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Washington Northwest

District of Columbia and Vicinity

WASHINGTON CONFIDENTIAL

Previously Published

by Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer

• NEW YORK CONFIDENTIAL
• CHICAGO CONFIDENTIAL

by Jack Lait

• HELP WANTED (a play)
• THE BIG HOUSE
• BROADWAY MELODY
• BEAST OF THE CITY
• PUT ON THE SPOT
• GANGSTER GIRL
• BEEF, IRON AND WINE (short stories)
• GUS THE BUS
• OUR WILL ROGERS
• WILL ROGERS’ WIT AND WISDOM
• A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO SUCCESSFUL WRITING

by Lee Mortimer

• NEW YORK BEHIND THE SCENES

WASHINGTON
Confidential

BY JACK LAIT
AND
LEE MORTIMER

CROWN PUBLISHERS, INC.
NEW YORK

COPYRIGHT, 1951, BY CROWN PUBLISHERS, INC.

Second Printing, February 1951

Printed in the United States of America
American Book—Knickerbocker Press, Inc., New York

The Confidential Contents

WASHINGTON CONFIDENTIAL

P-s-s-s-t!

Here we go again—Confidential.

We turned New York inside out; but we both live there. We turned Chicago upside down; but we were both raised there. We descended on Washington not quite like Stanley invaded Africa, because in our combined 75 years of newspaper work we had been in the capital hundreds of times. It intrigued us because we never could understand it. So we decided brashly to do a Lait-Mortimer operation on it from scratch. Our principal discovery was that nobody understands Washington—the city, not the nation’s nerve-center.

By the time we went through it—its avenues, its alleys, its cat-houses, its dumps, its mansions, its hotels, its police stations, its jails, its courts, its clubs, its closets, and its catacombs, we knew more about it than anyone who lives in it, and finished the job which stymied Lincoln Steffens 40 years ago; for that classic muckraker who turned up the shame of the cities recoiled in bafflement when he attempted to “do” Washington.

It was our toughest task of digging, but we turned up plenty. We think we have X-rayed the dizziest—and this will amaze you, as it did us, the dirtiest—community in America.

We are not reformers. We are reporters. As such we will take you with us through a metropolitan area of 1,500,000, living in what should be a utopia, but which is a cesspool of drunkenness, debauchery, whoring, homosexuality, municipal corruption and public apathy, protected crime under criminal protection, hoodlumism, racketeering, pandering and plundering, among anomalous situations found nowhere else on earth.

Washington is a made-to-order architectural paradise with the political status of an Indian reservation, inhabited by 800,000 economic parasites; no industries but one, government, and the tradesmen and servants and loafers and scum that feed on the highest average per capita income in the world, where exist the soundest security, the mightiest power, and the most superlative rates of crime, vice and juvenile delinquency anywhere. And this in a seat of intelligence, the cross-section of the whole United States, where women far outnumber men.

It leads the country in the percentage of the native-born. There are no peasants, factory-workers or slums as they are known in every other city of magnitude.

The paternal form of local administration in this disenfranchised and politically castrated community should eliminate ward and district bosses, vote-buyers, grafters and gangsters, all of whom elsewhere thrive primarily on controlling votes. Yet in this magnificent planned city of majestic proportions, the official heart of the richest and greatest and freest land in the history of mankind, we found corruption and perversion, organized and individual, that dazed a pair of hardened characters who considered themselves shock-proof after their groundwork for the books that debunked New York and deloused Chicago.

We spent many months in Washington. We made contacts in our own surefire way, which opened up sources not usually available to the reporters there, who regard affairs of their town as chickenfeed, and who dream of becoming syndicated columnists who can pontificate on Congress, the Cabinet and the White House.

We know plenty about those, too. But we will stick to the Lowdown on the Big Town, which has become our trademark.

We will not even attempt to be comprehensive. We have no hope or aim to make Washington a better place to live in. We don’t give a damn what kind of a place it is to live in, except that the kind of place we found furnished us with that sole commodity in which we deal—copy.

Everything interested us, but we will limit this to what we think will interest you. This is no guide-book. This is no preachment and no appeal, not even a lesson. As we said in the introduction to Chicago Confidential, “We have nothing to sell except books.” And we sold plenty of them and are still selling them.

This will be the stripped-down story of a queen who turned into a street-walker.

That’s why we were born—to tell you what you couldn’t find out without us—Confidential!

PART ONE
THE PLACES
(Confidential!)

1. DISTRICT OF CONFUSION

The Nation’s Capital is a bastard born of a compromise and nurtured on a lottery.

The founding fathers, whose infinite wisdom gave us a Constitution and form of government well nigh perfect, located the seat of that government in a stinking, steaming swamp. This was a peace offering to recalcitrant Southerners, who were that way then just as they are now.

The first funds to build and improve that city were raised by selling real estate by lottery. With such ancestry, it is no wonder today that “numbers” make one of the biggest businesses in Washington. The policy racket far exceeds bookmaking, the Number 1 source of gambling revenue in all others parts of the country.

Before the plane which brings the arriving traveler to Washington lands at the National Airport, on the Virginia side, it swoops gracefully over the city in a salute. The tall, needle-like Washington Monument and the familiar dome of the Capitol arise through a sea of green, to dominate the landscape.

They and the other public structures, which alone form the skyline in a city where buildings over 110 feet high are banned by law, are the symbols of Washington. It is an old-fashioned, tree-shaded Southern town, delightful and gracious, taken over by a gigantic governmental apparatus which, though founded on Colonial Virginia’s tradition of personal freedom, has mushroomed into the world’s greatest bureaucracy, humpbacked and bow-legged under tons of laws and endless regulations.

The spacious avenues, the tree-shaded lawns, the green which one sees wherever he looks, is a symbol too—that Washington is dominated by the rural mind.

It is the only capital of any world power where there is no variety of humanity. London, Paris, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Tokyo, these are great commercial centers where national government is incidental. Washington is inhabited by residents of every state in the union and representatives of every country on the globe, yet it is as backwater and provincial as any small inland one-plant town.

This most uncosmopolitan capital is overshadowed by that giant of metropolises, New York, only minutes away by air, and by Baltimore, with its wide open and blatant vice much nearer. The foreign trade commissioners, the visiting bankers, and all the important public personages go to Manhattan, where the United Nations is cutting into Washington’s diplomatic monopoly. The lowlier links lam the 36 miles to Baltimore to cut up.

Not that Washington has no vice and venery. It has more of it than the escape havens. But, as in all ingrown towns, the “respectables” must go away from home to prance and play. It is the story of the deacon from Dubuque all over again, and what happens to him in the Big Burg. Only here the deacon is a Congressman, or—

As we unfold the rates of crime, vice, sex irregularities, graft, cheap gambling, drunkenness, rowdyism and rackets, you will get, thrown on a large screen, a peep show of this stately concentration camp of cold monuments and hot mammas where there are four women for every three men. Murkier than the “smoke-filled room” so often used as a cliché to typify a corral of politicos, it is a vast bedroom with a jumbo bottle of bourbon beside the bed.

And yet its manners and morals are those of the barnyard and the railroad-junction town rather than the romantic intrigue of the salon and the scented boudoir.

Washington has a kind of glamor all its own. It is not the kind one finds in New York, or Paris, or even Atlantic City. The Washington feeling comes from being close to great events and to the memory of great people. It is, to a certain extent, similar to the public appeal of Hollywood’s famed Forest Lawn Cemetery, the place where the movie stars are interred. Forest Lawn there is a must for tourists. There is no sacred peace about this graveyard. Trippers photograph its ornate tombs and profane its dead. The tombs were purposely designed by hams who craved publicity even in death.

