Police to clean up Harlow Street, a Bangor Daily News headline declared Dec. 6, 1915. The multi-tiered announcement made it clear Bangor’s finest weren’t going to be using soap and water. Their target was “bad resorts,” also known as disorderly houses, houses of ill repute, public nuisances, bad road houses and other euphemistic jargon of the time.
The previous year, police Chief Thomas O’Donohue had shut down 15 well-known disorderly houses and ejected the proprietors and “inmates” from the city. Now things were heating up again, and Harlow Street was the latest war zone in the city’s battle against vice.
Harlow Street had become an architectural showcase after the fire of 1911. The street was lined with impressive new buildings. Besides the new high school, which Chief O’Donohue said was the main reason for his decision to clean up the street, there was the new library, a new post office, a new hotel, and the new recreational palace, the Charles W. Morse Building, containing the Bowlodrome and the Winter Garden, an auditorium for balls and other important events.
“The finest school in Maine should be in a clean neighborhood,” the chief remarked.
One of these bad resorts was located just across Spring Street, which ran next to the high school, and another particularly obnoxious place was just up the road at 227 1/2 Harlow St. The dozens of illegal saloons in the neighborhood seemed to have been forgotten for the moment, as long as they followed certain city rules like closing on Sundays.
There was nothing new about prostitution in Bangor thanks to the influx of thousands of loggers and naive, young girls from rural villages in Maine and Canada looking for work. Occasionally, however, local ministers and society matrons, imbued with the spirit of the Progressive Era, gasped loudly, and public officials spasmodically launched invasions of neighborhoods where the problem seemed to reside.
Names like Fan Jones, Aunt Hat and Billy Townsend were known far and wide as entrepreneurs of conviviality.
The papers had been silent on the subject of Jones for many years. She appeared to be living quietly just up the street from the new high school at the corner of Harlow and Cumberland. streets, site of a parking lot today, according to local historian Dick Shaw.
Hat’s legendary place on the river just over the city line in Veazie had burned, but she was still around. She appeared to be running a carnival tent show by then. She had recently been acquitted in a Belfast court of “deceitful enticement of a young girl,” which was alleged to have taken place at the Unity Fair, according to an Oct. 7, 1915, Bangor Daily News article.
Townsend, recently retired after being arrested and jailed repeatedly, had run an infamous roadhouse out on Stillwater Avenue. Its new owners had made the papers in the summer of 1915 after “four young people of good character” were caught by the police during a raid.
The two young men were University of Maine students and one of the girls was alleged to be “the daughter of a state official.”
Naturally, they had been misinformed on the true character of the place, having been attracted there quite innocently by the presence of a piano playing ragtime music. They received a lecture from police and were dismissed to their parents.
Meanwhile, the “three young women habitues of the place were locked up for the night,” after the lady manager disappeared out a back door, the Bangor Daily News related on July 2, 1915.
Lesser known operators like these existed all over the city. Broad Street was a particularly ripe location.
Police storm the trenches of Satan, a headline blared on Nov. 25, 1914. The cops had raided “a notorious resort” run by Annie Burns down on lower Broad Street, a notorious section of the city. Burns was arraigned for having some liquor around and for maintaining a nuisance.
She was getting almost as well known as Jones and Hat, but without the same flair. “The police are determined to break up the Burns place, which has caused them a good deal of trouble in the past,” the newspaper said.
Another noteworthy battle involved a respectable old house on South Street alleged to have turned into a house of ill fame. The neighbors got up a petition signed by the mayor and others who lived in “the fine residential section.”
The intoxicated men coming and going, liquor found by police and the presence of “a notorious woman known as ‘three fingered Jack’” convinced a judge to issue a temporary restraining order ending the traffic, according to the Bangor Daily News on May 6, 1915.
Trouble on Pine Street, meanwhile, was endemic. The only thing noteworthy about it was the arrest of Joe Kaminsky, the owner of a famous hot dog and fried onion stand on the Kenduskeag Bridge. The charge was “aiding in the maintenance of a nuisance.” Joe owned one of the buildings, although building owners were seldom brought into these disputes.
Another place aspiring to notoriety was the Dexter House on Exchange Street. After the latest raid in March 1916, a young man visited the Bangor Daily News offices and threatened that if the story was treated with “levity and sarcasm. … [H]e would print in another paper all that he knew about the editors and the reporters down here.”
The battle to save Harlow Street from the barbarians lasted well into 1916 and beyond. The target at 227 1/2 Harlow St. was the Hotel O’Clair, (possible a facetious label applied by a newspaper staff comedian), run by Mary O’Clair, “an old offender.” Mary was sentenced to 30 days in jail for drunkenness, along with Wallace Beady, “the alleged cook,” according to the Bangor Daily News on March 20, 1915.
On June 5, the place was raided again. O’Clair “promised to get out of town.” That was one way to settle difficult issues.
In 1916, a new establishment, the Hotel Avon, also located “near the high school,” became the center of attention for awhile. Four young women were taken to police headquarters, but no liquor was found, the newspaper said on Jan. 8, 1916.
A few days later, the hotel’s proprietors, John and Laura Mitchell, were arrested and charged with violating Maine’s white slave law, a serious charge that could land them in jail for years.
The message from the police station was the same. “This step is in line with my policy to clean up Harlow Street. I believe that a street on which the city’s largest school is situated and which is traversed by hundreds of children everyday, should be free from corrupting influences; and as I have said before I hope to make it so,” Chief O’Donohue said.
“A slight delicate girl of fourteen” was brought before the municipal court and alleged to be in danger of becoming a delinquent at the hotel, which was located at 213 Harlow St., according to the 1916 Bangor City Directory. In invoking the white slave law instead of a lesser charge, the chief had played his “trump card,” the reporter commented on Jan. 18.
The young girl was sent to the Industrial School for Girls in Hallowell. The Mitchells were advised that it would “be better for them” to move somewhere else.
Like liquor and gambling, however, commercial sex would ebb and flow with public opinion and the politicians in power. The problem would seem to have reached its apex during World War I when federal officials advised Bangor to remove from the city “disorderly and disreputable women, that class being regarded as dangerous to the young men who are depended upon to fight the country’s battles,” according to the Bangor Daily News on Aug. 5, 1918.
That event is for another column.
Wayne E. Reilly’s column on Bangor a century ago appears in the newspaper every other Monday. His latest book, Hidden History of Bangor: From Lumbering Days to the Progressive Era, is available where books are sold. Comments can be sent to him at wreilly.bdn@gmail.com