Latest / Cleaning Business Life / EP. 232 | Buried Behind Whiskey Row: Prescott’s Lost Chinatown and Double-Decker Brothel

Transcript

EP. 232 | Buried Behind Whiskey Row: Prescott’s Lost Chinatown and Double-Decker Brothel · Cleaning Business Life

1:08
SPEAKER_00: If you keep telling yourself you'll finally get serious about your cleaning business when things calm down, I need you to hear me.
1:17
SPEAKER_00: Things are not going to magically calm down.
1:21
SPEAKER_00: Unless you do something.
1:23
SPEAKER_00: The clients will keep calling, employees will keep needing answers, fires will keep popping up.
1:29
SPEAKER_00: And if your business doesn't have the structure, every new opportunity will feel like one more thing that you have to carry.
1:39
SPEAKER_00: That is exactly what the Structure Scale and Profit Cleaning Business Academy is designed to change.
1:45
SPEAKER_00: Over 400 businesses have gone through the program.
1:48
SPEAKER_00: This scholarship isn't for the person with the saddest story or the most perfect application.
1:54
SPEAKER_00: It's for the cleaning business owner who is ready to stop winging it, start implementing, and build a company that can actually support the life that you want.
2:04
SPEAKER_00: You do not need to have everything figured out before you apply.
2:08
SPEAKER_00: That's the whole damn point.
2:12
SPEAKER_00: The scholarship application is officially open on my website, Clean Freaks University.
2:18
SPEAKER_00: Applications close on Veterans Day, November 11th, and the recipient will be announced on Black Friday.
2:26
SPEAKER_00: Stop deciding for me that you won't be chosen.
2:31
SPEAKER_00: Fill out the application.
2:34
SPEAKER_00: Tell me where you are, where you want to go, and why you're ready to do the work.
2:42
SPEAKER_00: Talk to you soon.
2:47
SPEAKER_00: Welcome back everyone.
2:48
SPEAKER_00: This is Shannon Miller with Cunning Business Life, and this year we're gonna do something a little different for Halloween.
2:54
SPEAKER_00: I went on a haunted ghost story with my littles last month, and I did a bunch of research.
3:00
SPEAKER_00: I have three fabulous stories to tell you about the local history of my town.
3:07
SPEAKER_00: So Prescott's Red Light District and Double Decker Brothel had a lot of history.
3:12
SPEAKER_00: When people think about historic Prescott downtown, they usually picture just Whiskey Row.
3:18
SPEAKER_00: They picture cowboys, saloons, gunfights, the courthouse plaza, but behind Whiskey Row, almost deliberately tucked out of sight, was another part of Prescott entirely.
3:31
SPEAKER_00: All along South Granite Street, between Gurley and Goodwin Streets, stood Prescott's red light district.
3:36
SPEAKER_00: The respectable residents of Prescott apparently didn't like to say its name.
3:42
SPEAKER_00: According to longtime resident Gail Gardner, adults referred to it simply as the restricted zone.
3:49
SPEAKER_00: Children were forbidden to go near it, which naturally made Garner and his friends want to ride their ponies through it whenever they could.
3:56
SPEAKER_00: By 1895, a local newspaper reported that more than 100 women working in Prescott's Red Light District, some of them worked from tiny wooden structures called cribs.
4:07
SPEAKER_00: These were barely large enough to hold one woman and a bed.
4:10
SPEAKER_00: Rows of them stretched along Granite and Goodwin streets.
4:13
SPEAKER_00: Other women worked inside larger parlor houses.
4:16
SPEAKER_00: Seating in the middle of the district was a building that became one of its most recognizable landmarks.
4:22
SPEAKER_00: Prescott's only known two-story brothel, fondly called the Double Decker.
4:29
SPEAKER_00: The property had once belonged to Hesbach brother Brooks, Yappawise County's first probate judge and his wife, and the two-story brothel, not only yet to be constructed, they owned it, but the connection is still interesting.
4:42
SPEAKER_00: Even this early, the land beneath Prescott's supposedly scandalous district passed through the hands of some very respectable and powerful people.
4:51
SPEAKER_00: The woman credited with establishing the double decker was Mary Annie Hamilton.
4:57
SPEAKER_00: In the 1880 census, Annie described herself as a housekeeper, ironically.
5:02
SPEAKER_00: There's the tie-in.
5:03
SPEAKER_00: Now, of course, that immediately caught my attention.
5:05
SPEAKER_00: Cleaning is forever a thing.
5:06
SPEAKER_00: Apparently, even if you were running the only two-story brothel in Prescott, you still called yourself a housekeeper.
5:13
SPEAKER_00: Something to think about, ladies and gentlemen.
