Building Tucson

My manuscript about the red-light districts of Tucson is now with McFarland and is being processed. Expect it to be released toward the end of the year. In the mean time, I am catching up on my reading, and working on an article about Annie Sullivan Wiley, a.k.a. Eva Blanchard, for The Journal of Arizona History. I presented an earlier draft to the journal, which is peer-reviewed, and it was rejected as I did not have a thesis. I simply wrote a history. Now, I am going back and talking about how Blanchard, like other madams of the era, was instrumental in helping Tucson grow from a frontier settlement to a modern city (among other comparisons). Like Lou Graham of Seattle, Belgian Jennie Bauters of Jerome, and Jennie Rodgers of Denver, Annie/Eva invested heavily in real estate throughout Tucson, and, over the years, paid a goodly amount in personal and property taxes. Some idea of Annie’s net worth may be derived from a 1907 tax assessor’s record. At that time, her personal property and real estate holdings were valued at $12,795 (over $400,000 in today’s dollars). In addition, there were the fines, license fees, bribes, etc. which were part of doing business in the demimonde. As author Hannah observed in her book Notoriously Bad Character, "Funding the police department was pieced together from a combination of sources, including citations, bail money, and auctioning impounded animals - all of which were bolstered by the sale of intoxicating liquors and a good time. In order to fund necessary items like horses and meals for inmates... the police department needed a a constant supply of income. (Lou) Graham's business was part of a kind of cottage industry that provided that stream. Gambling, dancing, drinking, and prostitution were all vital when it came to producing revenue for the City of Seattle." The same can be said of Annie/Eva and the City of Tucson. Much of the civic improvement in Tucson between 1865 and 1917 was directly funded by the women of the demimonde.

I would like to take a moment here to acknowledge some of the sources which I used in writing my book about the red-light districts of Tucson and my biography of Annie/Eva. First, is Border Bodies: Racialized Sexuality, Sexual Capital, and Violence in the Nineteenth-Century Borderlands by Bernadine Marie Hernández, a fantastic study about the women of color who worked as prostitutes in the southwest in the late 1800s/early 1900s. Second (and these are not listed in order of importance or by merit), is the aforementioned Notoriously Bad Character: The True Story of Lou Graham and Immigrants and Sex Workers Who Built Seattle by Hannah Brooks Olsen. Olsen did a remarkable job in separating the myth from the the facts, and reminds the reader that one cannot fully piece together the life of another person. Alice: Memoirs of a Barbary Coast Prostitute, edited by Ivy Anderson and Devon Angus certainly deserves mention, as does Michael Rutter's books Upstairs Girls: Prostitution in the American West and Colorado Madams. The Fair But Frail: Prostitution in San Francisco, 1849 - 1900 by Jacqueline Baker Barnhard (which I utilized in writing From the Footlights to the Tenderloin) and Josie Arlington's Storyville: The Life and Times of a New Orleans Madam by Marita Woywod Crandle (which I am referencing in writing about Annie/Eva). There are a number of others whose books have been helpful in understanding the women who in the sex trade during this era. I am immensely indebted to you all.