Lou Graham born Dorothea Georgine Emile Ohben, was a German

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

-born woman who became famous as the madame of a brothel

Brothel

Brothels are business establishments where patrons can engage in sexual activities with prostitutes. Brothels are known under a variety of names, including bordello, cathouse, knocking shop, whorehouse, strumpet house, sporting house, house of ill repute, house of prostitution, and bawdy house...

 in what is now the Pioneer Square

Pioneer Square, Seattle, Washington

Pioneer Square is a neighborhood in the southwest corner of Downtown Seattle, Washington, USA. It was once the heart of the city: Seattle's founders settled there in 1852, following a brief six-month settlement at Alki Point on the far side of Elliott Bay. The early structures in the neighborhood...

 district of Seattle

Seattle, Washington

Seattle is the county seat of King County, Washington. With 608,660 residents as of the 2010 Census, Seattle is the largest city in the Northwestern United States. The Seattle metropolitan area of about 3.4 million inhabitants is the 15th largest metropolitan area in the country...

, Washington, USA

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

the "undisputed Queen of the Lava Beds". She became one of the city's wealthiest citizens before dying in her forties.

Graham in Seattle

Graham arrived in Seattle in 1888; the city, barely three decades old, was at the tail end of a period (from November 23, 1883 until a series of court decisions in 1887–1888) in which women's suffrage

Women's suffrage

Women's suffrage or woman suffrage is the right of women to vote and to run for office. The expression is also used for the economic and political reform movement aimed at extending these rights to women and without any restrictions or qualifications such as property ownership, payment of tax, or...

 had led to a triumph of "reform" politics there. Monied interests were voted out of political office, liquor licenses revoked, brothels closed and relevant laws strictly enforced. The result for this frontier economy was, in the words of local popular historian Bill Speidel

Bill Speidel

William C Speidel known as Bill Speidel was a columnist for The Seattle Times and a self-made historian who wrote the books Sons of the Profits and Doc Maynard, The Man Who Invented Seattle about the people who settled and built Seattle, Washington.Speidel is also credited with being one of the...

, that "The fines and licenses on liquor, gambling

Gambling

Gambling is the wagering of money or something of material value on an event with an uncertain outcome with the primary intent of winning additional money and/or material goods...

 and prostitution

Prostitution

Prostitution is the act or practice of providing sexual services to another person in return for payment. The person who receives payment for sexual services is called a prostitute and the person who receives such services is known by a multitude of terms, including a "john". Prostitution is one of...

 that had been the major source of income for the operation of the city dwindled to almost nothing."

Graham approached Jacob Furth

Jacob Furth

Jacob Furth was an Austrian Empire-born American entrepreneur and prominent Seattle banker. He played a key role in consolidating Seattle's electric power and public transportation infrastructure, and was a member of Ohaveth Sholum Congregation, Seattle's first synagogue...

, and through him a number of the city's leading businessmen, with a proposal for the establishment of a brothel comparable in prices and quality to the city's finest hotels. Prices were to be openly posted (as against charging what the traffic would bear from night to night), staffed by women who would be (Speidel's words again here) "gorgeous…, talented…, … [and] who could discuss the opera, or politics, or economics, or world conditions on an intelligent level with the leaders of America.

With their forthcoming start-up capital she purchased the property at the corner of Third and Washington. Her first building was short-lived; it burned in the Great Seattle Fire

Great Seattle Fire

The Great Seattle Fire was a fire that destroyed the entire central business district of Seattle, Washington, USA, on June 6, 1889.-Early Seattle:In the fall of 1851, the Denny Party arrived at Alki Point in what is now the state of Washington...

 of June 6, 1889, but she had already profited sufficiently to rebuild in stone afterwards. In less than 18 months she had done well enough to expand significantly. Her initial parcel of land had cost $3,000; The larger parcel she bought after the fire cost $25,000.

She established the young city's most refined parlor house at the southwest corner of 3rd Avenue South and South Washington Street, "a discreet establishment for the silk-top-hat-and-frock-coat set to indulge in good drink, lively political discussions and, upstairs, ribald pleasures -- all free to government representatives." Speidel, in his history of early Seattle Sons of the Profits, remarks that in her heyday "More city business was transacted at Lou's than at City Hall." The building survives as the Washington Court Building, 221 South Washington Street and houses, among other things, part of the Union Gospel Mission. There are interior vestiges of the original brothel in the form of a stairway leading up to a second-floor landing from which former bedroom spaces are accessible.