Washington does remind one of a well-kept cemetery. Its gleaming public buildings of white marble are like so many mausoleums. It is the nation’s Forest Lawn, where is sunk its priceless heritage, killed by countless generations of getters and gimme-ers.

Washington is a reflection of Los Angeles—a Los Angeles without palm trees. Where it doesn’t look like a cemetery it resembles a movie set. It has a feel of unreality. This is a designed city, the only important one in America, and its streets are so straight, its architecture is so conforming, and its sidewalks are so neat and clean, it might have been set up in papier-mâché only today.

And it’s a dead heat which—Washington or Los Angeles—has more yahoos from more dull places. New York gets its share, but its tourists include many from fairly alive communities; the plowboys hail from New England or other points not very far away. But the barbarians who inundate Washington and Los Angeles would be conspicuous if they visited Little Rock. Heaven knows where they come from. Their clothes, make-ups, manners and expressions are of the cow-pasture.

We were sitting in the Senators’ Reception Room in the Capitol, waiting for one solon to come off the floor. This rococo room is open to the public. While we sat there, we idly contemplated the sight-seers who gaped at the mid-Victorian gold and mosaic with which it is embellished. One coatless yokel, with two dirty-nosed youngsters in tow and a dreary wife toting a wailing babe bringing up the rear, figured we knew something because we were wearing ties and sitting down.

“What room is this?” he humbly asked.

“This is the President’s private office,” we replied. “No visitors allowed.”

You should have seen them scram!

The number of transients who enter and leave Washington annually is in excess of 45 million. Most of them are peasants who shudder when they ride in an elevator and gape at an escalator. The sessions of Congress find them in the galleries of the noisy House and the sedate Senate. The men are negligee with firemen’s suspenders, the women often suckle babes at their breasts while some Demosthenes below debates a bill vital to the world.

But the residents of the Washington area are, on the whole, remarkably well-dressed—not only the natives in Washington but the government employes drawn from every corner of the map. It is surprising how quickly they shed their corn-fed looks and begin to look like Easterners and try to act like them.

One wonders where the hoards of ill-dressed, low-mannered visitors eat and sleep.

Tourists may wander coatless through the White House and in the legislative office buildings, but all of the better restaurants and hotels require men to wear coats and ties at all times. This, of course, is universal in New York, but in Chicago, horny-handed, wilted hoi polloi are seen in lobbies of such swell hotels as the Ambassador and Drake in shirt-sleeves.

Washingtonians are completely white-collar. Its private business is merchandising. The service trades, such as feeding and sleeping visitors, form its chief non-governmental activity. Before the New Deal put a premium on alphabet soup, federal employes got miserly wages. Washington was a poor city. Now some secretaries make as much as $8,000 a year and Senators’ assistants drag down $10,000. We talked to one babe, some kind of an expert in the Treasury, who draws $15,000 a year on a fee basis. In her spare time she checks hats in a joint which sells liquor after hours.

The average family income in Washington is the highest in any big city in the land, despite its disproportionate Negro population. Colored folk work for Uncle Sam at salaries equal to whites’, in many cases get preferential treatment, and others draw liberal relief checks. Another reason for high family income is that in so many families husband and wife work for the government, and many who are grounded there also hold outside jobs, after hours. This practice is permitted in many departments. Even members of the Metropolitan Police are allowed to accept outside employment after their eight-hour day. Many drive taxies or are chauffeurs.

The per capita income in Washington is $1820, compared with the national average of $1330. Even rich New York is second to Washington with $1758.

Washingtonians file more income-tax returns per capita than do any other Americans. More than two-thirds of the homes in the District are worth more than $12,000. The city has the highest retail sales per capita on earth. Government employes are paid regularly by a boss who never goes broke—though that isn’t the fault of the politicians.

Added wealth streams constantly into the city, from the cornucopias of lobbyists with no-limit expense accounts, tourists and representatives of foreign governments who let loose a few francs, shillings or lire before tapping our tills.

Here we have a city which, if mental cripples who believe in planned economies were correct, should be a happy place, free of crime and vice. Washington is rich and almost everyone in it is insured against want for life. Yet it has that apex rate of crime. The waterfront of Marseilles, the alleys of Singapore’s Chinatown, the sailor’s deadfalls of Port Said have nothing on it. Washington makes even Chicago look good. And that’s been going on since Abigail Adams hung the family wash in the backyard of the then unfinished White House—and shuddered lest the President’s drawers be stolen.

In the early years of the Republic, grifters and grafters, highwaymen and conmen, pimps and prostitutes flocked into the city. Instead of being a community where women greatly outnumbered men, as they do today, early Washington contained almost entirely males. The first Congressmen and early office-holders were easy pickings for the fancy girls and their fancy men, who arrived a jump ahead of the lobbyists. Lonesome men whiled their time at cards and dice, and ever since then Washington has been a gamblers’ garden.

Foreigners and many American political philosophers say one great fault of our American system is our form of municipal government. They point out the astounding crime, legal laxity and municipal deviltry in this country where we elect our local governments directly and give them great power, whereas most foreign countries are ruled from above, with cities and provinces allowed minimum authority.

Well, Washington is ruled from above. It has no votes, no county chairmen, no campaign funds to be raised, no favors to be returned. It is policed by a constabulary appointed directly by the United States government and paid from the public treasury of the United States. Its judges are appointed by the President with the consent of the Senate, and all but municipal court judges serve for life. Its District Attorney is chosen by the President, as are its city commissioners, and through them all public District officials.

There is no chance for a neighborhood gang boss to establish himself through floaters and colonized flotsam. Yet there are neighborhood bosses. There is influence. Judges and police are bought. Washington has the blackest record of any city in the country on the F.B.I. ledger of reported crimes. Black is the color of its crime, too, as will be shown. The proportion of Negro crime to white is almost eight to one.

Another reason for Washington’s defiance of the law which is made in Washington is that, except for ogling tourists, everyone who comes comes to get. To get jobs, contracts, favors, pardons, commissions, and sometimes social preferment. This acquisitive horde is not interested in the city. Toward local public affairs there is lethargy of mind, spirit and body, nothing conducive to enterprise or local pride.

This potpourri of human beings on the make remained within bounds until the first World War. There was room for all. As every schoolboy knows, the original grant of land from the states of Maryland and Virginia for the national capital was a square, ten miles wide. This proved too big and the Virginia part was receded more than a hundred years ago. The remaining area, all in Maryland, was ample for the needs of the city until overnight, in 1917, it changed from a country town to a madhouse in which all the residents are inmates. There was some respite during the 1920’s, but since the coming of the New Deal, Washington burst its pants and overflowed back into Virginia and across into Maryland.

As with other large cities, the 1950 census returns found the rate of growth of Washington suburbs far outstripping the parent. At this writing there are about 800,000 people in the city limits and 750,000 in the satellite suburbs of Virginia and Maryland. The percentage of Negroes is higher than it is in Mississippi.

Seniority rules in the Congress, which permit one-party Southern Senators and Representatives to control more than their share of committees, account for continuance of its Dixie slant. So Washingtonians talk like Southerners. Even the Oregonians and down-Easters fall into the liquid drawl after a few years in the capital. With the dulcet Dixie dialect comes the Southern attitude toward the Negro. Fiery FEPCers from New York, after a couple of years’ indoctrination, wink in private over the “tolerance” they sell in public. As Negroes move in the whites flee out.

