ATDTDA (2): Everleigh House (47.28)

Sun Feb 11 23:06:44 CST 2007

After a lengthy search including obvious favorites like the Silver Dollar and Everleigh House [...] (p. 47).

Pynchon apparently takes some liberties here with the Everleigh Club, which actually opened in 1900:

from _Chicago Days: 150 Defining Moments in the Life of a Great City_. (p.78):

"The Everleigh Club"
Chicago's famed brothel begins its eleven-year run of luxurious vice
February 1, 1900

Behind the doors of the twin brownstones at 2131-33 South Dearborn Street, Minna Everleigh gave her final instructions:  "You have the whole night before you, and one $50 client is more desirable than five $10 ones.  Less wear and tear," she told the women assembled before her.  With that, minna and her older sister, Ada, on this date opened what would become the best little bordello in Chicago and, for a time, one of the best known in the world.

Minna and Ada Everleigh, then twenty-one and twenty-three, took their name from their grandmother's habit of signing her letters "Everly Yours."  Raised in a prosperous Southern family, the sisters fled bad marriages to become touring actresses and ended up in Chicago, after running a bordello in Omaha during the Trans-Mississippi Exposition.

Amid the grimier brothels of the Levee, Chicago's notorious vice district, the Everleigh Club sparkled like one of Minna's many diamond pins.  The Tribune described the fifty-room mansion as the world's most richly furnished house of courtesans.  Guests were entertained in opulent parlors, among them the Gold Room, which featured gold-rimmed fishbowls, gold spittoons, and a miniature gold piano, and the Chinese Room, where gentlemen could set off tiny firecrackers.

In an era when a beer cost a nickle, the Everleigh sisters charged $12 for a bottle of champagne.  Dinners started at $50 a person -- without female company.  Gentlemen who left without spending at least $50 were advised not to return.  Exempt from that rule were newspapermen, for whom the sisters professed a soft spot.  If Tribune overnight clerks needed to round up reporters quickly, they were told to call Calumet 412, the club's famed telephone number.

Thanks to the protection money the sisters gave police and aldermen, the Everleigh Club operated freely.  But its extraordinary success eventually led to its downfall.  A brochure advertising the club fell into the hands of Mayer Carter Harrison Jr., and, on October 24, 1911, he ordered it shut down.  The sisters left with more than $1 million in cash, jewelry, stocks, and bonds.  Ada and Minna resettled on the West Side, but neighbors drove them out.  They moved to New York City, and there they led quiet lives under assumed names and started a neighborhood poetry circle.  After Minna died in 1948, Ada sold off most of their belongings, including the gold piano, and moved to Virginia.  She died in 1960, at the age of ninety-three.