Holes of Iniquity: The Stall Saloons of Oshkosh

Thursday morning, December 6, 1894...
Rudolph Weisbrod knew he had to do something about these saloon keepers and their whores on Main Street. Last night's episode caused a sensation. Now the eyes were on him. Weisbrod summoned a reporter from the Daily Northwestern to his office at City Hall. And so it began...

The Dirty Old Town: looking south down the 400 block of North Main Street at the turn of the century.

“Are these fellows running the city or is it the people?” the police chief bellowed as he paced the room. The journalist began taking notes. “These holes of iniquity would place a Hurley or Ironwood den in the shade when it comes to a matter of comparison. If a citizen's league would start a crusade against these black holes, it would be of untold benefit to the moral atmosphere of the city."

Weisbrod sounded as if he were reciting a prepared speech. His "holes of iniquity" were Main Street saloons offering chasers of flesh in companion to their liquid goods. They were called stall saloons. City officials, including the Chief of Police, had looked the other way. Until they couldn't.

Weisbrod was driven to act by what the Daily Northwestern called an "outrageous hubbub." The trouble began after police arrested a woman in one of the stall saloons. She was "in a beastly state of intoxication." The cops dragged her into the winter night wearing nothing but a low-cut wrapper. She went howling all the way to the jail on Court Street. The lurid spectacle inspired an equally lurid account of it on Thursday’s front page.

Her "screams, curses, and malediction" continued well into the morning, the Daily Northwestern reported. "The noise that resulted was terrific. The woman seemed to be possessed of a fiend incarnate."

The stall saloons had become too loud to ignore.

Kicking in the Stalls
Weisbrod had laid it on thick for the Daily Northwestern reporter. How much of his moralizing he actually believed is questionable. Weisbrod was an old-school sort of cop. He was a Civil-War vet who had been appointed chief of police for the first time in 1887. Weisbrod's views on prostitution were hardly consistent with the Progressive attitudes of the 1890s. That is, he wasn't altogether opposed to commodified sex.

Oshkosh Police Chief Rudolph Weisbrod in his Civil War suit.

Prostitution in Oshkosh flourished during Weisbrod's tenure as chief of police. Most of the sex trade was sequestered in an area on the north side; along what is now Ashland Street south of Murdock. A sense of decorum and discretion prevailed there. Downtown, it was a different story. Sex in the stall saloons was a grubbier affair.

That they were called "stalls" says it all. The term captured the barnyard spirit of the matter. In fact, “stall” may have been too charitable. In some places, the stall amounted to nothing more than a curtain. Others were glorified closets. An extravagant stall might even have a door.

A catalog illustration of an ornate bar screen made by R. Brand & Sons of Oshkosh. Oshkosh wasn't the only Wisconsin city with a stall-saloon problem. Brand's screens were used for stalls in saloons throughout the Midwest.

The stalls were tucked at the back of the barroom, usually near a rear entrance to an alley. This allowed prostitutes to slip in and out without drawing the attention of gawkers on Main Street. Yet it was no secret what was going on. There were at least a dozen stall saloons in Oshkosh. Eight of them were on Main Street.

The view north on Main Street from Washington Avenue; the heart of the stall saloon district. There were at least four stall saloons on Main Street between Washington and Merritt.

Weisbrod's rant in the Daily Northwestern caused the stir he intended. A week later, the chief issued an order to remove the stalls from the saloons. He had the support of the mayor and the city attorney, but the legality of the order was in doubt. Weisbrod realized he was pushing the limits of his authority. When asked what he would do if the saloon keepers disregarded his demand, Weisbrod bluffed saying he wasn’t at liberty to discuss it. That challenge was put off for the time being.

Most of the stalls were removed even before Weisbrod's order was made official. Harry Maxwell, who had an elaborate set of stalls in his saloon, said he was happy to remove them. "The change will be better for the moral atmosphere of the city," he told a Daily Northwestern reporter. Maxwell even managed to maintain a straight face when he said it.