As residents of Virginia and Maryland, these automatically gain the votes they surrendered or never had. Though still employed in Washington, they lose all interest in its municipal affairs. They live, vote, pay taxes, send their children to school and join churches beyond the borders.

And, as the Negro immigrates and propagates, Washington’s chance of ever getting the vote dwindles. Even Northern congressmen, with huge Negro voting constituencies at home, won’t burn their hands with such legislation. They declare for the principles of home rule, sign petitions to withdraw bottled-up home-rule bills from committees, then secretly withdraw their names.

As these pages unfold you will get a picture of how more than 1,500,000 people live. Few would stand for some of Washington’s nauseating conditions in their own towns. Yet they take them here complacently. Congressmen, the lords of the city, shrug at what would throw them out of office if the good burghers in Beloit or Boonetown suspected—and cared.

Washington has a heritage of “everybody’s business is nobody’s business.” But the stimulation which sparks its evils is different, though the result is the same.

Of old, Congress didn’t worry about local crime because all the people could do about it was write letters to the papers. But now, since crime is nationally syndicated, some legislators actively protect Washington crime, because it means more funds back in their bailiwicks from the branches of the swelling Syndicate of silk-lined racketeers who are allied with Washington’s criminals.

So this is the nation’s capital: with its panderers and prostitutes; gamblers and gunmen; conmen and Congressmen; lawmakers and law-breakers; fairies and Fair Dealers.

It is a city of moods, even drearier when Congress is away campaigning or vacationing; yet it turns electric when something big is about to happen.

It is a city of the wistful little people with adding-machine minds.

Over all, a feeling of fear pervades it. People become conditioned to talking in whispers. Senators will walk you to the middle of the room, then mumble, even when what they have to say is inconsequential. The main indoor sport is conspiracy.

We give you Washington: not the city of statesmen, but the stateless city.

2. “GORGEOUS” GEORGETOWN

We shall begin this catalog of places with Georgetown, by far the oldest in the city.

Not all who reside in Georgetown are rich, red or queer, nor do all Washington millionaires, Commies and/or fags dwell in Georgetown.

But if you know anyone who fulfills at least two of the foregoing three qualifications don’t take odds he doesn’t prance behind Early American shutters in a reconditioned stable or slave-pen in this unique city within a city.

Georgetown was a thriving Colonial village when the rest of the District was swampland. It was included in the District of Columbia from the time of the original grant, but Georgetown remained an independent municipality until 1895.

If you like that kind of stuff, Georgetown, which lies in the extreme NW section of the city, has a charm all its own.

Some people like the smell of dead fish in Provincetown. Others like to climb up four flights of stairs to ratty garrets in Greenwich Village. Georgetown is quaint that way, too. Now all this is to be preserved for posterity forever, through an act of Congress setting up a commission to keep it looking the way it is under penalty of the law for modernizing anything in the community without the permission of some bureaucrat.

Until twenty years ago, Georgetown was just another rundown backwash in a great city. Most of its residents were Negroes. Most of its real estate wasn’t even good enough for Southern Negroes, and don’t forget that a Southern Negro is forced to live almost anywhere. New Dealers and the bright young braintrusters from Harvard reversed what seems to be a foreordained rule in every city in the country. In other words, the whites drove the Negroes out—as many as they could—and took over for themselves what was practically a blighted area.

This is how it came about: When Washington was suddenly flooded with a horde of crackpots from the campuses, Communists, ballet-dancers and economic planners, there was no place for them to live. They abhorred the modern service apartments. These people were “intellectual.” The women wore flat-heeled shoes and batik blouses, and went in for New Thought. The men, if you could call some of them that, wore their hair longer than we do, read advanced literature, and talked about the joys of collectivism, though all of them were so individual they couldn’t bear to live in skyscrapers.

Most of these people had dough. The others got good government jobs, became “contact men” or spoke at meetings and wrote for publications sponsored by rich left-wingers to provide automobiles and other luxuries for the needier pinks.

Washington had nothing like New York’s Greenwich Village, but in the early days of the New Deal Mrs. Roosevelt herself, during one of the fleeting moments she was in Washington, “discovered” Georgetown and conceived it as a genteel bohemian community where her sandal-shod friends could find congenial company. She wouldn’t allow the WPA to alter anything though sewage comes up from the river. Georgetown is overrun with rats, which frequently chew up Negro infants.

Ancient wooden houses, much the worse for the wear of centuries, which could have been bought lot-and-all for $2,500 in the ’20s, skyrocketed as it became “smart” for society to move to Georgetown. Some properties are now worth twenty times what they brought twenty years ago, though terrible odors emanate from a nearby slaughter house.

Following the discovery of Georgetown, the truly gentle Negroes who had lived there, some for a hundred years or more, were driven out. Few owned their homes. Into rickety structures which had once housed as many as ten Negro families—seventy-five people—moved one millionaire left-wing carpetbagger and his wife. With improvements, naturally. Equality is okay to talk about. Hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent on some of these homes, modernizing, beautifying, disinfecting and furnishing them. Now they have house-and-garden tours for visiting Kiwanians.

Not all the Negroes could be ousted. Even today, Georgetown has a considerable colored population, though it is the only part of Washington where there are fewer Negroes than there were twenty years ago. Those who remain live in shanties so undesirable that no rich white fairies can be found who want to turn them into something gay. In fact, there’s a saying in Georgetown now that you’re not “smart” unless darkies live next door to you.

The sight-seeing buses point out historic Prospect House, now used by the government for visiting notables, but they don’t show you the tumble-down Negro shacks behind it.

One of Georgetown’s most distinguished residents is Dean Acheson. Emmitt Warring, king of Washington’s gamblers, about whom more will be found in succeeding chapters, is in business nearby.

Warring is the kingfish of Georgetown. He controls its local police precinct as well as its local crime. As will be shown, he has direct affiliations with the national underworld syndicate.

Eleanor Roosevelt gave Georgetown that first big impetus after her son, Jimmy, who didn’t “got it” in California, moved across the street from the old Imperial Russian Embassy, in the 3200 block of Q Street. It looked like good business to build up the area.

Soon the section filled up with all manner of strange people. Many of these were buddies of the First Lady. We have seen a letter she wrote to one Ben Grey, in which she pats such types on the head.

One of the queerest sights visible anywhere is the one from a window on the second floor of Dean Acheson’s quaint home at 2805 P Street. It faces the 28th Street side over a back yard. The Secretary’s personal lavatory faces that way. His mind apparently weighted by cosmos-shaking affairs of state, the secretary forgets to draw down the shade.

It is on the second floor, and Acheson doesn’t know he can be seen. This is to tip him off to what the whole neighborhood knows, first-hand and not confidential.

In the next block lives Justice Frankfurter. He and Acheson, fresh air fiends, walk to town every morning.

Another neighbor is Myrna Loy, out of films while on a special mission for the State Department. She is developing a “new type propaganda campaign.” Well, she played enough spy roles in the movies.

Georgetown is also the home of Georgetown University, oldest and largest Catholic school in the country. The broad acres of its beautiful campus were undoubtedly originally responsible for preserving the historic buildings of the community from the onward rush of modernity which swept over the rest of Washington.

