We deem it our duty to call the attention of our city fathers to
the soil with which our community is afflicted. We refer to the
existence of houses of ill-fame on our most public
thoroughfare…These dens should be vacated… For the good name of
our town we make the suggestion and hope the City Council will
consider the matter at their next meeting.
-Gilroy Advocate, May 31, 1873
We deem it our duty to call the attention of our city fathers to the soil with which our community is afflicted. We refer to the existence of houses of ill-fame on our most public thoroughfare…These dens should be vacated… For the good name of our town we make the suggestion and hope the City Council will consider the matter at their next meeting.
-Gilroy Advocate, May 31, 1873
Along with the rapid population and commercial growth which accompanied Gilroy’s incorporation, business of an undesirable nature came to town as well. By 1873, four brothels were situated on Monterey Street, two of them in the heart of the business district between Fourth and Sixth Streets. Two more were located at the north and south entrances to town. Citizens, forced to pass by the dens of ill-repute during the course of daily business, were becoming aroused. Gilroy’s image, they said, was being threatened. While the new town was being promoted by real estate developers as a place of salubrious climate and scenic locale, offering good schools, and healthy pursuits such as churches and fraternal organizations, folks were hard-put to explain the presence of sleaze joints on the town’s main street. Many worried potential newcomers might choose to settle elsewhere, perhaps San Jose, instead.
Gilroy was being labeled. Unable to settle down to complete respectability, it was becoming known as a “wide-open town,” a fact which offered pulpit fodder for numerous Sunday sermons. The local newspaper kept up the tempo, urging the City Council to take up stricter ordinances against the flourishing flesh trade, summarizing, “Crime, vice and disorder are on the rise. Swarms of gamblers, prostitutes and roughs haunt the streets night and day, they lurk around their miserable rum-holes on the outskirts of town, they swarm at the dance houses…luring the unwary to their gambling hells and under cover of darkness fleece customers at their leisure.”
But the City Fathers were taking their time. The public was urged to increase pressure on its elected officials and insist the houses be closed down. Calling it an alarming condition of affairs, and a disgrace to the city, the Editor noted that a large number of former convicts, fugitives from justice and highwaymen, with their “pimps and spies,” had made Gilroy their headquarters.
Adding to the problem, the town had only two police officers, hardly sufficient to stem the tide. “They make various arrests at sinks of iniquity…then lawyers, for a consideration, are ready to delay justice, browbeat and badger witnesses, and stop at no means of evading the just punishment of the criminal,” the paper harrumphed.
Throughout the summer of 1873, problems escalated at the town’s “plague spots.” From the doorways of the “gilded palaces of shame,” respectable ladies passing along the street were hooted at by the denizens, who shouted every manner of insults. Noisy nights were on the increase in town as well, disturbing the populace with “riotous carousings” and “sounds of debaucheries” emanating from the town’s dance halls, called “sin-breeding holes of iniquity.”
Dancing halls were particularly singled out because the establishments, which had to pay a $50 quarterly municipal license fee, employed female bargirls to entertain the clientele. Although called “dance halls,” the spots operated openly as houses of prostitution.
Despite repeated urgings, no actions were taken by the City Council in August, September, or October 1873. Then, on the night of Nov. 4, an entire business block was deliberately torched. Brannan’s Livery and Feed Stable on Sixth and Eigleberry streets, and part of Dr. Morey’s new two-story office building went up in smoke.
Finally, the citizenry was aroused and frontier Justice came to the fore. Quickly forming a Vigilance Committee, late on Saturday, November 11, a group of citizens visited 20 individuals at their various vice establishments. Quietly they informed the shifters that the town’s population had voted for them to depart. Nine individuals were grabbed on the spot, lined up and force-marched to the city limits, headed toward San Jose. Business owners were told they had 48 hours to settle up and depart. Three persons were sent away on a train on Sunday morning and the last two, that night.
“A very noticeable change has taken place on our streets within a week,” the Editor noted. “After 10 PM it is as quiet as a grave.” Finally awakened to the will of the people, a week following the Vigilance Committee visits, Gilroy’s City Council finally appointed four special policemen to walk the streets. In addition a nightly patrol of citizens volunteered to guard the city in shifts.
There was only one straggler left, Jake the Fiddler. Jake didn’t get the message from the previous Saturday’s “moonlight walk.” Defying the will of the citizens, the following Tuesday, he was back in town. By the next day, Jake was nowhere in sight. But a farmer, coming into town, mentioned he’d seen a heap of feather-covered clothing, alongside a tarred rail, lying by the roadbed just outside the city limits.
Soon, it was reported, both Watsonville and Hollister were following the same measures so successfully applied in Gilroy.
Here at home, residents were delighted with the new-found peace and quiet. Just before Christmas, 1873, the newspaper noted, “Our officers wander about listlessly with nothing to vary the dreary monotony. Since the organization of the vigilantes, ours has been an orderly city and the Police Judge languishes for the want of business.”
All good things, in their course, come to an end, and within a decade, the old plague had returned. By 1881, the Editor was noting, “A short time ago, Gilroy was rejoicing in the flight of the doves whose acts shocked the moral sense of the community. The closing of the houses of prostitution brought us the congratulations of the neighboring towns. Those who rejoiced over the sudden spasm of public virtue that relieved the town of the demoralizing haunts will learn with regret that a fresh stock of prostitutes have arrived and that the evil is before us, as brazen as ever.”
