Hotel Street Harry & the Honolulu Harlot

brooklyn has its sand street chicago has its loop san francisco has its market street and honolulu has its hotel street brethren when you speak of hotel street you're talking about the new crossroads of the world as far as the soldier is concerned it starts at the y and ends at the river long after the war is over the boys from podunk and blue goose hollow will tell their families with baited breath how they won the war on hotel street yours for bigger beers harry so began the first newspaper column by a u.s army journalist known only as hotel street harry it was march 1943 the column debuted in the army newspaper the mid-pacifican and the author was writing very openly about a touchy subject in wartime hawaii prostitution there are a lot of objections to harry coming from the ministers and the bad element but they probably just couldn't do anything about it gi's were gi's and they were big boys and so they just left the thing right by [Music] i hotel street harry we'll start in at the y and we'll cover for you all the angles of this merry carnival of fun [ __ ] popcorn stands junk jewelry shops photograph galleries pinball machines joints and what have you and brother i use the word carnival advisedly between december 1941 and september 1944 an estimated one million servicemen followed harry's path and visited the 200 prostitutes of hotel street there were so many men who wanted to go to the brothels that they literally lined up on the street for blocks standing there waiting to get in during the day because there was a curfew every night so they weren't doing this at night they were standing there in broad daylight during the war prostitution in honolulu was hardly a secret it was tolerated by hawaiian society regulated by the local police taxed by the federal government patronized by the united states military and exploited by a few shrewd women who for their war work became millionaires [Music] it's a complicated fascinating story recently uncovered by historians david farber and beth bailey it's an awkward story it's it's a problematic story but it's really a good story [Music] before the war most soldiers knew very little about hawaii except what they saw in the movies i was visually you know girls on the beach with the straw skirts you know and no tops and all this that's what i thought it was going to be like richard fisk's first trip to hawaii was in 1940 he was a marine corps bugler barely 18 years old assigned to the uss west virginia fisk didn't find any topless hula girls but he did find hotel street for food drinks and what have you the restaurant that we usually went to was low fat and right below offets in the corner there there was this bar where all the west virginia guys used to hang out and all the ships had their own particular bar to go to and also there are particular places there they want those little recreations cb smith joined the navy in 1942 and volunteered for submarine duty based at pearl harbor it didn't take him long to learn about hotel street i'll probably ask somebody i say where are you going i said oh we're going to go have a few drinks and go to hotel street or you go in do your business and he's happy the prostitution business operated within a few city blocks bordered by four downtown streets fort britannia river and hotel street the brothels were called hotels or rooms such as the new senator hotel which was next to low fats restaurant and the bell rooms down by the river there were the bronx the western rooms the ritz the cottage the service hotel the modern the anchor the pacific the rex rooms the bungalow and the camp rooms about half of the buildings still exist today the brothels were all upstairs second floor operations i used to say let's go climb the stairs and when they wanted to visit the girls ted chernin a civilian engineer discovered the hotels in 1938 when he first arrived in honolulu i was told about them right away which come right out and call them by the name or whorehouses or cat houses they weren't very busy except when the fleet came in and then the sailors would line up the doors waiting their turn this rare photograph given to chernin is the only known group picture of the ladies of hotel street these particular girls worked at the new senator [Music] overwhelmingly they were white women from the mainland who came to hawaii for a short period of time and they could be anything from well-educated to some really tough customers despite some allegations of white slavery the women were there by choice most had regulars men who were surprisingly loyal i learned from the girls themselves that quite a few men felt out there you know they would stick to the same girl like it was a surrogate wife until december 1941 honolulu's vice district was little more than a seedy facet of hawaiian life but when war broke out in the pacific a remarkable social battle erupted on hotel street at the center of it were three colorful figures an iron-fisted chief of police who ran the brothels and set the rules a no-nonsense u.s army provost marshal who assumed control of the brothels when the war broke out and the rebellious opportunistic beauty who became infamous as the honolulu harlot [Music] in 1941 william a gabrielson was chief of the honolulu police department gabrielson was a pretty tough guy sort of ramrod straight brook no nonsense acted in a professional manner i liked the guy i enjoyed him he was a to me he was a number one chief among his duties gabrielson was in charge of regulating the vice district it was gary griffin who had the assignment of seeing that these girls operated within the rules chris faria joined the honolulu police in december 1941. at first he worked as an undercover observer on hotel street posing as a young customer it was quite a adventurous deal for this young 20 year old boy to get involved in something like that and actually i was undercover working for the police and checking on them and they didn't know it faria's job was to make sure the women obeyed a specific set of unwritten rules which had evolved during chief gabrielson's tenure quite loosely they were called the ten commandments seemingly there were detailed regulations somewhere between 10 and 20 some say 13 the number varies and they