But also in Georgetown is the Hideaway Club. It is known in local parlance as a bottle club. A bottle club is a resort which gets around the law which provides that all liquor dispensaries shall close at 2 A.M. Despite a murder at the Hideaway and a recent Congressional investigation of such enterprises and a flurry of activity by the United States Attorney, there are still at least 500 of these unlicensed places, some say more, in the District, a subject which will be covered in detail hereinafter.

The area’s favorite gathering place is Martin’s Bar on Wisconsin Avenue where New Deal and Fair Deal policy is made. It was the hangout of Tommy the Cork and Harry Hopkins, who changed the world over bottles while Georgetown students roistered around them.

Georgetown is relatively free of street-walkers who plague every other section. That is because there are no hotels and few transients. But what it lacks in ambulent magdalens is more than made up for by homosexuals of both indeterminate sexes. It seems that nonconformity in politics is often the handmaiden of the same proclivities in sex. Among the thousands known in the capital, a goodly proportion live in the storied ancient dwellings of the area. The fun that goes on in some is beyond words and was even worse when the staffs of the embassies of some of the Iron Curtain countries still found it feasible to travel about in society.

Some Washington policemen will tell you with a shrug of despair of the times the patrol wagons pulled up at particular homes as a result of complaints from neighbors, only to find the prancing participants in the unspeakable parties were Administration untouchables or diplomats sacred from interference.

Which, when you consider that Emmitt Warring also seems to be immune, makes Georgetown seem like a wonderful place to live in—nobody ever gets pinched there.

3. NW COULD MEAN NOWHERE

The first question asked by members of the new Seventh Congress, after taking the oath in the draughty and unfinished Capitol in 1801, was “where is a saloon with dames?” or the early 19th century equivalent thereof.

The chief usher escorted them to the steps on the Hill, which overlooked what there then was of the young city, a collection of boxes resembling nothing so much as a rude Oklahoma oil-boom town on a rainy day, and pointed northwest. “There,” he replied. Ever since that historic moment, anything that matters and much that doesn’t is in that part of the city known by its postal address as “NW.”

“North West” is the only section of Washington which counts. It is the capital of the capital. NW is the works.

When Major Pierre L’Enfant accepted the commission to plan the capital, he went Caesar’s Gaul one better and divided it into four parts. These he laid out like spokes around a wheel, with the hub “The Hill,” on which he built the Capitol. He named each section after compounded cardinal points of the compass, NW, SW, NE and SE. The others you can throw into the garbage-can—NW is the city.

Other municipalities have distinctive sectors. In Washington everything, the rialto, marts of commerce, homes of the wealthy, are piled into this one corner, where they rub shoulders with the lowly, the dirty and the wicked, not to overlook Washington’s No. 1 problem, the colored.

Washington’s Main Drag is F St. if you could call it such. The crossing at 14th Street is its Times Square, its State and Madison—an insult to both. Most of the 1,500,000 who live in the District and environs, plus a half-million tourists, pass it daily.

Here are the movie palaces, but its sole legit theatre is almost a mile away. Its best-known restaurants are around the corner. Any night, Saturday included, the heart of America’s heart is dark and quiet.

Washington’s Main Stem is somewhat more somnolent than those of most villages. Don’t get us wrong—things do happen after dark. But—those who do them don’t want them seen.

When one seeks the reason for the empty dreariness of Washington at night, where trees swaying in the wind often are the only living things, he is told what seems the obvious—Washington is a town of early-to-bedders who do not go in for night life. That is not true. Washington has hundreds of sneak-ins that remain open all night. Your hardy reporters almost collapsed before they could complete this assignment—to visit every place openly or surreptitiously breaking the law. Almost all are in NW, which should have made it easier.

After-dark Washington is the way it is because it has the smalltown mentality. People do their sinning in homes and hotels or in pseudo-private “clubs.”

Now let’s get on with NW.

Most Congressmen live there. That’s a break for all except cab-drivers. Hack rates are regulated by zones. Passengers pay the same fee regardless of where they ride to in a zone, with a surcharge for each extra zone the cab enters. The Congressmen, who make all the District’s laws, talked the Public Utilities Commission into gerrymandering the zone map in such a way it ended up allowing them and you and us to go almost anywhere from the Capitol into NW for a minimum fee. No one wants to go elsewhere, so it’s a fine deal for all but the cab-jockies.

All the big hotels are in NW. That includes everything from popular-priced tourist fall-ins near the station to the luxury hostelries like the Mayflower, Statler, Carlton and the residential ones in the outskirts, such as the Shoreham and Wardman Park. And the assignation hotels are downtown, smack in the middle of everything, very snug.

Perhaps the most famous hotel is the Willard, at F and 14th Streets. They call it the New Willard now, though the new section was built during Teddy Roosevelt’s first administration. For almost a century, VIP’s from all over the world stayed here. Julia Ward Howe wrote the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” in one of its rooms. Now its cocktail bar is a hangout for lonesome government girls and other fancy-free women, best time after 5 P.M.

The new and modern Ambassador Hotel is at 14th and K, one of the many holdings of Morris Cafritz, husband of Washington’s “first” hostess since the elevation to the Diplomatic Corps of Mme. Mesta. The High Hat Cocktail Lounge in the Ambassador is a gay drinking spot, much patronized by the lonesome of either sex because of its informality. When we asked a cab-driver where we could meet a “friend” he directed us to the Ambassador. We sat there five minutes, not long enough to attract a waiter’s eye. But the eyes of two blonde things, young and not bad-looking, were quicker. One asked us to buy her a drink. We did.

Before long we were old friends. They told us they’d spend the evening with us for $20 each. We said we had to catch a train. They thought we meant the price was too high and reduced it to $10—“if we had a place to take them.”

We returned to the Ambassador half a dozen times, and all except once we were approached. That time it was too late, about 1 A.M., and all the volunteers had already booked themselves. We also saw other stags talk to girls with whom they hadn’t come in, but with whom they left.

Another cash-and-carry supermarket is the gracious old Peacock Alley of the Willard Hotel, a broad indoor parade where once world statesmen sat and sized up famed society beauties.

These hotels are not unique. All of Washington’s respectable inns and cocktail bars are plagued with loose ladies; there’s nothing much can be done about it, because the muddled situation of District law and law enforcement makes it impossible for the managements to bounce that sort of undesirables—if they are so regarded. The cops would refuse to eject them for fear of suits; the hotels and saloon-keepers are subject to the same liability. We saw hookers, or busy beavers that looked remarkably like them, speak to strangers in the cocktail lounges of the Statler and Carlton, and we were approached by one in the former place.

The hotel situation is never static. Comes war or emergency and the town is always short on rooms. In times of depression or recession there are too many rooms. When your authors began their regular trips to the city in search of material for this book, Washington had not started to take on its Sino-Korean war dress. We and our money were welcomed with open arms. We spent lavishly throughout the summer at the Carlton, a haunt of New Deal and Labor aristocracy, where John L. Lewis and White House assistant David K. Niles maintain luxurious suites.

As the summer wore on, Washington filled up with hoards of businessmen, manufacturers’ agents, lawyers, fixers and other finaglers. They had unlimited expense accounts. Remembering what happened in Washington during the years of World War II, some leased permanent suites. Others slipped large and welcome tips to room clerks and executives. Then reservations at the Carlton for mere confidential reporters were bitched up. They were unceremoniously moved from room to room, given second-class accommodations, notified they must get out; so better spenders could get in—and our bills had been running to $100 a day.

