From Messy Nessy Chic, August 30:
The Brothel Boss Lady who Helped Build Seattle
Madame Lou’s parlor
Like many West Coast settlements, Seattle is a city built on sin. As a logging town and port city their main industry might have been lumber, but the businesses that kept them competitive were the ones that could keep the sailors and other labourers entertained. Madame Lou Graham was a businesswoman through and through, and while she might have been notorious for the business that went on inside her mansion, she was also responsible for financing a lot of the infrastructure that allowed the city to grow into what it is today.
Lou must have been especially good at what she did to have convinced the city leaders to let her set up shop. Just a few years prior to her entering the scene, Seattle had allowed women the right to vote– and it had almost bankrupted the city. Women elected uncorrupted officials who enforced the laws of the land and cleaned up the streets.
Brothels and gambling dens were shut down, and with them gone, so too were the sailors who frequented them, moving along the coast to greener pastures. Seattle’s budget, which relied heavily on fines and licenses from those establishments, disappeared, and the city very quickly revoked women’s suffrage, not to make an appearance again until the 1919 constitutional amendment 30 years later.
When she entered the scene in the 1880s the men of the city were set against having to “deal” with women. But Lou convinced them otherwise, she proposed a luxury building for the needs of the finer men in the city. A place to take visiting dignitaries to relax and unwind....MUCH MORE
