Great dames

DON’T FENCE HER IN Author Karen Abbott, at the former site of the Everleigh Club, investigates turn-of-the-century prostitution in her new book.

On the surface, Minna and Ada Everleigh were an enterprising pair of sisters at the turn of the 20th century. They built their business in Omaha, Nebraska, adapted the best practices from similar operations in other cities, and scouted for a new location. They eventually settled in Chicago, where their business took off and earned a national reputation.

“Theirs is the classic story of the American Dream,” says Karen Abbott, author of the forthcoming Sin in the Second City (Random House, $25.95). “They were very inventive, and by the time they retired, they were millionaires several times over.”

Where the ambiguity comes in, and this is the crux of her book, is that the Everleighs were madams: They ran the nationally famous Everleigh Club in Chicago’s Levee District. (The club stood at 2131–33 South Dearborn Avenue, now the location of the Bertrand Goldberg–designed Hillard Homes.) The two oversaw a bordello where the women were well cared for and compensated generously, and the clientele was rumored to include just about every man of money who came through town.

“That time period was sort of pre-Capone,” says Abbott, 34, who now resides in Atlanta. “I’m always fascinated by how cities are shaped, and that was such a dynamic time period, when Chicago was always trying to prove itself, constantly changing.”

The book is rich with details about a fast-and-loose Chicago of the early 20th century, a city that teems with prostitution, overzealous reformers and white slavery. That’s enough rich material to draw any writer into a story, but for Abbott, it was personal.

“It’s a bit of family lore,” Abbott says. “My great-grandmother came to America from Slovenia in 1895 with her family, and she moved to Chicago and was never heard from again.”

Sin explores this world with gusto, throwing light on a booming city and exposing its shadows. But the Everleigh Club held itself above the fray—a job there paid more than most any other available to a woman. And the Everleigh sisters were such characters, they make for sympathetic pimps. Both were allegedly abused before striking out on their own, and they crafted new identities—they shaved years off their ages, claimed to be married to two brothers and practiced a convincing good cop/bad cop routine.

“I grew to have great admiration for them,” Abbott says. “They were doing more good for the women than the reformers, even though they were technically criminals.”

But Sin, while a vivid take on the time that brings life to the sepia-toned newspaper accounts, hardly glorifies the world’s oldest profession. While many books about the era devolve into a romanticization of criminals, Abbott remains objective from the outset.

“I’m wondering if someone from Chicago would have seen it differently,” says Abbott, who took more than a dozen research trips here. “I really had no preconceived notions about Chicago, I just wanted to write the sisters’ story.”

And as for the novelistic approach that makes characters of people in history?

“It’s not difficult to tell what people were thinking, reading the newspaper accounts,” Abbott says. “I’ve always thought, What’s the point of writing about people who are dead if you’re not going to bring them back to life?”

Sin in the Second City hits the shelves July 10. Check out sininthesecondcity.com/events for more info.