were really quite amazingly specific the honolulu prostitute cannot live outside the brothel where she works she cannot own property she cannot have a bank account she cannot wire money to the mainland cannot own a car cannot be seen in public with a man cannot have a steady boyfriend or marry someone in the military she cannot go to nice restaurants bars or hotels cannot ride a bike or a streetcar and she cannot go to waikiki beach if they obeyed these rules the girls worked if not they'd get shipped out they'd be on the next ship [Music] chief gabriel soon ran everything and he was very strict everything was done to keep things low key so that there would be no excuse for upsetting the apple cart in 1941 u.s army major frank steer was provost marshal of hawaii head of the military police he was quite a guy i liked him i knew him personally and i can't say enough about him he was a straight guy very straight no fool around before the war major steers authority applied only to men in uniform not to civilians or the prostitutes mostly steer dealt with public drunkenness and fighting for those offenses he had a stockade which he filled with a couple of hundred gi's every weekend including saturday night december 6 1941. i didn't have anything to do with the prostitution until december 7th i took charizard within hours of the attack on pearl harbor all life in hawaii changed forever martial law was immediately declared a dusk to dawn curfew was imposed it would last for years and provost marshal frank steer suddenly became the top cop in hawaii while he had many larger concerns in the great war against japan and germany frank steer soon found himself in the middle of a tiny little war he couldn't possibly have imagined a freedom fight of sorts pitting the women of hotel street against honolulu police chief gabrielson and his oppressive rules for whatever reason the women in hotel street trusted frank steer he was firm but they thought he was honest with them [Music] her name was jean o'hara an everyday hotel street prostitute who had the moxie to demand the right to invest her hard-earned flesh money in honolulu real estate and tan her stunning body on waikiki beach by doing so jean o'hara would wage a personal war against police chief gabrielson she would ignite a local scandal be charged with attempted murder and in the end become the most notorious harlot in honolulu history before pearl harbor prostitutes had no respectability in honolulu but on december 7th the ladies of hotel street became unlikely heroes right after pearl harbor people came forward to try and help and the prostitutes being close closer to pearl harbor than many opened up their houses went to serve as nurses did whatever they could i have spoken to women who went through the war right at the beginning of the war who said oh yes the prostitutes came in and helped out in the same place that i was working and we worked alongside them and there was a lot of kind of whispering of you know that these are the these women are the prostitutes from downtown you look at those girls and sure they were ladies of the night but i mean if it wasn't for some of those girls a lot of those guys would not be walking around today we got to know that by god this was war and those girls came through with flying colors and i admired every one of them for their swift comforting action the ladies of hotel street earned lasting affection from the man in uniform what also happened in the aftermath of the attack was that things were chaotic and the prostitutes started to take advantage of some of that chaos and they said we've done our patriotic duty we are american citizens we want to have the full rights of american citizens in honolulu the prostitutes led by gene o'hara recognized a window of opportunity and immediately tested police chief william gabrielson's rules the infamous ten commandments it began just days after pearl harbor simply because the prostitutes had given their own beds to the wounded this meant they couldn't sleep in the vice district they had to go elsewhere rule violation number one the first salvo exploded when several girls rented nice hillside homes from families who were fleeing the islands they moved into some of the best residential areas in honolulu which alarmed their neighbors to say the least the police came to throw them out the vice cops said you know you know the rules you belong back in the district you've got to lose that the prostitutes refused to move claiming they had constitutional rights to live where they pleased the matter went straight to the desk of provost marshal frank steer as soon as the owners found out that they had a bunch of prostitutes in their homes they came to me wanted me to evict him i told him you're not getting me in any trouble at age 101 frank steer remembers the situation well when it came to the issue of civil rights for prostitutes his position was clear and i didn't evict any of them if they had the money to pay the rent and did their business down on river street that would suit me fine just fine the police were furious because this was completely undermining not only the the system of control over prostitution that set up over the past decades but it was a balance of power issue in wartime honolulu which was under martial law this put honolulu police chief gabrielson in an awkward position under martial law he was ordered to continue running the vice district just as he had done before the war but now his power to enforce was neutered without clear authority the chief decided to continue his strong arm policy of keeping prostitutes confined to the hotel street district and he would make an example of one girl in particular jean o'hara she had gotten in trouble with the police many times before she had opened up a house on maui that had not been approved she had broken the rules in all sorts of ways and had been really vociferous in demanding to be treated well in february 1942 o'hara and two other girls rented a room at a very posh hotel the moana they sunbathed on waikiki beach and they had a little party someone called the cops the vice cops showed up and the other two women ran out of the room and hid and jean o'hara popped herself into bed with the book and pretended to be just hanging out