Wicked Milwaukee

By Yance Marti

Local historian Yance Marti uncovers the rough and rowdy blackguards who once made Milwaukee infamous.

The Cream City of yesteryear was a dingy haven for scofflaws and villains. Red-light districts peppered downtown's landscape, but none had the enduring allure of River Street, where Kitty Williams and Mary Kingsley operated high-class brothels. Chinese opium dens flourished in the backrooms of laundries. The demise of the Whiskey Ring brought down local distillers in a nationwide scandal that nearly reached the Oval Office. As a result, Police Chief John Janssen and the Committee to Investigate White Slavery and Kindred Vice waged a protracted battle to contain the most brazen offenses.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Oct 8, 2018
• ISBN: 9781439665466

Yance Marti

Yance Marti works as a civil engineer for the City of Milwaukee. In his spare time, he researches and writes about the history of the city. In 2007, he developed OldMilwaukee.net to share the fascinating stories he found in newspaper archives. The site also presents the architectural history of downtown and provides a forum for discussing local history. In assistance with Historic Milwaukee Inc., he authored Missing Milwaukee in 2011. It showcased the work of two local photographers who documented downtown buildings lost to demolition over the last several decades.

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INTRODUCTION

Wickedness and sin were always the worries of crusading evangelists like Reverend A. Lee Aldrich, who made the statement in the accompanying headline from 1916. At a time when poor families were living in pest-ridden hovels without adequate heat, they took a back seat to the problems of gamblers, prostitutes and drunks. One major crusade after another took place across the country in the second decade of the twentieth century. The vice crusades led to the creation of the Teasdale Committee to Investigate White Slavery and Kindred Vice in 1914. The liquor crusades led to the Volstead Act of 1919. Both crusades used the government to enforce vice but never stopped the underlying problems leading to prostitution in the one case and excessive drinking in the other. Greater enforcement of vice also had an unwanted side effect: the growth of organized crime. Gangsters enriched on the underground economy grew empires and used government and police corruption to grow even larger. The term organized crime was created in the 1890s to refer to crime sanctioned by the corrupt government of New York City.

Each of the chapters in this book tells the story of the wicked. These stories are interesting reading because they tell about the often forgotten transgressive behaviors of Milwaukeeans one hundred or more years ago. It bears mentioning that wicked people are not always evil. In many cases, they were people living outside of proper society because that society didn’t want them. They were disenfranchised because they didn’t fit certain cultural, political, racial or gender norms. Their behavior became criminalized, not necessarily because what they did was illegal but because it was unwanted. As laws and mores change, some of what was wicked one hundred years ago is now considered normal—and some still remains wicked.

Headline from an article in the Milwaukee Daily News reporting on a series of sermons by Reverend A. Lee Aldrich. Milwaukee Daily News, March 29, 1916.

Religious crusades occasionally uncovered bribery and political corruption that fed off of vice. In the early 1890s, Charles Parkhurst, the Presbyterian minister from Madison Square in New York City, led a successful crusade against political corruption. He uncovered the connection between vice and Tammany Hall politics, and this inspired similar actions in all of the nation’s big cities for the next twenty-five years.¹ His unorthodox methods of uncovering and exploring dens of vice went so far as to pose as a customer at a brothel to witness nude women cavorting. Whether the ends justified the means wasn’t clear, but it didn’t stop others from following the same steps.

In 1895 Milwaukee, two local pastors inspired by Parkhurst’s successes went on such an exploration tour of River Street.² The Reverend Walter J. Patton, Methodist pastor of the Asbury Church, and another minister visited a string of brothels on River Street and afterward several gambling houses. They even played the roulette wheel in one house, crossing the line from mere observers. Copious notes of their travels throughout the Milwaukee badlands were kept for use in their crusade. A vivid description from an interview the next day was published in the Milwaukee Sentinel: We left the Kirby house and followed our guide, who soon brought us to River Street. We first entered a red brick house just south of the Stadt theater which is kept by a woman named Coddington. We found it to be a bagnio in the fullest sense of the term. From there we went along down the street, which appears to be almost entirely populated by disreputable women.

With the thoroughness of these and later investigations, it seemed that the threshold of decency had been crossed, especially in the vice hearings twenty years later. In 1913, State Senator Victor Linley wrote a bill bearing his name to investigate white slavery throughout the state. Vice investigators soon descended on the red-light districts and operated like secret agents to ferret out the places in Milwaukee (and elsewhere throughout the state) that were involved in the white slave trade. Searching the saloons and dance halls for prostitutes, they uncovered the underground economy of vice. There would always be helpful bartenders or people-in-the-know who, for a small fee, would lead men to the apartment of the keeper of a disorderly house. Vaudeville and burlesque shows were also investigated and rated for bad moral influences on the audience. During the official investigations, saloon men, prostitutes, boardinghouse madams and even Police Chief John T. Janssen were subpoenaed to provide testimony before the committee in a weeklong series of hearings. Their personal histories in the world of vice were brought out into the open, to be documented and published in the daily newspapers.

The stories of vice and wickedness in Milwaukee over the last 170 or more years can fill many volumes. The ten chapters of this book scratch the surface, giving a variety of stories that may not have been detailed in many other written works. Enjoy the history uncovered here of Wicked Milwaukee.

