1910 City Councilman Hiram Gill, an open-town advocate with financial ties in the Tenderloin, runs for mayor. The Seattle Star denounces him as a would be “red light mayor” who will unleash “a carnival of vice and crime.” Gill is elected anyway, and vice and corruption thrive.
1911 Mayor Gill and Police Chief Charles “Wappy” Wappenstein are caught conspiring in the construction of a 500-room brothel—supposedly the largest in the world—in two sprawling buildings on city property on Beacon Hill’s west slope. Wappy goes to prison and Gill loses a recall vote, triggering an exodus from the Tenderloin.
1914 Hi Gill switches sides and is elected mayor as a law-and-order candidate. He cracks down on vice operations but keeps his hand in the till,
Late 1920s Nellie Curtis, another madam of legendary business acumen, launches her first brothel in the Camp Hotel on First Avenue. She runs a string of houses and amasses a small fortune.
1942 Nellie Curtis takes over the LaSalle Hotel at the southwest corner of the Pike Place Market when its Japanese proprietors are uprooted by wartime internment. She makes it the city’s leading brothel, bathed in a telltale red glow from the “Public Market Center” sign on Pike. Stairs down to Western Avenue for sailors streaming up from the harbor. Many brace themselves with a drink at the adjacent Lotus Inn. Curtis somehow escapes a military-instigated brothel shutdown and operates the LaSalle until 1951.
1950s To discourage dozens of would-be customers who still show up each day, the LaSalle Hotel’s new owners hang a sign outside the door reading “No Girls.” The Lotus Inn is renamed Place Pigalle, after Paris’s red-light district. Place Pigalle (aka “Pig Alley”) continues as a seedy tavern with an Edith Piaf soundtrack until 1982, when it becomes an upscale restaurant.
1951 An errant B-50 bomber taking off from Boeing Field demolishes the Lester Apartments on Beacon Hill—formerly world’s largest brothel.
1973 Cinderella Liberty, starring Marsha Mason as a whore with a heart of what might be fool’s gold and James Caan as her sailor swain, shows the world a sad, seamy, sexy Seattle a mile and a universe away from the gleaming world’s fair grounds. And it records a now largely vanished First Avenue of dive bars, pool halls, and peep shows.
June 1974 The Association of Seattle Prostitutes, a chapter of the national union COYOTE, is inaugurated. Its motto: “At the Breast of the Queen City.”
June 14, 1974 The Association of Seattle Prostitutes pickets the Roosevelt Hotel for “giving free rooms to the vice squad for entrapment purposes while raking in dollars from business generated by working women.”
Feb 20, 1975 The American Civil Liberties Union of Washington and the Association of Seattle Prostitutes sue to overturn Seattle’s anti-prostitution law on grounds it violates First Amendment rights and discriminates against women.
March 1975 Using unpaid volunteers posing as prostitutes, the Seattle Police Department arrests a Spokane school principal, a 15-year-old boy, and 21 other alleged patrons. A police spokesman calls the volunteers “typical working girls.”
May 1975 SPD begins deploying female officers as prostitution decoys and says it will phase out the use of volunteers.
July 29, 1975 King County Superior Court Judge Donald Horowitz overturns the 1974 prostitution convictions of two Seattle women on discrimination grounds, because police failed to arrest male customers as well. Police have since begun snaring using volunteer female decoys to snare customers.
August 1977 Police and outreach workers report an unprecedented number of young male street prostitutes in Seattle. Police make their first arrest for pimping underage boys.
Published: February 2010
Do the Seattle Underground Tour and you’ll learn all about prostitution and how it helped build Seattle.