bar. Collins had also been raided in recent months, and was facing pending charges the night investigators visited her. Across the street from her former haunt is the up-scale Library Hill Apartments.

The Big House

Mattie Carter is one of the rare women the commission investigated who claimed to have entered the sporting life for reasons unrelated to poverty or desperation. Carter was born into a middle class, African American family in Chicago . By age 24, she was married with two children and living a reasonably comfortable life. She never articulated any particular reason for leaving home to investigators (it is entirely possible she was hiding darker parts of her past), but found a certain kind of appeal in Chicago ’s nightlife. In the ten years since she’d left her family, she had taken up with a long string of men, but maintained her independence by working as a prostitute. In Milwaukee, she either owned or rented a large, ten-room multi-family home at 415 Cedar Street (now Kilbourn Avenue), on the fringes of Milwaukee’s small African American neighborhood. She occasionally hosted other women in the place, but was most often working alone. She earned $1 a turn, soliciting the white laborers that abounded in the area. She was known to hang out in the alley behind her house, waiting for men to pass by during shift changes. She had a musician boyfriend in the city and almost certainly out-earned him. There is no other line of work, she told an investigator, that would allow her to earn such an income. Where her home once stood is today part of the parking lot across the street from the Milwaukee Panther Arena.

The Hot Corner

At the corner of Cedar (now Kilbourn) and 4th sat the little, two-story Upton Hotel . The place was decidedly low-end. It was only a few hundred yards down the street from the huge and regal Republican House Hotel, but was miles away in terms of luxury. But the rustic little dive did have something the Republican House lacked… Action! Action in the way of early morning gambling, hard drinks served to adults and teenagers alike, and raunchy jazz tunes courtesy of a singer known only as Mrs. Butler. It was also a place where sex was sold. Mrs. Butler was known to solicit after her shows in the first-floor bar and white prostitutes prowled the room for both white and black johns. While the Upton was one of at least a dozen hotel bars in downtown where the sex trade was plied, it was the mingling of white and black that so often drew the attention of Milwaukee vice police, specifically the interactions of black men and white women. Mattie Carter luring randy Poles and Greeks into her house was one thing, but the prejudices of the time made white womanhood (even if it was for sale) something to be defended from the advances of non-white men. Police were known to perform soft raids on the Upton , hauling away the known west-side pimps – both black and white – who frequented the place and “breaking up” mixed-race groups of people sharing a table. The Upton Hotel no longer stands, but Major Goolsby’s currently sits snuggly in the old footprint of the building.

Interested in more weird tales from Milwaukee ’s past? Check out Matthew J. Prigge’s new book, Milwaukee Mayhem: Murder and Mystery in the Cream City’s First Century.