5:15
SPEAKER_00: Although in Annie's case, I suspect housekeeper involved slightly more than keeping the house.
5:20
SPEAKER_00: The occupations of the six other women living with her were recorded with much more direct prostitutes.
5:26
SPEAKER_00: There is another detail that changes the way we picture life inside this building.
5:30
SPEAKER_00: The census also reportedly recorded two children living there, an eight-year-old boy and a two-year-old girl.
5:36
SPEAKER_00: This wasn't merely a workplace visited by nameless cowboys before disappearing into history.
5:41
SPEAKER_00: For some of the people inside of it, this was actually called home.
5:46
SPEAKER_00: In 1889, the property was purchased by Morris Goldwater, a successful businessman, future mayor of Prescott, and member of the prominent Goldwater family.
5:56
SPEAKER_00: That tells us something important about the way prostitution was treated in territorial Prescott.
6:04
SPEAKER_00: The women themselves were pushed into a restricted district and kept away from respectable society.
6:11
SPEAKER_00: But powerful and respectable members of that same society could still own the property, profit from the businesses, or benefit from the money moving through it.
6:20
SPEAKER_00: Something to also think about.
6:21
SPEAKER_00: The double decker appears to have been one of the more expensive high-class establishments in the district.
6:28
SPEAKER_00: How do we know that?
6:30
SPEAKER_00: From the things they threw into the toilet.
6:34
SPEAKER_00: Another tie-in for housekeeping.
6:35
SPEAKER_00: Before Prescott had regular trash collection, people frequently disposed of unwanted items in well, cellars, trash pits, and privies.
6:44
SPEAKER_00: When one pit became full, it got covered with dirt and ashes and replaced by another.
6:48
SPEAKER_00: More than a century later, those forgotten dumping places became archaeological time capsules.
6:55
SPEAKER_00: Behind the double decker, archaeologists uncovered what they called feature number 32, the brothel's trash-filled privy.
7:05
SPEAKER_00: Inside of it, they found worn-out hairbrushes, toothbrushes, combs, bottles of perfume, cologne products for dental hygiene, and several bottles of bachelor's liquid hair dye.
7:17
SPEAKER_00: Ooh la la.
7:18
SPEAKER_00: The women inside the double decker wanted to look good, smell good, and present themselves well, but the artifacts also suggest that they could afford products that would have been considered luxuries in territorial prescott.
7:30
SPEAKER_00: Archaeologists found English china and porcelain and a sapach covered dish, a decorated chamber pot with a broken handle, and an expensive Majocola pitcher.
7:42
SPEAKER_00: Majocola was a fashionable form of Victorian pottery, you've seen it all over, known for its molded, raised designs, rich and brightly colored glaze, a pitcher that could be used for water, milk, wine, but this wasn't the kind of plain inexpensive vessel you might expect to find inside of a frontier shack.
7:58
SPEAKER_00: It was imported, decorative, and relatively costly.
8:02
SPEAKER_00: The archaeologists concluded that pieces like the pitcher demonstrated both the ability to purchase expensive objects and the appreciation for the finer things in life.
8:12
SPEAKER_00: And I find that interesting because archaeology doesn't merely tell us these women existed.
8:18
SPEAKER_00: Something as simple as a beautiful picture tells us a little bit how they decorated their home, what they valued, and perhaps how they even wanted the people walking through the doors to see them.
8:27
SPEAKER_00: The archaeologists also recovered an elaborately decorative fragment from a porcelain doll's head.
8:34
SPEAKER_00: Remember, the census reportedly recorded a two-year-old girl living inside the brothel.
8:40
SPEAKER_00: We cannot know whether that doll belonged to her, but it's difficult not to wonder.
8:44
SPEAKER_00: Suddenly, the double decker isn't just a distant story about a prostitution in the Old West.
8:51
SPEAKER_00: You can begin the picture in real women brushing and coloring their hair, displaying beautiful dishes, pouring water from a brightly gazed pitcher, and possibly raising children inside that same building where they worked.
9:03
SPEAKER_00: Another artifact found in the privy was a well-preserved hat believed to have belonged to a gentleman.
9:09
SPEAKER_00: How exactly how one of the double deckers' customers lost its hat in the privy is one mystery archaeology will never truly solve.
9:18
SPEAKER_00: Among the discarded bottles were also several called so-called medicines, wild alcohol, I'm sure.
9:24
SPEAKER_00: Those bottles were Hamlin's Wizard Oil, a curol containing approximately 55% alcohol, camphor oil, and of course ammonia.
9:32
SPEAKER_00: It was advertised as a treatment for everything from rheumatism, sprains to frostbite, and yes, diarrhea.
9:39
SPEAKER_00: They I'm sure it gave you diarrhea.
