Holladay Street, Renamed: Denver's Old Tenderloin

You are driving the row. From the eighteen seventies through nineteen thirteen, this stretch of street was Denver's open red light district, and at its peak as many as one thousand women worked these blocks. The street was called Holladay until June first, eighteen eighty nine, when the Holladay family, sick of seeing their grandfather's name attached to what the papers called the wickedest street in the city, leaned on the council to rename it.

The new name was Market. Ahead, toward the lower numbers, was the cheap end of the trade. Crib girls rented six by eight foot wooden rooms by the day at fifteen to twenty five dollars a week, called to men from the doorways in low cut spangled dresses or loose white Mother Hubbard gowns, charged twenty five cents up to two dollars per encounter, and turned twenty to forty men a night.

The papers called them soiled doves, fancy women, frail sisters, nymphs of the pavement, cyprians. They called venereal disease getting burned. They protected themselves between customers with douches of mercuric cyanide and carbolic acid, both of which would slowly kill them.

The Denver Republican wrote of one of them, a woman named Lizzie Preston, that by eighteen eighty one her looks and talents had gone, that she was living for years in the back alleys and along the river fronts, purchasing liquor when she could and eating out of the garbage bins of local restaurants. Farther up, toward the higher numbers, the nineteen hundreds and two thousands, the parlor houses stood. Three stories, twelve to twenty seven bedrooms, four parlors on the ground floor where men sat with the madams for conversation and drinks before any business was done.

Mattie Silks ran the most famous house, first at five oh one Holladay, then later at nineteen sixteen and nineteen twenty two Market. Jennie Rogers built the House of Mirrors at nineteen forty two. The Rocky Mountain News reported in the eighteen eighties that lawmakers would retire to Jennie Rogers' Palace of Joy on Market Street in the afternoons.

The district operated openly because the city profited from it. In January of eighteen eighty alone, Denver collected more than one thousand dollars in fines from these houses, more than any other source of municipal revenue that month. When the city issued an ordinance in the eighteen nineties requiring the working women to wear yellow ribbons on their arms in public, the madams dressed every woman head to toe in yellow and marched them in a column through the best hotels and restaurants until the ordinance was repealed.

The trade was outlawed entirely in nineteen thirteen. The cribs came down. The parlor houses became Buddhist temples, then warehouses, then bars and lofts.

You are driving past every one of them right now.