Regarding just two of the building
blocks of Western Canada. In which the Indian People had no knowledge of
until contact with the first Europeans.
Booze and Prostitution which was aloud
by various government officials and introduced to this country.
They will never find an answer to stop it. Quoting Mr James H. Grey book
“Red
Lights on the Prairies” Thank you Mr. Grey for your Historical insight
:
Quote
There was no Street
like Annabella Street. .
Winnipeg was the
first prairie city, so the study of the urban mores of western Canada naturally begins
there. The city was incorporated on January
1, 1874,
long before any of the other centres was more than a minor gleam in a
cartographer's eye. That act of incorporation was perhaps as characteristic of
the place as anything that ever happened there. With a scant 2,000 population, Winnipeg in 1873 would hardly
have qualified as a good small town. Yet it scorned town status and opted for
becoming a city. When its bill of incorporation was delayed by a procedural
wrangle in the Manitoba legislature, a mob of indignant citizens seized the
Speaker of the house, dragged him from the building, and treated him to a
tarring and feathering.' That surely was an indication of the depth of the Winnipeg conviction that,
whatever its momentary population deficiency, it was manifestly destined to
become the great metropolis of the northwest. It was right, of course; Calgary did not achieve city
status until twenty years later, while Edmonton, Regina, and Saskatoon were unable to shed
their small-town limitations for still another decade. When Winnipeg reached its silver
anniversary, at the tail end of the Victorian era, its population outnumbered
that of all these other embryo cities combined, and by at least three to one.2
Because it was first,
Winnipeg tended to become the
pattern, if not the accepted trend setter, for the cities that came after. The Winnipeg tycoons, whose
interests were eastward, might live and die without ever getting to Calgary or Edmonton. But leaders of the
other cities had to pass through Winnipeg en route to the
business centres of eastern Canada, or to check in
periodically with the western headquarters of eastern firms located there. Thus
Calgarians and Edmontonians could hardly avoid being aware of what was going on
in Winnipeg. When they watched
Winnipeggers frantically planting trees all over the place, they carried the
idea home, just as they copied its experiments with publicly owned utilities,
its school designs, its street layouts, even its streetcar heating system. Most
of all, they adopted Winnipeg's casual enthusiasm
for uninhibited boozing, and its toleration of prostitution, preferably within
a specially segregated community of its own. Like Winnipeg the other cities,
which began as wide-open boom towns, were eventually overrun by legions of
reformers dedicated to turning the great northwest into a latter-day
Massachusetts. Because it was the first and largest, Winnipeg also became the
inspiration centre for the prohibition crusade that kept the prairies on fire
from 1880 until 1916. In Winnipeg, however, things
tended to go to extremes, and in all directions. The history of morals kept
repeating itself elsewhere, but seldom with the same explosiveness that was the Winnipeg hallmark.
In later years it was
Calgary which sought to
identify with the two-fisted, he-mannishness of the western frontier. In fact
it was only in Winnipeg where such a posture
could claim a semblance of legitimacy. Winnipeg began as a scattered
collection of shacks in which men casually took the law into their own hands.
There was, for example, the notorious case of the Reverend Griffith Owen
Corbett, the Anglican priest who was jugged in, 1864 for attempting an abortion
on a housemaid he had seduced. When he was hauled before a justice of the peace
and ordered confined to the jail at Fort Garry pending trial, his
friends stormed into the post and threatened violence unless Corbett was
released on bail. After a lot of shouting and threatening and coming and going,
bail was eventually granted. When Corbett was brought to trial, a jury
convicted him and he was sentenced to six months in jail. From his cell he
bombarded the Nor' Wester with James H. Gray denunciations of his accusers and
professions of his own innocence. After some days a local schoolteacher named
James Stewart organized a posse, knocked the jailer unconscious, and released
Corbett, who returned to the bosom of his family at Headingly.
The authorities then arrested Stewart, who was promptly rescued from jail by
another mob. No attempt was ever made to re-arrest either man. Corbett
eventually deserted his family and returned to England, the seduced housemaid
died a few years later, and the schoolteacher went on to achieve a large
measure of local fame as a leader of the "Canadian
Party" 3
What part
booze played in the monkeyshines of 1864 is, of course, conjectural, but it was
probably substantial. Winnipeg at the time boasted
two hotel saloons. The first was owned by George Emmering and was known far and
wide as "The Dutchman's". The Royal Hotel was built by Henry
McKenney, a half brother of the notorious Dr. John Schultz. "The
Dutchman's" was a favourite watering hole for the American mule-skinners,
teamsters, traders, and sundry roughnecks who were then forcing the Hudson's Bay Company to
tolerate the free-traders and to switch to St. Paul as its major supply
route. At "The Dutchman's" bar the Americans toasted the impending
doom of the Hudson's Bay Company and
agitated loudly for annexation of the Territory to the United States. At the Royal,
Schultz's followers toasted the demise of the Company with equal fervour, but
agitated loudly for the annexation of the Territory to Canada.4
After Manitoba joined the Canadian
Confederation, Winnipeg held firmly to its
original development blueprint. It went on such a binge of hotel-saloon
building that in 1876 the Y.M.C.A. was able to couple it with Barrie, Ontario,
as the two wickedest communities in Canada.5 The blocks of hotel-bars which had
sprung up on Main Street made such a reputation easy to acquire, and the
proliferation of such establishments during the next two decades made it an
easy reputation to sustain.
There is no evidence, moreover, that the
city took more than the mildest umbrage at the Y.M.C.A.'s broadside. Its sense
of the fitness of things had been demonstrated the previous year when JS. Ingram, the boozing. brawling chief
of police, was taken in flagrante delicto in a Colony Creek whorehouse.6 The
city fired the chief for being stupid enough to be caught and let the brothels
continue to operate. They did so without hindrance from Ingram's successor
until 1883 when the first morality crusade blew them clear off the Creek to a
more remote location on the town's far western outskirts.
This
crisis developed from the construction of the Manitoba College a couple of hundred
yards from the brothels near what became the corner of Portage Avenue and Colony Street. Based on priority
rights, the brothels clearly had a better claim to the general area than the
College. They had been in business along the Creek since Winnipeg had become a city.
The College did not get into operation on its new campus until five years
later. Soon after it opened, however, its corridors buzzed with stories of
pupils tarrying in the houses of ill repute en route to and from school. In the
end the stories travelled far afield and early in the winter of 1882-3 the
Winnipeg Times made the juxtaposition of the College and the whorehouses the
subject of a front-page exposé. The city council then nudged the police
department into closing the •establishments. Nothing happened, however, until
a new fire-eating Congregationalist minister arrived in town to join the Times
in an all-out campaign to rescue the Winnipeg teen-age students
from the clutches of the scarlet women.7
At other times and in other places, clarion calls for
action to suppress brothels seemed the prerogative of the Baptists and the
Presbyterians. This time it was the rafters of the Congregational Church which
rattled to the thunderous oratory of the Reverend J.B. Silcox.
"The Bible is not silent on the sins of unchastity
and the pulpit ought not to be either," he declaimed. The tour de force
that followed was one that Dwight L. Moody or Billy Sunday might have envied.
There were passages that could have been set to music as a battle hymn for morality
crusades. For example:
"On the outskirts of Ephesus were the infamous
Groves of Daphne where crowds of licentious votaries held a perpetual festival
of vice. So on the western outskirts of our city stands in unblushing impudence
the same monstrous iniquity throwing its blighting shade over our fair city.
There in these abodes of vice are the depths of immorality, debauchery and
death. In their swinish precincts the youth of our land are beguiled and
ruined, body and soul.
