For more than a half century\u2014from the late-19th century to the mid-20th century\u2014 Peoria hummed to the tune of its bad reputation. Far from a blandly typical midwestern town, it evolved into arguably America’s most unchecked sin city, a place where the municipal government worked hand-in-glove with racketeers, madams, and other underground businessmen. However one judged this sin city \u2014 and reformers looked at it aghast and tried for decades to shut it down \u2014 there was widespread agreement on one thing. It was anything but dull.<\/p>\n
Sitting on the banks of the Illinois River, a convenient way-station between St. Louis and Chicago, Peoria played host to all sorts of travelers across the nineteenth century. Among\u00a0gamblers, frontier traders and itinerant laborers, it gained a reputation as a place where any and all desires could be satisfied, and even after it grew into a full-fledged city with its own industries and institutions, the reputation lingered.<\/p>\n
Outside observers were shocked by how openly the vice trade flourished in Peoria. City Hall took regular payments from those running gambling and other rackets, and, through the police department, collected license fees from all prostitutes, who were obliged to be checked for “social diseases” by certified doctors.<\/p>\n
Because it still carried a disreputable odor, the business of vice was open to all comers. Not surprisingly, at a time when none of Peoria’s larger employers hired blacks in anything other than menial roles, some black Peorians turned to the red light district as the best place to secure their livelihood.<\/p>\n
Black women in particular achieved unprecedented wealth and power as purveyors of sex in turn-of-the-century Peoria. Adeline Cole<\/a>\u00a0astonished locals by riding her team of black horses through the city streets and\u00a0left a fortune worth millions upon her death in 1898; \u201cDiamond Lil<\/a>”\u00a0was\u00a0famous for her diamond-studded teeth in the 1920s and 1930s. Both enjoyed relative freedom in a society that otherwise marginalized women of color.<\/p>\n When the United States ratified the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919, Peorians rightly worried that two of their major industries \u2014 distilling whisky and running taverns \u2014 would suffer dearly. However, the distilleries were re-purposed<\/a> to making industrial solvents and non-alcoholic food items, and the taverns continued to serve bootlegged liquor. Peoria kept alive its bad reputation.<\/p>\n Ten years later, the Great Depression crippled Peoria\u2019s industrial sector but left its brothels relatively untouched. Gangsters continued to run rackets and gambling was widespread. Vice was such an ongoing success that, as World War II approached, some citizens of Peoria once again started organizing against the keepers of brothels, <\/a>taverns and any sort of immoral activity.\u00a0The city reported \u00a0a divorce rate double<\/a>\u00a0the national average.<\/p>\n This was the city Marie Pryor reached in the mid 1930s after leaving Decatur, Illinois, with her husband and four teenage children.\u00a0The Pryors’ first establishment was on Eaton Street, not far from Diamond Lil\u2019s infamous \u201cOasis.\u201d Eventually they moved onto North Washington Street, where they joined an already booming mix of legitimate and illegal businesses stretched along several blocks on the edge of downtown.<\/p>\n The world of North Washington Street was a troubled and troubling one. Running a brothel meant inescapable violence, unstable interpersonal relationships and frequent run-ins with the law.<\/p>\n At the same time, the red light district of Peoria could allow for a close-knit sense of community. As in any typical Midwest neighborhood, stoops and porches provided social spaces for friends and family to gather<\/a>\u2014they just happened to be the stoops of brothels. The nightclubs and taverns that doubled as gambling houses and drug dens were also social spaces for Peorians to gather, drink, dance and hear the latest jazz<\/a>.\u00a0 They were the kind of places where a family friend who owned a club <\/a>could give a struggling up-and-coming comic like Richard Pryor a regular gig.<\/p>\n The half-legal nature of Peoria\u2019s \u201cillegitimate\u201d businesses also afforded connections to the more legitimate sides of Peoria. Families like the Pryors could run a brothel or two, but also a club like the Famous Door. Their neighbor Bris Collins was involved in prostitution, narcotics and counterfeiting, but was also a straight-up proprietor of clubs, a motel, and a barbecue joint.<\/p>\n In pre-reform days, these underground entrepreneurs had direct connections to the city\u2019s political structures through regular bribes and sympathetic patronage. Even after reforms swept out the most corrupt politicians, members of Peoria\u2019s underworld attempted to stay engaged with local politics. In a head-turning move, club owner Harold Parker<\/a>\u00a0ran for alderman in 1961 \u2014 as a Republican allied with the cause of reform.<\/p>\n By the mid-1950s, political reform was starting to take its toll on Sin City. Without explicit protection from politicians and corrupt police, it became increasingly difficult to run an illegal business.Many of the gangsters<\/a>, at least the living ones, had already been pushed out in the late-1940s.<\/p>\n In the 1950s and 1960s, raids on brothels and gambling establishments became a much more regular part of life. At first they seemed an expensive part of doing business, but eventually laws began to change: instead of hefty fines, madams faced serving serious jail time and having their business padlocked.<\/p>\n Criminal activity in Peoria was also less of local issue after World War II, as federal investigations took down both drug<\/a> and prostitution<\/a> rings run out of the city.\u00a0Ultimately, the heyday of Peoria\u2019s wide-open days came to a symbolic end when several blocks of North Washington were condemned as blighted and demolished to make way for a new\u00a0bridge<\/a>\u00a0connecting Peoria to East Peoria.<\/p>\n Sin did not disappear from Peoria just because it was no longer the city\u2019s calling card.\u00a0As longtime Mayor Ed Woodruff was fond of saying, \u201cYou can make prostitution illegal but you can\u2019t make it unpopular.\u201d Prostitutes were no longer licensed or regularly checked up on by doctors, but they continued to turn tricks by walking the streets. And as prostitution moved further from the public\u2019s eyes, conditions worsened:\u00a0stories of serious abuse and drug addictions became commonplace<\/a>.<\/p>\n Gone were the days of Adaline Cole\u2019s lavish lifestyle and vast fortunes. Arrived were the days of the late 1960s when women like Ann Pryor, Richard\u2019s stepmother and the woman who put food on the family table, was still soliciting sex even though she was awaiting sentencing<\/a> for a previous arrest and dying of mouth cancer. Over the next several decades, more of the old brothels would be demolished and taverns closed to make way for new corporate offices and training centers. But women continued to walk the streets and men like Bris Collins<\/a>\u00a0still owned motels, on the outskirts of town, where fantasies were for sale.<\/p>\n Today, in the popular imagination, Peoria is rarely remembered as Sin City. The old vaudeville line of \u201cWill it play in Peoria?\u201d has been taken up by politicians and marketing researchers who use Peoria as a stand-in for middle American ordinariness.<\/p>\nPeoria Roars between the Wars (1919\u20131941)<\/h3>\n
Strange Bedfellows (1942\u20131952)<\/h3>\n
The Sun Sets on Sin City (1953\u20131980)<\/h3>\n
Did it Play In Peoria?<\/h3>\n