9:42
SPEAKER_00: They also recovered Pinkett's vegetable compound, which was marketed for menstrual discomfort and other supposable female weaknesses.
9:49
SPEAKER_00: Despite its respectable medicinal advertising, it also contained a considerable amount of alcohol.
9:55
SPEAKER_00: The trash from this brothel tells us more about the women's daily lives than the newspapers of the time ever bothered to record.
10:02
SPEAKER_00: Then on July 14, 1900, the Great Fire swept through downtown Prescott.
10:07
SPEAKER_00: The entire block bordered by Montezuma, Gurley, Granite, and Goodwin streets was consumed.
10:13
SPEAKER_00: It was a pretty big fire.
10:14
SPEAKER_00: The double decker burned to the ground along with most of the red light districts and businesses surrounding it.
10:20
SPEAKER_00: Risky Row was quickly rebuilt on brick and stone.
10:23
SPEAKER_00: South Granite Street was not.
10:25
SPEAKER_00: A block that had contained nearly 18 buildings in 1895 remained largely undeveloped for decades.
10:32
SPEAKER_00: Much of the land was used as a parking lot.
10:35
SPEAKER_00: The women disappeared, their homes disappeared, their businesses disappeared.
10:40
SPEAKER_00: Even the name restricted zone slowly disappeared from the everyday memory.
10:46
SPEAKER_00: But their belongings were still there, sealed beneath the dirt, ashes, cellars, wells, and privies left behind by the fire.
10:53
SPEAKER_00: More than a hundred years later, the city of Prescott decided to construct the Granite Street parking garage.
10:59
SPEAKER_00: Before construction could begin, archaeologists were brought in to investigate what remained beneath the property.
11:06
SPEAKER_00: What they uncovered didn't just reveal the story of the double decker brothel.
11:11
SPEAKER_00: It opened a window into the lives of two communities that had existed side by side behind Whiskey Row and had both been pushed by the margins of Prescott society.
11:23
SPEAKER_00: The women of the Red Light District and what it is where this story gets even more interesting.
11:38
SPEAKER_00: Sorry about that.
11:39
SPEAKER_00: But the women of the Double Decker were not the only people living along the edges of the respectable Prescott society.
11:46
SPEAKER_00: The same block behind Whiskey Row is also home to Prescott's Chinese community.
11:52
SPEAKER_00: The first Chinese residents arrived in Prescott during the late 1860s.
11:57
SPEAKER_00: Some have may some have may been among the thousands of Chinese laborers left searching for work after the Transcontinental Railroad was completed in 1869.
12:07
SPEAKER_00: They came to Prescott and found work was work wherever it was available.
12:11
SPEAKER_00: Chinese residents worked as miners, cooks, domestic servants, laundrymen, merchants, restaurant owners, gardeners, produce farmers, and according to historical records, at least one worked as a faro dealer.
12:24
SPEAKER_00: Ooh la la.
12:25
SPEAKER_00: They became part of Prescott's economy almost immediately, but they were never completely accepted as part of Prescott's society.
12:33
SPEAKER_00: The local newspapers frequently wrote about Chinese residents with open contempt.
12:39
SPEAKER_00: When three or more Chinese men arrived in town on November 1869, the Arizona Miner announced that Prescott now had four, four declared residents who were quite enough.
12:50
SPEAKER_00: So four Chinese residents.
12:52
SPEAKER_00: In a small sentence, it tells us exactly what these men were walking into.
12:55
SPEAKER_00: Prescott wanted their labor, it wanted their vegetables, their cooking, their restaurants, their domestic work, and especially their laundry services.
13:06
SPEAKER_00: It just didn't necessarily want them.
13:08
SPEAKER_00: And once again, cleaning becomes part of the story.
13:11
SPEAKER_00: In 1871, a Chinese entrepreneur named George A Fatt and his partners placed what that may have been the first advertisement for a Chinese-owned business in Prescott.
13:22
SPEAKER_00: It was for a new laundry on Granite Street.
13:25
SPEAKER_00: I believe it's still there.
13:26
SPEAKER_00: The advertisement promised that George A Fatt and company would wash every class of fabric.
13:32
SPEAKER_00: In a frontier town filled with minor soldiers, cowboys, saloons, restaurants, hotels, brothels, and laundry wasn't a small or insignificant service.
13:42
SPEAKER_00: Clothing, bedding, table linens, towels, and uniforms still had to be washed without modern plubbing.
13:48
SPEAKER_00: Washing machines or dryers that worked were physically brutal.
13:53
SPEAKER_00: Chinese laundrymen filled the need the rest of Prescott would not function without.
13:57
SPEAKER_00: But just as the women of the red light district were reduced to stereotypes like soil doves, Prescott's Chinese residents were often treated as characters in someone else's version of the Old West rather than its real people.