"Let us," he implored, "drive out these
leprous libertines who out-Judas Judas!"
That surely must be
one of the fanciest definitions ever coined for what the criminal code was
content to call common prostitutes. But Dr. Silcox did not stop there. He went
on to call down malediction on the sinning customers of the brothels. "Do
not," he pleaded, "be content to hypocritically condemn the sinning
women and acquit the sinning men." He urged the newspapers to publish the
names of the male sinners who frequented the houses side by side with those of
the inmates. He reminded his listeners that they were proud members of the
AngloSaxon race, which ruled the world. It had been able to achieve that lofty
pinnacle because of the strength it derived from maintaining its racial purity.
Only by recapturing the respect for womanly virtues that prevailed when
Knighthood was in flower could the present generation rise above and overcome
the social evil.
Twenty
years later the chief of police of Medicine Hat echoed Dr. Silcox's
sentiments, though somewhat less elegantly .8
"A skirt is a
skirt," he said, "and must be respected as such."
What
impact the combined onslaught of Dr. Silcox and the newspaper had on Winnipeg public opinion, or
on the business being done by the brothels, is difficult to assess. The Times
reported that business was so good the brothel operators could afford to pay
rents of up to $125 a month, an unheard-of sum when a good wage was $15 a week.
The paper also reported that one madam had recently retired and left with
between $30,000 and $40,000 in savings. There was no evidence from the paper,
however, that the public was really much aroused. There was no support at all
from that usually reliable bellwether of public interest, the writer of
letters to the editor. By that criterion the really important question
agitating Winnipeg was home rule in Ireland. Nevertheless, the
Times kept hammering away at the story for the next week with reports of
interviews which were also inconclusive. One doctor argued that segregation of
the brothels in one area made medical inspection possible. Another was just as
sure that medical inspection did not work. A third cynically opined that all
such campaigns as Dr. Silcox's were bound to accomplish nothing. Prostitution
had begun with the beginning of the human race and would end only with the
ending of the human race. Some confirmation of this belief was provided by a
fourth member of the medical profession. In the short period since the
newspaper had become interested in exposing the social evil, he had noticed a
dozen women soliciting within a stone's throw of his office. And there were
many others in the hotels of the city, he said.
Dr. Silcox, however,
was not one to be put aside by any such negative attitudes as these. He
returned to the fray on April 6 to recall the fine example which Mr. Justice
Wood had set in sending a prostitute to jail for two years at hard labour. In
passing sentence, the judge had severely criticized the Winnipeg system of levying
small fines periodically on the women as a licence of sorts. Such a system was
a disgrace to the city. Dr. Silcox agreed and insisted that all that was needed
to rid the city of prostitutes was for the police to drive them out and keep
them out.
"The
heart of this young city," Dr. Silcox contended, "beats on the side
of purity and right. The police can drive these women out of the city and keep
them out by enforcing the law. There is no city in Canada where the law is
defied as it is in Winnipeg."
The police all the while were quietly closing
down the Colony Creek houses, but they were being reasonable about it, as the
Times reported in an interview with one of the madams. The operators of the
houses were acquiring property farther west outside the city limits. But, as
they would be unable to build until the weather improved, the police had
extended their deadline from April 1 to June 1. Once they had their new houses
(on what would one day become Thomas Street) they would be glad
to get out of the city. Anyway, this madam said, the coming of the college had
created more problems for the brothels than the brothels did for the college.
"We
are forever being pestered by kids," she said. "Just a while ago I
had to chase a bunch of them away. `We don't operate no
Saturday matinee for kids here,' I told them."
The June
deadline came and went without notice. The brothels moved out to Thomas Street and the question of Winnipeg's sexual morality lapsed
more or less into limbo for the next twenty years.
When the
dawn of the twentieth century broke over Winnipeg it caught the
fastest-growing city in Canada in its rays. Here
were 40,000 people where there had been barely 8,000 twenty years before."
Crude statistics can be misleading, however. The fact was that Winnipeg was just beginning
to break out of a decade-long depression which resulted from the collapse of
wheat prices in 1887-8. During the hard times immigration slowed down, and
while Winnipeg continued to grow,
it did so at a much slower pace. Not only was the Winnipeg of the new century a
city poised to take off on the greatest boom in history, it was also a city
struggling to extricate itself from the crudities of frontier life; but it would
be frustrated at every turn by the succeeding waves of immigrants that were
soon to engulf it. The migratory waves were by no means made up only of
unlettered peasants and the disinherited of the earth. Each incoming train
brought a generous complement of senior managers, junior executives, and
white-collar workers for the banks, insurance companies, railways, and the
mercantile trade, as well as skilled mechanics for the railway shops and the
building trades. But the migratory tides likewise washed in equal proportions
of unskilled labourers, drifters, boomers, ne'er-do-wells, gamblers,
prostitutes, and an infinite variety of other human flotsam.
What
there was about the Red River Settlement that attracted so many militant Orange
Protestants from Ontario and so few French
Catholics from Quebec is a question around
which many theories can be embroidered.
Attract
the Protestants it certainly did, not only those from Ontario directly but also
many thousands of former Ontario residents who had
gone to settle in the United States. By 1881 almost half
of Winnipeg's population3,397
out of 7,985-was Ontario-born. Twenty years later, Winnipeg had a population of
42,340, of which 13,322 were Manitoba-born and 10,419 were natives of Ontario. Only 1,365 came
from Quebec and 1,405 were born
in the United States. The inflow from Europe was already under
way in 1901 as England sent 5,223, Ireland 1,218, and Scotland 1,671. Of the 7,546
foreign-born Iceland accounted for
1,500, Austria-Hungary for 1,343, Germany for 699, and Russia for 1,398. By
religion the populace broke down into 10,172 Presbyterians, 10,170 Anglicans,
6,741 Methodists, 5,143 Roman Catholics, 4,253 Lutherans, 1,145 Jews, and
segments of a dozen other sects. In summary the city was a good three-quarters
Anglo-Saxon and just as solidly Protestant if the Anglicans are included.10
So
much for quantity.
More important was what might be called the hard-shell quality of Winnipeg
Protestantism. A measure of its militancy was the fact that Winnipeg enjoyed the most
tightly closed Sunday tolerated anywhere in Christendom since the days of the
New England Puritans. No wheel of industry turned, no store opened, no
streetcar clattered down the streets, no bread or milk was delivered, no game of any kind was played. On Sunday there were only
church services. The Protestant sermons were reported fully by all the
newspapers, as they also reported the activities of the Christian Endeavor, the
Royal Templars of Temperance, the Loyal Orange Lodge, the Masonic order, and
the missionary societies beyond numbering. Roman Catholic news was reported
when a pope died or a new bishop was appointed. As the clergymen laboured for
the souls of their adherents, their communicants worked overtime getting rich
and improving their city. Getting rich must have been comparatively easy,
judging from the numbers who succeeded; the city itself, however, was something
that could stand an immense amount of improvement.
Making
anything of a city on the Winnipeg site challenged both
the imagination and the financial genius of its early leaders. It was located
on the edge of a treeless plain that stretched unbroken to the Rocky Mountains. In the summer its
shadeless mud streets baked hard in a blistering sun. In the spring and fall the
same streets became impassable bogs of the stickiest, clingingest gumbo known
to man. In years of extreme drought, it was plagued with grasshoppers; in wet
years, by myriads of mosquitoes which bred by the billions on the flood plains
of the Assiniboine. Flies swarmed in
all seasons and the annual August outbreaks of typhoid fever kept the city's
hospitals filled to capacity. In the late fall, it was likely to be swept by
blizzards which continued intermittently throughout the winter and often came
back for a final assault after spring had settled in. Yet this was the
environment that somehow managed to attract and retain a population that had
grown up in the incomparable natural beauty of Ontario and British
countryside's.
