June Darlington, 31 years old and five years a resident of Milwaukee, had been summoned to the State Capitol over the summer of 1914 by state Sen. Howard Teasdale to tell her side of a highly controversial story. Teasdale, a Republican and reform-minded crusader from Sparta, had created a special committee to investigate vice and prostitution in Wisconsin. Darlington, a former showgirl who had been working in the sex trade for over a decade, did not intend to hold back. 

““It is unusual to find a normal man.”

– June Darlington

She spoke in plain language, estimating that three-quarters of the men she saw were “perverted” in some way, describing a “safety valve” that all men had; if it wasn’t released by drink, it was served by women. “You all have one,” she told Teasdale and the fellow members of his investigatory committee, “because you are all men.” And there was more nuance in her line of work than most cared to admit, Darlington insisted: “You must be able to talk to a man. You must know what his hobby is and be able to talk about it. I have known men to stay in a house a week, simply because a girl entertained them.”  

The testimony of Darlington, as well as dozens of fellow working girls, madams, pimps, procurers, beat cops, city officials and various other hangers-on, told the story of one of Milwaukee’s most notorious – and misunderstood – commercial districts. “We are not harming anyone but ourselves,” Darlington said of the city’s quasi-sanctioned district of vice. “I was taught there was a God who gave me these things.”

MILWAUKEE’S DOWNTOWN VICE DISTRICT, known locally as “The Line,” was a common feature of major US cities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Gender norms of the era cut a restrictive gulf that deemed sex outside marriage an occasional necessity for men, but a fatal wound to any woman’s respectability. Economic restraints also factored, limiting employment opportunities for women living outside of a family home to a handful of heavily gendered and often ill-paying professions. The degree to which women were coerced into the life varied from case to case, but it was always capitalistic at the core. While few outside of The Line were willing to admit so at the time, Milwaukee’s “working girls” were just that – workers. Like thousands of other Milwaukeeans who toiled away at work they’d rather not do in conditions that could only be tolerated when destitution was the only other option, the women of The Line endured. 

The oldest reference in print to prostitution in Milwaukee dates to 1851, although it almost certainly existed in some form dating back to the first European settlements. By 1857, police raids revealed that the city’s trade had evolved into a sophisticated business, with a hierarchy of brothel-keepers who employed both female sex workers and male procurers of potential customers. Milwaukee’s madams had established business models that sold beer and liquor to a regular stable of customers while providing room, board and health care for their “inmates,” a term politely applied in the era to prostitutes but most often used to refer to lodgers. Arrests and raids made news a few times a year and mostly resulted in small fines that were considered by most to be little more than a de facto licensing fee. Calls for reform were regular but mostly unheeded.  

Hattie Jennings was 48 when she sat for an interview with Teasdale. Born in Madison, she had a child at 13 and left home shortly after. She began “boarding” in Milwaukee at 17 and spent most of the next 20 years working on The Line. “I never cared for the life,” she told the committee. “There is nothing in it but trouble.” She alluded to attempts to leave the life, all of them fruitless. In 1903, she opened her own house and began boarding her own women, refusing to take on anyone as young as she had been when she started. “It is awful hard for a girl to quit our business, because they are not going to let you. They will not let you alone,” she said of the world outside her own. “And they seem to find it out anyway, no matter how good you try to be.” 

By the 1870s, the geographic boundaries of what would become The Line had begun to take root. In 1875, the Milwaukee Sentinel made the first known references to “River Street.” River Street (now Edison Street) was, per city maps, an unimpressive five block stretch of storage yards and multi-family housing located just east of the Milwaukee River. But to those in the know, River Street was shorthand for the cluster of upscale riverside brothels that city officials were by then permitting to operate mostly free of legal sanction. The district ran from what are now Highland and Wells streets and as far east as Market Street. West of the river, a more working-class brothel district developed along Wells Street as far west as Sixth Street. By the 1880s, it was estimated that 95 houses of prostitution (not to mention numerous gambling parlors and illegal saloons) were operating within these boundaries with little to no threat of legal recourse.  

Having no hope for eradicating the sex trade in Milwaukee, Police Chief John Janssen, appointed in 1888, laid down a structured (if unofficial) policy that would allow The Line to operate openly but with police oversight. If the madams and their charges did not cause trouble and made sure that their trade was kept civil and honest, the police would make no move against their businesses.  

In short, anything went, so long as it went behind the closed doors of The Line. And while the city would not oppose the trade of the so-called “fallen” woman, Chief Janssen still saw it as the duty of his department to prevent the “fall” of others and to ensure that women were not being coerced by factors outside the little-acknowledged societal and financial pressures of the time. During the operation of what the police would refer to as the “segregated district,” madams were required to inform the police department whenever a new woman wished to begin working at the house. “If we found that a woman … had been a prostitute before and had no home and didn’t know what to do with herself, we allowed her to stay,” a vice squad detective testified. “If we thought she was too young or previously of good character, we took her out of there.” The department took notes during these investigations but destroyed them afterwards.

Kittie Williams sat for the Teasdale Committee as perhaps the Milwaukee’s most famed brothel-keeper. Her 15-bedroom estate at 69 Martin St. (presently the site of Red Arrow Park) was considered one of the finest “sporting houses” in the country. In better times, she had been offered $125,000 for the house, but as she spoke with Teasdale at age 52, tired from a life in the business, Williams admitted she’d now gladly accept $50,000 for the property. Forced out of her family home as a teenager, she began boarding at age 20 and soon after purchased the building on Martin Street that she would slowly build into Milwaukee’s most whispered-about palace. But by 1914, she had the weary aura of caretaker in a world that had little to offer young women who did not fit into respectable society. 