reading and relaxing and she was hauled in a military judge threw the book at her she got four months in jail not for violating the chief's rules but for disturbing the peace jean o'hara's war was on and she was quickly reinforced by her friends on hotel street within days other prostitutes were openly sunbathing on waikiki beach usually in the company of army or navy officers when the chief's vice squad came to roust them the soldiers defended the rights of the women they were also backed up by the superseding authority of the military police tension grew between honolulu's cops and the mps after several weeks of open defiance chief gabrielson had had enough if he couldn't run the brothels his way he wouldn't run them at all so in a clever gambit he issued an order saying the honolulu police were no longer in charge of the vice district the chief of police issued administrative order 83 and said publicly the military controlled the vice district they're in charge of it which embarrassed the military no end and so the military governor had to step in and negotiate the whole process the military governor was general delos emmons knowing that the military could not be officially involved in the prostitution business it was against federal law evans countermanded gabrielson's order then he handed the entire situation off to provost marshal frank steer he said that's your problem i got to worro in that's a word to use believing he was back in charge chief gabrielson immediately reinstated his ten commandments the prostitutes who were enjoying their newfound freedom retaliated with their own clever gambit that august 1942 the ladies of hotel street did something very american they went on strike they actually picketed with picket signs very hushed up i mean there are no photographs of it and i'm sure there were no official descriptions of it published in any newspaper at the time because all news was censored so we know very little about it and so after three weeks of picketing the um the police station it never showed up in the newspaper but honolulu citizens saw good and well what was going on the military governor and the police managed to negotiate a settlement which put more control with the military than with the police but soothe the ruffle feathers of the police at the same time the compromise allowed the prostitutes to live and visit where they pleased but it required them to do all their business in the brothel district and behave in an orderly fashion outside the district the honolulu police were given power to enforce these specific new rules but the days of the ten commandments were over coincidentally gene o'hara had been released from jail that august just in time something to help organize the strike gina o'hara according to her accounts was at the center of everything that happened in honolulu during the war and she was one of the people who was most prominent in demanding her right to live where she wanted do what she wanted make her own life i have no pictures of her marching around the police station but she was one of the leaders among the madames and it's it's quite likely she had a role for jean o'hara this was a small victory in her war against the chief it would continue later but first she had some business to conduct with the united states army navy and marine corps [Music] during the second world war several million u.s servicemen were sent to the pacific front most of them passed through hawaii many never came home not every soldier or sailor visited hotel street but enough did to make prostitution in honolulu an estimated 10 million a year business some statistics claim that as much money was made during the war in brothels as had been made in the tourist industry before the war a prostitute would make somewhere around thirty to forty thousand dollars a year put that in context a good paying rosie the riveter job on the mainland during the war a woman might make two thousand dollars so 15 to 20 times as much money madam's and here we sometimes have tax records some of these women paid taxes during the war made upwards upwards of 150 000 a year ironically the women of hotel street might have made more money had their prices not been fixed by provost marshall frank steer this happened right after pearl harbor as hundreds of thousands of soldiers sailors and civilian workers began arriving on mass from the mainland the pre-war price for a visit with a girl had been three dollars but when raw demand overwhelmed supply the madams understandably upped their rates it didn't stand with frank steer they raised the price to five dollars a trick i removed that and pushed it back down to three dollars and madame didn't like the idea of cutting the price back but i told them all they could afford was men were only making almost 130 a month in essence steer told the women that it was their patriotic duty to keep the price at three dollars it was also an order if disobeyed steer would shut them down this presented a logistical problem for the girls with so many men as many as ten thousand a day and just two hundred women how could it work the answer was a simple formula three dollars three dollars for three minutes that's about that's about all long it took because one time i went six months without seeing a woman so i don't know it don't take you long three dollars for three minutes became the saying and the fellas became known as three-minute men but there was more some enterprising prostitute figured out a way to personally serve up to a hundred men a day in just a few hours by using several rooms at once it was called the bullpen or the bull ring each lady worked three rooms so you go in they say take your clothes off you take your clothes off and while you're taking your clothes off somebody else putting his clothes off on leaving out another room and she's making love here in the middle room so then she comes into your room finished that's the way they operated no it's not a legend it's true they had this gal and there was the five rooms around and then she operated from the center one of the guys was telling me he didn't think ever see you with any clothes on because he was just busy and it was called the bull ring and that is true that is true it sounds pretty agonizing to me actually i mean even