14:11
SPEAKER_00: They were mocked in newspapers, excluded socially, targeted politically, and in 1886 an anti-Chinese league was formed in Prescott.
14:21
SPEAKER_00: That's amazing.
14:22
SPEAKER_00: Then came the Federal Chinese Exclusion Act and the Geary Act laws created specifically to restrict Chinese and immigration immigrant immigration and control movements of Chinese residents already living in the United States.
14:34
SPEAKER_00: Even people who had had established businesses and relationships in Prescott could be detained, questioned, or deported while trying to return from a trip to China.
14:46
SPEAKER_00: And yet, despite all of this, Prescott's Chinese community continued to build lives here.
14:52
SPEAKER_00: Along Granite Street were laundries, restaurants, stores, residents, a Joss house, a place that served as the community's religious, political, and social center.
15:02
SPEAKER_00: This Joss House stood near Granite Creek, across from South Granite Street, from a Chinese-operated saloon and dancehall.
15:11
SPEAKER_00: Newspapers dismissively called it the Mongolian headquarters.
15:15
SPEAKER_00: But for Prescott's Chinese residents, it was a place to worship, gather, share news, settle community matters, and maintain traditions thousands of miles from home.
15:25
SPEAKER_00: Then in 1891, Granite Creek overflowed its banks and flooded Chinatown.
15:30
SPEAKER_00: And nine years later, on July 14, 1900, the Great Fire reached the district.
15:35
SPEAKER_00: Whiskey Row, the Red Light District, restaurants, hotels, saloons, stores, and other businesses burned.
15:41
SPEAKER_00: But the Joss House survived.
15:44
SPEAKER_00: According to the historical account, members of the Chinese community stood on the bank of the Granite Creek and fought the flying embers with wet blankets and brooms, ironically.
15:54
SPEAKER_00: If you want to picture that for a moment, downtown Prescott is burning.
16:01
SPEAKER_00: Excuse me, buildings are collapsing, embers are flying through the air, people are trying to save whatever they can.
16:06
SPEAKER_00: And beside Granite Creek, members of a community that Prescott had openly mocked and excluded are fighting to save their place of worship with wet blankets and brooms.
16:17
SPEAKER_00: There it is again.
16:19
SPEAKER_00: The broom.
16:20
SPEAKER_00: The simplest cleaning tool imaginable becomes part of the story of how community tried to preserve its history.
16:27
SPEAKER_00: The Joss House survived the fire, but the Chinese community's struggle did not end there.
16:34
SPEAKER_00: The loss of the surrounding saloons, restaurants, hotels, and other businesses also meant the loss of jobs.
16:40
SPEAKER_00: When gambling was outlawed in the Arizona Territory in 1907, more employment disappeared.
16:46
SPEAKER_00: When Prohibition closed the saloons and their restaurants in 1914, many Chinese cooks lost their work.
16:53
SPEAKER_00: Prescott's Chinese population had reached its peak around 1900 with a census counting of 229 people, four women and five children.
17:03
SPEAKER_00: After that, the community steadily diminished.
17:06
SPEAKER_00: By the time the Great Depression arrived, only a handful of Chinese-owned laundries, restaurants, and grocery stores remained.
17:14
SPEAKER_00: Eventually, buildings paved the streets and the parking lots covered much of what had once been Prescott's Chinatown.
17:21
SPEAKER_00: Even the dead were displaced.
17:23
SPEAKER_00: Chinese residents had been buried together in a section of the citizens' cemetery, still there, when Sheldon Street was widening during the 1950s and those graves were moved because the burial ground had never been properly surveyed.
17:36
SPEAKER_00: No one could be certain how many people had actually been buried there or whether all of them were relocated.
17:45
SPEAKER_00: Some may still lie beneath the part of the Annelo Hills golf course.
17:49
SPEAKER_00: So when we talk about Prescott's lost Chinatown, we simply mean that the buildings disappeared.
17:56
SPEAKER_00: The businesses disappeared, the community scattered, the graves were disturbed, and most of the people who lived there left behind very little written in their own words.
18:08
SPEAKER_00: Much of what we know about them comes from newspapers that ridiculed them, government records that monitored them, and objects eventually recovered from underneath the ground.
18:19
SPEAKER_00: That is why archaeological excavation along Granite Street became so important.
18:25
SPEAKER_00: Because underneath what most people knew only as an ordinary downtown parking lot, Prescott's forgotten Chinatown was still there.
18:32
SPEAKER_00: Not as a ghost story, not yet.
18:35
SPEAKER_00: But as dishes, bottles, bones, gambling pieces, pieces of opium pipes, burned foundations, abandoned cellars, and the physical remains of people whose town depended on them, but whose stories it almost allowed to disappear.