“I have women come to my house and write me letters and ask what [else] they will do,” Williams said. “I don’t know myself. I wonder, myself, what can be done. It is really pitiful. They have no home.” Williams was also asked about “white slavery,” a racially coded term of the day for what is today referred to as sex trafficking. Williams dismissed the idea, saying that there was no shortage of women willing and ready to work in one of The Line’s houses. The kind of force that “white slavery” suggested – something more akin to kidnapping – was simply not necessary. And, like Hattie Jennings, she said she refused to take in any working woman as young as she had been when she started out. “I would like to sell my property and get away from the city,” She told the committee. “I have never had any pleasure in it, and I have been working and working.”

A canvass by Milwaukee police in 1912 estimated that just 7% of the women who worked on The Line were native to Milwaukee. (The total number of women working The Line, as in other sources on the subject, was not included.) As a group, they were poorly educated, hardened by their experiences and often running from trouble. The trouble started at home, oftentimes with one or both parents corrupted by drink or prematurely dead. The trouble continued in the girls’ first dealings with men. Many got pregnant by a boyfriend or lover and were deserted, left on their own in a world that saw paying a single woman a livable wage as something akin to supporting immorality. A girl without a formal education could make a few dollars a week plugging away as a telephone operator or performing menial labor. Even with a few years’ experience, she could hardly hope to make as much in a week as a working girl could by “entertaining” a handful of men. 

After finding a house to board them, women stayed on The Line anywhere from a few days to several years. It was not uncommon for married women to work on The Line, or to find husbands while boarding. Some madams allowed their women to raise children in their rooms. In rare cases, children raised in houses would later enter the life themselves, sometimes working for their own parents. There was even a small segment of the women who remained religiously observant. The predominant religious affiliation of The Line was Catholic, although most had admittedly lapsed in their faith. But enough remained active that an East Side keeper took a group of working girls to church every Sunday. 

In the surviving accounts of life on The Line, the most anonymous participants are its male patrons. None was summoned by the commission or interviewed by its investigators. Madams and their women saw so many and knew so little about them they could provide only the vaguest of descriptions – some single, some married, mostly older, and none younger than their early 20s. Newspaper accounts from the days when the cops would still indiscriminately raid houses on The Line occasionally spoke of civic, business and religious leaders supposedly caught up in such sweeps, but names were never given. Indeed, it was common practice for men taken up in raids to give the cops false names, pay their bail and never return for trial. There was never any effort by the police to curtail this practice.

Sarah Worcester had never worked as a prostitute. She was 46 when she met with Sen. Teasdale and had been running one of The Line’s most profitable houses since 1906. Twice widowed, she had, years earlier, found herself in Chicago and out of money. She was trained as a school teacher, but the work no longer appealed to her. She answered an ad for a housekeeper in Milwaukee and soon found herself tidying up and selling cigars in a River Street brothel. She didn’t drink, didn’t stay out late, saved her money. Soon enough, she was running her own house and bringing in an estimated $10,000 per year. “What I did, I did of my own volition and with my eyes open,” She told the committee. “It was simply a matter of livelihood for me.”

Although Worcester lacked the hard upbringing and background in the life that many of the area’s other keepers had, she was no less protective of her working girls. She charged them no board and was generous with her earnings. “There isn’t a more charitable lot of people in the world than the sporting women,” she said, declaring that most of her profits ended up in the needful hands of churches, charities, beggars and anyone else on hard times. She, like Kittie Williams, also possessed a sense of civic pride. Williams once donated a bull to the city zoo. Worcester contributed $100 towards to the building of the Milwaukee Auditorium, at the northwest end of The Line. Neither was ever officially thanked for their donations. “Anything like that hurts a little,” she said.

“If I had my life to live over, I would be an old maid school teacher. … I would have never looked at a man.”

– Kittle Williams

LEGEND HAD IT that when a new house of prostitution, all-night saloon or gambling den would open on The Line, its operator would toss a key into the Milwaukee River. The ritual was a symbol of their intentions in the area – to hold their doors open, to neither be locked in nor locked away. But as the number of keys in the river grew, Milwaukee was changing. The wide-open city that allowed The Line to operate in a loosely regulated universe of its own had fallen out of the fashion by 1910. A movement toward reform-minded politics swept the city, pushing the Socialist Party – which had promised to eradicate The Line – into control of the city.

The end of The Line came in June 1912, when Socialist district attorney Winfred Zabel announced that he would soon begin to enforce existing laws and would hold the landlords – nearly all of the area’s brothels were in rented property – as accomplices. Within days, a flood of evictions swept the area. The June 16 Milwaukee Journal featured a photo of a moving wagon, filled to the top with the holdings of a River Street brothel. “MILWAUKEE’S VICE DISTRICT IS NO MORE,” blared the headline.  

Sarah Worcester knew The Line as well as anyone. She knew its heartaches and comforts, its lucrative opportunities and painful constraints. When the city made the show of “shuttering” the district, she would not have been surprised. And when Teasdale’s 1914 canvass of Milwaukee found vice to just be as rampant as it had been before Zabel’s actions, she was similarly nonplussed. “Have you any remedy for this?” The committee asked her about the depth of contradictions that allowed The Line to be at once a feature and a symptom of modern urban life. 

“Oh, my dear man,” she said. “You will never prevent it.”