The Shoreham asked permanent guests to leave. Included were many Congressmen who had been living there for years. Some had voted against rent control in the District. But now they were Displaced Persons.

It was no secret that among the permanents who were in danger of being forced to go house-hunting were several statuesque blondes whose rents were being paid by high officials, diplomats and senators. The swank Shoreham, one of the most beautiful hotels anywhere, has figured prominently in police court and divorce court news more than once.

Washingtonians smile when they wonder if the Shoreham’s managing director, Harry Bralove, asked his pretty ex-wife to find other lodgings, too. There was a lot of gossip when she and Bralove were divorced. Once, when unable to meet an overdue $900 alimony bill, he convinced the court he no longer had an interest in the hotel, merely worked for it. Meanwhile he and his former spouse renewed their sentiments, but figured they’d be happier as friends than as man and wife. So the former Mrs. Bralove moved into the Shoreham.

A very pleasant exception to the general rule about kicking the guests around is the Mayflower Hotel, after three decades, still the choice of Washington’s smart set. In the wing devoted to private apartments are housed some of the most prominent people in the nation and they haven’t been moved to enable the management to snag profiteer revenue.

What there is of show business is in NW. That is little. Yet it was not always so. In the early days Washington was a hell of a show town. There was gaiety then. Long before the streets were paved, dignitaries attended the theatres and dined sumptuously at famed eating spots.

The theatre figures prominently in Washington’s history. The martyred Lincoln was slain in Ford’s Theatre, now a museum. President Wilson was an incurable vaudeville fan with the real habit, attending the same theatre every week on the same night. He used to slip out of the White House to Keith’s, a block away, where the management held a seat in the back row, where he tried to be unobserved. Washington had top vaudeville before the demise of that medium. Today Keith’s is a grind movie house. The only thing resembling variety is at Loew’s Capitol, where four or five modest acts are sandwiched in between runs of a picture.

Washington’s sole remaining legit theatre was the National. Once Washington was a hot road show town. Many New York hits-to-be had their tryouts there. Successes played week stands after leaving Broadway. Washington had minor population but supported many houses. Its residents were avid show-goers. The National gave up the ghost and turned into a movie house because of the race problem. Few Washington theatres permit colored patronage, though Negro theatres allow whites.

The National was restricted against colored attendance in its lease. A couple of years ago, a race-conscious Actor’s Equity Association, steamed up by Eleanor Roosevelt and her “we’re-all-brothers” group resolved not to permit its members to appear in any theatre in Washington while racial discrimination was enforced. Equity did not issue the same edict against theatres in the rest of the South, all of which are so restricted. The operators of the National were bound by the terms of their lease and could not change their policy. Rather than risk a long, costly fight, they converted the house into a cinema. Meanwhile, for two years, the capital of the world’s most literate nation was barren of all living drama.

Within the last few months, the owners of the Gayety Burlesque, on 9th Street, which is Washington’s Skid Row, converted it into a legit house. The Gayety had offered pretty low entertainment, because practically anything is permitted. But trade wasn’t too good. The cagey operators, not hampered by contractual restrictions, switched. To accent the fact that they were going all out on this new line of race tolerance, they booked as their first attraction a show with a mixed cast, “The Barrier” starring Lawrence Tibbett and Muriel Rahn, who is a Negro. Its theme was miscegenation in the Deep South.

The opening in the old home of burlesque, surrounded by shooting galleries, tattoo artists and cheap sex movies for “adults only,” was attended by the top layer of Washington New Deal and left-wing weepers and critics for the Negro press and the Daily Worker. The show was panned by the other reviewers. It closed prematurely, after five days. Producer Michael Meyerberg said, “We shouldn’t have opened in Washington.”

After that, the theatre limped along, sometimes lighted, sometimes dark. The Negroes showed no zeal to patronize it. The whites passed it up. Now the Theatre Guild is sending shows there, subsidized by highbrow subscribers.

Many who want to see good drama go to New York. There’s usually a Broadway hit playing in Baltimore.

During the summer, attempts are made to present road shows of New York companies on The Water Barge, in the Potomac, and in some neighborhood playhouses. Regardless of the success of some individual play, Washington can be written off as a theatre town.

Despite all the hardships, there are always optimists, especially when they can get their names in the papers. One of these is Congressman Klein, of New York, a screaming New Dealer, who represents one of Gotham’s most poverty-stricken neighborhoods. Klein is trying to get the government to spend $5,000,000 for a national theatre. Naturally it is to be named the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial Theatre. Some of his constituents need shoes, but F.D.R. needs another monument. His bill forbids barring any person from appearing in it or attending it because of race, creed, color, religion or national origin. It would be conducted by the Secretary of the Interior, who at this writing is that well-known showman, Oscar L. Chapman, of Denver, Colorado, who is a co-founder of the Spanish-American League to Combat Exploitation of Mexican Workers in the United States, an arty cause, no doubt.

For most of the area’s 1,500,000 permanents and 500,000 transients, movies offer the big night out. How much longer, in the face of TV competition, remains to be seen. At the present time, attendance runs 100,000 a day. Most film houses in white neighborhoods are restricted to whites. Negroes have their own. One of the most famous is the Howard, in the NW colored section, which often augments its shows with top-flight Negro stage shows. At such times the place is apt to draw more white customers than black. Washington has its hep-cats. Many of the younger social and diplomatic sets get a bang out of hot licks. These people who willingly sit next to dark folks in the Howard refuse to permit them in their own theatres or restaurants. That’s typical Washington thinking.

The high-class shopping street—the Fifth Avenue—is Connecticut Avenue, running from La Fayette Square, past the Mayflower Hotel, and out into Cleveland Parkway, past residential hotels and swank apartments.

There are plenty of first-grade shops here, with chic imports, expensive antiques and other gewgaws to lure the feminine dollar. Despite the great wealth of the District and the presence of an international set, all is not pheasant for these merchants. New York and the magnet of its style-conscious stores is too near. Even Baltimore gets some of the trade which can’t find enough smart things at home. But a curious reverse process has been taking place in recent years. Whereas many Washingtonians travel to New York to shop and to dine, a couple of Washington’s best-known institutions have been reaching out and taking over some of the same places in New York which Washingtonians travel 225 miles to patronize.

Garfinckel’s is Washington’s high-fashion department store. A couple of years ago, its proprietors bought out the ancient and aristocratic New York men’s furnishing house, Brooks Brothers. Within a few months, the Garfinckel octopus reached out and gobbled up one of New York’s oldest and best-known Fifth Avenue stores, de Pinna.

While this was going on, a couple of smart Swedes, who had made a tremendous success at Olmsted’s Restaurant, a popular eatery with fine food in the NW business section, bought New York’s oldest and most famous restaurant, Luchow’s, on 14th Street, one of the last places left in the country where dining is still a fine art.

Reference to the appendix will show many other Washington eating places, some good, some bad and not all recommended, but most of them are in NW.

One of the best-known and best is Harvey’s, on Connecticut Avenue, near the Mayflower. This is J. Edgar Hoover’s nightly eating place when he is in Washington. Like most Washington restaurants, Harvey’s has been in business long. It specializes in sea food. The room does a sell-out business and it’s almost impossible to get a table at the height of the dining hour. Service by ancient Negro waiters is slow. Best time to eat is after 9, because most Washingtonians dine early; 6 o’clock is the standard time. Many start at 5. Those are the homely habits. Some restaurants close at 8, and a few at 7.

