P a g e 2 G h o s t T o w n s a n d H i s t o r y o f M o n t a n a N e w s l e t t e r ors of wide-open mining camps like Butte. By the 1890s, glamorous parlor houses, moderately priced brothels, and hundreds of one-room “cribs” lined Mercury and Galena streets. While Charlie Chaplin raved about Butte’s beautiful prostitutes, another noted that “there were some tough-lookin’ blisters too.” Pickpockets, thieves, and drug addicts made the district a dangerous place. The city partially gave in to reformers in 1903, forcing public women to move to less obvious places like Pleasant Alley, Fashion Terrace, and Model Terrace. At its peak, as many as a thousand women of all ages, races, and backgrounds vied to make a living in Butte’s terraced alleys. On Saturday nights and paydays, thousands of men strolled along its wooden sidewalks. The Copper Block (see 8) was home to many of the women; its back opened conveniently onto the multistoried cribs. Prohibition and World War I sent red light activities underground in 1917. The district, however, reopened in the 1930s as “Venus Alley” with a green board fence around it. The cribs closed in 1943, but several bordellos operated until the last one, the Dumas, closed in 1982. Butte’s red-light district was at its peak in 1916 when this Sanborn-Perris fire insurance map of Butte was drawn. Cribs, tiny one-room “offices” where women of the district conducted business, crowded into nearly every available space. “Female Boarding” or “F.B.,” the Sanborn label for prostitution, appears on almost all the buildings. Owners of property in the district, some of them prominent businessmen, collected two to five dollars a day in rent for each crib. Collection, of course, was done through an agent employed for that purpose. A Short Guide to Butte’s Once-Famous Tenderloin Copper Block Park 1 This central alleyway was first known as Pleasant Alley. Beginning in the mid-1880s, cribs lined both sides of Galena Street and by 1900 filled in the spaces on Mercury Street where the high class parlor houses did a lucrative business. Attempts at reform just after the turn of the century made open solicitation on Galena and Mercury streets illegal. This changed the district in a major way by shifting much of the women’s blatant “advertising” to the alleyways. Women of the Mercury Street houses sat in their upstairs windows and tapped on the glass to attract attention because “public” women were, at least for a time, not allowed on the ground floors. 2 The Windsor, first called the Richelieu and later the Irish World, was originally an exclusive parlor house with twenty-four beautifully furnished rooms. Satin-covered chairs, gilt-framed mirrors, expensive tapestries, and red draperies graced the two downstairs parlors. In 1900, madam Bertha Leslie emPhoto by Jolene Ewert-Hintz
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