Downtown Los Angeles at the turn of...

Downtown Los Angeles at the turn of the century offered much the same array of government services you find today--assessor, coroner, courts and the like.

But there was something extra then that even some government employees considered practically official: Pearl Morton’s bordello.

In the hub of political power--indeed, in a building that had served as the courthouse--sat Los Angeles’ most famous brothel.

Morton operated her sporting establishment in the Murrieta Building at Spring and Temple streets, where the Hall of Justice now stands.

She ran it with the full knowledge and even the patronage of the law: Her landlord was Deputy Sheriff Juan Murrieta (for whom Murrieta Hot Springs in Riverside County is named). Her operations proceeded within sight of the Los Angeles police station and the old County Courthouse, a red sandstone building across the street.

Contrary to the reputed workings of Heidi Fleiss, the alleged “madam to the stars,” men--including men in city and county uniform--never had to call ahead for a date; they just dropped in.

Their “hostess” was L.A.’s bawdiest madam. She was so fondly remembered that 40 years after her heyday, when the movie “Gone With the Wind” was released, those who had known Morton said Ona Munson, who played Belle Watling, the madam of the movie’s house of ill repute, was made up to look exactly like her, down to her dyed red hair.

Morton ran the most lavish, the most lucrative and perhaps the most genteel prostitution business in Los Angeles. Her charity for all and her malice toward none made her L.A.’s most loved and respected madam--at least by men.

She was a soft touch for local charities and anyone with a sad story.

However she dressed in her ostentatious quarters, when Morton went out in public, she always dressed respectably. What may have given her away was her rose-water perfume, which many thought was an aphrodisiac used only by fast women or fancy ladies.

Her parlor featured overstuffed chairs, massive chandeliers, full-length mirrors in magnificently carved, gilt-edged frames, thick red carpets, huge oil paintings of naked fat ladies and two Steinway pianos.

Former customers particularly remembered one of Pearl’s girls, Dolly, who played the piano and made clients laugh. She also went to church on Sundays, much to the congregation’s surprise. Dolly was fond of remarking that men love to laugh and that was something wives rarely did.

“Diamond-Tooth Charlie,” Dr. Charles William Bryson, dropped by weekly in his carriage pulled by two white horses to check Pearl’s girls for occupational hazards.

Morton’s clientele included railroad executives, lawyers, mayors and senators. They came from Sacramento, Washington and New York. U.S. Sen. Stephen White became a frequent visitor, and Earl Rogers, a famous attorney, stayed for weeks at a time during drinking binges and always sent Morton gifts of books at Christmastime.

In an early but effective form of direct advertising, Pearl and her strumpets would get all gussied up in their finest, with plumed hats, to take the air in an open carriage. Up behind the women sat a little old Irishman in a green coat, blowing a trumpet to announce their obvious arrival.

When Morton wasn’t in such a flamboyant mood, she gave the trumpeter the day off and rode about with her white bulldog.

People clustered on the street to watch when Morton and one of her competitors, Cora Phillips, the owner of the Golden Lion on Alameda Street, drove in their hacks to Agricultural Park--later Exposition Park and the site of the Coliseum--to bet on the novelty entertainment of the day, auto races.

Afterward, all the girls would climb into their carriages and race one another back Downtown, whooping and yelling and good-naturedly calling one another names. And men in their buggies would race right along with them.

In 1909, when the horse and buggy began to give way to the Model T, Mayor Arthur C. Harper resigned from office amid charges that he was taking payoffs from gambling casinos and was often found inebriated in Morton’s brothel. But Harper claimed that he was only on a fact-finding mission.

That same year, a reform administration called the “Crusade Against Vice” eliminated brothels--even the upscale ones--for the first time in Los Angeles history.

“Parlor houses and cribs were padlocked. . . . The girls were scattered throughout the rooming houses of Los Angeles. Poker games were silent. A haze of holiness heavy as a Pittsburgh pall settled upon the disgruntled pioneers.”

Those were the sarcastic words of Alfred Cohn and Joe Chisholm, who wrote “L.A.--The Chemically Pure,” in 1913. They blamed the blotting-out of public sin on the invasion of “Midwest Puritans into the land of the Padres and the Dons.”

Morton skipped town and headed north for the more welcoming climate of San Francisco’s Barbary Coast. She soon became known as the “Queen of the Underworld” at the Uptown Tenderloin establishment on Mason Street, at least until 1917, when the Red Light Abatement Act destroyed all the parlors, including hers.