Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America's Soul

Leave the fireworks for those who cast no spark of their own.

An amusing city, Chicago, any way you look at it. I'm afraid we are in for the time of our lives.

A Republican is a man who wants you to go t'church every Sunday. A Democrat says if a man wants to have a glass of beer, he can have it.

I do not mind mankind’s crimes, but I do mind its hypocrisy.

a girl can’t lose her social standing if she stands level with those poised to judge her.

You can get much farther with a smile, a kind word, and a gun than you can with a smile and a kind word. -Al Capone

In Rome, they stared for hours at the magnificent Apollo and Daphne. Minna described the piece in a letter to a friend. “The Greeks construed Apollo's loss of Daphne,” she wrote, “as symbolizing that all mortals shall be denied the Heart's Desire, ever the unattainable.

If the ship sinks, we're going down with a cheer and a good drink under our belts anyway.

Pulled or prompted, men cam to the Everleigh club...They came to see the library, filled floor to ceiling with classics in literature and poetry and philosophy, and the art room, housing a few bona fide masterworks and a reproduction of Bernini’s famous “Apollo and Daphne,” which the sisters had failed to find in America. After learning that the original statue was at the Villa Borghese in Rome, Minna sent an artist to capture its image. She was haunted by how the exquisite nymph’s hands flowered into the branches of a laurel tree just as the god of light reaches for her. A gorgeous piece, but she mostly admired the statue for the questions it posed about clients: why did men who had everything worth having patronize the Everleigh Club? And what if the thing they desired most in this world simply vanished?

If it weren't for married men, we couldn't have carried on at all, and if it weren't for cheating married women we could have made another million.

The sisters' acquaintance Madam Nell Kimball recalled the sage advice of her aunt Letty, a retired courtesan: “Every girl, if only she knew it, is sitting on her fortune.

Men in general, the sisters concluded, were gullible but not to be trusted, greedy but frivolous with money, predatory but easily trapped.

A Republican is a man who wants you to go t’church every Sunday,” Bathhouse John pointed out. “A Democrat says if a man wants to have a glass of beer, he can have it.

You had to hand it to those reformers: They concocted better stories than the ones at the nickel theaters.

When trouble came, as the sisters feared it would, it didn’t knock at the mahogany doors. Instead it waited, lying dormant inside heads and silent inside mouths until it passed, undetected, into the Club. And then it was too late.

We discovered that the scrupulously strict were correspondently keen to discern suggestions of sex where nobody else would think of looking for them.

the blustery talk of civic leaders—and not Chicago’s weather—had inspired the “Windy City” moniker.