LAUREN GILGER: Red light districts in Tucson stayed in operation for years after they’d been outlawed in other Arizona cities and towns. But as our next guest explains, the women who worked there were still largely marginalized.
David Grassé is an Arizona historian and author of the book “Red Light Districts of Tucson: A History, 1870-1918,” which came out earlier this year.
He spoke with my co-host Mark Brodie, and they started with what we know about what these areas looked like, or as we might talk about now, what the vibes were like there.
DAVID GRASSÉ: Well, there was actually two of them. The first one was on Maiden Lane, and it was really just a series of small adobe rooms that lined the boulevard. Maiden Lane no longer exists. When they widened Congress Street, they demolished all of those buildings.
The second one was actually a more formal area, also predominantly with little crib rooms all along both sides, but at one end was a full-fledged brothel, two stories tall. And eventually they fenced the entire area off to keep women and children who might be influenced from seeing what went on there.
MARK BRODIE: Do we have a sense of how popular these areas were, like how much business they got, I guess, for lack of a better word?
DAVID GRASSÉ: They were pretty popular. Should be remembered that prostitution was actually legal at the time in the Arizona Territory, and so they were pretty, pretty busy.
Also depended on the class of the girl. The so-called — there’s a hierarchy in prostitution, the top being the girls who worked in the high-end brothels like that of Eva Blanchard, who owned the brothel in the red light district of Gay Alley, which was the official red light district. So, those girls were made their customers a lot more money.
And then it goes down to, you know, the lower-end brothel girls, the crib girls or the cottage girls, and then all the way down to streetwalkers — streetwalkers being very low, the lowest on the totem pole.
MARK BRODIE: What was the dynamic like between the people who maybe worked in the red light districts, the women who worked there, the men who frequented there? And I imagine at that time, even though it was legal, there were still people who were trying to shut them down, right?
DAVID GRASSÉ: Yes. In fact, the entire time, they were trying to be closed down. The progressive movement was starting to take effect as early as 1890s. And so that’s why they closed Maiden Lane originally is because it was too close to the business district and there were people who were like, “OK, we can’t have this here. It needs to move.”
And ironically, what they did is they went in and closed Maiden Lane, shut it down, kicked the girls out. And the result was they scattered all over town. They ended up in the really nice neighborhoods, the really nice hotels, and that was just, yeah, that was unacceptable. So they decided to make a restricted district in which prostitution would be legal.
MARK BRODIE: It’s interesting what you say about how some of the women could make a pretty good living because it strikes me that that’s probably pretty dissimilar to women at the time who were working in jobs that were not sex workers.
DAVID GRASSÉ: That is actually very true, especially in the Arizona Territory. And a lot of that is economics. The Arizona Territory, most of the industry here was extractive. And so there were no factories, there was nothing like that for these girls to work in as there were back East. So really, good girls could become schoolteachers. Middle-class and lower-middle-class women were laundresses, maybe worked in a shop as sewing or something like that, but there just was not a lot of opportunity for these women.
So yeah, the girls in the red light district actually made comparatively good money, even compared to some of the men who worked in the labors and the trades.
MARK BRODIE: Did the women have any legal protections? Although what they were doing was legal, like did they have any protections?
DAVID GRASSÉ: Very little. In fact, a good portion of the book I pulled from police files of these women getting arrested, and assault and battery was actually fairly common. The girls beat each other up quite often, and of course their customers sometimes would often beat them up, too.
When that happened, it was not considered assault and battery. They did not press felony charges against the men who beat them. It was usually just simple battery, and the men who did it were fined somewhere around $10 or 10 days in jail, and that was pretty much all the punishment for it. The girls had very little legal protection.
MARK BRODIE: OK, so you mention, you know, using police records, other sort of primary sources like that. How did you go about trying to piece these stories together because, as you write, a lot of the women who worked in the red light districts — they didn’t keep journals or diaries or anything — you didn’t really have necessarily a lot to go on?
DAVID GRASSÉ: There really isn’t. I was lucky, I was actually very lucky. I found one oral history, and that was really all I had for primary source documents outside of the police records. And police records actually kind of aren’t really helpful either because, of course, the whole system was really geared against these poor girls.
And also the girls, almost all of them used an alias, and they were all very transient, always moving from one boomtown to another. They’d be lucky if they stayed six months in a place. And once they got arrested, they vacated very quickly to go somewhere else.
MARK BRODIE: Why is it that prostitution was legal for so much longer here than it was in so many other places?
DAVID GRASSÉ: It was kind of an accident, really. They really started shutting it down all across — I think 1903 Bisbee closes its red light district, and Phoenix does the same. They really all start closing in the early 1900s.
Tucson had this restricted district, and there was a big fight to have it closed, but the board of supervisors in Pima County were like, “No, let’s not bother. It’s too much of a hassle.” And they wanted to move it at one point, put it further outside of city limits. And they were like, “Well, where would we put it?” And so they hemmed and hawed for many, many years.
They finally do technically get it shut down about 1918, right after World War I. They’re like, “OK, it’s closed.” But that doesn’t work so well either because the girls really just move around the block. They don’t leave the area.
And it’s until like about 1919 they finally do a big police raid, but the girls obviously knew about it beforehand. Nobody gets arrested; they’ve just disappeared.
MARK BRODIE: All right. That is David Grassé, an Arizona author and historian. He’s the author of “Red Light Districts of Tucson: A History, 1870-1918.” David, thanks so much. I appreciate it.
DAVID GRASSÉ: Well, thank you, Mark. Thanks for having me.
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