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Texas Vice

PROSTITUTION WAS A FACTOR IN Texas society from its earliest days, even before it became a state or even an independent nation, and the Spanish had recorded its presence in San Antonio at least as far back as 1817. As settlers poured into the area and new towns sprung up and grew throughout it, prostitutes followed and set up business along with everyone else.

Military activity in the region was certainly one of the factors that encouraged prostitution. General Zachary Taylor’s troops were well served by women of ill repute during the eight months they spent around Corpus Christi prior to the 1846 U.S. invasion of Mexico. Bawdy houses also sprang up around military camps in the years during, and after the Civil War (1861–65).

Encouraged by the boom in ranching, the arrival of the railroads, and the establishment of permanent military bases—and, ultimately, the arrival of the oil industry—permanent vice districts became a distinct phenomenon in cities from the 1870s onward. Some of the most significant of these included “Boggy Bayou” and “Frogtown” in Dallas, “The Concho” in San Angelo, “Guy Town” in Austin, “Happy Hollow” in Houston, “Hell’s Half-Acre” in Fort Worth, the Postoffice Street district in Galveston, the “Sporting District” in San Antonio, “Two Street” in Waco, and the Utah Street reservation in El Paso. Many districts in smaller communities were also called Hell’s Half-Acre or had names similar to those in larger cities (e.g., “Feather Hill,” “Hog Town”).

Often tacitly blessed by civic leaders as a means of segregating vice, these districts generally encompassed several city blocks, were located within a short distance of the downtown business area and railroad station, and included brothels, saloons, gambling dens, dance halls, burlesque theaters, and the little shanties used by many prostitutes.

Some streetwalkers in larger cities like San Antonio and El Paso had pimps, but most prostitutes were associated with brothels, where they were protected and managed by madams. The names of most of these have been lost to history but a few of them are known—at least by their working names—among them Blanche Dumont in Austin, “Miss Hattie” in San Angelo (q.v.), Mary Porter in Fort Worth, and Jessie Williams in La Grange (q.v.).

Cost for a session with a prostitute in the latter half of the nineteenth century depended on many factors but generally ranged from 25 cents at one end to $5 at the other. Depending on the demographics and purpose of a particular community, customers included cowboys, businessmen, convention goers, drifters, farm hands, laborers, ranchers, soldiers, oilfield workers, politicians, sailors, students, and gamblers.

Permanent vice districts became a phenomenon … these included: Guy Town, Happy Hollow, and Hell’s Half-Acre.

Hispanic prostitutes were the norm in the early days but by the era of the Civil War had been joined by many white women as well and, by the 1880s, blacks.

“In Austin half or more of the prostitutes during the 1880s and 1890s were white, most of them born in the United States, while about 40 percent were blacks and some 7 percent Hispanics,” wrote David C. Humphrey, author of several detailed articles on prostitution in Texas. “In Houston in 1917, 60 percent of the women who headed households of prostitutes in the vice reservation were Anglo, 35 percent black, and 5 percent Hispanic. Hispanic prostitutes were more common in San Antonio, El Paso, and Laredo, at army forts in West and South Texas, and generally in communities closer to the Mexican border. Anglo and black prostitutes lived and worked near each other in vice districts, but race had a significant bearing on how the districts operated. Whites predominated in brothels, while blacks predominated in cribs. Most bawdy houses maintained color separation in their employees, and Anglo houses refused as a rule to accommodate black men. On the other hand, many white men patronized black as well as white prostitutes.”

Not all prostitutes were wholly devoted to their occupation, and some only turned tricks when they had to or also served in other capacities (e.g., as laundresses around military camps). Most were women in their twenties, but they ranged in age from their teens to their sixties. Many were itinerant, following the spread of the railroad or the establishment of new communities around railheads, ranchlands, and oilfields, or being driven out by periodic anti-vice campaigns.

Life was, in any event, rough for the majority of prostitutes in Texas, and most were constantly threatened by disease, violence, and municipal authorities and lived on the verge of poverty (although prostitution paid better than most jobs open to women, an enticement to widows and abandoned wives). Many also suffered from disorders like depression, abused drugs like cocaine, morphine, and opium, or attempted to commit suicide.

