The Virgin of Vine Alley
In the 19th century, Canal Street—epicenter of The Hooks, a hard-bitten section of the city sandwiched between the Erie Canal and Lake Erie—had earned a rightly skeevy reputation as a hive of vice.
Thirsty sailors and scoopers (men who unloaded grain ships into grain elevators) could find cheap beer and liquor at any hour, and concert houses, gambling parlors, and brothels were lined cheek-by-jowl along every street—as you can see in this very famous 1893 map.
All of these mostly illegal pastimes were mostly tolerated, however, in this compact ‘vice district’, so long as the police were paid enough to look the other way, and no one of any importance got killed.
Vice districts were a 19th and early 20th century notion that the urges to gamble, have casual sex, and get wasted were best expressed in a geographically bounded area in which such things could be managed with minimal oversight from the authorities, and where they were ‘walled off’ from the more respectable parts of town.
(Sounds odd, perhaps, but nowadays indulgence is distributed. We have legal gambling (OTB, lotteries, sports betting, and casinos), Tinder et al., online pornography, and weed delivery–and thus one may partake without any need to get off the sofa.)
Most cities and towns had a defined vice district, but Buffalo held the unique distinction of having not one but two—The Hooks and the (much larger) Tenderloin District.
The Tenderloin was a trapezoidal area defined by Washington, Exchange, and Michigan Streets, and topped at an angle by Broadway. In the very heart of this rather large area was the ‘Canal Street’ of the Tenderloin—Vine Alley, which became Vine Street when it crossed Elm. These two short blocks were lined with houses inhabited by what people then politely referred to as ‘window-tappers’—meaning young women, sometimes rather scantily clothed, who would sit in the front windows of their boarding houses and tap on the windows as men went by.
(It was a lot harder to arrest a woman for prostitution if she wasn’t out walking the street, soliciting for clients—there was no law against tapping on windows.)
Along Vine Alley was a particularly dense conglomeration of these ‘disorderly houses’—you can always identify which are which in the old Census records by the staggering number of ‘dressmakers’ living in each one. Believe me, Vine Alley was hardly Buffalo’s Garment District—if anything, most visitors had their garments off as soon as they could manage it.
The map image is from the 1891 atlas of Buffalo (courtesy New York Public Library); yellow structures were wooden, and most of them were either saloons, brothels, or both.
And on the wickedest corner of this wickedest part of the Tenderloin–the intersection of Elm and Vine–lived Eva Little, who didn’t fit the profile.
In the 1910s, Eva Little ran away from her parents’ farm in rural North Adams, Massachusetts, for a chance at a new and more exciting life in booming Buffalo, where she had an aunt, Mrs. Rose Jaynes. Attractive, intelligent, and vivacious, Eva completed a course in nursing and landed a job as a private nurse for a tuberculosis patient–who also happened to own a few sketchy properties in the Tenderloin. When the man died a year later, twenty-five-year-old Miss Little found herself in the big city without any means of support, and sponging off of her aunt was apparently not her style. What to do?
Her deceased patient’s widow had a solution. One of the properties she now owned was 26 Vine Alley, at the corner of Elm and Vine—a typical combination business: saloon on the ground floor, knocking-shop upstairs—and she asked Eva to run the downstairs bit.
There was only one small problem. The place had no liquor license–so Eva applied for a soda fountain license and, while awaiting its expected approval, opened up shop in the dingy former saloon. Every day she would serve up non-alcoholic beverages to thirsty people going to and fro along narrow Vine Alley. So rare was an unspiked glass of pop in these parts that Eva was soon given the sobriquet of ‘The Virgin of Vine Alley’.
Here’s a very rare photograph of Eva’s soda parlor.
Eva’s choice of work was so unusual for the area that a couple of Buffalo newspapers ventured (accompanied by a security detail—people visiting Vine Alley didn’t like publicity) into the vice district to get an interview. She professed that she was quite happy, was herself not tempted into sin, and with a charm that jumps off the old newsprint, asserted that life along Vine Alley was a heck of a lot more exciting than it had been back on her parents’ farm. By all accounts, Eva was an intrepid, fearless young woman who seemed genuinely to delight in her newfound independence and somewhat quirky way of making a living.
Unfortunately, Eva’s contentment would be short-lived. Aunt Rose Jaynes, as it happened, was one of the leading lights of Buffalo’s very active (and politically powerful) chapter of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU)–an organization dedicated to the prohibition of liquor. Even though Eva was to all appearances doing nothing but serving up soda pop, Aunt Rose was indignant. In her view, the mere location of her niece’s soda fountain in the vice district reflected poorly on Eva, on Aunt Rose, on the WCTU, and on the old folks back home.
Aunt Rose accordingly rained down on her niece’s head the most feared antipersonnel weapon of the period: shame. Shame may be a bit out of fashion these days, but not so in the early 20th century, when adherence to social norms was a mark of respectability. There were a few who didn’t care about such things, of course, but Eva—as much as I suspect she wished to be—was not among them. After a concerted effort by Aunt Rose (and her friends in other influential women’s reform groups) to smear Eva as a runaway and potentially a wanton woman, the newspapers reported that the Virgin of Vine Street had had her soft-drinks license application denied–by the Mayor of Buffalo personally, no less.
Again without any income, and now with evil hints circulating about her reputation—which would make it impossible to get another situation as a trained nurse—Eva had to throw in the towel. The onetime Virgin of Vine Alley reluctantly gave up on Buffalo and returned to Massachusetts.
The final news article I can find about her states that Eva’s ‘will had been broken, and tired and discouraged’ she was again ‘tending chickens’ on her parents’ farm. By contrast, Aunt Rose was said to have wept tears of joy that she had saved her niece from the tawdry life of Vine Alley.
P.S. Vine Alley, Vine Street, and a lot of the most interesting parts of the Tenderloin have long since been reduced to rubble. The ‘Vines’ specifically were replaced by the extension of William Street west of Michigan Avenue. One of these days, I recommend you stand on the corner of Elm and William and imagine that you are about to enjoy a refreshing soda pop at the Virgin’s place. You made it all the way past Vine Alley’s many temptations to get this far, after all.
You can find more articles like this here on Robert’s blog and also on his weekly column on Buffalo Rising.
Read the other articles, and in this post, see the Tenderloin District maps, and as you read Robert’s chart-topping novel, The Buffalo Butcher, you'll recognize some street and place names.