Who was Nina Clifford?
How does one go from widowed in Detroit to the most powerful woman in St Paul at the turn of the century? Some may marry into power, but the historically best way is to be like Nina Clifford (pronounced Nine-ah). Open a brothel, but not just any brothel. Open the best, most exclusive, extravagant brothel in the state. Nina Clifford served the wealthiest and most powerful men of St Paul from 1889 until her death in 1929. A forty year run of champagne, larger chandeliers, and, of course, prostitution. The story if Nina is shrouded in mystery due to all records of her having been stolen from the Minnesota Historical society for unknown reasons. However, her story lives on in the small amount of information that has been preserved.
A little backstory on Nina first. Before she became a proprietor of vice, she was born in Canada by Irish immigrants. Little to nothing is known about her early life other than that. At some point, she married and moved to Detroit. Her husband died in the mid 1880s. They had no children.
More unknowns go within where Nina received funding for her brothel. It was built for her and was not too shabby by anyone’s standards. A massive chandelier hung from the ceiling of the large, first floor ballroom of sorts and a large quantity of fine champagne was always on hand. It is the high class of Nina’s in tandem with its location between downtown and Summit Avenue, known for being the residence of many of St Paul’s wealthy citizens. (1)
St Paul brothels in the late 1800s and early 1900s were fairly well accepted. Saloons were targeted as the major problem for moral crusaders and city officials were not inclined to eliminate organized prostitution since some of their wives were operating brothels themselves. Both the chief of police’s wife and the wife of a mayor had brothels. Well, either that mayor’s wife had a brothel or was housing a group of a little more than half a dozen young women out of the kindness of her heart. Another mayor and poet, Lawrence Hodgson, more commonly known as his pen name Larry Ho, was known to frequent Nina’s and, when the brothel was taken down, wrote his most famous poem, The Lay of Nina Clifford. The poem bring out the only known first person account of Nina’s in its heyday. He described the brothel not as a seedy underbelly of St Paul, but as the “pride of the town”. (2)
Not to mention the city managed to find a way to tax prostitution through “catching” a brothel and fining them $100 monthly (~$1,200 today). (3) It seems that when the O’Connor system started for gangsters, madams were taken along for the ride.
The brothel died with Nina in 1929, but the building existed until 1937 when it was torn down for a new city morgue. Years later, in 1997 when the morgue was torn down to make way for the Science Museum of Minnesota, the foundations and some artifacts were discovered in a 1 month archeological dig led by Anne Ketz. The dig did not reveal anything of great importance.
Today Nina lives on, not in the prostitution business, but in the form of Nina’s Coffee Cafe, a coffee shop on the corner of Selby and Western. Nina Street off of Summit Ave was named before Nina ever came to St Paul and is often misattributed to her. (4)
That covers the majority of what we know about Nina and her brothel, and it’s not much, but a big part of the reason Nina has become such a legendary figure is because there’s an air of mystery to her that attracts the curious side of the world.
The most famous legend involving Nina is the tunnel. Supposedly, and well within St Paul’s history of underground crime (author’s note: I am very proud of that pun), Nina’s had a tunnel that went from the basement to one of two places, maybe both. Some say that the tunnel went to the courthouse and city hall just 2 blocks to the east. Others say that it went to the Minnesota Club. Either way, the purpose was to provide some level of secrecy for certain, high profile patrons. When the 1997 archaeological dig occurred, the tunnel was not discovered, however, there was one wall of the basement that was completely destroyed in the creation of the morgue that may have contained the tunnel entrance. (5) I don’t believe that the tunnel existed in the first place based on how widely accepted the brothel was in St Paul culture. There would not be such a need for secrecy, in fact, I believe that, if anything, going to Nina’s would be a point of exclaiming one’s social standing to the world.
In digging for more information about Nina, I discovered that there was a play written in 1980 by Lance Belville about the brothel in the 1910s. Now, I could not find the date when the records about Nina were taken, but the play was very specific on a few points that peaked my interest. First was the a scene where Nina was getting her lawyer and right hand man, Fred, to go tell the mayor to arrest the New York Yankees for stealing her pet parrot. The play discussed Nina’s prominence in the community. Allegedly, she would walk up and down Summit Ave every Sunday afternoon and then catch a show at the Orpheum Theater. Nina preferred the box seats, so when the city passed an ordinance that barred “ladies of unsavory profession” from getting front row or box seats at any theater, she made a couple calls and the ordinance was removed. The play also explains some of what happened to the brothel after Nina’s death. Apparently, the brothel was taken over by Nina’s number 1 girl, May, for the following three years before it was shut down for “not being lawful”.
What I consider the most interesting scene in the play was a meeting that Nina had with a representative of the Archbishop of St Paul. The representative thanked Nina for her past donations to the church to help pay for the St Paul Cathedral, which would have been possible at the time. Nina wanted to donate more, but this time to open an orphanage on Summit Avenue. It took a lot of digging, but I found a record of an orphanage within St Paul’s 8th ward that opened within that timeframe. The only problem is that St Paul has 7 wards. However, within the 4th city charter for St Paul, the 8th ward of St Paul contained a portion of Summit Avenue. Correlation is never equivalent to causations, but if I were to bet on this, I’d bet that Nina funded that orphanage on Summit. Theories like this are part of what makes the story of Nina so great.
All of this still leaves 1 major question: who was Nina Clifford?
She was a widow, a madam, a champagne enthusiast, a philanthropist, a legend, and the most powerful woman in St Paul for the first 28 years of the 20th century.
Sources Cited
- Hare, Erik. “Madam to a Saintly City.” St Paul Real Estate Blog. N.p., 10 June 2007. http://www.stpaulrealestateblog.com/2007/06/madam_to_a_sain.html
- Empson, Donald, and Kathleen M. Vadnais. The Street Where You Live: A Guide to the Place Names of St. Paul. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 2006. Print. Section on Larry Ho Drive
- Best, Joel. Controlling Vice: Regulating Brothel Prostitution in St. Paul, 1865–1883. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1998. Print.
- “The Streets of Saint Paul.” Nina Clifford and Her Brothel. http://www.streetsofsaintpaul.com/2011/12/nina-clifford-and-her-brothel.html
- City of St Paul. “1997 Excavation of Nina Clifford Site.” YouTube. N.p., 26 Dec. 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KG6Baekh_wk