The
dominant segment of the Winnipeg business community
was the real estate interest, and in some measure it was the periodic
confrontations between the real estate promoters and the brothel operators
which caused the moral eruptions. Residential development was beginning to move
westward at the time of the first rumblings against Colony Creek in 1883. The
existence of brothel concentrations undoubtedly adversely affected property
values, so when the reverend clergy began agitating against the prostitutes
they could always call on the realtors to exercise some political muscle. And
there was undoubtedly a real estate salesman in the background when the Colony
Creek women decided to move to Thomas Street, a mile to the west.
There, smack in the middle of nowhere, they erected six large frame whorehouses
in a cluster about 250 yards north of Portage Avenue. There was not
another building within half a mile and, with their white paint glistening in
the sun, they became a Winnipeg landmark for the
next twenty years. Then they too fell before the western march of the real
estate promoters.
Thomas Street might have been an
ideal spot for a red-light district when Portage Avenue was the westward
trail for the Red
River
carts, settlers in covered wagons, and teamsters en route to the Saskatchewan settlements. It may
even have derived a profit from that traffic. But as the Winnipeg boom developed along
Main Street with the arrival of
the C.P.R. it was the unhandiest location imaginable. The nearest bars were
over a mile to the east, and the C.P.R. station was almost two miles away.
However, the streetcar service on Portage Avenue was good, and
despite its location the settlement prospered with Winnipeg. At the height of
its busy season as many as a hundred girls might be working there, not counting
domestic servants and Chinese houseboys. Moreover, for almost twenty years it
existed without attracting more than passing notice from the reformers. Until
the turn of the century they concentrated their main fire upon the liquor
traffic and lobbied for the enactment of stiffer and stiffer penalties for
violations of the Sunday observance laws. The Establishment seemed to go along
with the clergy as far as the Sunday observance was concerned, though there is
no record of any law being passed to restrict the Sunday trade of the brothels.
The modus vivendi which the bordellos had with the police excluded the
enforcement of the Winnipeg by-laws in the
settlement. They operated round the clock as the demand warranted, and the
demand on weekends consistently did so.
The
building boom of the 1880s carried within it the seeds of destruction for Thomas Street. Each year the house
builders crept a little farther westward and closer to the red-light district.
By 1900 houses were being built within two or three blocks of the brothels and
the rowdiness of the drunken customers returning from the houses so enlivened
the nights for the new residents that they began complaining to their pastors.
To their voices were added the complaints of the real estate interests. As the
years passed the agitation against Thomas Street increased and was
reaching its peak in 1902 when the Reverend Dr. Frederick B. DuVal was elected
chairman of the Winnipeg Ministerial Association.
Frederick B. DuVal was born in
Maryland, and graduated from
Princeton with gold medals for
oratory and debate and a first prize for Biblical scholarship. After graduation
from the Theological Seminary in 1875 he served churches in Delaware and Ohio before being offered
the pulpit at Knox Presbyterian church in Winnipeg. A pint-sized zealot
with a hard glinting eye and luxuriant chin whiskers, he arrived in 1888 and
served the church for more than twenty years, eventually becoming the moderator
of the Presbyterian Church of Canada. His reputation as an outstanding orator,
theologian, and moral reformer preceded him to Winnipeg.
He not
only became quickly embroiled in local controversy, he became the leader of it.
Certainly he was a prime mover in the campaign to drive the Roman Catholic
parochial schools out of the public schools system. In the struggle for
prohibition in the 1890s, he was both the leading agitator and the recognized
spokesman before legislative tribunals."
Frederick DuVal was a one-man gang, and when he took over
the direction of the ministerial association he soon had all his fellow
preachers breathing fire and brimstone from the pulpits. In the fall of 1903
they turned their attention from booze to brothels and launched an all-out
campaign to close down the Thomas Street establishments.
They collided with Mayor John Arbuthnot and the city police department.
From the day Chief John McRae had first joined the Winnipeg police department in
1882; regulated prostitution had been the accepted policy of the city. As
chief of police he had managed to confine most of the prostitutes to the Thomas Street area and the women
who tried to work the hotels and railway station were given short shrift. McRae
was convinced that segregated prostitution was about as effective a way of
treating with the oldest profession as had been devised. So were Mayor
Arbuthnot and the police commission. So were most Winnipeggers. When the first
oratorical thunder clapped, the chief, the mayor, and the police commissioners
took to the storm cellars to wait for the storm to blow over, as it always had
before. They woefully misread the character of Frederick B. DuVal.
When the sermons failed to accomplish anything DuVal
spurred the ministers to mass action. In the largest churches on November
15, 1903,
the ministers asked the male members of their congregations to stay after the
services for special meetings "on the social evil". They stayed by
the hundreds.12
In his after-sermon sermon, Dr. DuVal quoted the recently
published report of a commission which had investigated prostitution in New York City. "This most
experienced commission ever appointed in the civilized world," he
thundered, "has found that segregation does not segregate and regulation
does not regulate. It is inevitable that segregated areas become nests of
crime."
The Reverend A.W. Wickson told the newspapers that 700
people had stayed for the meeting at the Central Congregational church and
voted overwhelmingly to close the Thomas Street houses.
E.D. Martin, a prominent businessman and spokesman for the
laity, called the houses a threat to the morals of the children because houses
and schools were going up within sight of Thomas Street.
The following night the clergy hired the Winnipeg Theatre
and treated a capacity audience to three hours of denunciations of conditions
in the city. Of the 1,500 in attendance, only about 15, the newspapers
reported, appeared opposed to the stand taken by the ministerial association.
Two days later the organized clergy descended on the police commission and
demanded action to enforce the law against houses of ill fame. Surprisingly
enough, when Dr. DuVal polled the commissioners he found they all claimed to be
against their own policy of allowing segregated prostitution.
All this uproar,
probably from design, blew up while the 1903 civic election campaign was in
full swing. Within hours after the ministers had bearded the police commission
the subject got a thorough airing at a stormy election rally at the Winnipeg
Theatre. Mayor Arbuthnot, who was running for a fourth term as mayor, lashed
out at the clergy for blackening the fair name of Winnipeg. "If this is
such a great evil, why have they never complained about it before?" he
demanded and added, "Nobody has ever come to me about it!"
One clergyman quickly contradicted the mayor from the
floor. They had so complained, he said, and the mayor had sarcastically replied
that a better alternative might be to locate the segregated area in Armstrong's
Point among the wealthy Winnipeggers.
The mayor veered away from that charge with one of his
own. He blamed Dr. DuVal for the uproar. "As a man thinketh so is
he!" the mayor thundered. "The man chiefly responsible for all this
agitation has by his own admission been thinking about this for twenty years
and is now so saturated with the subject that it has to belch out of him
somewhere!"
And so the argument raged until Mayor Arbuthnot called it
quits and retired from the mayoralty race. The DuVal candidate for mayor was
Thomas Sharpe, a wealthy contractor. He was elected almost by default and the
reformers took over City Hall. While the morality issue did stir the populace
momentarily, it becomes clear in retrospect that it was by no means the main
issue of the election.
Several other
questions were causing much greater concern to a population just becoming
conscious of the great potential of their city and of the practical problems
that beset it. There were the thorny questions of municipal versus private
ownership of power, municipal operation of the streetcars, the need for more
bridges, lower water rates, and a better water supply. Above all there were
recurrent municipal financial crises about which all the candidates talked.