if even if these women were making a lot of money it's not a pretty life lounging around one of the more popular lines in town i heard one of the three minute men who had been through the line come in with deep disgust some of these gals act like they think they're frozen to their jobs harry out of this carnal assembly line the money flowed and a handful of people became very rich first the property owners who rented the buildings to the madams some belong to the upper crust of hawaiian society police commissioned documents detail who they were but this was kept quiet next were the madams who ran the houses and raked in a dollar per trick they also collected room board and laundry fees from the prostitutes sometimes up to 50 dollars per girl per week uncle sam got his share too most madams paid income tax up to a half million dollars in revenue per year but the madames usually got the tax money from the girls even with all these payouts a hard-working prostitute could net about a dollar fifty per trick up to a hundred fifty dollars a day or nearly a thousand dollars a week it was three dollars so they paid in dollar bills and by the end of the day at the the brothels that have you know mountains of dollar bills that they had to then work with and some of the prostitutes decided the best thing they could do was buy property one of the neatest spare time money-making tricks i've heard about recently is engaged in by one of the girls whose full-time labors take place in a local banyo this bright little lady buys houses through an anonymous agent in uppity residential districts then she moves in and lets word of her profession be noised around the neighborhood the neighbors she tells me always band together and buy her house at a nice profit to her strikes me is a very sensible way to capitalize on your reputation harry so free enterprise reigned in the busiest red light district in the pacific but there was one more dark lair to be uncovered another scandal between the women of hotel street and the police another matter for frank steer to resolve well gene o'hara claims that the police were corrupt from head to toe the fact that the police were so intimately involved in regulating prostitution before the war suggests that they had some kind of payoff going at least on individual bases but there's not a document to prove it most of the madames well they were too too cozy with the police and this pertained mostly to graft as we call it paolo now i am not saying that the chief was paid off i have never witnessed any chief being paid off it was always down at the lower level from the captain on down that i witnessed one right after another under martial law the issue of police graft as alleged by gene o'hara became another battle in hawaii's red light war zone the prostitutes they were paying off so much to some of these lower rank officers okay and they revolted against doing that they didn't feel they had to do that the women of hotel street wanted the payoffs to end so they complained to provost marshall frank steer he went straight to chief gabrielson he had knowledge of it but he wasn't getting any of the money or what they called a hawaiian is called cumshaw well i stopped on the come show i told them if they were found doing cumshow they would be locked up frank steer was determined to keep the entire brothel system squeaky clean his rigidness included medical hygiene under steer's rule measures of protection and prophylaxis were mandatory for all service men visiting the brothels the men were not allowed to go in with a prostitute until they had a short-arm inspection and if he was all right he'd be allowed to go in with these rules regulations and inspections in place the bullpens of hotel street operated at full tilt each day from december 1941 to september 1944. [Music] for many gi's the pleasures of hotel street began at the black cat cafe a popular bar that served hawaii's unique brand of home brewed liquor five island gin which was horrible and they had a bourbon and also a whiskey that they had out there which was terrible it was strictly rock gut stuff once liquored up gi's entered the carnival that was hotel street there were shooting galleries tattoo parlors shoe shine boys souvenir stands and photo shops where gi's could get their pictures taken with hula girls you know everybody want to get picture of a beautiful hawaiian girl and uh you'd go in just so you could send pictures back home and uh all along hotel street there ever so often it'd have these photo places that you could go in and and the girls would pose with you for three years the people of hawaii tolerated this adult carnival but they could only take so much it was just a matter of time before the whole setup had to fall hotel street harry noted the first serious grumble in march 1944 ran into an ugly rumor to the effect that there is a movement afoot to close up certain of the sin centers about the city i investigated the rumor and discovered that the fly in the ointment is a man from washington he doesn't intend to do anything drastic harry the unofficial military position was to ignore the grumbling until it became a roar i ignored it until it got to the point where more than half of the people wanted to shut down the local people don't want it i told the general we've got to close them down not surprisingly the straw that broke the camel's back was probably honolulu's most flamboyant harlot gene o'hara for three long years she had literally worked her tail off she was said to have invented the bullpen and she was said to have boasted i slept with the entire u.s navy apparently she had also married a navy man around polite society she was known as mrs gene norriger o'hara allegedly made a small fortune she invested in real estate and she also bought a fancy car which she proudly drove around town o'hara did all this with open disregard to honolulu police chief william gabrielson she had accumulated her fortune by breaking his rules and publicly threw it in his face under cover and protection of the military government but in 1944 o'hara lost her protection that's when martial law came to an end and civilian government returned to hawaii while this legal process was unfolding mrs jean o'hara norager was arrested the charge was not