Brick pavement is the only enduring feature of this once-promiscuous alley of national ill repute. By the 1890s, Pleasant Alley and other smaller alleys were the dingy backyards where the less favored women of Butte’s sprawling red light district eked out a living. In halfhearted response to reform-conscious citizens, officials decreed in 1903 that prostitutes and their one-room “cribs” fronting Galena and Mercury streets were too visible. The city ordered these “public” women to don high-necked blouses, lengthen their skirts and lower their blinds in an attempt to curtail open solicitation. Instead they took to alleys like this one, pushing their less fortunate sisters into the district’s even darker recesses. In many cases, windows and doors were simply cut into the backs of the existing cribs. Prohibition and World War I closed the alleys in 1917. In the 1930s, illicit business activity resumed on a smaller scale along this street, renamed “Venus Alley,” until all cribs were closed by federal law in 1943.
]]>A visiting journalist wrote in the 1890s that this neighborhood was “like a street leading into hell,” and, in 1910, even the passionate bar-smasher Carry Nation failed to make an impression. Here in the sleepless heart of Butte’s red light district, prostitutes and gamblers conducted their illegal business. Fourteen prostitutes worked on this side of the block in 1900, many out of one-room rentals or “cribs” that lined the street. That year Annie Jones age 21 and divorcee Edna Hall age 36 entertained customers in the two frame-and-brick cribs that stood at this address. Remodeling later incorporated these cribs into the present building, and after 1917 progressive reforms and prohibition brought dramatic changes to Butte’s demimonde. Parlor house, brothels, and cribs were either torn down or, like the Butte Tin Shop, converted to respectable businesses.
]]>