Texas Confidential. Michael Varhola
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.
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Miss Hattie’s Bordello
FOR HALF A CENTURY, FROM 1902 until 1952, one of the best-known and most successful businesses in San Angelo, “the Oasis of West Texas,” was Miss Hattie’s Bordello. It was, in fact, the crown jewel in the local vice district known as the Concho, a neighborhood named for the river along which it was located.
Each of the girls who worked at Miss Hattie’s Bordello had an area like this one for entertaining customers. Today, the site has been restored and is operated as a museum.
In 1867, the U.S. Army established Fort Concho in west central Texas as part of a network of posts designed to protect frontier settlers against the resident Comanche, Apache, and bandits. Its garrison included units of infantry and cavalry soldiers, among them the black troopers referred to as “Buffalo Soldiers” by the Indians.
A settler named Bartholomew J. DeWitt established the village of Santa Angela just outside the fort, at the juncture of the north and south forks of the Concho River, naming it after his late wife, Carolina Angela. This name was eventually shortened to San Angela and, in 1883, changed altogether and masculinized to San Angelo at the insistence of the U.S. Postal Service, ostensibly because this made it grammatically correct.
“As an early frontier town, San Angelo was characterized by saloons, prostitution, and gambling,” says the Texas State Historical Association. “Officers of nearby Fort Concho would not leave the garrison after dark.” By any name, San Angelo was a rough place, and Miss Hattie’s was by no means the first brothel to be established in it.
Many people settled in the area, however, and after San Angelo became the seat of Tom Green County in 1882 and the railroad arrived in 1888, the community became a regional transportation hub and grew quickly. As tuberculosis swept the country around the turn of the century, the warm, dry climate of the Texas plains also made it one of the venues that people flocked to in search of cures from the “consumption.”
Around this time the woman who became known as Miss Hattie moved to San Angelo and married a local man named Mr. Hatton and the two of them purchased the building at 18 Concho Street. This beautiful structure had been built just a few years before, in 1896, and was located in what is now the historic heart of the downtown district of the city.
Their marital bliss was soon disrupted, however, when Mrs. Hatton discovered that she could not abide being married to a drinking man, and the two were soon divorced. As part of their settlement, Mr. Hatton received the lower level of the building they owned together, and the former Mrs. Hatton received the upper level, which could be accessed from a separate door at 18½ Concho Street.
It’s not clear how much this lady’s reputation was damaged by becoming a divorcee in this era or what options were available for supporting herself. What is certain, however, is that she tweaked her name to Miss Hattie and turned her part of the building on Concho Street into a high-end cathouse. It was, in fact, the first place in San Angelo to have running water.
Miss Hattie’s Brothel soon became a fashionable spot for local cowboys, ranchers, and businessmen to unwind and blow off a little