The barroom of Harry Maxwell's stall saloon at what is now 416 N. Main. Maxwell was a notorious saloon man and gambler. In the back bar mirror is the reflection of a painting inside of a draped frame. It shows a nude sprawled across a bed.

The saloon keepers bent to Weisbrod's will so willingly that it immediately aroused suspicion. Their rationale was explained by an anonymous Oshkosh resident who seems to have had inside knowledge.

"Mark my words well, the stall feature of the saloons has not been stamped out of existence. Let me tell you that the partitions have not been taken apart, and that the parts of the stalls have only been stored away for future use."
     – Oshkosh Daily Northwestern; December 18, 1894.

The Long Debauch
It took little more than a year, but as predicted the stalls returned. By 1897, the selling of sex on Main Street was as brisk as ever. Chief Weisbrod threw away his order. He insisted that the common council needed to take up the matter.

In early 1898, a city ordinance was introduced that would ban stall saloons. But there wasn’t enough support for it to bring it to a vote. Then, as if on cue, there occurred another sensational episode that set Oshkosh on edge.

It would later be referred to as a “Long Debauch” and it involved a series of men and three young women ranging in ages from 17 to 21. The women had come to Oshkosh from Neenah on the Thursday afternoon of March 17, 1898. That evening, they attended a dance at the North Side Turner Hall. It was there that the "handsome maiden only seventeen years of age" took her first drink. There was no turning back.

Ground zero for the Long Debauch: the northside Turner Hall at the northeast corner of Merritt and Jefferson.

The three young women met two Oshkosh men at the Turner Hall dance. On Friday, their new friends took them on a tour of the southside saloons. Later, they went to Main Street and into a stall saloon where they spent the remainder of the evening. Whatever took place there was clearly transformative.

By Saturday, the women were "in the charge" of a middle-aged man. He brought them back to Main Street for another go. They spent time in at least two stall saloons. Near midnight, the women were picked up by police on Merritt Street. One of the women was injured; she said a man had kicked her. Another was too drunk to walk. All three were carted to the police station. The city physician was called in to tend to them. They were held over until Sunday evening.

The story was front-page news in both the Daily Northwestern and the Oshkosh Times. A member of the common council told the Northwestern he was witness to at least some of what had taken place over the weekend. "I wish every other of the twenty-six aldermen could have seen what I saw," he said. "It was a pitiable thing."

The unattributed quote was likely given by second-ward alderman Charles D. Heath.

Charles D. Heath

Heath was the longest-serving member of the Oshkosh Common Council, having won his seat in 1882. He'd been a saloon owner even longer than that. Heath hadn’t chosen his profession. He was born into it.

His father had launched a saloon on the south side of Washington Avenue near Main in the mid-1860s. Heath, born in 1853, had grown up working in that saloon. When he was 25, his father died. Heath took over the bar and named it the Senate Sample Room. His life was wrapped up in that saloon.

It wasn't always a good fit. Heath was notoriously kindhearted and charitable. Sometimes to a fault. Somehow, after almost 30 years in a business known for creating misanthropes, Heath had managed not to have the empathy beaten out of him. His compassion would cost him dearly in the days to come.

Heath's Senate Sample Room no longer stands. The parking lot behind the Exclusive Company now occupies that space. The Senate is seen here in the background with its protruding sign highlighted in yellow above the awning.

Charles Heath and the Evil Temptation
Heath was one of six saloon owners on the Oshkosh Common Council in 1898. As a group, they managed to sidetrack a number of saloon reform measures. Among them was the languishing proposal that would ban stall saloons in Oshkosh. But Heath parted ways with his fellow saloonists after conducting his own examination of the stall saloons.

"Never before in any city of the country has such prostitution existed," Heath railed at his fellow aldermen. He told of "the disgraceful scenes being enacted in the stalls" and how they were far worse than he could have imagined. Heath said that during his investigations he had encountered "five or six little girls" in stall saloons.

