Empire of Sin (10 page)

It was at this point in his life, in the early 1890s, that he decided to give marriage a second chance. Little is known about Catherine Turnbull, the twenty-nine-year-old woman from St. Louis he married in early 1894. Apparently, she was a widow who had fallen into prostitution after the premature death of her first husband, a man named M. L. Roder. But her profession made little difference to Tom Anderson. Having grown up as a messenger boy for Irish Channel brothels, he held little truck with the hypocrisies of Victorian moral ideals, and seemed to truly enjoy the company of prostitutes. But Kate soon became an exception. Within months of his bringing her into the Prytania Street home that he shared with his widowed mother, Honora, the battle was on. The elder Mrs. Anderson developed a vehement dislike of her new daughter-in-law, and Tom, like the dutiful Irish son he was, always took his mother’s side. The three Andersons argued bitterly and frequently, sometimes even in public, until matters came to a head in August of 1894. Catherine demanded that Mrs. Anderson leave the premises. Tom obliged, moving his mother—and himself—to a new house on Canal Street. He instantly filed suit for a separation from his wife, prefatory to a divorce.

It was to be one of the few times in his life that Tom Anderson did not get his way in the local justice system. Appearing before a judge in Civil District Court, Anderson accused his wife of “
excesses of cruel treatment and outrages” and of threatening to shoot him with a loaded pistol. Contesting the suit, Catherine denied ever threatening her husband, and in turn cited a few transgressions of his, among them “compelling her at times to perform various duties such as scrubbing, washing, and cooking, refusing to permit a servant to perform said duties.” She further accused him of using “the most profane and vulgar language” toward her, of “humiliating her in the presence of his employees,” and of “treating her in an outrageous manner, for which she could never forgive him.” And as if this weren’t enough, she rounded off her case with a whopping revelation: Catherine Anderson alleged that she was now pregnant with child. As a mother-to-be, then, she was entitled to support in the amount of $100 per month in perpetuity, along with a fair portion of Tom’s existing assets.

Whether Catherine’s alleged pregnancy was real or merely a ploy to earn the judge’s sympathy (there appears to be no record of any child ever being born), it got the job done. The court ultimately ruled in the wife’s favor, refusing the divorce and holding the husband responsible for his wife’s continued upkeep. Anderson began an appeal, but meanwhile he had to suffer the indignity of having court assessors rummage through his home and businesses, inventorying all of his assets—right down to the two-dollar keg of pickles in the cellar of his restaurant.

It’s possible that one point of contention in his marriage was Anderson’s growing association with the brothel madam Josie Lobrano—now calling herself Josie Arlington.
Rumors of a romantic relationship between the two would persist for decades, but there’s no real evidence that they were ever anything more than close friends and business partners. Most likely Tom recognized in Josie a kindred spirit—another no-nonsense pragmatist with a determination to succeed in one of the few ways available in 1890s New Orleans to persons not born to wealth and privilege.

For Josie, too, was now
a businessperson on the rise. The four or five years since the killing of her brother had been transformative for her. She’d successfully shed the taint of her former rough life and started out anew, just as she had vowed to do back in 1891. She’d taken up with
a new paramour, John Thomas “Tom” Brady, an easygoing, mild-mannered clerk in the City Treasurer’s Office, much closer to her own age than Phillip Lobrano had been. Several months after the shooting, she and Brady had gone off on an extended vacation to Hot Springs, Arkansas. There they’d witnessed firsthand the lush life offered by the city’s celebrated Arlington Hotel, a luxurious spa where the well heeled could take a water cure amid the trappings of Gilded Age opulence.

For
a former orphaned child once forced by her aunt to sell apples on street corners (only to be beaten unmercifully if she didn’t bring back $1.50 a day), this was a revelation, a potent vision of a very different and desirable kind of life. Josie came back to New Orleans resolved to re-create a bit of that elegance at her Customhouse Street brothel. She changed the name of her establishment to the “Chateau Lobrano d’Arlington” and proceeded to fill it with “
gracious, amiable foreign girls who would be at home only to gentlemen of taste and refinement.” She even began advertising her high-toned new offerings in the newspapers: “Society is graced by the presence of a bona-fide baroness, direct from the Court of St. Petersburg,” ran one announcement in the
Mascot
. “The baroness is at present residing incog. at the Chateau Lobrano d’Arlington, and is known as La Belle Stewart.” True, the alleged baroness was soon exposed as nothing more than “
a hoochy-koochy dancer and circus specialist,” but the tone that Josie was striving for was evident nonetheless.

Perhaps in part to finance her wholesale image renovation,
Josie Arlington sold an interest in the Chateau to her friend Tom Anderson, whose Rampart Street restaurant stood just around the corner. Whether this was Anderson’s first foray into the brothel business is uncertain, but it would not be his last. The saloon and brothel businesses, after all, were natural complements. And it wasn’t long before the bar at 112 Rampart Street became a popular stopping-off place for clients heading to or from the Chateau at 142 Customhouse. To cement the association in the mind of the public, Tom eventually renamed his restaurant the Arlington. Soon both establishments were prospering mightily, enriching both principals and even
allowing the genial Tom Brady (a friend of Anderson’s in addition to being Arlington’s kept man) to quit his job at the City Treasurer’s Office and invest in a local pool hall.