Prostitution may have been the main issue for the clergy, but none of the
candidates paid much attention to it in their speeches. And, except for those
who had become thoroughly aroused by the DuVal crusade against vice, the electors paid little attention to the candidates. The
turnout at the polls was one of the poorest in years. Nevertheless, Dr. DuVal
succeeded in putting most of the civic administration on record as favouring
the shut-down of Thomas Street, and the matter got
quick attention from the new police commission. 13
Chief John McRae
clearly regarded the DuValites as meddling busybodies who would provide his
morality squad with an impossible task. The new boom was taking hold and Winnipeg's population was
rising at the rate of 1,000 people a month. In addition, the prairie farms were
at last beginning to realize their potential and in 1903 more than 50,000,000
bushels of wheat were marketed through the Winnipeg Grain Exchange. That Winnipeg had at last become
the financial centre of the West was indicated by the erection of no less than
thirteen bank buildings along Main Street and Portage Avenue.
On several of the
corners brand new brick and stone banks replaced some of the city's earliest
hotels. The surplus warehouse space that had resulted from the optimism of
previous decades was now filled to capacity and additional floors were being
added to several of the largest buildings. Bank clearings were rising at such a
rate that the town boosters were forecasting that a billion dollars a year
would soon be reached; by 1913 the clearings exceeded $1.5 billion.
All that anyone had to do to dispel all doubt of Winnipeg's future was to be
on hand when the harvester specials arrived at the C.P.R. station during late
July and August.'* So jam-packed were these trains that the men coming west to
cut and thresh the grain crops could not be accommodated on the platform. From
the station platform those who were detraining in Winnipeg were herded along
the tracks to branch line trains which would distribute them to the country
towns where they would find farmers eager to hire them at rates that sometimes
got as high as three dollars a day, for an eighteen-hour day.
After being cooped up on the board-hard seats of the
excursion trains for three or four days, an irresistible desire to interrupt
their journey to the harvest field seized many of the youthful newcomers when
they stretched their muscles on the Winnipeg station platform.
Away from parental control for the first time, many of them developed an urge
to explore the flesh-pots of Winnipeg. Wherever they
looked from the C.P.R. platform the hotel bars and poolrooms beckoned. They
could count half a dozen within a stone's throw of the station north on Main Street. To the south, Main Street was dotted with
hotels and poolrooms as far as they could see. Between the harvesters and the
hotels, however, lurked an awesome assortment of con men, sneak thieves,
pickpockets, and pimps all waiting to separate the newcomers from whatever
small sums of cash they possessed. In midsummer the incoming harvesters, who
were usually short of cash, were far from the favourite targets of the petty
criminals. Then they much preferred permanent settlers or construction workers
intent on a spree. Only after the harvesters came back in the fall with their
summer earnings unsafely stowed in pockets and purses did they merit special
attention. Nevertheless, the malefactors had specially developed senses that
enabled them to ferret out harvesters with a thirst for booze and broads, and
they quickly latched onto their prey and steered them, first to the bars and
later to the Thomas Street brothels.
Keeping minor crime
under control occupied most of the waking hours of the police department. It
was a task that was continually complicated by the steady inflow of petty
crooks and prostitutes from the United States. As the number of
permanent immigrants increased, so did the floating population, which sooner or
later came to roost in the bars and brothels. Chief McRae had been adding to his
force a dozen men at a time as finances permitted, but he continually lost
ground in the race to keep up with Winnipeg's growth. Clearly
his job was difficult enough without having the Thomas Street Jezebels
scattered all over town where they could not be kept under a watchful eye. He
was completely out of sympathy with the DuVal campaign.
Like all Winnipeg policemen, Chief
John McRae was an imposing figure. Over six feet in height, he habitually wore
the peak of his cap well down over his eyes, whose colour matched the steely
grey of his moustache. That there was steel in his personality as well as in
his mien can be assumed from the fact that he survived for more than twenty
years as head of the Winnipeg police department and built it into one of the
best in the country. But he was also a man who knew how to obey orders as well
as give them. On January 7, 1904, the new police
commission gave the Chief his orders-raid the Thomas Street brothels and drive
the prostitutes out of business.15
It did him no good to argue that this would spread the women
all over the city. Orders were orders, and the chief laid his plans to carry
them out. To prevent a leak to the district, no one on the force was taken into
his confidence. When the night shift arrived for duty the following Saturday,
he gathered the entire force together and issued his instructions. They were to
proceed at once to the Thomas Street houses, arrest all
the women keepers and their employees, and transport them bodily to the police
station in the conveyances provided. For the occasion the Chief called in a
dozen hired hacks to supplement his own horse-drawn paddy wagon, and assembled
them in front of the James Avenue station.
The long procession moved down Main Street and out Portage Avenue at a leisurely pace.
By the time they got to Thomas Street the houses were
beginning to jump with the usually brisk Saturday trade. The raid went off
without a hitch, accompanied by considerable confusion and shouted protests
from the customers. Individual houses had been raided before, for unseemly
conduct or on suspicion of harbouring fugitives from the law.' But a raid on
the entire settlement violated everybody's sense of the fitness of things,
including, if truth were known, that of most of the raiding policemen.
It quickly became apparent that the transport facilities
were inadequate. While they waited for the arrival of more hacks, the raiding
party sorted out its catch. The madams were all identified, as were the working
prostitutes. The names of the customers were taken and then they were ordered
on their way. But it was not a particularly cold night so they gathered in
front of the houses and awaited further excitement. As the police emerged from
the houses with their prisoners in tow the crowd jeered loudly and followed the
parade of prostitutes and escorts all the way to the police station. There,
according to the Manitoba Free Press, they stood ten deep in front of the
station and hooted at the police in the late-arriving hacks. The paper also
reported that the police bag for the night included twelve keepers of
bawdy-houses, seventy-two women inmates, and four male porters. While the
arraignments were taking place, the Chief thoughtfully ordered a guard to be
posted against looting in all the houses which the raid left vacant. The women
who ran the joints were all fined forty dollars when they pleaded guilty, while
their employees were each assessed twenty dollars. All were warned by the
magistrate that the era of segregated prostitution was over for Winnipeg and that they must
either reform, leave town, or face much stiffer penalties if they ever again
appeared in court.
Little
attention was paid to the warning from the bench. The women paid their fines,
disposed of their houses, and moved to better locations closer to their
customers. Doris Vennette, for example, moved several times before landing
permanently on Annabella Street, where she remained
for the next twenty years. Minnie Woods, who enjoyed a thirty-year reign as
queen of the brothels, moved from Thomas Street to James Avenue, where she lived
until the Annabella-McFarlane district was opened in 1909.10
The name
of Thomas Street itself disappeared
from Winnipeg annals under
circumstances which clearly indicate that somebody at City Hall had a most
ribald sense of humour. The Earl of Minto, Canada's most colourful
governor general, made a vice-regal tour of the West in 1904 after the Thomas Street raid and the
street's restoration to respectability. To mark the visit Winnipeg decided to do for
Lord Minto what it had done for many other ornaments of British
aristocracy-name a street after him. And what street was chosen to forever
carry the name of Minto for future generations of Winnipeggers? Thomas Street. Then in 1912 Ottawa decided it needed an
armoury in Winnipeg. It was also named
for Lord Minto and was located across the street from the long-vacated Thomas Street whorehouses.
Having achieved total victory, the reverend
clergy retired from the field of battle, though they returned to the
fallen-woman theme occasionally in their sermons. The Reverend Charles W.
