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

 

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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.