1

RIVER STREET,

RED LIGHT OF THE BAYOU

It started as a bayou on the east bank of the Milwaukee River between Juneau Avenue on the north and Wells Street on the south. Like other marshy areas along the river, it was a place of pestilence to be avoided. The Town of Milwaukee plat of 1837 showed a sliver of swampy land between the river and a stream where River Street would lay. An 1858 newspaper article called the swampy lands that horrible stench-pool, the old Bayou.³ Earlier, in 1857, the filling of the bayou began, and the platted lands along the riverbank subsequently were used for warehouses, lumberyards and docks where the lake schooners loaded and delivered goods. Stevedores and sailors working here needed places to unwind after a hard day’s work. Small shanties were built in the empty lots to give them a place to drink and a place to stay when they could stand no more. Today, office workers and tourists unwind at the taverns in the popular Water Street district overlapping the former red-light district. In an attempt to bury the disreputable past that existed in the nineteenth century, River Street was renamed North Edison Street in 1912.

The start of the red-light district almost coincides with that of the city itself. The City Charter of 1846 had specifically written a part in Section 25 to suppress and restrain disorderly houses or groceries, houses of ill-fame. An early effort was made in 1847 by the common council to ascertain the locations of all houses of ill-fame within the city so that something could be done about them. Either the report was never completed or nothing was done about it, because they remained a growing concern for concerned citizens. In 1851, the Annual Report of the County Jail mentions two convictions for operating houses of ill-fame. By 1885, perhaps mostly because of heavier enforcement, there were fifty-three convictions. Apparently, the taming of the savage Wisconsin wilderness made space for something wilder than the early pioneers would have expected. Looking back on accounts from the Milwaukee Sentinel of the 1850s, some of the more notorious people arrested for keeping disorderly houses were John and Sybil Spencer and Catharine Warncke. Their resorts were in different areas of the city, but they always tended to mix the vices of drinking, violence and sex.

Map of River Street and the bayou as it appeared in 1837. The street names shown are the modern names of all of the streets, with the exception of River Street. North is to the left. Illustration by author.

John and his wife, Sybil, had a brothel in what was then the countryside out on Lisbon Plank Road. The Plank Road began at the intersection of Twentieth and Galena and headed out to the town of Lisbon, nearly twenty miles northwest of the city. The nicknames to which John and Sybil were referred in the press were Sleeky John and Old Syb. Sleeky John kept several tavern-brothels throughout southeastern Wisconsin and was a well-known criminal with many robberies to his name. In December 1855, he started an argument with former partner and pimp John Singer over an old grudge.⁴ In the heat of the argument, Singer was shot in the side with a shotgun and stubbornly held on to life for several days. In the meantime, Sleeky John escaped on horseback to hide out at one of his other houses. By the next night, Police Officer Garlick had followed his trail to a roadside inn south of the city. The officer waited until John was sleeping before he entered the room, handcuffed him and hauled him off to justice back in Milwaukee. He was subsequently charged with first-degree murder and sentenced to life in the Waupun State Prison. After eleven years of prison life, John was pardoned by the governor on a promise to leave the state.⁵ He was never heard from again. During John’s incarceration, the Lisbon Road brothel was set on fire and burned to the ground in April 1856, presumably by neighbors never wanting him to return.⁶

An 1855 article detailing the aggressive character that was Sleeky John. Milwaukee Sentinel, March 12, 1855.

John’s wife, Old Syb, relocated to Milwaukee, moving from place to place and earning a living as best she could. She remained out of the news until 1858, when her friendship with Catharine Warncke led to serious trouble that led to her eventual banishment from the city.

Catharine Warncke was listed in the 1856 city directory as a widow working as a seamstress and living on River near E. Water. Another directory listing a few years later mentioned a Catharine Warencki and a listing for her son William Warencki living in the same location on River Street. A July 1858 Milwaukee Sentinel article mentioned her as a keeper of a villainous house of prostitution.⁷ An article in August of that year gave her the nickname Old Mother Warnke. The reporter pulled no punches, even writing that she was a sly, old witch.⁸ Obviously, she had gained a notorious reputation over a period of years. However, like today, if you really don’t like someone, the first step is to publicly demonize them. The truth of her character lies beyond the printed pages of the newspaper, forever lost to history.

The neighbors began to mobilize to drive out Old Mother Warnke. Starting in July 1858, a group of rowdies forced their way into her house and broke furniture and destroyed her belongings. Then in August, a full-scale war broke out. On Sunday, August 22, her son William insulted a woman walking on Water Street and attempted to commit violence upon her person.⁹ The newspaper record does not mention if there was a provocation by this respectable woman, but things escalated from there. Neighbors hearing the noise came to her aid and started to beat William. Shortly thereafter, an angry mob violently attacked the house and left only the frame standing, destroying everything within as well as the walls. Before a lynching took place, the police arrived and put a stop to further destruction. Old Mother Warnke and her friend Old Syb were the only inmates of the house still trying to defend themselves from the attackers and were promptly taken into custody for their own safety. The police court dealt with the case on Thursday, August 26, sending Mrs. Warncke to jail, fining her son twenty-five dollars and requiring that Old Syb leave the city. Oddly enough, two years later, Catharine’s name was once again in the paper with a police raid on a house of ill-repute, this time nearby on Market Street.¹⁰ The neighbors succeeded in removing one notorious house of ill fame, if only temporarily, but the name of River Street would eventually become synonymous with sin.

The start of the Civil War in April 1861 seemed to help the growth of the red-light district. African Americans escaping war and slavery in the South started to trickle into northern cities far removed from the bloodshed and violence. Some women fleeing the South took up working in Milwaukee brothels. There could be