Gordon of St. Stephen's church managed a series of three discourses in which he
developed the idea that women themselves were mainly to blame for
prostitution. He went on to describe the men who patronized the houses of ill
fame as moral lepers and urged that action be taken to identify them publicly
so that respectable women could quarantine their homes against them. Dr. Gordon
felt respectable women would scratch them from their social invitation lists if
the men's sins were publicized. But for the most part the clergy concentrated
their attention on booze and the blue laws whenever they wandered from biblical
texts, and left the enforcement of laws against houses of ill fame to the
police.
After
scattering the inmates from Thomas Street, the police
encountered heavy going. When there was an understanding between the police and
the brothel keepers it was fairly easy to keep the traffic under control. The
police staged periodic raids; the operators pleaded guilty and paid small
fines, and went about their business. When the crackdown came, however, and the
police tried to suppress the houses permanently, co-operation ended.
It was
not enough for the police to prove that houses under investigation had an
unusually large number of people wandering in and out. As long as the occupants
behaved with reasonable decorum they could not be convicted of operating
disorderly houses. To get a conviction on a charge of operating a house of ill
fame necessitated testimony from somebody who had visited the house and paid
for the service. While the Chief was prepared to have his newly formed morality
squad keep watch on the houses from the outside, he categorically refused to
send his men into the houses to become accessories to the commission of an
offence. Yet if the police refused to fabricate evidence how could
the law be enforced? By stool pigeons who would visit the prostitutes,
pay them with marked money, and testify in court. In July 1905 the city acceded
to a request from the police commission and put up a $250 "secret service
fund" which Chief McRae could spend buying testimony.17
Unhappily
for the moral reformers, after the brothels were closed on Thomas Street the problem broke
out in a new place. Now the prostitutes took to the streets to sell their
charms while they worked up a clientele which would come to their houses. Soon
it seemed to the Winnipeg gentlefolk that Portage Avenue and Main Street were being overrun
with dories. Naturally, the gay blades in search of female accommodation
frequently took to accosting the wrong women and there were complaints to the
police.
There was
no way in which city policemen on patrol duty could cope with the
streetwalkers, for the policemen could be spotted a block away by their height
alone, to say nothing of the London-bobby type of headgear they wore. A year
after the Thomas Street dispersal, an indignant citizen wrote to the Manitoba
Free Press to charge that the growing number of attacks on women on the city
streets was the direct result of scattering prostitutes all over the city.18
Winnipeg's recent experience, he contended, was proof of the soundness of a
statement by a Montreal preacher that segregation was the best way to handle
the social evil. The ever-alert Dr. DuVal rushed an immediate reply to the
paper. While the hotbeds of vice had existed on Thomas Street, he wrote, ladies of
the best families of Winnipeg had been assaulted
on Broadway and Donald streets. What Winnipeg needed, he
contended, was not segregated prostitution but more zealous law enforcement by
the city police. With this the city council seemed to agree. In January 1906 it
raised the Chief's secret service appropriation to $5,000, surely an immense
sum in the context of the times.19 For the next three years, save for the
casual references, the controversy over sex faded from the public view.
One reason for the
decline in interest in moral issues may have been the emergence of an
overabundance of other news concerning the great economic boom that was
developing on the wings of mass immigration. A second transcontinental rail
link with the east was under construction, and vast new railway shops began to
go up in south Winnipeg and in Transcona.
Between the City Hall and Portage Avenue, new banks and
insurance buildings were beginning to give Winnipeg its first hint of a
skyline. Building permits were being issued amounting to $10,000,000
a year, while the city's manufacturing centres were turning out products worth
more than $18,000,000 annually. With only a rough sketch of a plan scratched
on a piece of wrapping paper, building contractors were throwing up whole
streets full of identical houses, both within the city proper and in the dozens
of suburban munipalities that were coming into existence around its periphery.
The city voted to embark on its own hydroelectric system, and construction of
its first generating plant on the Winnipeg River was begun.
Thomas Sharpe served
three terms as mayor and was succeeded by James Ashdown, Winnipeg's richest merchant
and a great pillar of the church. C.P. Walker came in from New York to build the finest
theatre in Canada outside Toronto. The C.P.R. was
planning the construction of the Royal Alexandra hotel, which would exceed the
luxurious proportions of anything Toronto or Montreal had to offer and
would raise Winnipeg's hotel total to 69.
When the lieutenant-governor held his formal ball on January
21, 1907,
it boasted a guest list of 600, all of whom got their names in the papers along
with descriptions of the gowns worn by the ladies.20 The
city government itself had to struggle frantically to keep pace with private
development. But it had crews out from dawn to dark gravelling some streets and
paving others with creosoted wooden blocks, installing sewer and water lines,
and building schools and hospitals. By the end of 1906 it had even managed to
cut the number of outdoor privies in the city from 4,900 to 3,600.
It became abundantly
clear with the passing years that closing the Thomas Street houses had failed to
solve Winnipeg's "problem with
social vice". During 1907 the police managed to convict the keepers of 71
bawdy-houses and 101 prostitutes. The following year the figures doubled and
as they did so Magistrate T. Mayne Daly became increasingly provoked at the
moral reformers and delivered periodic homilies on the folly of their actions.
In 1908 he kept track of the number of young girls coming before him on morals
charges and when it reached sixteen he decided that enough was enough.
Ordinarily Daly, who had been a. Conservative
Minister of the Interior in a post-Macdonald cabinet, presided in a perpetual
pique that made him the terror of the underworld. In the winter of 1905 a pair
of strong-arm American footpads created panic in the streets and alleys of the
town as they waylaid and robbed drunken wayfarers. At last they were caught
and hauled before Magistrate Daly. He
sent John Sandercock to prison for fifteen years at hard labour plus
seventy-five strokes of the lash. Frank Macdonald got ten years and fifty
lashes. Soon after that Daly established a Canadian record by sending a mere
burglar to prison for fourteen years.
Yet when it came to
prostitution, T. Mayne Daly was the image of tolerance and understanding. The
system which turned prostitutes into streetwalkers, and not the streetwalkers
themselves, was always on trial in his court. On April
20, 1909,
he committed his convictions to paper which he took with him to the meeting of
the Winnipeg Police Commission. The gist of his letter was that since 1904
things had gone from bad to worse. He produced a list of over 400 convicted
prostitutes over the five-year period. In the end he moved that the 1904
resolution be repealed and that "all matters relating to houses of ill
fame and immoral women be left to the chief of police, he to act in accordance
with his discretion and best judgment". His motion won unanimous approval
from the
commission.21
Chief McRae's best
judgment was that a red-light district under his control should be
re-established forthwith. As a first step, the houses would have to be
concentrated in one area. He sent a messenger for Minnie Woods, who was then
running a bordello on James Street, a hundred yards
east of the police station. Minnie was a former operator of one of the largest
houses on Thomas Street and was recognized
as the leading madam of her day, though Lulu
Thornton, who was
somewhat younger, was probably better known among the frequenters of the
brothels. The Chief broke the news of the commission decision to Minnie and
asked her to pass the word along to the sisterhood. The Chief and the madam
undoubtedly discussed possible locations for the new district, though the
evidence on this point is clouded by disclaimers. In any event the upshot of
the conversation was that an isolated in Point Douglas was selected.22
Until it
got well north of Winnipeg, the course of the
almost as serpentine as that of the Assiniboine . At the foot of Market Street the Red River veered sharply eastward
for half of a mile and then swung sharply to the northwest It
thus created the long narrow triangle of land which was named for a Scottish
nobleman-Point Douglas. The main line of
the C.P.R. entered Winnipeg over' a bridge
roughly at the apex of the Point Douglas triangle. Two streets paralleled the
railway from the river to Main Street-Higgins
Avenue on the south and Sutherland Avenue on the north. The
railway was flanked most of the way by a succession of warehouses and
factories, a flour mill, a lumberyard, and an iron works.
