Two-Bit Street
Near Ogden, Utah
Twenty-Fifth Street runs east from Union Station, and for most of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century it was the most reliably disreputable block in Utah. The railroad brought everything through Ogden, and some of what it brought stayed. By the eighteen eighties, the street the locals called Two-Bit Street, where a quarter was the going rate for the cheapest transactions, had become a working district of saloons, gambling parlors, cheap hotels, and commercial prostitution operating at a density that drew visitors and occasionally appalled them in print.
The dominant figure organizing the commercial sex trade was a woman named Belle London, born Dora Hughes in eighteen sixty-six. She arrived in Ogden around eighteen eighty-nine and over the next few years established what became known as Electric Alley, a complex of more than thirty small rooms, or cribs, built into the space behind the storefronts on the north side of Twenty-Fifth Street, accessible through a hidden walkway between Twenty-Fourth and Twenty-Fifth. Her parlor house, number ten, anchored the western end of the alley. Out front, facing the street, she ran the London Ice Cream Parlor. Belle London married Thomas Topham, a Union Pacific boilermaker, in eighteen ninety, and together they gained substantial influence in Ogden's political and business circles, enough that the operation continued for decades with minimal official interference.
The railroad years gave Two-Bit Street its clientele: transient workers, travelers changing trains, soldiers passing through. During Prohibition, beginning in nineteen twenty, bootlegging operations moved in alongside the existing commerce. A frequently repeated story holds that tunnels ran from Union Station to the Ben Lomond Hotel a block north, used to move liquor from the railcars.
In nineteen fifty-four, Mayor Lorin Farr led a citywide crime-reduction effort that effectively ended the organized vice district. The buildings on the block have been rehabilitated over the decades since. The street is now Historic Twenty-Fifth Street, a recognized commercial and cultural district. The alley behind the north side of the block is still there.
