Kansas agitator. [volume] (Garnett, Kan.) 1890-1905, 1900-01-26
THE CHICAGO"L EVEE"
BLACK PLAGUE SPOT WHERE
CRIMINALS REIGN.
WretClied "Hypos" Who Herd Like Swine
in Abandoned Structures, and Beg
the Pittance That sustains Them-To
BE Purified.

ing sore has been fastened for more
than forty years. 1t has fed upon the
city and has waxed strong. For more
than generation 1t has been looked
upon with complacency and liberation
as thing. which must be, and now
the official surgeons of Chicago declare
they are about to cut it off, root it out
tSd destroy it, and leave the spot it
has so long infested strong, healthy
and fair to look upon. This canker,
which feeble efforts extended over
many years have failed to cure or to
restrain in its development, is the
''levee." 1t is that black plague spot,
more than mile long and more than
half a mile wide, which Chicago has
turned over to the outcast, the scarlet
woman and all the army of thieves
and satellites which come in her train.
Now it has been placed under the ban.
The demands of commerce are imper-
alive that the valuable ground occu-
pied by these dives and bagnios and
the motley crew of outcasts, male and
female, who have made the place
stencil in the nostrils of Chicago must
60 elsewhere.
The "levee" is almost as old as Chi
cago. Gray-haired men of today, who
quest of fortune in the days before the
civil war, found the plague spot in the
very heart of the ramshackle wooden
town, which was wiped out by the
great fire of II. 1t was not where 1t
is now, along Clark street and what
was once called Fourth avenue, but
over to the west, on what is now Fifth
avenue, but wGs then called Wells
street, south as well as north of the
bridge, they found the resort of vice,
misery and crime.
Then came the great fir?, which
swept the whole outfit away in night
In the ruins of some of those dens
many lost soul shrieked in vain for
mercy, reused from drunken slumber
by the. rushing flames. Many an out
cast was incinerated on that fateful
night on the ''levee" drunk and hope
less. But the devastation of the flames
carried away only the dens and broth
els. Wien the fiery breath had passed
away the denizens who were awake
that night and had fed in terror to
places of safety, crept back to the ruins
of their old haunts and again took pos
session of them. The old red curtains,
the old painted faces, the vice and
crime which are as old as the human
family, came back again.
Probably nowhere else in the world
are so many characters of divers kinds
gathered together as in the foul. ill
smelling, unclean district of the
"levee." There are hundreds of peo-
pie gathered there nightly in out of
the way lofts and dens who make their
living by their wits in other parts of
the city and flock there under cover of
darkness to revel in the cheap delights
of bad whisky, cocaine or morphine.
Beggars, confidence men, mepdicants,
thieves of every grade from the porch
climber to the pickpocket spend their
leisure hours sitting around the
"levee" saloons. When the police of
the Harrison street station want a
certain crook they go to the. "levee'
and get him. If he is not there to-
night, he is up to some crooked work
and will be there tomorrow night. But
they get him.. 81" =; &: -:
in two barns not. far from Harrison
street, dirty, abandoned old structures,
which the owners do not waste enough
thought on to destroy, live about forty
TYPOS They are the trembling |
wretches, male and female, who are
given over body and soul to the use OF
cocaine or morphine in hypodermic in
jections. They are so numerous in the
"levee". that they are regarded as a
class in themselves by the police, and
called "hypos. pc They live solely
for the pleasure of Shooting" the drug
into their emaciated bodies. They beg |