Evidence of Seamy Past Is Dug Up in Downtown L.A.

Archeologist Mike Stoyka was excavating an old outhouse in downtown Los Angeles near Union Station. A century-old map said there once was a brothel at the site, but Stoyka wasn’t so sure.

“Slowly, I started to find medicine bottles, salve bottles,” he said. Digging deeper, he found perfume flasks and, strangely enough, fine china and the remains of oysters and other shellfish. Then came the clincher, an aquamarine bottle dating to the 1890s, labeled “Darby’s Prophylactic Fluid.”

The turn-of-the-century site, uncovered this month during construction of the new Metropolitan Water District headquarters next to Union Station, is the largest “red light” district ever excavated in California, said Dr. Julia Costello, one of two archeologists directing the dig.

Several hundred prostitutes worked at the site starting in the mid-1880s, when the new Southern Pacific rail connection brought waves of immigrants to Los Angeles. Using historical documents and an 1888 insurance company map--which labeled the site “Female Boarding”--the archeologists are slowly assembling a portrait of life in a seamy corner of the burgeoning city.

“They were going gangbusters, it was a growth industry for L.A.,” Costello said. The city’s population grew from 11,000 to 102,000 between 1880 and 1900. Los Angeles was just beginning to shake its frontier status and still attracted more than its share of ruffians, gamblers and hard drinkers.

Rows of squat brick buildings made up the red light district, just a few blocks southeast of Olvera Street and the central Plaza. Before the railroad boom, the land was on the outskirts of the city. Vineyards grew nearby on land that is now the carpool lane to the San Bernardino Freeway.

Working with shovels, trowels and brushes, a team of 17 archeologists has uncovered the brick foundations of the brothels at two locations on the four-acre site.

Most of the prostitutes worked in narrow rooms that the archeologists call “cribs.”

“These are not people who are heavily represented in the historical record,” said Dr. Adrian Praetzellis, a Sonoma State University professor co-directing the dig with Costello. “To find out how these people’s lives were, we have to dig.”

A thin layer of blackened soil marks the location of Schaefer Street, a narrow lane that long ago disappeared from city maps. Oil was poured on the ground to keep dust from blowing into the dozens of rooms lining the street. Prostitutes stood on the boardwalks and in the doorways.

Most of the objects recovered from the site have been found in the remains of a dozen outhouses. The old latrines are repositories of artifacts. Bottles of champagne have been retrieved from the privies, along with spittoons, jars of face cream, steak bones and the best English china then available.

“They were eating very well,” archeologist Stoyka observed. “And they were eating on very nice plates.”

Thirty inches deep in the soil filling one outhouse on Aliso Street, archeologist Arturo Ruelas recovered the head of a porcelain doll, a valuable find that he should be able to date precisely by comparing it with pictures in 19th century catalogs. The doll may have belonged to a child who lived in the brothel with her mother. Or it may have belonged to a woman who, despite her profession, wasn’t that far removed from childhood herself.

Today, most of the site is little more than a dusty lot. Until recently, it was the location of a multistory parking garage for Union Station. Construction workers demolished the parking structure to make way for the new MWD headquarters, which is scheduled for completion in 1998.

State law required MWD officials to order the archeological survey and dig, which is scheduled to be completed in three weeks. One corner of the archeological site will be covered over Monday when digging for the building’s foundation gets underway.

Costello said she was surprised to discover so much archeological evidence underneath the Union Station parking lot, which was built in the 1930s.

“You would think nothing would have survived,” she said, pointing to the heavy concrete pillars of the parking structure. “But between these are all these delicate remnants of the 19th century.”

A small flask of “Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup” is one of many objects to have survived a century buried under concrete. Despite its innocuous name, the flask contained a deadly mixture of opium and brandy, Praetzellis said. “People of every class and ethnic group would imbibe opium and brandy in large quantities.”

The bordellos thrived during a period of relative tolerance, in which the city’s red light district spread south and east from the Plaza, along Alameda and Commercial streets. By then, the city’s more respectable residents and businessmen had moved west, to places such as Spring Street and Bunker Hill.

Such was the climate of permissiveness that the city’s prostitutes could take out advertisements, such as those that appeared in a “Souvenir Sporting Guide” published in 1897. Colorful euphemisms described the prostitutes’ services. Consider the ad for “The Little Brick,” on North Alameda Street: “The above named place is just what the name implies, and the landlady is justly entitled to the same appellations, as she is a royal hostess and will give you as good a time as you will get anywhere.”

Women with parasols worked the crowds at the horse races held in Agricultural Park, now known as Exposition Park, according to “Tarnished Angels,” a history of Los Angeles prostitution written by W.W. Robinson in 1964. “They would all be dressed in their very best mutton sleeves, long black gloves and great picture hats with two or three long ostrich plumes in them.”

Once they recruited customers, the prostitutes rented buggies for the ride back to the red light district, often staging impromptu races down Alameda Street.

In 1909, after a reform movement swept through the city, the bordellos were cleared out.

“There was a big lockout,” Costello said. “The police came in and shut down every brothel.”