To
provide access from the Sutherland side to the Higgins side of the tracks, the
city had recently completed a subway which joined Annabella Street on the west with Rachel Street on the east.
Eventually it was given the name of Annabella Street for the entire
length and was selected as the locale for the new red-light district.
In all Winnipeg no other site could
have been discovered which would have served that purpose so well. It was far
out of range of sight or sound of the pulpits of the moral reformers, it was
well insulated from the downtown business section, and it was easily one of the
city's least attractive residential areas. One side of Annabella Street from Sutherland to
the Red
River
was given over completely to the coking ovens, coal piles, cinder piles, and
gas tanks of the Winnipeg Gas Company. Facing the gas plant were a dozen modest
houses and several shacks.
Winnipeg harlotry had kept
pace numerically with the growth of the population so that it now far
outnumbered the housing capacity of Annabella Street between Higgins Avenue and the river.
However, immediately to the east was McFarlane Street, which ran from the
C.P.R. tracks to the river, a distance of less than 300 yards. By adding
McFarlane
Street to Annabella, the new red-light area would contain fifty houses. As that
total was more than the estimated needs for the moment, it was decided to incorporate
only the west side of McFarlane Street into the segregated
area. Neither Minnie Woods nor Chief McRae seems to have considered the
interests of the hard working residents of either street, or the result of permitting
a row of brothels to operate opposite respectable homes on the east side of
McFarlane Street. Minnie went off to spread the word among the girls, and
shortly afterward she was visited by one John Beaman. a
real estate agent who had been sent around by Chief McRae. Beaman took Minnie
for a walk down Annabella Street to inspect the
houses. As queen of the whores, she naturally got first choice and selected No.
157, the largest house on the street, located midway between Sutherland and
the river. It contained seven smallish rooms and had a broad verandah along
the front. Beaman then conducted other women on similar tours and when he had a
solid deal he approached the owners with purchase offers. He succeeded in
buying most of the houses on Annabella for prices ranging from $2,500 to $5,000
which he resold to the women for up to $8,000. When word got around that a
mysterious stranger was buying up property, prices stiffened on both Annabella
and McFarlane streets.
The
late-comers, ergo, bad to pay the stiffest prices. The highest price
was apparently that paid by Lila Anderson, who was charged $12,000 for a
double house at i t 3 McFarlane Street, which she claimed
had probably cost $2,000 to build. Like all the other madams, she financed her
purchase with a small down payment of $500 and whopping instalment payments of
$225 a month. Rented to ordinary tenants the double house might have brought
$30 a month.23
By the middle of July
1909, Annabella Street was completely
converted to brothels and McFarlane Street was perhaps a
quarter occupied. But if the authorities had trouble from complaining citizens
before the policy was changed, it was multiplied tenfold by the uproar that the
invasion of the whores created in the Annabella-McFarlane enclave. Instead of
the red lights in the windows which the Barbary Coast of San Francisco
affected, Annabella Street went in for the
largest electric porch lights obtainable and foot-high, brightly painted house
numbers. Within a matter of weeks the new district was the most brightly lit
area in the city. Soon the respectable McFarlane Street residents were being
solicited as they passed back and forth from work. Their children were accosted
en route to school. After the west side of McFarlane Street was filled with
brothels, they began to spread to the east side. Early in the fall of 1905 the
police commission seamed to realize that the existence of the April resolution
on its books might lead to embarrassment if the complaints of the residents got
out of hand, so it repealed that motion and thus left the problem of coping
with prostitution up to Chief McRae on a completely informal basis.
The morality squad by
then had put the houses under regular surveillance. The inmates were required
to have a medical examination every two weeks and to produce medical
certificates when required. In response to early complaints, Chief McRae
decided that the brothel keepers were becoming a bit carried away with the
light-burning. He ordered the porch lights removed and the house numbers
reduced to normal proportions. Indeed, the morality department put a whole set
of rules into force for the houses. The houses must not permit rowdy conduct on
the premises. The women were not to go streetwalking, or embark on shopping
excursions uptown without prior notification to the police, who sent a
policeman along as an escort. There was even a rule that white women were not
to be employed as cooks in the houses.25
None of these rules
prevented the behaviour of the inmates of the houses and their customers from
getting completely out of hand. The residents of McFarlane Street became particularly
vocal in their protests. As the opposition mounted, the police decided to back
off a little by evicting the inmates and closing the houses that had become
established on the east side of McFarlane Street.
On July 12 a Thomas
Street type of raid was organized.26 The street was blocked off at both ends
and the women were swept from one house to the next and then on to the next
until they had better than thirty of them cooped up in the fourth house. The
paddy wagon spent the rest of the afternoon hauling them to the police station,
where the women cried foul at the top of their lungs. They had paid exorbitant prices
for these houses on the understanding that they would be allowed to operate
with impunity. They had good reason to accuse the authorities of
double-crossing them. In any event, they pleaded not guilty and were released
on bail. They were acquitted in the end and their return to McFarlane Street signalled the
complete takeover of the street by the brothels.
During the winter of
1909-10 relative calm prevailed and it began to appear that the city had solved
its prostitution problem to the extent of hiding it away out of sight. But a
wave of umbrage soon broke out louder than ever. When spring came, customers by
the thousands swarmed into the new district. And not only
customers. Winnipeg Sunday being what it
was, the only available recreation for the populace was going for a stroll.
Annabella and McFarlane streets became the mecca for Winnipeg sightseers on a
Sunday afternoon The women of the houses sunned
themselves on their front steps, clad only in flimsy kimonos, and exchanged
obscenities with such passers-by as spurned their proffered wares. As often as
not, both streets were choked with hacks, taxis, and the hundreds of
rubbernecks who milled about. They not only milled about the streets, they also
patronized the brothels, as openly and casually as if they had been going in
for a package of gum. A private detective hired later by the moral reformers
swore that on one occasion fourteen Annabella
Street brothels put through 292 customers in two and a half
hours.27
Not only was sex for
sale but it is clear from the record that the brothels did a thriving business
in bootleg liquor in competition with the Main Street saloons. The
delivery rigs of the wholesale liquor vendors hauled in Scotch and gin by the
case and often by the wagonload. The brothels quickly became popular with
under-age drinkers who had difficulty getting served in the licensed bars,
which were under more or less regular inspection by the provincial liquor
police. A recurrent complaint of the residents was about the number of under-age
patrons seen emerging drunk from the houses of ill repute. The liquor laws of
the province were enforced by inspectors employed by the provincial government,
into whose jurisdiction the city police never intruded. The houses were all
raided periodically by the provincial police, and the keepers pleaded guilty
to violations of the liquor act and were fined $100 and costs. This was the
minimum penalty for the offence was never varied, although the same women
appeared in court every three months.28
After the abortive
raid of July 12 the city police continued to make token raids on the houses
when things became too boisterous. But the outer limits on rowdiness were quite
elastic and the raids were probably undertaken more to show City Hall the
police were on the job than as a serious effort to eradicate the nuisance.
There was, however, a fatal public-relations defect built into the
Annabella-McFarlane complex that did not show up until well into the summer of
1910. By then the whores had taken over the whole of McFarlane Street, and most of the
residents who could not sell out to the prostitutes newly arriving from the United States rented their houses
for brothels for $200 a month. So the cries of anguish emanating from inside
the area diminished. It was then that the police and the brothel keepers
discovered that the segregated area had stopped one block too soon.