During the period of Graham's ascendancy, Seattle wavered back and forth between "open city" and "closed city" policies. Graham's establishment briefly went dormant during one such "closed city" period in 1890 but soon opened wide its doors for business once again. By February 14, 1891 (Valentine's Day, ironically), something of a "Wild West" atmosphere had returned to the tideflats, and a rookie policeman involved in a general crackdown on prostitution arrested Graham out of ignorance of her identity. The result was acquittal in a jury trial and (according to Speidel) the subsequent resignation of reform mayor Henry White.

For the rest of Lou Graham's life her brothel remained an institution. "No young businessman was really considered a man about town until he could discuss with ease the interior decorations of Lou's establishment...and some of the finer points of the distinguished young ladies…"

Character and legacy

Speidel describes Lou Graham as "regal",

The fortunes of many of Seattle's leading families were founded on loans from Graham. When banker Jacob Furth was approached with a loan request for a business idea that he thought was good, but which he did not think his board of directors at Puget Sound National Bank would approve, he would send them on to Graham, who would make a loan at higher interest, but with less formality. Graham may have been instrumental in saving Furth's bank from a bank run

Bank run

A bank run occurs when a large number of bank customers withdraw their deposits because they believe the bank is, or might become, insolvent...

 during the Panic of 1893 by ostentatiously making a large deposit. After she died a Puget Sound National Bank employee became administrator of her estate.

By the time she succumbed to syphilis

Syphilis

Syphilis is a sexually transmitted infection caused by the spirochete bacterium Treponema pallidum subspecies pallidum. The primary route of transmission is through sexual contact; however, it may also be transmitted from mother to fetus during pregnancy or at birth, resulting in congenital syphilis...

 in San Francisco in 1903, Graham had become a wealthy landowner, one of the largest in the Pacific Northwest

Pacific Northwest

The Pacific Northwest is a region in northwestern North America, bounded by the Pacific Ocean to the west and, loosely, by the Rocky Mountains on the east. Definitions of the region vary and there is no commonly agreed upon boundary, even among Pacific Northwesterners. A common concept of the...

. She owned one of Seattle's great mansions (2106 E. Madison Street, demolished in 1966) and "contributed liberally" to projects sponsored by the Seattle Chamber of Commerce. She contributed more money to the education of the city's children than the rest of the city's prominent early citizens combined. After the Panic of 1893

Panic of 1893

The Panic of 1893 was a serious economic depression in the United States that began in 1893. Similar to the Panic of 1873, this panic was marked by the collapse of railroad overbuilding and shaky railroad financing which set off a series of bank failures...

, her loans saved some of the city's most prestigious families from bankruptcy. At least one source says she left her estate to relatives in Germany, but according to Bill Speidel she died intestate, and her supposed relatives from Hamburg

Hamburg

-History:The first historic name for the city was, according to Claudius Ptolemy's reports, Treva.But the city takes its modern name, Hamburg, from the first permanent building on the site, a castle whose construction was ordered by the Emperor Charlemagne in AD 808...

 turned out to be frauds. Her estate went to support the common schools in King County

King County, Washington

King County is a county located in the U.S. state of Washington. The population in the 2010 census was 1,931,249. King is the most populous county in Washington, and the 14th most populous in the United States....

, the county in which Seattle is located.

Speidel wrote in his last book that traditional forms of documentation consistently underrate the contribution of women in general, and particularly of less respectable women such as Graham. He credits Henry Broderick

Henry Broderick (Seattle)

Henry Broderick was Seattle, Washington realtor, civic leader, memoirist, and Seattle historian. He arrived in Seattle in 1901 and, in 1908, founded the real estate firm that he would turn into the city's largest....

 and Joshua Green

Joshua Green (seaman and banker)

Joshua Green was an American sternwheeler captain, businessman, and banker. He rose from being a seaman to being the dominant figure of the Puget Sound Mosquito Fleet, then sold out his interests and became a banker...

with corroborating Graham's importance and her business relationship with Jacob Furth, but he notes that both insisted that their names could not be cited in this connection until after their deaths.

External links

• Episode about Lou Graham (October 2004) on J. Kingston Pierce's video series Eccentric Seattle, on the City of Seattle's web site.