bathhouse john and the funky bunch

Or, the story of Minna and Ava Everleigh, featuring some truly incredible 1900s gangster names.

Hi friends! I live!

Thanks for your patience while I briefly fell off the face of the earth for a month due to a confluence of things including travel, book stuff, family stuff, and a day job that occasionally tries to kill me. I haven’t forgotten you, Dirtbag Nation, and I hope you’re all well!

I came across the two ladies I’m featuring today in a wonderful book I read recently called Sin in the Second City, by Karen Abbott, which I highly recommend. You’ll see why when I start telling you about…

Minna and Ada Everleigh, the Gold-Plated Brothel Owners Who Stormed the Nation and Ruined the Mayor’s Life

nothing warms my heart like a stone-cold bitch running a scheme, and in this story we have TWO OF THEM

The story of the Everleigh sisters starts out in strong dirtbag fashion: the Everleigh name is made up and we’re not really sure when they were born because they lied so wildly about their ages it’s basically impossible to say. Ballpark, let’s put their birthdays in the mid-1860s, their birthplace in Virginia? Kentucky? Who knows. Ada was the elder sister, born about two years before Minna.

The way Ada and Minna tell the story of their early life, the two sisters married a pair of brothers, both of whom were abusive and awful. So instead of continuing in this weird family affair, they ran away and joined a traveling theater troupe. Was this true? It does sound more like the beginning of a Grimm’s fairy tale than a real biography, but that’s none of my business.

Anyway, the point is, Minna and Ada traveled the country as actresses for a while, until they were stranded by the theater company in Omaha, Nebraska and decided they needed a better way to make money. And what better way for two women to make money than to open the best goddamn brothel the world had ever seen?

I don’t know why but this part of the story gives me “Vlad and Dmitri jump on the back of a streetcar after announcing the greatest con in history” energy

They opened their first brothel in Omaha in 1895 after taking a cross-country road trip to see some of the most impressive brothels in the country and take copious notes. Business took off, but there’s only so much money you can make in turn-of-the-20th-century Nebraska, so they decided to pack up and head for a wealthier city: my home of Chicago, Illinois.

And this was where the sisters went goddamn stratospheric.

Real Pain for My Sham Friends, Champagne for My Prussian Friends

Minna and Ada opened the Everleigh Club in 1900 in Chicago’s Levee District, which for my fellow Chicagoans was near where the Cermak-Chinatown Red Line stop is today. They picked the name—and changed their own last name to match—allegedly based on how their grandmother used to sign letters: “Everly Yours.”

Pretty much immediately, the Everleigh Club was the best place to be in the Levee District. Everything was covered in gold and mirrors and expensive carpets, and Minna and Ada would serve elaborate buffets of oysters and caviar and champagne to their clients while wearing every single diamond they owned, which was a lot of them. They hired sex workers selectively and taught them all how to quote Robert Burns, because it was 1900 and apparently rich guys were into that. They got a piano for $15,000 and plated it in gold.

find another place they could have put gold or naked ladies, I dare you

Basically, the vibe was “Sure, we’re a brothel, but we’re not like those shitty, sketchy brothels down the street. We’re classy business bitches and when we charge you four times what they charge, it’s goddamn worth it.” In the club’s early days, Ada would stand at the door and inspect the men trying to get in, and if they didn’t look fancy enough, she’d send them away.

One person who was fancy enough: Prince Heinrich of Prussia, who famously visited the club and then drank a bottle of champagne out of a sex worker’s shoe. This started a worldwide trend of shoe-based champagne drinking, and it reinforces my desire not to learn about Prussia, because apparently they were weird about feet there.

the front hallway of the Everleigh Club. note the restrained décor. very demure. very mindful.

Skinamarink a Hinky Dink

There’s nothing more quintessentially Chicago than aldermen doing wildly illegal things to make money, so it won’t surprise you that’s what comes next. The two aldermen nominally in charge of the Levee District had exactly the kind of whimsical names you hope for in a story like this: Bathhouse John Coughlin and Hinky Dink Kenna. If you think I’m not going to email my own alderman immediately and ask him to come up with an old-timey gangster nickname, you are mistaken.

I don’t really need to tell you that Hinky Dink is on the left and Bathhouse John is on the right, do I?

Bathhouse John and Hinky Dink knew that the now-famous Everleigh Club was a great way to make some money, and they wanted in. They were already skimming off the top of every liquor license in their wards, but pretty soon they were running a classic protection racket, having the Everleigh Club pay a portion of its profits to City Hall to get the police to turn a blind eye to whatever was going on there.

They also had a great time, it seems: both Bathhouse John and Hinky Dink attended the First Ward Ball with the Everleigh sisters for several years. The point of the ball was allegedly a fundraiser for local government. In practice, it was a nine-hour-long orgy and drug binge that usually ended with a riot or two.

Who Wants to Kill a Millionaire?

Things were going well for the sisters throughout the first decade of the 20th century. They were making money, they were famous, the line to get in the club was always out the door. But then two deeply annoying things happened to their business model.

The first one: someone murdered a rich guy.