Adjoining McFarlane Street to the east was Syndicate Street, and the houses on
the west side of Syndicate shared a back alley with the brothels on the east
side of McFarlane. In the spring and summer of 1910, living on the west side of
Syndicate Street was like having a
front seat at a huge outdoor peep show. Blinds were seldom drawn on the McFarlane Street houses, so that the
services being provided were easily viewed from the houses on the next street.
The nude men and women who were seen cavorting in the houses occasionally
spilled out into the back yards. The Syndicate Street citizens joined the
odd holdout still on McFarlane Street to carry their
protests to the City Hall. They got brushed off by the mayor, who pointed out
that the police were under the control of the police commission, not the city
council.
It seemed to the
residents that their police protection had all but disappeared. In actual fact
the uniformed policemen who patrolled Sutherland Avenue were instructed to
stay out of the brothel area. When the citizens sought advice from the
patrolmen they were ridiculed with the reply that the city could hardly afford
to station policemen permanently in their front or back yards. Yet one of the
residents swore that while he and his neighbours were talking to a policeman
on Sutherland Avenue, they heard a sound
they thought was a police whistle being blown on Annabella Street. The policeman took
off like a shot and when the citizens followed they found him clubbing into
submission a belligerent drunk who had been disturbing a brothel 29
By the
summer of 1910 the Winnipeg red-light district
had degenerated into a massive orgiastic obscenity. The sky-rocketing Winnipeg population, coupled
with the tremendous floating population, kept the district on a
twenty-four-hour shift all through the summer. Though it was isolated from the
main part of the city, it was only five minutes by streetcar or ten minutes on
foot from the C.P.R. station. As many of the customers had already tarried in
the Main Street saloons, it was only
to be expected that they would arrive in the district somewhat foggy about
precise addresses. So it was common for householders some distance removed from
the brothels to have their meals and their sleep interrupted by ruffians
bursting in looking for prostitutes. Men exposing themselves
to women and children on the streets was an almost continual occurrence.
Citizens who sought to protect their women from abuse were often painfully
assaulted by the drunks who ranged through the district in groups. A woman
testified that one afternoon three men entered her home on Higgins Avenue (some distance from
the red-light district) and, assuming she was a prostitute, threw some money on
the table and started tearing off her clothes. She escaped to the street and a
nearby factory where her husband worked. Another resident complained of being
awakened at five o'clock in the morning by the whooping and hollering of a couple
of whores who were chasing each other around the block on horseback, naked, as
he said, from knees to hips.30
The district that
summer was living proof that there was nothing glamorous or exciting about
commercial sex. The area was drenched continually with dense smoke and acrid
fumes from the gas plant which, in combination with the dust from the streets
and cinders from the trains, coated everything in grime. The houses were mainly
the product of spare-time workmanship of rough carpenters, who built their own
houses and expanded them as their families grew. Inside, the brothels were
furnished mainly with whisky-stained chairs and tables, beds sometimes two to a
room, and footworn linoleum. They were decorated with brewery calendars and,
not infrequently, framed religious mottoes.31 As for
the women, the reformers who tried to rescue them from their lives of shame
wrote most of them off as hardened beyond redemption.
Eventually the
complaints of the citizenry reached the ears of the reverend clergy and things
began to happen. The Salvation Army brought in Adjutant McElhaney and his wife
from Toronto and in 1910 put him
to work in the district. The women from Annabella and McFarlane streets
occasionally became hospitalized, and when they turned up in the new Grace Hospital the Salvation Army
workers tried to talk them into returning to the respectable world. Both the
reformers and their quarry were faced with an impossible problem. The
respectable world, Christian or secular, wanted no part of the converted
female sinners. Even where the spirit was willing, and it was occasionally when
the girls were hospitalized, there was no place for the flesh. There was no
women's rescue mission, aside from the Margaret Scott home, where the girls
could go en route to respectability. Occasionally the Salvation Army leaders
took women into their own homes while making preparations to return them to
their families.
The contacts that
McElhaney established with the prostitutes did yield a lot of factual
information. From the seriously ill, he obtained names of other women who might
be amenable to reason. Unhappily, when the Sally Ann girls went calling on the
brothels they seldom had much luck. The adjutant was convinced that there was a
well-organized white slave ring operating. He encountered one girl who had been
shipped to Winnipeg from Kenora, then
out to Saskatchewan, and back to Winnipeg.
He started collecting
data on drug addiction, alcoholism, and a system which kept the girls so deeply
in debt to the keepers of the houses that they could not escape. Once he had
his material he intended to launch a publicity campaign. In the interim he
encountered representatives of the Temperance and Moral Reform Council who were
also making the rounds. They had already decided to hire a pair of detectives
to conduct an in-depth investigation and Adjutant McElhaney joined forces with
them.
When the
two detectives delivered their report it triggered a double-barrel blast that
rocked Winnipeg for days. While McElhaney was delivering a summary of the report to a
businessmen's club on November 12. the Reverend
J.G Shearer, n national secretary of the Temperance and Moral Reform Council,
was being interviewed in Toronto by the Globe. In
that and subsequent statements, the Revereno Shearer went a lot further than
Adjutant McElhaney By the time the newspaper headline writers got through with
him, Dr. Shearer was accusing Winnipeg of permitting the wide open operation of
brothels under police protection. He stated flatly: "They have the
rottenest condition of things in Winnipeg in connection with
the question of social vice to be found in any City in Canada."
Dr.
Shearer went on to detail circumstances which he believed to be strongly
suggestive of graft. Not the least telling of his points against segregated
areas was the fact that they offered a ready market for the white slave trade.
He gave instances of this
Speaking of the white slave traffic, Dr. Shearer said:
"Some
half a dozen of white slave victims have been marketed within the past year in
the vice district of Winnipeg. Four of these have
recently been deported, two being sent to Scandinavia and two to the United States. One is waiting
deportation to England. Two of these cases
were discovered through the efforts of our Federation and its detectives while
in Winnipeg."
"In the first
place I reiterate the statement I previously made, and affirm that it was a
moderate statement of conditions that I know to prevail in Winnipeg. The Winnipeg City Hall officials will not
deny that they have a segregated vice district, in which is permitted the
carrying on of the criminal business of social vice-criminal, because expressly
prohibited by the Code of Canada.
There are in round
numbers 50 of these dens of vice. Every one of the fifty keepers, every one of
the 250, or thereabouts, inmates, and every male frequenter, whether he be a
prominent citizen of Winnipeg or not, is a
criminal in the terms of the code. In addition to this, every one of these 50
dens of vice is also an illicit liquor dive in spite of the license law of
Manitoba, every day of the week and at all hours of the day or night. The
officials moreover, will not deny that no serious attempt is made to close up
these dens of vice or to put a stop to the running of these liquor dives.
It is not easy to
believe that such an utterly disgraceful condition of things is permitted day
after day, week after week, and month after month, either for love of vice and
crime or on any high moral principle. What then is the motive? Members of the
City Council and City Hall officials are said to complain bitterly that I have
been guilty of blackening the fair name of Winnipeg. I have only said
what is the truth, and moreover, by no means all of the wretched truth. The
true blackeners of the fair name of Winnipeg are those that are
responsible for this criminal, disgraceful and debasing condition of things.
The vice area has become one of the great show places of Winnipeg. The real vilifiers
of the good name of Winnipeg are those that are responsible for the permission,
if not the careful protection, of this moral cesspool, the stench of which is
making itself felt to the discredit of Winnipeg throughout the Dominion and
elsewhere."
