IF WALLS COULD TALK,

                COVER YOUR EARS!

(Source of images above: Florida State Archives; image below: Florida Collection, Main Public Library, Jacksonville)

CLICK HERE to visit this location today!

\
 

See how the foliage has grown by the time of the second picture.  You're looking at the Court, Jacksonville's classiest house of joy.  The time is about 1903, around two years after the city's Great Fire.  A building of glazed, dark red brick and smooth stone trim, the Court was accentuated by its well-trimmed grass plots, privet hedges, and umbrella tree.  The picture below is a comic postcard from about 1910.  The caption declares, "I'm willing to be loved in JACKSONVILLE, FLA."  On the back, the sender scrawled, "How do you like this for a display of nerve?"

A century ago, the River City's red-light district operated in La Villa.  It centered on Ward Street, which is now Houston Street.  The selection of brothels there was called "the line," a Southern term for an area of prostitution.  Some of Jax's bordellos offered white ladies, while others, African American.  The Court was situated at the southwest corner of Ward and Davis, two blocks from the train station, the future site of the Prime Osborn Convention Center.  In addition to brothels, the neighborhood provided bars, rooming houses, and small hotels that catered to transient visitors and railroad employees.  It also contained industrial and commercial enterprises. 

Not many bordellos could boast of a ballroom, but the Court could.  The pleasure palace also contained parlors, kitchens, a dining room, fourteen bedrooms, and an annex with eight additional bedrooms.  Cora occupied an apartment at the Court, and her ladies lived on the premises too.  A housekeeper helped to manage the day-to-day affairs. 

The Court represented a "sporting house," a refuge to which gentlemen could retire for dining, dancing, card playing, and socializing.  Of course, sex still served as the the principle draw.

Would you label La Villa's brothels as "female boarding houses"?  This is how a fire insurance map discreetly referred to them in 1903.  Cora did try to make the Court as homelike as possible for her good-time girls.  Her business averaged 13 ladies on duty, but the number often varied because of marriages or because the women would accompany their male friends on long trips.

After a while, Cora profited from the Court financially.  This came in spite of competition from an old adversary across the street, Lyda de Camp. (Earlier, Stephen had some sort of dealings with Lyda while he was getting to know Cora.  Lyda owned an autographed copy of Maggie: A Girl of the Streets that Stephen had dedicated to his "friend.")  Other nearby brothels included the "Senate," the "New York House," and an establishment maintained by Belle Orloff, who appears to have been a pistol.  When temperance champion Carry Nation preached in the city's dens of iniquity in 1908, she had a run in with Ms. Orloff.  As the Times-Union described the incident the next day, "'Russian Belle,' as she is familiarly known, was not in her resort when Mrs. Nation arrived, and it is fortunate for Mrs. Nation, for when she did arrive she proved a match for the famous saloon smasher.  A colloquy finally resulted, and Mrs. Nation left the resort, denouncing the keeper as a demoniac..."

Whether or not she was actually possessed, Belle does seem to have been atypical.  If its info can be trusted, the 1910 census lists her as a 26-year-old Russian native, yet it also indicates that her parents were born in Florida.  Given the state's small population during the nineteenth century and the relatively little foreign travel, you might wonder about the story behind the Orloffs.  Keeping up appearances, did Russian Belle tell the census taker a fib about her national origins?    

According to the 1910 census, Miss Orloff served as the keeper of a residence that contained seven white girls between the ages of 20 and 22.  Her establishment and the neighborhood's other bordellos were said to be rooming or boarding houses by federal censuses, city directories, and fire insurance maps, but every local adult knew better.  Belle's type of brothel, relatively open about its services, would not prove as widespread for much longer, though.  Prostitution started to take another form during Prohibition (1917-1933).  The number of bordellos decreased in many places across the country.  They were replaced by call girls, prostitutes hired by phone.  The world's oldest profession became more of an underground activity, no longer as blatantly advertised.  Services were provided in more clandestine places, like tenements, dance halls, massage parlors, "call houses," and even taxicabs.  Prostitution during Prohibition also grew closer in its ties with the mob and the liquor trade.  

The Court itself closed because of Cora's death in 1910.  The building later contained a cheap brothel named the White House Hotel, established in about 1911.  The landscaping was neglected, the outside facade was repainted white, and two additional doors were added so as to provide easier escape routes in case of police raids.  From 1917 onward, the structure stood vacant, a dilapidated den for thieves and vagrants.  The former bordello was finally torn down to make room for a warehouse in either 1928 or during the 1930s.  By the early Fifties, a parking lot covered the spot.  Also during this time, probably the last bawdyhouse in the former red-light district went out of business.  Everyone called it "Spanish Marie's," and the fleshpot had occupied a former church across from the Court site. 

After the wrecking ball did its work in 1979, there were no more former bordello buildings in the old Ward Street area.  The final three were demolished despite the efforts of historical preservationists.

  THANK YOU...  

       FOR VISITING THE JACKSONVILLE STORY,

        YOUR TIME MACHINE TO THE PAST