Lafayette Park is one of the showplaces of NW. Another is Thomas Circle. Years ago, the circle and all the streets leading into it were lined with mansions. Now you can pull up in your car in front of a newsdealer there, at any hour, day or night, and place a bet on a horse, buy a deck of junk or get a girl--$10 asking price, $5 if you put up a struggle.
Another NW cynosure was Dupont Circle. It was social. There were the homes of such as Princess Eleanor Patterson. Now they’ve been razed or cut up because of taxes, death benefits, estate distributions and the high cost of maintenance. Those that still stand have been turned into embassies, headquarters of national organizations, and rooming-houses in between. One triangular corner was torn down to make way for the Dupont Plaza, a glassy and glossy apartment hotel, swell for lobbyists, flashy girls and 5-percenters. What happened to Dupont Circle hit all the way out the length of 16th Street, which runs off from the White House, and Massachusetts Avenue. These two long, broad avenues run through all NW. They are the “Ambassadors’ Rows.”
Of the sixty embassies, legations and chancelleries, almost all are on one or the other. Both have a liberal sprinkling of organization headquarters, such as unions, trade associations and eleemosynary institutions, with the ever-present furnished-room coops and apartment hotels.
The complexion of NW is changing, growing darker. The area always had a large Negro section. There are no racial zoning laws. Restrictive covenants cannot be enforced. There are no longer any racial boundary lines and some people think that is dandy. They have been in the driver’s seat since 1933.
You will find colored people living within a half a block of an embassy or around the corner from a new luxury apartment house. There is no reason why this should not be so, but the property-owners and the white residents do not agree. As the process continues, NW grows less swank and less desirable, while many of its rich residents move into Maryland suburbs such as Chevy Chase and across the river into Virginia.
The Negroes and other specific phenomena of NW will be considered in specialized chapters.
4. NOT-SO-TENDER TENDERLOIN
The District’s “red-light” region may be the largest on earth. That is because almost all of it is such, neither restricted by law, custom nor local habit to a particular part of town. But, more than any other, NW is the Tenderloin, in some ways more blatantly open than ever was New York’s infamous Satan’s Circus or Chicago’s 22nd Street.
Of all places, you would think Washington would be the last location a practical, professional prostitute would pick to pitch her camp. With so many more women than men, so many dames lonesome and far from home, on the eager upbeat for a meal, a drink or even a kind word, you’d figure mathematically, psychologically and pathologically that this would be a ghost town for the trollops.
Part of such traffic is always supported by tourists and strays. Washington has a large and constant visitation of these, but many other places have more and have virtually expunged street-walkers and entirely eradicated the sweatshops where such operators do homework. Yet in Washington they flourish, though they are supposedly verboten, and the Weary Winnies parade the pavements. It made a couple of graying Chicago boys homesick for their childhood.
Lorelles--as the Parisians call them--are in the Washington tradition, claim the capital by long-established squatters’ rights, almost by right of discovery.
The same stagecoaches which carried the first Congressmen to Washington 150 years ago brought also the first whores. They and their descendants have been here ever since, an integral, important segment of the population.
For the first 113 years they were protected by law. Segregation in the District was expunged by act of Congress in 1913, in the first year of the presidency of the school-teacher from Princeton.
In the early days of the Republic, whoring flourished as an essential and honorable trade. Transportation facilities were so primitive, many Congressmen and officials from backwoods sections had trouble getting to Washington themselves and would have found it impossible to transport their women. Trollops became an adjunct to legislation. Without them, it is doubtful whether a quorum could have been maintained for transaction of public business, which might not have been a bad idea sometimes.
The last compound of the trade was in what is now the Federal Triangle, between Pennsylvania Avenue and the Mall, from 10th to 15th Streets. The Willard Hotel, the Treasury and the White House are nearby--which made it convenient for all concerned.
In the Civil War, General Joe Hooker’s division was encamped in Washington to protect the President. It was bivouacked in what later became the official restricted district. One story, accounting for the term “hooker,” now worldwide, ascribes its origin to the habitat of local prostitutes, who gathered near the camp to pick up soldiers and remained after the soldiers left. When local blades went out for a night of hell-raising they said, “Let’s go over to Hooker’s.”
Another version ascribes the origin of the word to the Hook, in Baltimore, the town’s sailor section, where tarts picked up sea-faring men.
In the absence of a determination by H. L. Mencken, we will remain neutral as to the competing claims of the two neighboring cities, except to say that the residents of either ought to know what they’re talking about, because there are so many hookers in both.
Leaving out all occasionals in Washington who do it for fun or because of temporary monetary embarrassment, and counting only pros--those who have no other form of livelihood, some say there are at least ten thousand floozies actively in full-time business at this moment. We were solicited by half that number.
Most of these girls work as loners on the streets or in the cocktail lounges and bring their earnings back to their pimps. Some function through call services, via a headquarters phone-number, a cocktail lounge bartender, or a switchboard operator in a cheap hotel.
Many are tough and predatory. A 20-year old youth was stabbed and slashed after he turned down a street-corner proposition at Third and E. He fled when the woman drew a knife, but two colored men caught up to him and gave him the business.
Until recently, Washington was loaded with whore-houses, was in fact the last large city where this ancient and storied institution existed.
That’s because it was necessary to take care of the transients and the male government employes and officials away from their wives. The war and the post-war housing shortage virtually put the final kibosh on such dives here as it had done a few years earlier in other towns. Property became so valuable, landlords could do better by running it legitimately.
We spoke to a police captain who told us that obstacles were no longer placed in the way of the vice squad when it came to raiding these premises; but it is impossible to keep the girls off the streets and out of the hotel lobbies and cocktail lounges where they had transferred their business addresses.
Under the law of Washington, as well as all other municipalities, vice-squad detectives are forbidden to partake personally of forbidden wares while on raids. If they do, they have no case, for a prosecution then becomes “entrapment” and they are agents provocateurs.
During a recent raid, an operational plan was drawn up in advance. One of the cops, the handsomest, made the pick-up, and his confederates were supposed to crash in five minutes after he entered the room, which would give both time to disrobe, and that is enough evidence to make a collar.
But the raiders were late. The honest, hardworking cop went through the motions of undressing. Finally he had to get in bed with the wench; 15, 20, 30 minutes passed, and still no raiding party. He couldn’t stall her off any more.
By the time the doors were busted in, the evidence was null and void.
The figures in this chapter refer solely to white tarts. The black sisters are mentioned in another one.
Health records indicate that 50 percent of Washington’s white street-walkers are infected with venereal disease. With the colored ones, it goes up to 99 percent.
Many of the white women who solicit on the streets are young; it takes some time for these girls, fresh off the farms, to get the nerve to hustle in high-class hotels. Police have arrested girls 14, 15 and 16 hawking their bodies on the public highways. Many of these children, who should be home doing their schoolwork, left the hills when they were 12, after first having been raped by a local lout, usually a relative.
This story is not apocryphal. A very young street-walker was formally charged by the arresting officer with “practicing prostitution.”
“That’s not so, your honor,” she piped up. “I don’t practice any more. I know how now.”
The going rate for whores, the pick-up kind, is $20 and down. Pretty fair ones will take $10, and many will come along for $5. These prices are low compared with the current tariffs in other large cities, the reason being the extraordinary amateur competition.