SECOND SOUTH GREEK ACTIVE AND PASSIVE Issue 16 Volume 2 4 August 2005 Published in Salt Lake Metro

SECOND SOUTH GREEK ACTIVE AND PASSIVE 

This column is about a stretch of road between 500 and 600 West on 2nd South. Like most of you, I have eaten there, walked there and partied there without giving much thought about the old derelict buildings on the block. Doing a little investigating I was flabbergasted by the amount life and sexual vitality that was crammed into this little nook on the west side of Salt Lake City.  In its hay day, between 1910 and 1915, it was as crowded at Sugar House ever was. Over 75 businesses operated on the block, not including the infamous Stockade, where anywhere between 75 and 100 women were making a living in the sex trade.

In 1915 alone, 12 of Salt Lake’s 24 Coffee Houses were located within its borders. Besides the Coffee Houses between 1910 and 1915 there were a shoe repair Shop,  7 barber shops, 3 meat markets, a candy store, 7 neighbor grocery stores, a dry goods store, a drug store, 6 clothing stores, 3 cigar stores, 3 rooming houses, 3 hotels, a boardinghouse,  4 furnished room establishments, a café, 7 restaurants, an Italian Bakery, 17 bars and saloons, 4 billiards parlors and 2 pool halls.

         

It was a community geared to mainly single ethnic gentile men, and the "soiled doves" of the Stockade. If one lived there, one would not have had to venture out of the area for lodging, food, clothing, and recreation.

It seems that Second South Street has always been randy ever since pioneer days, although in the 19th Century most the "action" was located between Main and State. Here Whiskey Street, Plum Alley, and Commercial Street were filled with saloons, brothels and opium dens, just a stone throw away from the Mormon Temple. By 1894, as Salt Lake City began to mature and statehood was eminent, steps were taken to have  Salt Lake City’s vice and “bums” removed nearer towards the railroad tracks on the west side of town.

At the beginning of the 20th century the area between 500 West and-600 West and 2nd South became the heart of old “Greek Town”. Census records show that In 1900 there were only three Greeks in all of Utah.   However through the efforts of Leonidas G. Skliris, a Greek labor agent, by 1910, the largest concentration of Greeks in the United States was in Utah, nearly 4,000. Greeks settled all over the intermountain west but were mainly concentrated on 2nd South where the Skliris’ coffeehouse was located at 507 West.

Leonidas Skliris

When the gentile Greeks, Turks, and Italians moved in, the old genteel Mormons moved out. In 1900 the 2nd South block was filled with dressmakers, bakeries, and barber shops but by 1910 all but the barbershops were gone.

It was not only the influx of Southern Europeans that drove the "respectable" citizenry from the neighborhood but also a beautiful woman named Mrs. Dora B. Topham. In 1908 Salt Lake City's’s Mayor John S. Bransford established a red light district between 530 and 560 West on 2nd south called the “Stockade” to rid downtown Salt Lake of its brothels and prostitutes. The mayor put Mrs. Dora B. Topham, a professional madam, in charge of the sex business.  She was the employer of nearly 100 men and women at any given time.

The decision to place the Stockade in the neighborhood was influenced by “class and ethnic biases” with city councilmen stating that the area was full of Italians, Greeks, and “Japs”.

The Stockade, which was surrounded by a ten foot wall, was approximately behind where the Obit Café [now 2013 Club Metro] is today, and operated for three years before Topham was convicted of inducing a minor “to enter the stockade for immoral purposes."  In 1911, the Stockade was closed and Topham returned to Ogden, although she quietly continued to lease a brothel in the southwest corner of the Stockade until 1913.  Eventually the Stockade was torn down to "rubble".

The end of the city’s supported sex trade and the beginning of Prohibition in 1919 doomed the businesses on the block. By 1920, national Prohibition had a sobering effect with the Polk Directory for Salt Lake City, under that heading “Saloons”, declaring, “see Soft Drinks”. However several enterprising businessmen did open seven soft drink establishments along 2nd South.  They didn’t last.

The Greeks and Italians had assimilated mostly by the 1920’s and moved away from the increasingly shabby neighborhood. Also new minority began mixing with the Greeks in the 1920’s. During the “Roaring Twenties” the ethnic make-up of the block began to change as more Southwestern Latinos moved to SLC and settled on 2nd South.   

By the 1930’s, the block had past its prime with pool halls, newly reopened bars, and flop houses for the Depression’s destitute being the block’s main businesses. The Great Depression Years hit the block hard and by the 1940’s the Polk Directory showed many vacant lots on the block where old businesses had been torn down. The place was a ghost town and quickly becoming a skid row. A soul saving mission and soup kitchen was operated by the Church of God at 559 West for those down on their luck.

By the 1950’s only a few flop houses and bars remained. A business called the Three Aces Tavern operating at 579 West stayed in business for over 35 years and was at a time a Gay friendly bar in the 1960’s as Gays were became the newest minority to inhabit and frequent  the block.

The reputation of 2nd South as a place to solicit sex remained long after the Stockade closed. The deserted Westside neighborhood was ideally suited for “vice”. In 1964 the Utah State Health Department cited west 2nd South as the worse area for venereal disease cases reported since records were kept. Violence crime was also becoming rampant.

In 1967 SLC vice officers led a morals drive along the 500 block of West 2nd South with a massive round up of prostitutes. The city fathers were embarrassed because SLC had ranked in the top 1/3 of cities its size for prostitution. The morals drive failed and the area was still the main location to solicit illicit sex in Salt Lake City until the late 1970’s. The block's most noticeable “john” arrested in 1975 on 2nd South was Utah’s 2nd District Congressman Allen Howe.

Street Walking prostitution peaked in 1977 when city commissioners put up “no parking signs” along 5th West and 2nd South to curb road side services.  However the occasional hooker still picked up tricks on the corner of 600 South and 2nd South well into the 1980’s out side the In-Between’s front entrance. 

In the early 1980’s, the Sun Club relocated to 702 West 2nd South where the Kozy Corner Bar had operated since 1905. Also a Gay bathhouse was operating at 1414 West 2nd South since the late 1970’s. Second South was increasingly becoming Gay. The first official Gay Bar on the 500 West block was the In-Between. The In-Between opened in 1986 at 579 West 2nd South at the Three Aces old location. The bar was positioned between The Sun Club and Backstreet on 500 West hence the name. The owners were Bob Dubray and his lover Donny Eastepp.  After the death of Dubray, the bar was bought by Joe Redburn who renamed the bar, “Bricks”. Through a succession of owners the club is called now called Club Sound.    Little do patron  know, nor probably care, that they are dancing on the location of the old Albany Hotel and Demiris & Veros’ Saloon.