The next day the city
council unanimously asked the Manitoba government to
appoint a royal commission to investigate. The government immediately named Mr.
Justice H.A. Robson of the Court of King's Bench to head the inquiry and
within a week he had his investigation under way. Before him came not only
Adjutant McElhaney and Dr. Shearer but representative citizens from the area,
representative prostitutes, the mysterious real estate agents, the chief of
police, and enough other witnesses to titillate the interest of even the most
blasé of Winnipeggers for the next ten days.
Lila Anderson told the commission she was in business with
her sister and had come from Ohio. Together they
employed four girls at 113 McFarlane Street and guessed that
their average patronage was from ten to fifteen customers per night. Amy
Norris, who had operated at 549 Logan Avenue for six years, did a
lot better at 173 Annabella. According to an official from the Manitoba
Telephone System, who reported on the money taken from the pay phones which
were installed in most of the houses, Amy Norris's pay phone was always full of
nickels. One month her customers had deposited $39 in the telephone. Mostly,
she explained, the customers used the phone to call for hacks or taxis, an
indication that almost 800 calls a month went out for transportation from Amy's
place. As the customers seemed usually to arrive in groups of two, three, or
four, it could reasonably be assumed there were nights when Amy's place must
have accommodated at least 100 customers. Amy, moreover, was one of the
earliest settlers in the area and picked up her house for $4,250 compared with
the $8,000 Alice Penchant paid for the house across the lane en McFarlane Street.
From the testimony
before the commission, it became apparent that the new segregated area had not
attracted all the prostitutes from downtown residential districts. Among the
exhibits tabled was a list of 490 keepers and inmates the police had identified
in the city. While the police claimed they had reduced the number of houses
operating outside the district from 63 to 7 or 8, they also admitted they still
received complaints about 80 houses allegedly operating outside the area.
As the Robson Commission hurried its hearings to a
conclusion the civic election campaign of 1910 moved into high gear. It was one
of the bitterest ever held in Winnipeg. Mayor Sanford
Evans, then completing his second year in office, was about to drop out of
civic politics when the brothel scandal broke. In order to vindicate his
position and, in the process, to put the issue of segregated versus
proliferating prostitution squarely up to the electors, he decided to run for a
third term. The reformers welcomed his challenge and nominated E.D.Martin, a
lay leader of the Presbyterian Church.
The Martin supporters leaned heavily on the testimony of
the Robson Commission witnesses and demanded that the laws against prostitution
be enforced and that wide-open bootlegging he ended. Evans ran on his record,
which he defended as best he could. To the astonishment of everybody
concerned, the electors went to the polls on December 13 and re-elected Evans
by' a vote of 7,250 to 5,660 for Martin. It was a decisive majority, yet the
reformers refused to accept it and went to court in an effort to upset the
election. That attempt failed; Evans served out his term and then returned as
full-time editor of the Winnipeg Telegram, the raucous organ of Toryism in Manitoba. He ultimately
became leader of the Manitoba Conservative Party.
In January 1911 Judge Robson brought in his verdict. His
findings were:
1. That
the charges as to vice in Winnipeg appearing as
headings to the newspaper items in question are not true.
2. As to
the charge made by Dr. Shearer, so far as it condemns the condition of things
in Winnipeg in regard to the question of social vice, I have to report that a
policy of toleration of the offence in question in a limited area, with
regulations as to conduct, was adopted by the Police Commissioners, that such
an area was accordingly established by immoral women; that since October 1909
there was no attempt to restrict the increase of houses of vice in the area,
and the number of houses of this class grew from 29 to 50.
3. That
the result of the above state of affairs has been the disturbance of peace and
good order in the locality, a menace to morals and great depreciation in value
of property of the neighbouring residents.
4. That
the above conditions were not brought about by the corruption of any police
authority, and that the occupants of the houses referred to do not pay for
police protection.
Winnipeg, however, had beaten
Judge Robson to the punch when it had gone to the polls. It had opted for
tolerated prostitution although it also indicated to the police commission that
there was strong opposition to the wide-open variety that had developed in the
last eighteen months. The morality squad became more severe in its repression
of drunkenness and rowdyism. As it did so the district began slowly to shrink
back to its original size. The houses on McFarlane Street were gradually
vacated, perhaps more than anything else because the business had been vastly
over-expanded during 1910. For the real estate interests that had been gouging
the whores for all the rent traffic would stand, the party ended too soon.
Those who had helped push prices to ridiculous heights found themselves with
unrentable houses on their hands. Gradually the street reassumed its
working-class image, but with a difference. So notorious had it become as a
result of the Robson Commission that only unwary foreigners could be lured
into renting the vacant houses even at a tenth of the rate the whores had paid.
In the
months following the vindication of Mayor Evans the denizens of the district
undoubtedly began to take too much for granted as far as law enforcement was
concerned. There was a series of violent outbreaks on the street. An angry
pimp waylaid his woman and tried to shoot her full of holes. Strong-armed
gangsters attempted to move into the brothels. A messy murder brought the
street back to the front pages of the newspapers. The police commission decided
a crackdown was called for. Mayor R. D. Waugh, who had succeeded Evans, started
enforcing the criminal code. A series of raids was ordered which eventually
restored a measure of tranquillity.
But Annabella Street was proof against
vice crusades, wars, booms, and busts. The madams from Thomas Street who had taken root
on Annabella Street survived the Great
War with ease, as well as prohibition and the changing mores of the 1920s.
Minnie Woods celebrated her thirtieth anniversary in the oldest profession in
her house on Annabella Street.
Gertie
Curney, who took over the house at the corner of Annabella and Sutherland
streets in 1909, survived three marriages and other disasters, and in the moved
into high gear. It was one of the bitterest ever held in Winnipeg. Mayor Sanford
Evans, then completing his second year in office, was about to drop jut of
civic politics when the brothel scandal broke. In order to vindicate his
position and, in the process, to put: the issue of segregated versus
proliferating prostitution squarely up to the electors, he decided to run for a
third tern. The reformers welcomed his challenge and nominated E.D. Martin, a
lay leader of the Presbyterian Church. The process became a legendary figure
among western prostitutes. She, almost alone in Winnipeg, was a whore with
style and finesse. She converted her brothel into a fair imitation of a classic
Parisian bordello. She hung her walls with tapestries, draped her windows with
velvet hangings, hired a French cook for her kitchen, and laid in a stock of
French wines; as late as 1929 her Chinese houseboy -was still sporting a queue
and answering the door dressed in brocaded silk. Of all the Annabella Street madams, she had the
least trouble with the police, probably because she had a commanding view of Sutherland Street from her front door
and of Annabella Street from an adjacent
side window.
Hers was
not a place, moreover, for the callow farm boys, or for the crude and rude
harvesters who flocked to Annabella Street from all over
western Canada in the 1920s. Gertie
sought and got the carriage trade. When the leaders of the Establishment wanted
a secret hideaway in which to conspire, a dinner at Genie's was a frequent choice.32
But the high and the low alike suffered economic disaster in the 1930s and
Gertie was no exception. Long before the war, the girls on Annabella Street were reduced to
spending hours sitting at windows, prepared to cut prices for any prospective
customer who came along, and prospects were few and far between. The patrons
who once phoned to make reservations for all-night appointments were long gone.
The prospects that did appear on the street came on foot, halting at each
window-rapping to haggle over a two dollar fee. Yet the street itself survived
well into the war years, when it quietly lapsed into respectability.
The
oldest profession, as a segregated and regulated institution, faded from Winnipeg as it was already
disappearing elsewhere from the West.