So for Tom Anderson, Josie Arlington, and their associates in vice, things weren’t going too badly in the New Orleans of the mid-1890s. Business was good, despite a nationwide depression, and harassments from police were minimal. But the forces of reform had not been idle, and the outlook for the city’s vice industries was about to change significantly. A new and more energetic reform administration had been elected to office in 1896, and they were ready to ratchet up the battle to clean up the city. Under the leadership of Mayor Walter C. Flower, this new administration set its sights in particular on the spread of vice and crime into respectable neighborhoods all around the city. And their proposed solution to the problem was a uniquely practical one. Recognizing that any attempt to abolish vice entirely was doomed to failure (at least in New Orleans), they hoped instead
to regulate and isolate the trade. And they would do it by moving vice out of the central city and the better residential neighborhoods, into a part of town where few respectable people would come into contact with it. Drawing boundaries to isolate vice and crime was the new progressive answer of the day, and it would ultimately change the culture of New Orleans in ways that no one could anticipate.

F
OR
a place with such a deeply entrenched culture of prostitution, of course, any scheme to segregate the practice would not be easy to implement. New Orleans’
reputation as a center of sin and perdition had dogged the city virtually since its founding in 1718. Established in that year under a temporary charter to the private Company of the West, La Nouvelle-Orléans was from the beginning a community filled with rough, ungovernable men and women of dubious morality. John Law, the notorious Scottish adventurer who had contracted with France “
to establish, thirty leagues up the river, a burg which should be called New Orleans,” needed to populate his new town as quickly as possible, and he wasn’t overly fastidious about how he accomplished the task. According to one early historian, “
Disorderly soldiers, black sheep of distinguished families, paupers, prostitutes, political suspects, friendless strangers, unsophisticated peasants straying into Paris—all were kidnapped, herded, and shipped under guard to fill the emptiness of Louisiana.” French jails and hospitals were ransacked for potential colonists, while men with an opportunistic bent were enticed with promises of free transportation, free land, and the prospect of fabulous riches derived from a region of unimaginable abundance. To deal with
a chronic shortage of women, prospective wives were also imported from the Old Country,
among them eighty-eight inmates from a Parisian house of correction known as La Salpêtrière. As a result, the town was—within a decade of its birth—already famous as a den of iniquity, a place “
without religion, without justice, without discipline, without order, and without police.”

By the latter half of the eighteenth century, New Orleans had polished away some of its rougher frontier edges, and had even attained a patina of French refinement in parts. But the city retained its notoriety for vice and lawlessness. Subsequent political upheavals did little to change this. In 1762, to avoid surrendering New Orleans and western Louisiana to Britain after the Seven Years’ War (known in North America as the French and Indian War), King Louis XV secretly ceded these territories to his Spanish cousin, King Carlos III. But although Spain took political and military control of Louisiana for the rest of the century,
the Spaniards sent over few additional colonists; as a result, New Orleans remained distinctly French—and libertine—in character. (Spain did, however, rebuild much of the central city after two devastating fires, which is why the architecture of the “French Quarter” is actually Spanish.) In 1800, the whole territory reverted to France, but by then the mother country’s ardor for its unruly American colony had cooled. Three years later,
Napoleon sold New Orleans and the whole Louisiana territory to the United States for the sum of $15 million. Residents had no say in this matter, and were not at all pleased, but nothing could be done. And so, in 1803, the old Gallic metropolis became American—at least politically.

The population explosion set off by the Louisiana Purchase took New Orleans vice to new levels of visibility. Tenderloin districts grew up along the busy waterfront, where
rowdy flatboatmen from the American interior, carrying cargoes downriver to the newly unrestricted port, indulged in sprees of gambling, drinking, and “
wholehearted wallowing in the fleshpots.” Soon the rise of the Mississippi steamboat culture was bringing a somewhat higher class of scalawag to the Crescent City—in the form of
confidence men and professional riverboat gamblers. Gambling, in fact, became something of an obsession for New Orleanians of every class. And although the Louisiana State legislature, occasionally dominated by conservative elements from the state’s Anglo-Protestant north, passed various anti-gambling laws over the years, they were—in New Orleans, at least—widely ignored.

Efforts to control prostitution were likewise ineffectual. By the mid-1800s,
prosperous Anglo-American planters and merchants had built entire neighborhoods of capacious, colonnaded mansions in the “American” part of the city—the Garden District, upriver from Canal Street. Here they hoped to set themselves apart from the neighborhoods of
downtown “Creoles” (a term that at this point meant the offspring—white, black, or mixed-race—of French or other foreign-born parents). To keep their enclaves free of sin, efforts were made to regulate prostitution by city statute. But thanks to lax enforcement over the years, the problem of “vice contamination” in respectable neighborhoods did not go away, and in fact by 1890 seemed worse than ever.

But now, with the election of the new reform government of 1896, city officials were determined to make vice segregation work. Just after the election, a newly installed alderman named Sidney Story took it on himself to devise a way to protect “the pure and noble womanhood” of New Orleans from this unwanted contamination. “
That vice should be allowed to flaunt its scarlet drapery in the face of virtue,” as he would later opine to the
Item
, “was not only a blotch upon our escutcheon, but a constant menace to the moral health of the community.” So Story developed a plan that would make prostitution illegal everywhere in the city
except
in a certain eighteen-block area, a neighborhood that was already rife with vice establishments. In this way, sin would be drawn out of prominent and respectable parts of town and relegated to places where, he believed, it would do the least harm to decent sensibilities.

This was not an entirely new idea. Story had seen similar schemes in several European cities during a tour of the Continent some years earlier. And even some American cities had experimented with officially tolerated vice districts. What made Story’s plan unique, however, was the explicitness of the toleration and the specificity of its geographical limits. And since the proposed ordinance did not actually legalize prostitution within this area (but merely made it illegal everywhere else), it would be able to survive the inevitable court challenges it was bound to inspire.