Julius Lully, who owns Harvey’s, is the butt of J. Edgar’s robust sense of humor. Once Hoover had a batch of wanted-fugitive-identification “fliers” made up showing Lully in his World War I private’s uniform. He had them nailed up on posts for miles around Lully’s country place. When the hick sheriff locked up the restaurateur, who sputtered and gave Hoover as a reference, J. Edgar said he had never heard of him.

On another occasion Hoover sent a letter, purporting to be from Oscar of the Waldorf, threatening to sue Harvey’s for appropriating his salad dressing. Lully hired a lawyer and told him to offer the Waldorf $2,500, but J. Edgar advised him it wouldn’t be enough.

The Occidental is hoary with age and legend. Pictures of presidents, cabinet officers and generals cover the walls. This was our favorite, but the Occidental has succumbed to the new boom. An officious head waiter, with a typical Prussian attitude toward customers, lined us up like prisoners of war, then heaped contemptuous abuse when we dared question his excellency about the possible chances of being seated and served. Washingtonians take it. They are used to being kicked around. Senators or cabinet officers they may be, but at heart most are grass-rooters overawed by the big city. We didn’t take it. We walked out. We are used to consideration and hospitality, spoiled by the good manners of heartless Manhattan.

When Major L’Enfant plotted the city, he provided that the streets should run in three directions, north and south, east and west, and diagonal. Where the diagonal avenues, which are named after states, cross the rectangular streets, generally numbered or alphabetically lettered, there are wide circles or broad squares. One of those is Lafayette Park, known to all Americans because it is the square in front of the White House. Here, less than a hundred yards from the President’s front door, is one of the most sordid spots in the world. At night, under the heroic equestrian statue of Andrew Jackson and in the shadow of the foliage of overhanging trees, there is a constant and continuous soprano symphony of homosexual twittering.

The President knows about it; he reads the papers. The police superintendent knows about it. Congress, which governs the District, knows about it. Recently, the secretary of a Senator was arrested there, charged with indescribable misbehavior. He was acquitted by a jury. There are few convictions.

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.

Many of the girls roll their customers, mugg them or use knockout drops and then go through their pockets. But Washington’s prostitutes are not so hard-hearted as the street sirens in New York, where it is commonplace for one to be taken to a hotel-room and wake up doped and robbed, but never loved.

Many Washington nymphs conscientiously give value received.

In other cities the cops take stern measures against the untrustworthy whores. It is considered the lowest form of larceny to take advantage of a man with his pants down. New York police recently sent a young married woman to the penitentiary for five years for just such an outrage, but in Washington the appointed judges, many unrealistic and some downright dishonest, condone and encourage such unethical practices.

David L. Miller, 43, a resident of the Soldiers’ Home, picked up Alma Lee Dugent and took her to a 16th Street, NW, room. He said the 33-year-old woman robbed him of $2 in bills and a $30 wrist watch while he lay asleep. The woman pleaded guilty of petty theft.

“This man is as guilty as the woman,” thundered the judge. He ordered Miller to pay half of Mrs. Dugent’s $25 fine.

At this writing there are few really big madames operating in Washington. One of the last big operators was Carmen Beach, deported to Spain. But Nancy Pressler, who figured prominently in the conviction of Charles “Lucky” Luciano, international Mafia overlord now in Italy, when she turned state’s evidence against him in New York, is in business in the capital.

Though many of the girls work as independent contractors, except for the inevitable pimp, they are loosely organized for emergency purposes in the event of arrest, through bail-bond brokers and lawyers who specialize in underworld cases. The law staff of Charles Ford is frequently in court defending intercepted prostitutes, who usually get off with a small fine or a warning.

Many singed doves get their weekly check-ups from a physician in the 1700 block of K Street, who charges them $5 a visit. They learn about him through their community of interests.

We have studied commercial vice in most large cities. It is as a rule confined by public tolerance to certain streets or sections. When we wrote about New York and Chicago we were able to name these thoroughfares and state exactly what kind of merchandise was for sale in each. That is not so in Washington, where the city seems to be one huge red-light range, with tramps falling over themselves trying to grab unattached men.

We made a contact on the southeast corner of 14th and New York Avenue, NW, in front of the cigar store, with a young pedestrian who told us her name was Sue. She came originally from Florida and had been hustling in Washington for four years. We asked how to get in touch with her again and she said, “Just call the Astoria Hotel and ask the operator for Sue.” When we inquired her last name she said she was the only Sue there. The Astoria is a cheap hotel on 14th Street.

About two weeks later we were walking through the plush lobby of the new Statler Hotel and saw Sue ensconced in one of the comfortable armchairs. We stopped to watch. The slender blonde leaned over to a gent in another chair and asked for a light. In a couple of minutes they struck up a deal and walked into the elevator together. When she came down half an hour later we asked her how much she got.

“Ten bucks,” she exclaimed, “and the tight-wad stiffed me out of luck money.”

When we first came to Washington to work on this book almost everyone we spoke to, except cops who knew better, said we wouldn’t find any professional whores, because why should anyone pay when so many government girls are easy?

We took some of these friends—government officials, members of Congress, newspapermen and others, on our tours. And this is what we showed them:

We were solicited by two girls at Jack’s Grill, 3rd and G Sts. Three broads came up to us at 4th and G NW and asked us if we wanted company. We also saw girls bracing strange men at the Purity Lunch and Grill, 3rd and G NW, and at Mitchell Grill on the same corner. Mitchell’s is the hangout for precinct cops who saved its license after charges.

A white prostitute tried to date us at the Mai Fong restaurant, in Chinatown, and two other girls spoke to us at the China Clipper on 14th.

We could have made pick-ups—$10 asked, $5 bid—at the corner of 14th and R. We were approached by girls at the Casablanca Tavern, 421 11th St., NW, and the Covered Wagon, 14th and Rhode Island. The manager of an all-night diner back of the Statler offered to get us a bed companion for $15 if we bought a bottle of Seagrams for $8.50—cheap when you consider it was after hours and he didn’t have a license.

Few if any restaurants and bars employ B-girls. These are women who in Chicago circulate from table to table and hustle drinks on commission. They are illegal in the District, though quite common in Maryland, near the border and in Baltimore.

The femmes fatale who frequent Washington joints usually do so in free-handed reciprocity. The management steers lonesome men to the gals who hang around regularly. They, in turn, bring their customers in for drinks or tell them that’s where they can find them. A saloon which gets a reputation as the hangout for the best-looking dames finds its gross up.

When a girl closes a pitch, she usually has a place to take the guy, if he can’t or won’t bring her to his own room. Most Washington hotels, including the largest, are very broadminded about this, and if you don’t make noise they don’t make trouble. But this situation is changing as the hotels are getting more crowded and more independent.

Few small hotels, even if so inclined, properly police their guests. Some of the girls take their clients to the New Colonial and the Fox.

A former madame named Jackie is now running a rooming-house at 703 Mt. Vernon, where some of the girls steer their customers. You can usually find seven or eight girls hanging around Ivy House Inn, on New York Avenue.

Among the most active hookers are Kay Saunders and Peggy Proctor, both 29, who were once arrested while entertaining 15 male customers. At this writing they are still in business on the second floor of a house in the 2300 block, Lincoln Road, NE.

One of Washington’s most famous characters is a toothless old hag known only as Diane. She hangs around 14th and Florida. Diane reminds old New Yorkers of the fabulous Broadway Rose, who used to panhandle in front of Lindy’s until she was carted to the bug house.

