Ghosts

I am a ghost hunter. I write about ghosts. Not like those fools who write books about supernatural entities which allegedly inhabit old buildings and sites of terrible tragedy (seems every decrepit old hotel and theater has a lady in a white gown wandering through its hallways and weeping profusely). No, I write about people who no longer inhabit this earth at all. I write about the dead.

Currently, I am writing about the red light districts of Tucson - Maiden Lane, which operated from the late 1860s until about 1901, and Gay Alley, which operated from 1903 until about 1916. Both places have long since ceased to exist. Maiden Lane was demolished in 1905, when the city decided to widen Congress Street, and Gay Alley was demolished (along with a generous portion of Barrio Libre, the old Mexican neighborhood, when the city decided to build the Tucson Convention Center in the 1970s (it is beneath the parking lot on the west side).

When I say I am writing about the red light districts, do not misunderstand me. I am not writing about the places, but the people, primarily the women, who plied their trade in these places. Places are of no interest without the stories of the people who inhabited them. The patch of land which the Lakota called Pezi Sla (Greasy Grass), and which we know today as the Little Big Horn battlefield, would not be remarkable at all if not for what occurred there. It is the people who make the places, and not the inverse.

Like the places - Maiden Lane and Gay Alley - the women who worked there are no longer with us. They have all died and are long buried. We have a few names (mostly aliases) - Pearl Hall, Minette Dumas, Fat Carmen Garcia, Josie Davis, Blonde Bella, etc., a headstone or two, and a few photographs, but little else is left of them. They have all the substance of those ghosts which are purported to haunt those old buildings.

This is why I call what I do "ghost-hunting." I task myself to find out all I can about these people who have ceased to be. I pour over and sort through old court documents, period newspapers, memoirs, passenger manifests, census reports, tax receipts, licenses, prison records, and the like in order to re-construct the lives of these women. Some are forever lost to us, as the records of their existence in negligible, or have been lost altogether.

By was of example, at the Arizona Historical Society archive, I found licenses for some of the women who worked in Gay Alley between 1911 and 1914 - Lizzie Parker, Jean Blair, Carroll Edwards, Loraine Wear, Ethyl Rowe, May Anderson, and Blanche Wilson. These I cross-referenced to the 1910 Census, and the period newspapers. Only Lizzie, Carroll, and May appeared in the regional newspapers between 1910 and 1915, all as witnesses in court cases. Only Blanche, alias "Blanche #1," appears on the census taken by the police in August of 1910. none of them appear in the 1910 Federal Census.

The fact is, most the women of the demimonde, in Tucson and elsewhere were, at best, functionally literate, and many could neither read nor write. Few left behind letters or diaries or memoirs. Also, most had no one to write to anyway, having been rejected and turned out by their families and friends once they entered into the life. Words "shameful," "immoral," and "wicked," were often used by the bourgeoisie to describe the women. As Elizabeth Healy, during an interview, when asked about the prostitute's position in the community socially, observed, "Well. no one associated with them."

Even though Elizabeth knew Annie Sullivan Wiley, formerly Madame Blanchard, and roomed for eighteen years with a retired Gay Alley prostitute named Maxine Russell, in the interview, she did not reveal much about the inner thoughts or feelings of these women, if she was privy to them at all. Maxine was forthcoming with Elizabeth about how she got into the business and. later in life, would point out former clients on the television, but if Maxine shared anything more intimate, Elizabeth kept it to herself.

What I am left with is the chimeral, insubstantial shades - the ghosts - of these women from which to construct a history.

My only hope is I do them justice.

An unknown woman peaks out of a doorway in Gay Alley. Original photograph held by The Arizona Historical Society, Tucson.