Galveston's Red Light District by Kimber Fountain

Author:Kimber Fountain
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Published: 2018-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

A prostitute kept track of her earnings by scratching them on the wall in the old Oleander Hotel (currently Antique Warehouse). Photo by author.

Visitors of the esteemed variety were not in shortage, either. President Lyndon B. Johnson and Texas governor Shivers were said to have come to the district to “get lost for a while.” Local playboys, most of whom were the scions of elite Galveston families, were known to take over houses on the Line and throw outrageous parties.7 Some of these parties were gratis, hosted by the madam for good measure. Her guest lists included an eclectic assortment of characters to whom she was the penultimate hostess—attentive and generous with both her liquor and her girls.8 On other occasions, wealthy clients would buy out a house for an entire night. The doors would be locked, and no one was allowed in or out under any circumstances, much to the delight of a young errand boy who got trapped one evening and was served ice cream and soda until sunrise, when he was finally allowed to leave.9 Sometimes the parties would last for two or three days. Food was brought in for the guests, and the madam would keep a running tally of drinks and frolicking as the party went on, to be paid in full by the host as his bleary-eyed guests slipped out the back door.10

Aside from price, another way some houses set themselves apart was through the use of themes and gimmicks. This technique became most popular later in the 1940s and into the ’50s, when competition amped up, but one of the first and most notorious to do it was a madam from the 1920s simply known as Janet. Its regular and robust clientele nicknamed it the “French House,” because it specialized in “alternative” sexual methods and, of course, charged higher prices.11 In the ’30s, a brothel known as the Pennsylvania Hotel specialized in corpulent women and flagrantly advertised their “love by the ton.”12

Other distinct specialty houses included the Spanish House on Twenty-Seventh Street, fully stocked with gorgeous women from all over Central and South America, and the Cajun House, which featured tall, slim Louisiana girls with dark skin and thick accents whom all the men considered “foreign” and exotic.13 Houses that specialized in male homosexual prostitution were few in number and always located away from the red-light district, in small hotels along the beachfront and next to Union Station at Twenty-Fifth and Strand, as well as on one particularly shady street with ample coverage from a group of resplendent palm trees.14 But the one house that caused more head turns than all of the others combined was one run by a black woman who was coupled with a white man; not surprisingly, her house supplied the same combination, which was highly frowned upon in the Jim Crow era.15 In fact, her existence may be nothing but legend, considering that more reliable documentation exists of white women being chased out of town on several occasions for offering their services to black men.

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