But, unlike Rose, Diane is an out-and-out hustler. Once upon a time, they say, she was a good-looker. But her main trouble seemed to be that she liked her work too much to commercialize it.

We spoke to a man in his late 30’s who remembered her when he was a school boy. He said the kids used to pick her up because she would take “small change.” Now some of her old customers, matured and prosperous men of the world, occasionally drive by her corner to stake her to a hand-out.

All she can get now are colored men, “winos” and dregs. But she refuses to retire.

We picked up a girl by the name of Doris who had just been discharged from the Federal Hospital for narcotic addicts in Lexington, Kentucky. The story she told us illustrates how girls are recruited for prostitution in the District.

Doris said she lived in a small town in West Virginia. She and a girl high-school mate occasionally did a little free-lance whoring on Saturday nights, on call of a bell-boy in the local hotel. Once he sent them to a room occupied by two men. One, whose name was Grigsby, tried to sell the girls on coming to Washington. He said he’d put them in a swell house. The teenagers were afraid of the big city. Grigsby told them the landlady of the house was in the next room and called her in. She was a motherly sort. They consented to come with her.

They found themselves in the house of a madame named Billie Cooper, on 7th St., in the 1000 block. Doris told us she was an instantaneous success in the Cooper menage. She was only 17, fresh, buxom and bucolic. Madame Cooper’s clients were charmed. After she’d been in the house a few weeks, the madame asked Doris if she’d like to get a “kick.” She produced a hypodermic needle and gave the child a shot in the arm. Doris liked the sensation, wanted more. This went on for several weeks, Doris said, and every day Billie Cooper increased the frequency of the shots.

One day Doris woke up, nauseated and ill.

Billie Cooper exclaimed, “You’re hooked!”

She informed Doris she had become a dope fiend, that henceforth Doris must pay for the shots.

The girl went into debt, though she was taking in up to $50 a day and, no matter how much she made, the dope always cost more. She knew no one else who sold it. She was truly hooked, which was Billie Cooper’s original purpose, to keep the young girl in her joint and take her money away from her.

Billie Cooper’s clientele was mostly Chinese. When U. S. narcotics agents raided her establishment at 5 A.M., gaining entrance with a ladder borrowed from a fire-house, so two T-men would get into Billie’s bedroom before she had a chance to flush the narcotics down the drain, they found several Chinese customers in the place. While the search was still on, 15 more came to the door and were admitted; of these two were officials of the Chinese embassy.

In the trial it developed that Billie Cooper, who was sentenced for violation of the narcotics laws, was charging Doris $7 a deck for heroin, which she bought at half that price from Chinese peddlers. The F.B.I. proceeded against Grigsby for white slavery violation and he, too, was convicted.

Doris swore to us that she was off the stuff now. She said she was living with a Chinaman who worked in a gambling house in Chinatown.

The glamorous brothels are no more. Not since the notorious Hopkins Institute was closed by the F.B.I. some years ago has there been anything operating on a lavish scale. Now there are some so-called masseurs who use that classification as a blind, but nothing on the grand scale.

When F.B.I. men raided the Hopkins Institute, an innocuous-looking massage parlor in the 2700 block on Connecticut Ave., they uncovered one of the most sensational call-houses ever in Washington. Not only was the clientele accommodated at the so-called Institute, but a phone call could arrange a date on short notice almost anywhere in the District. The establishment kept a detailed and up-to-date written record on each patron, fees paid, dates of service, and eccentricities. Girls there said this list contained entries that could flabbergast some very prominent persons, in and out of Washington.

The proprietor of the Hopkins Institute was one George Francis Whitehead, who lived in New York and seldom visited the place. Profits were sent to him weekly by the “resident manager,” Diane Carter, who was vice-president in charge of the operation. The Institute was established originally by someone else and was bought by Whitehead in 1941. He ran it for several months, then engaged Diane Carter to manage it at a salary out of earnings. Her principal duties entailed accepting calls, arranging to send girls to answer the calls, and to have girls available on the premises.

Whitehead left Washington in 1941, after the girls began to complain that his presence was hurting business because of his excessive drinking, untidy habits and uncouth deportment. He did not live up to the dignity and spirit of an Institute. The girls threatened to strike.

The record system was originated by the first operator and passed on to Whitehead. In addition to other entries, initials of each girl filling an assignment and the amount of the fee were noted. For the fees a code was used, to conceal the fact that some paid more than others. The word “FITZGERALD” was the key to the code. Each letter stood for a digit, i.e., F was 1, I was 2, T was 3, etc. Thus the symbol “FD” beside the name of a customer meant $10; “TD” meant $30, etc. This method was used also to bamboozle Whitehead, if he checked on his share of the proceeds.

The U.S. Commissioner issued warrants for the arrests of Whitehead, Diane Carter and 13 girls involved, on charges of violations of the White Slave Traffic Act. Whitehead was arrested in New York and extradited. Two indictments were returned against Whitehead, Diane and nine others. Whitehead pleaded guilty to both and was sentenced to one to four years on the Act and to eighteen months on conspiracy. But he was adjudged insane and committed to a mental institution.

Diane Carter pleaded guilty to both indictments and was sentenced to three to nine months on each, the sentences to run concurrently. Seven other defendants were found guilty.

The Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the convictions of the seven, held the violations were of legislation of the District of Columbia and not of the White Slave Traffic Act.

But the racket was broken. The place never reopened. The F.B.I. seized the files and never revealed a name, but hundreds of men still tremble when they remember the Hopkins Institute. Some still attempt pressure to try to get their names blacked out. They have no success with the F.B.I.

5. HOBOES WITH NO HORIZON

The pride of the bum, even when he has abandoned the virile vitality to hold out his paw as a panhandler, is a terminal twinkle of consciousness that he is only resting between Election Days, when he is a man. These derelicts have swung cities and states. But in Washington even that last link to a reason for being is lost.

No Hinky Dink, no Pendergast caters to him, gives him free beer and rot-gut or a kip in the flop on the joint. No eager dirty duke stretches forth to greet the floater and the repeater. He can do nothing for anyone.

So he is just a shade lower, lousier and grizzlier than the ones at whom you shudder as you pass them in your own town. Agglomerations of beachcombers vary little, even with differences of climate. Every city has its Skid Row. But Washington has three of them. Like everything else here, they are departmentalized. No alphabetical designations have yet been allocated to them, but don’t despair.

One is for the general riffraff; the second is for old-timers; the third is exclusively for sailors.

But first let us tell you about 9th Street—NW, natch—and specifically where it crosses Pennsylvania Ave.

Stand on one side of the avenue and you are in the shadow of the great marble structure which houses the forces of law and order. This is the Department of Justice Building, and the corner we’re standing on is the entrance to the F.B.I.

Cross Pennsylvania Avenue and walk into 9th Street, and you are an intruder in the most publicized Skid Row of the three—they call it the Bowery here, to distinguish it from the others. As such thoroughfares go, this is pretty classy-looking. It is wide. All Washington streets are kept clean, so neither rubbish nor drunks litter the pavements—anyway not by day. By nightfall, topers rendered hors de combat on smoke and cheap wine pile up in the doorways.

This part of 9th Street is packed solid with “play lands,” featuring pin-ball machines, peep show movies and souvenir stands which sell composition statuettes of the White House and Washington Monument, and embroidered pillows tastefully lettered with “Love to Mom from the Nation’s Capital.”

