Meet the sisters who ran ‘the most famous and luxurious house of prostitution in the country’
Chicago’s Everleigh Club hosted celebrities and princes. Its owners made millions.
The spread, so to speak, at Chicago’s famed Everleigh Club was nothing short of breathtaking. There was lobster, caviar, fried oysters, deviled crabs, and iced clam juice. There were ducks, geese, pheasants. Not to mention nuts and candies, pastries, and lavish chocolate confections. And the alcohol? It flowed. The wine was some of the best you could find anywhere in the country. It figured that dinner at the 50-room manse cost $50 — about $1200 today. And that was after paying the steep $10 entrance fee.
The decor was also sumptuous. The club at 2131 Dearborn Street, which was open from 1900 to 1911, was decorated, according to PBS’s City of the Century, with “silk curtains, damask easy chairs, oriental rugs, mahogany tables, gold rimmed china and silver dinnerware, perfumed fountains in every room, a $15,000 gold-leafed piano for the Music Room, mirrored ceilings, a library filled with finely bound volumes, an art gallery featuring nudes in gold frames — no expense was spared.” Many of the rooms were themed: the Persian Room, the Japanese Room, the Turkish Room, and the Room of a Thousand Mirrors, among others. A four-piece orchestra frequently played, as “hostesses” glided around, tending to guests’ every desire, or making arrangements to.
The Everleigh Club was the brainchild of two entrepreneurial sisters, Minna and Ada Everleigh, born Minna and Ada Lester in Charlottesville, Kentucky, in the 1860s. Having used their inheritance to open a brothel in Omaha, the pair were experienced madams when they landed in Chicago and purchased the mansion that would become the Everleigh. They took the name from the closing signature their grandmother used when she wrote letters: “Everly Yours.” And they recruited the best talent they could find, initially putting a call out to the women who’d worked for them in Nebraska, and then to other top-notch brothels around the country. They did face-to-face interviews with all of the candidates, and selected only those who were both beautiful and compelling. Even the chosen women still had to undergo courses in culture and manners before being trotted out to clients.
The club was situated in Chicago’s Levee District—which was known for its saloons, gambling halls, and an abundance of prostitutes—and was presided over by two crooked aldermen, Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna and “Bathhouse” John Coughlin. Kenna and Coughlin were famously tolerant of vice in all its forms, and even threw an annual political fundraising event, the First Ward Ball, which “attracted a wild mix of society thrill seekers, police captains, politicians, prostitutes and gamblers,” according to the Chicago Tribune. And though the “girls” wandered the house in the evenings, patrons paid an extra $50 for a romp with one of them. It was awfully pricey for the era, but the Everleigh sisters knew their clientele would fork it over. The club was “the embodiment of elite white male urban leisure,” as Cynthia M. Blair writes in I’ve Got to Make My Livin’: Black Women’s Sex Work in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago. It became a mark of haute luxury to have sampled the goods at the Everleigh. Besides, fewer clients per night was better for the women. “You have the whole night before you and one $50 client is more desirable than five $10 ones. Less wear and tear,” Minna told her employees.
Even in a district all but zoned for partying, the Everleigh wasn’t the average brothel. The “pride of the Levee,” according to Robert M. Lombardo in Organized Crime in Chicago: Beyond the Mafia, it was only a few blocks north of Bed Bug Row, a dismal collection of cheap brothels. The Everleigh attracted a broad range of wealthy notables from Chicago and beyond, including many international visitors, and it brought in over a hundred thousand dollars in profit per year. The sisters even expanded, purchasing 2133 Dearborn, the neighboring building, in 1902, and dubbing it The Annex. The admission policy, however, was strict. Keen to keep the club as exclusive as possible, the sisters vetted visitors almost as rigorously as they did their own employees, only allowing in men they knew to be wealthy and powerful, or those with a letter of recommendation from an existing customer. “How is my boy?” Ada would ask, as she opened the door to greet the men.
Among the club’s famous regulars were poet Edgar Lee Masters and sports writer Ring Lardner. In 1905, Marshall Field, Jr., the son of prominent department store owner Marshall Field, was shot dead, and many thought it was an Everleigh prostitute who killed him. Perhaps the most famous piece of Everleigh lore involves Prince Henry of Prussia, brother of German Kaiser Wilhelm II. Henry visited the club in 1902, and the sisters rolled out the red carpet. During a dance performance in his honor, a prostitute’s shoe flew off, knocking over a bottle of champagne, which spilled into it. To spare the woman a wet foot, one of Henry’s buddies picked up the shoe and drank the bubbly from it. That gesture, an act of chivalry amid revelry, is thought to be the origin of the odd party tradition of drinking from a shoe.
But all good things must come to an end, or at least for the rich white men of Chicago they did. In Murder and Mayhem in Chicago’s Vice Districts, Troy Taylor writes that a publicity tool designed by the sisters was the very thing that may have brought the Everleigh Club down. They had commissioned a leather-bound book — a brochure, really — with text penned by Ada and professional photographs of the elaborate interior of the club. When the advertisement fell into the hands of then mayor Carter Harrison, Jr., he ordered the establishment closed. It was part of a citywide effort to “clean up” commercial “vice” districts, following the publication of the Chicago Vice Commission’s 1910 report, which said there were a shocking 600 brothels operating in the city. (The Everleigh Club was singled out as “the most famous and luxurious house of prostitution in the country.”)
In a gesture somewhat unthinkable today, the city let the club throw one last party. It was, as you might imagine, a rager. On October 11, 1911, the police — some of whom had likely been there since the night before — padlocked the door.
Minna was 45 and Ada 47 when the pair retired with around a million dollars to their names, not to mention $200,000 in jewels and $25,000 in furnishings. They traveled Europe for a while, then settled in New York City, where they changed their names back to Lester, joined women’s organizations, started a poetry circle, and lived in comfort in the East 70s until their deaths in 1948 and 1960, respectively.