During the 1880s, the larger municipal vice districts probably had more than one hundred prostitutes working in them, a number that might have been twice as high for periods in even moderate-sized boomtowns, and which probably doubled or tripled by 1910.

While most Texas communities had ordinances on the books illegalizing prostitution, they generally did not overly enforce these and instead tried to control and isolate it, both because they considered it could not be eliminated and because it often had a significant impact on local economies (i.e., via rents, fines, money spent by patrons). And in the late 1880s and 1890s, Dallas, El Paso, Houston, and Waco tried legalizing prostitution within specified vice districts.

Campaigns led by clergymen, political reformers, and women’s groups did manage to get a number of vice districts shut down during the years 1911 to 1915, notably in Amarillo, Austin, and Dallas. And, with the outbreak of World War I, opponents of prostitution gained an ally in Secretary of War Newton D. Baker, who wanted prostitution banned in communities where military bases were located so as to protect troops from venereal diseases. Fearing the loss of installations or that they might be put off-limits to troops, the cities of Galveston, El Paso, Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio, and Waco complied with these demands in 1917 and shut down their vice districts.

During the 1920s and 1930s, prostitutes in Texas began to spread out of the vice districts and conduct their business from apartments, hotels, rooming houses, and roadhouses; to communicate with patrons via telephone; and to walk the streets to make themselves visible to people driving automobiles. Vice districts continued to operate during this era in many communities, including Beaumont, Borger, Corpus Christi, Corsicana, Dallas, El Paso, San Angelo, and San Antonio, but many of these deteriorated, becoming seedy and dangerous. Many brothels shut down and higher-end prostitutes became call girls.

During the late 1920s, however, Galveston had as many as nine hundred prostitutes working in its thriving vice district.

“Every big city in Texas had prostitution in the 1930s, but only in Galveston did it have identifiable, official boundaries, and tacit police protection,” wrote author Gary Cartwright of the Postoffice Street district in his book, Galveston. “By day the street was mostly deserted … but it came alive after dark. Prostitutes dressed for the evening appeared in lighted doorways, or leaned against the sills of open windows, calling to the passing parade of seamen, dockworkers, soldiers, medical students, and conventioneers. Businessmen, trying to look nonchalant and appear as though they were just pricing the real estate, ducked furtively behind latticework screens that had been positioned in front of the houses for precisely that reason. Some houses had steep flights of steps, in various stages of disrepair, and doors with tiny stained-glass windows and peepholes. Black maids answered the doors and led customers to shabby parlors where they were permitted to buy watered-down whiskey for themselves, and colored water for the girls. They were urged to feed quarters into the music box, and permitted a dance or two before being led upstairs. If the guests behaved, they were allowed to hang around afterward to dance and drink.”

Galveston had as many as nine hundred prostitutes.

With the onset of the Great Depression in the 1930s, many more women were driven to sell themselves, pushing down prices, doubling or even tripling the number of women working the streets, and further damaging the viability of the vice districts and the brothels. Pimps became more common. Prostitution was sometimes targeted along with offenses like bootlegging, but enforcement remained uneven and many civic leaders continued to be tolerant.

During World War II (1941–1945), prostitution was once again attacked by the military leaders as a threat to the health of troops, and communities were pressured into shutting down their red-light districts under threat of being put off-limits to service members. By the time the war ended, the distinct, tolerated municipal vice districts had almost completely disappeared from Texas cities, and the general attitude of tolerance had been replaced with one of repression.

Whores Galore

FOR A MORE DETAILED DISCUSSION OF TWO particular brothels in the Lone Star State, see the chapters in this section on “Miss Hattie’s Bordello” and “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.”

Galveston, San Antonio, and a few other cities maintained their districts well into the 1950s, but they were the exception to the rule, and some of the protected bordellos persisted even a few decades beyond this, remaining a feature of society in the Lone Star State much longer than they generally did elsewhere in the country. For the most part, however, prostitution had become dispersed over a much wider area and moved into motels and cheap hotels, massage parlors, cafes, bars, and the streets. The era of the Texas vice district as it had existed for a century had come to an end.