Charlottesville’s Landscape of Prostitution, 1880–1950

Excerpt:

"In 1912, building on established Jim Crow laws, the city council in Charlottesville, Virginia, unanimously passed its segregation ordinance. The ordinance made it illegal for whites to move onto blocks that were majority black. Similarly, African Americans were not permitted to move onto blocks that were majority white. Residences facing both sides of a street between intersecting cross-streets constituted a block. Transgressions were punishable by fines; persistent violators could be jailed for thirty to ninety days. Domestic servants could share the private homes and lots with their employers regardless of racial differences. The city council did not require immediate racial separation; the majority block segregation rule applied whenever an existing residence was sold to a new owner or leased to a new tenant. Developers had to declare the race of all new residential blocks in their building permit applications. If the U.S. Supreme Court had not declared such laws unconstitutional in 1917, the segregation ordinance would have profoundly changed the neighborhood along South, Garrett, and Fifth Streets, immediately adjacent to Charlottesville’s downtown, just two blocks south of city hall. Here, single white women and African Americans had shared the neighborhood for decades. The white women were prostitutes. They lived in relatively substantial brothels surrounded by more modest houses, occupied by working-class blacks. Despite their illegality, these brothels operated relatively unfettered for over three quarters of a century before 1950. This essay will explore the architectural, urban, and social form of Charlottesville prostitution; in the course of these decades, city police, judiciary, political leaders, and university officials all played a role in maintaining Charlottesville’s red light district. In this neighborhood race and urban space intersected, transgressing the social mores codified by the segregation ordinance and underscoring the racial and gender dynamics that have often shaped American urbanism."

Bluestone, Daniel. "Charlottesville's Landscape of Prostitution, 1880-1950." Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum  Vol 22, No 2 (Fall 2015): 36-61.