Police Raid the 'Whitechapel' District
Justice Miller fines two dozen women in the wake of a citywide vice sweep.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
At 6 o'clock in the evening, Justice John F. Miller held a levée for the women arrested in Chief Sullivan’s chapel raid the previous night. The women under arrest filled the courtroom to suffocation. A crowd gathered around the windows and doorways, making the small courtroom as hot as an oven. Justice Miller ordered the crowd cleared away, but it still hung on with the prurient curiosity always exhibited when a woman is in the courtroom to answer for public indecency. Twenty-four of the women appeared and pleaded guilty. Lou Graham and Jennie Mitchell, proprietors, were fined $50 each; the inmates were fined $20 each. The total amount thus collected was $530. The girls who recognized in the sum of $500, including Blanche Foster, Dunn, Maud Armstrong, Myrtle Flora Baker, and Maud, failed to appear; the court declared their bonds forfeited by default.
“A crowd gathered around the windows and doorways, making the small courtroom as hot as an oven.”
This 1889 account of a 'vice sweep' in the Whitechapel district (roughly modern Pioneer Square) reflects the era's criminalization of sex work. These raids were often performative civic theater, using public morality to justify the policing of women's bodies in a rapidly growing, frontier-era city.
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