Belle - Lesley Pearse [85]
Alderman Sidney Story came up with a plan to take the area of thirty-eight blocks on the far side of the railway track, behind the French Quarter, and make prostitution legal there. This would mean that all the city’s ills were housed in one place, making it easier for it to be policed. Ordinary law-abiding people were happy to vote for a bill that would mean an end to whores and rowdy, drunken sailors around their homes. Gambling and opium dens would be out of sight, and they would no longer have to fear the violence of vice-related crime.
Sidney Story sponsored the bill and got it passed, and so the area was given the name of ‘Storyville’. But most people just called it the District.
Belle had been somewhat amused as Etienne explained how it had been before the bill was passed. It sounded so much like Seven Dials! She told him about that and said that although she’d been surrounded by all kinds of criminal activity and vice, she hadn’t really been aware of it, nor touched by it, not until Millie was murdered.
‘It amuses me that the very people who complain about the vice are mostly the ones who benefit most from it,’ Etienne said with a wry smile. ‘Shops, hotels, saloons, laundries, cab drivers, dressmakers and milliners couldn’t survive without all the visitors the District brings to New Orleans. Even the local council, the hospitals and schools benefit from the taxes that come from it. But everyone likes their dirty income to be hidden.’
Belle got out of her bed to go over to the window and see this place the good people of New Orleans wanted hidden away.
Her room was on the fourth floor, just a small, sparsely furnished room intended for a maid, very different from the opulent rooms the girls had downstairs. The window looked out on to the railway tracks which separated Basin Street from the French Quarter. As she understood it, Basin Street was the first in the District, and the one with the most prestigious sporting houses, the most beautiful girls, the best food, drink and entertainment. The establishments in the streets running behind Basin Street, be it saloons, restaurants or sporting houses, became cheaper and rougher as they got to the end of the District. By the last block and Robertson Street, the bars were hovels and the working girls down there turned tricks for just a few cents. Some couldn’t even afford to rent one of the cheap cribs.
Betty had told her about the cribs. They were a series of tiny rooms with no space for anything more than a bed. Men stood in line outside, and as one came out the next went in. Betty said they could service as many as fifty men a night. But these girls were controlled by pimps, who took most of what they earned and were often beaten if they didn’t earn as much as their pimp wanted. For these girls there were no such luxuries as a bath or indoor lavatory. Their lives were unspeakably hard, and most took refuge in drink or opium. Betty said that the men who used them were the very roughest kind, and the girls had no hope of anything improving for them, and most saw death as a happy release.
To Belle’s disappointment she couldn’t see anything more than the railway tracks opposite, even when she craned her neck out of her small window. For now she would have to be satisfied with what she’d seen fleetingly as she arrived on the previous day – big, solidly built houses, not a single one dilapidated the way they’d been around Seven Dials. She’d been told by Hatty that they mostly had electric lighting in every room, and steam heat.
Even though it was only April, the sun was warm on Belle’s bare arms and face, just like a summer’s day back home. She thought of how grey, cold and windy it was in Seven Dials at this time of year, and she surprised herself by being more glad than sad that she was here.
She wished she could go out now, walk around and see the District for herself. But she had a feeling Martha might not approve