The guy in question was Marshall Field Jr., the son of the Chicago department store mogul. My first association with Marshall Field will always be “Oh, that’s still what my mom calls Macy’s sometimes,” but he was the Jeff Bezos of the turn of the century, having invented a whole new way to take people’s money by selling them stuff they didn’t need. Marshall Field Jr. turned out exactly how you’d expect the son of the richest man alive would: he loved sex, drugs, fast cars, and being a problem.

for the son of the richest guy in the world you’d think he could get a shirt collar that didn’t look like two photoshopped triangles, but whatever.

In the fall of 1905, Marshall Field Jr. was shot with a pistol in the abdomen. Somewhere. By someone. Insanely, he took a cab back home, and when the household found him casually bleeding from a gunshot wound in his own bed, they rushed him to the hospital, but it was too late to save him.

Of course, this raised some questions. Which naturally it would! I myself have questions!

And Vic Shaw, a brothel owner who was not quite as popular as the Everleigh sisters, was quick to start spreading the rumor that one of the Everleigh Club girls had shot Marshall Field Jr., then stuck him in a cab and sent him home before the police could find out.

Did this happen? I mean, if you use a moment of critical thinking, probably not. This was almost certainly a case of a rival brothel owner trying to throw shade on the competition so she could make more money herself. But that didn’t matter. It was a fucking great story, and pretty soon the Everleigh Club was associated with scandal and murder, despite my girls’ best efforts to be the classiest ladies in the red light district.

Miami Vice (Commission Report)

The second deeply annoying thing that happened to the Everleigh sisters? The church.

A massive moral panic was taking place about this time about the safety and virtue of young white girls in Chicago. Every newspaper in the city, and many across the country, was running stories about innocent country girls who came to the city, were corrupted by men they met at train stations, and then were sex trafficked into brothels run by evil madams.

Which, to be clear, is a bad thing! And did happen in at least a countable number of cases! But it’s very much not what was happening at the Everleigh Club. Ada and Minna were bougie bitches with absurd standards and an extensive interview process, and there was a waiting list of girls who wanted to work at the club. They did not need to go around kidnapping people at train stations.

Minna, sitting next to what seems to be a cat shaped like a penis, tits out to next Tuesday, covered in diamonds: “Trafficking? Officer, you wound me.”

But did that stop people from holding prayer meetings in the street outside the club for weeks on end? It certainly did not! Minna even invited some of the reformers into the club to show them no one was being sex trafficked—and also to try and win them over as customers, because miss ma’am was an entrepreneur to the end—but they weren’t having it. Eventually, Mayor Carter Harrison Jr. had no choice but to launch a Chicago Vice Commission to figure out what the fuck was going on in the Levee District.

Note: the mayor himself did not give a rat’s ass about prostitution. He was a 20th-century Mayor of Chicago, and by that I mean corrupt as a poker player whose deck has 52 aces. But he wanted to be re-elected, and he also wanted these people holding Bibles to stop coming into his office and yelling at him, so Vice Commission it was.

portrait of a mayor who just wants to be left the fuck alone please

The Vice Commission issued its report in 1910, and Mayor Harrison decided that the best way to deal with it was to shut down the Everleigh Club. It was the nicest and most famous brothel in town, so it would be an easy way to make a statement that he was Doing Something About The Problem without having to do anything systemic. Minna and Ada received the news that the Everleigh Club would be shut down on October 24, 1911.

Cook County Penne-Tentiary

Of course, they tried to fight back, because they were two fancy bitches who loved money and never backed down from a fight. So Minna put together a list of all the people in city government who she’d paid off and threatened to bring the whole list in front of the Vice Commission and the mayor. The strategy: “If you’re bringing me down, Hinky Dink, I’m bringing you the fuck down with me.”

It was a good strategy, except for two problems.

Problem the First: Everyone and their mother already knew the First Ward Aldermen were criminals. They literally threw a criminals-only party once a year. This was not gonna be news to the mayor.

Problem the Second: Bathhouse John hired an Italian-American gangster named Big Jim Colisimo, who came to visit the Everleighs, threateningly made spaghetti in their kitchen, and told them he’d kill them both if they talked.

Minna Everleigh, whose expression can only be described as “why is there a man threateningly making spaghetti in my kitchen”

The “threateningly making spaghetti” part sounds like a joke cut from the Sopranos for being cartoonishly stereotypical, but it’s a real detail. It’s also the second instance in this newsletter of a good plate of pasta being used to commit a crime.

Minna and Ada, preferring to stay sexy and not get murdered, gave in, and the club was closed right on schedule. The sisters took their millions of dollars and moved out to a nice little house on the West Side of Chicago. However, the neighbors were like “hey, aren’t you the bougie brothel owners who tried to blackmail the alderman?” So they didn’t stay long, instead touring Europe and looking for a place they could be fun and free and sexy.

Regrettably, they didn’t ever really find one, although they always had each other! They lived together until Minna passed away in 1948. Ada then moved to Virginia—where maybe they were from? probably?—where she lived quietly until her death in 1960.

The Everleigh Sisters have largely been forgotten, which I think is a damn shame. At your earliest convenience, please raise a glass (not a shoe) of champagne to two criminal entrepreneurs who really knew how to throw a party.

That’s all for this week, my friends! God willing and the creek don’t rise, I’ll be back in two weeks as usual for another installation of dirtbaggery. Until then, be well, and please share your suggestions for old-timey alderman nicknames because I plan to forward them along to the appropriate authority,

-Allison