He described an episode where two 15-year-old girls had recently been lured into a stall saloon with an offer of ginger ale. "They took the ginger ale, which was 'doped' with the most evil of purposes and most evil results," Heath said. The fathers of the girls went to the district attorney demanding that charges be pressed, only to recant at the pleading of their daughters who feared the "disgrace of such a proceeding."

Heath collected other stories that were equally disturbing. His dive into the stall saloons seemed to unhinge him. He told his fellow alderman that eliminating the stalls wasn't good enough. He demanded that women be altogether banned from saloons. 

436 North Main was once the home of a bustling stall saloon run by Charles Lemon. It's now home to Eroding Winds Record Shop.

The anti-stall folks were glad to have Heath on board. But even they were taken aback by his extremism. They questioned if a ban on women would even be legal. Heath responded darkly, "I don't consider this matter as a question of personal liberty in any sense. It is a question of protecting the girls and boys of this city from ruin."

The Daily Northwestern steered clear of Heath's more strident proposals, calling them "anti-female." But the paper helped lend credence to his horror stories about "the evil doings in those stalls."

“In a conversation with a Northwestern reporter recently, a commercial traveler said that the stall saloon district of this city was rapidly becoming notorious throughout the state. “It has often been spoken of as one of the worst spots in the state”
   – Oshkosh Daily Northwestern; March 23, 1898.

 The "Finest Saloon in the State" in "one of the worst spots in the state." Nic Stein's Place was a stall saloon in the 400 block of North Main Street (the building no longer stands). Smiling Nic Stein is seen on the right strolling down Main Street.

There was now no doubt that the common council would pass the anti-stall ordinance. Before it came to a vote, Heath attempted to introduce his more radical measures “to prevent the practice of prostitution in saloons and to prevent the corruption of young women and girls in the city of Oshkosh.” The aldermen rejected it.

On April 12, 1898, the common council passed an ordinance outlawing stalls, compartments, and private rooms in Oshkosh saloons. The only dissenting vote came from Charles Heath. He said he couldn't support it because it didn't go far enough. It didn't prohibit "the evil temptation" of women in saloons.

A Ward in Heaven
With the new law in place, Chief Weisbrod sent his men out to tell the bar keepers they had three days to tear out their stalls. Once again, they complied. Once again, the moral panic dissipated. Once again, it reemerged (a story for another day).

Charles Heath was never the same. After the passage of the anti-stall ordinance, Heath renounced his profession and sold his saloon. Yet he remained haunted. In 1905, Heath ran for mayor on what the Daily Northwestern described as an "ultra-radical" platform of moral reform.

Heath promised to run all of the prostitutes out of town. He vowed to destroy every nickel slot machine in Oshkosh. He said he would move the saloons into a segregated area away from Main Street and force them to close on Sundays. That was just the warm-up. Heath's 12-point plan was a puritan’s wish list that included an "Absolute prohibition of the demimonde element parading our streets for the purpose of showing themselves."

His crusading zeal made Heath an object of ridicule. The La Crosse Chronicle ran an article mocking his plans for the city: "If Oshkosh elects Charles D. Heath and he keeps his promise, the famous city will indeed become a suitable spot for a ward in heaven."

Heath was soundly defeated. A year later, he moved away.

Heath went to Marinette, Wisconsin where he became the proprietor of a fashionable hotel. He remained there until his death at the age of 68. Still, his dissolute hometown retained a hold on his heart. Heath left instructions that he wanted to be buried here. His body was brought back to Oshkosh in a rail car. Charles D. Heath was laid to rest in Riverside Cemetery on April 25, 1921.

Charles Heath's return to the dirt of Oshkosh.

End Notes

I've previously written about Rudolph Weisbrod's approach to regulating prostitution in Oshkosh. You can find that story here.

If you're interested in the Oshkosh saloons of this period, there's a starting point here that leads to a tour through some of the old, downtown saloons.