But this human dump lacks romance and legend. No songs are written about it. There are no grisly tall tales, such as are told about the Barbary Coast, Basin Street and Chicago, much near the Loop and most of the old Levee. This is merely a street of convenience, moved up from around the corner when Pennsylvania Avenue itself was flophouse lane and Al Jolson and Bill Robinson performed on the sidewalk for pennies.

There’s no law agin’ stripping or peeling in Washington, but it doesn’t pay off well enough to build a permanent industry around it. The old Gayety Theatre, which ran pretty high-class traveling burleycue, is now, probably only temporarily, a legit house. Meanwhile, the burlesque fans buy their titillation in the cheap movie houses adjoining the Gayety. Sometimes they amplify their celluloid bills with “living dolls,” at other times the customers have to get their kicks out of sex movies advertised “For Adults Only.” An ad before us, of the Leader Theatre, says, “Burlesque’s brightest stars on screen.” The day’s program provided snake-charming Zorita in “I Married a Savage”; body-peeling Ann Corio in “Call of the Jungle”; and Maggie Hart, the stripper, in “Lure of the Isles,” plus “two more thrills.”

In and in front of cheap saloons, cocktail lounges and lunch rooms, are tarts, reefer-peddlers and novelty salesmen whose chief stock in trade is “sanitary rubber goods.” Pistols are on sale at $20. The local law isn’t tough on gun-toters.

Though Washington’s legal liquor closing on weekdays is 2 A.M., this street, like all in the city, is deserted early. Long before midnight its habitués have already made sleeping arrangements or are snoring in the alleys, cheap overnight lodgings or hallways, paralyzed by alky or cheap domestic red wine.

Crossing 9th Street here, is D Street, known as Pawnbroker’s Row. But get this—hockshops are against the law.

When you see a shop with a sign reading “Pawnbroker’s Exchange,” don’t believe it. The window looks like any “Uncle’s” anywhere in the world, with a profusion of new and used articles ranging from mink coats to tin watches. But that’s the build-up. These exchanges are only second-hand stores which buy and sell uncalled for articles pledged in other jurisdictions, where the three balls of the De Medicis are legal.

The temporarily embarrassed visitor, in need of cash quickly, often gets rooked in one of these pseudo-hock shops. Take the case of the stranger who runs short of petty cash until he can wire home. Suppose he has a $200 watch which he wants to put up for security. Needing only perhaps $25, that’s all he asks for, figuring when he redeems it in a few days he will pay only that, plus accrued interest. Yet when he asks the pawnbroker’s exchange man for $25, he is actually selling the $200 watch for that.

Some of the more legitimate shops get around the law by guaranteeing to sell the article back to the owner at a specified rate after a specified number of days. What usually happens to the unsophisticated is that they have lost their security for a fraction of its value, because it has already been sold.

Little effort is made to police the Bowery stretches of 9th St. The armed forces maintain a few MPs, but practically anything goes, short of mayhem, and even that is not uncommon.

The tomatoes who solicit the young and lonesome men in uniform in this neighborhood are pretty low. The five bucks they ask, plus three dollars for a room in a handy flea-bag, should be reported to the Better Business Bureau, considering the quality of the merchandise and the strong possibilities of picking up souvenirs of the sort they don’t display on counters.

Interspersed between the shooting galleries, theatres and hamburger hideaways are the usual bargain men’s clothing stores, army and navy outfitters, etc. One of the clothing stores, visible from the windows of the Department of Justice, was built by money inherited from a gangster who isn’t around to enjoy it, due to a sit-down strike in an electric chair.

This street is a little too fast, flighty and noisy for the old-time bums and stiffs. It is for younger men. The perennials, who know every flop-house and smoke-joint in the country, and travel from town to town with the seasons and the harvests, prefer the Skid Row at 3rd and G Streets, NW and vicinity, around the corner from Chinatown. Come to think of it, Skid Rows all over the continent are around the corner from Chinatown.

We call this Mission Row, because it’s where the mission stiffs hang out. These are the hoboes, bums and tramps who get their morning’s coffee and their night’s sleep on the benches of a gospel shop nearby on H Street, in return for listening to a “Come to the Lord” sermon. Mission Row is the best-looking Skid Row in the country. The streets are broad, with grass and trees, and most of the set-back buildings are reconverted residences with stoops and a surviving air of charm. We have been assured it is refreshing to wake up in the gutter here with a smoke hangover.

You find no brassy newcomers in these quarters. Young tramps abhor missions. They prefer 9th Street, with its zip and excitement. The mission stiff, almost an extinct species, is on in years and no longer troubled by dames. His animal needs are taken care of by a bowl of soup and as much red-eye as he can drink. If only one of the two is available, the former can be dispensed with. Some of these mission-moochers are junkies. But dope, like everything else, is suffering from inflation, and the wherewithal is forbidding.

The Greek colony, large for the size of the town, runs into this Bowery. Many Hellenes are gamblers. Hecht’s Hotel, at 6th and G, where girls take their men, was owned by a Greek arrested last month in New York on narcotics charges. The Hellenic Social Club, next door, is a gambling house.

There’s one Skid Row no visitors and few Washingtonians ever see. That’s Sailors’ Row. Unlike the other two, which are in NW, this is in SE—8th Street, down near the Navy Yard. After Chicago we thought nothing could make us blink. But some of the dives on 8th Street made it. At the northern approach of this stretch of howling hell are a couple of Filipino joints where bus-boys, house-boys and valets pick up white whores. Eighth Street runs into Sailors’ Row proper, a line of groggeries and lunch-rooms that hit bottom.

The undermanned Washington cops can do little to keep it orderly. The Navy’s shore patrol takes over most of the policing. We saw Navy paddy-wagons in front of Guy’s, the Ship’s Cafe and the Penguin. But the SP’s seldom make a pinch unless there are fights. We visited four or five of the bars—not alone, because hereabouts, even in the shadow of the Capitol’s dome, outsiders who travel in parties of less than four are crazy.

We saw hustlers working in the Band Box, the Ship’s Cafe, Guy’s and the Penguin. These were the frowsiest broads we have ever seen, dilapidated, toothless, drunk, swinging the shabby badge of their shoddy trade, long-looped handbags.

The worst and the cheapest were in the Ship’s Cafe, where two girls—call them that in charity—offered themselves to us at $3. The going price in the other places was $5. They circulated along the bar and from booth to booth and from table to table. They do not work in these saloons as B girls or house prostitutes. They use them as points of contact with their trade, apparently with connivance of the management for the business they bring in. In these Sailors’ Row joints we saw many amateurs, typical sailor-crazy bobby-soxers, servant girls and Victory girls. These may ask for money but can be talked out of it. There are many cheap hotels and rooming-houses close by. But the dark streets or alleys are free and busy.

6. GREEN PASTURES

Agonized oratory through the decades has been banging against the walls of the Capitol, demanding that Washingtonians be given the precious privilege of the vote. It is as futile as spitting against the wind.

And we will tell you why there will be no vote—Confidential.

If Washington got home rule, its first mayor would be a gentleman affectionately known to his constituency as Puddin’ Head Jones. And Mr. Jones is a Negro.

We will tell you what no one else has dared to publish—there are more Negroes than whites in Washington. We will prove it by incontrovertible figures.

There is an amazing underground proclivity in all big cities, south, north and everywhere, to fake the facts on Negro population. For some distorted reason, both races conspire in this foolish flummery.