As these four clips from local newspapers show, by the 1890s women were entering a place that had once been largely the domain of the Y chromosome: the jail cell.
“Hey, this Grant looks a lot like Jeff Davis”: She was arrested for passing a Confederate $50 bill—forty-three years after the war.
She was arrested for aiding in an attempted jail break. Two small saws were smuggled into a prisoner in a trusty’s cork leg.
Two female inmates hiss and make up.
“In olden days a glimpse of stocking/was looked on as something shocking” . . . by no one in Madam Ludwig’s line of work. A disorderly house, of course, was a brothel. The saloon was on the northern edge of Hell’s Half Acre. Judging by its name, it probably was in the acute angle of the intersection of 9th Street and Houston—where the Flatiron Building would be built in 1907 on the site of a two-story brick building. There is pathos aplenty in the final paragraph. The convent was St. Ignatius Academy (1888), just two blocks from the disorderly house.