pandering or prostitution but second-degree attempted murder she was accused of trying to run a man over with her fancy car true to her irish nature o'hara fought back while jailed she wrote a salacious name-dropping expose of prostitution in honolulu she wrote a publication called my life as a honolulu prostitute and the initial publishing of it so to speak was as a typewritten document mimeographed and pretty much sold underground and she describes very directly what her life was as a prostitute and this is a fascinating document because otherwise we wouldn't know most of this stuff gene o'hara's sordid public confession self-published and distributed in august 1944 proved too much for the good people of hawaii by that time it was involving legislators politics and everybody else said we don't need prostitution like that it is a bad name for hawaii and it just got larger and larger and larger pretty soon they passed the law and said that's it normal prostitutes the law went into effect september 20th 1944 that day the captain of the vice squad accompanied by the military police went to every brothel in the red light district and closed the doors girls still living in the houses were turned over to the provost marshal for immediate transport [Music] i loaded about 100 on the first ship that came in first transport sent them back to the mainland you could see them on the dock you know and waving a lot of guys would go by and wait wave at him saying goodbye to him and we knew that boy this was the end of the good times [Music] if truth is found in great fiction then author william bradford huey accurately chronicled the story of hotel street in his 1951 novel the revolt of mamie stover it was about a legendary honolulu harlot and her freedom fight against police rules i don't think there's any question but that the author of the original novel read gene o'hara's work and used that to write his own work about the character of mamie stover unlike her peers gene o'hara didn't leave honolulu after the brothels were shut down she was held over for trial it began after thanksgiving 1944 reporter elaine fogg covered it for the honolulu advertiser the child was the biggest attraction in town people were lined up at the courthouse uh oh before seven o'clock in the morning mostly service personnel were lined up there waiting to get in to see the trial and well she made the most of it it was like reading the society pages there were these breathless accounts of what she was wearing you know she in the afternoon she changed to a beige suit in the morning she had worn a black town dress and had rose lace inserts it was celebrity reporting and she became something that everybody was talking about someone that everybody was focusing on in truth o'hara's alleged crime was more of a fender bender than attempted murder she'd been driving with a friend and the friend's estranged husband had tried to jump in o'hara's car o'hara hit the man with her bumper while trying to get away from him he suffered no injury after a week-long trial the jury took five minutes to deliver its verdict not guilty i think she did get kind of a raw deal from the cops in in that case she was she was a likable person i i liked her a lot and she was a nice girl mrs jean o'hara norager hung around honolulu for a while even publishing a more polished version of her sordid story in pamphlet form on the cover she had copies of various press releases and what right under the name of the book practically was my byline elaine fog then o'hara vanished today she is nowhere to be found despite repeated attempts to locate her obviously she made some money obviously she got out of the whole thing but what happened to her i don't know and it would be fascinating to know what her later life was like richard fisk was in the war from beginning to end he was aboard the uss west virginia the day she was attacked at pearl harbor three and a half years later he fought at iwo jima that devastating battle put the whole war into perspective i remember on iwo jima when you're alone most of your buddies are gone you feel like nobody wants you but when you come back and you get someone to hold your hand and to caress you and and it gives you a sense that my gosh i'm still important to someone and people call us heroes but darn it we're not those girls and the mothers and they're the real heroes of this war not us we just did our job and hopefully we did it the best we knew how after the war frank steer was asked to take over the honolulu police department his response count me out he remained in the army until retirement and remained in hawaii after that he married a famous hawaiian dancer and entertainer tootsie notley honolulu police chief william a gabrielson left the police department in 1946 to take a consulting job with the police department in tokyo japan chris faria went on to become a highly decorated officer in the honolulu police department he retired in 1976 today he's active in sports programs for youths cb smith went home to illinois and married his high school sweetheart i have five kids all through college uh nine grandkids four great grand four or five great grandkids and then i don't know how many on how are you no don't have any i don't think ted chernin stayed in hawaii in the year 2000 he chronicled his memories of hotel street his candid eyewitness account is one of very few that historians have to study the era it's just not the type of thing that most people are comfortable discussing i mean sex is still not an acceptable topic even this many years later to put on television to talk about to write about everybody's interested in it but we all have to pretend that we're not the mid-pacifican eventually morphed into the army's most famous newspaper stars and stripes as for hotel street harry turns out he was actually two fellas the first harry roy berryhill wrote the column for six months then was shipped out his identity remained a mystery to most i didn't know who he was myself and i was on the staff the second harry bill gropenbacker was an apparent disciple of the first he continued the column until the end of the war whoever they were both harry's were soldiers in the u.s army both were stranded in the mid-pacific islands of hawaii and both found something fun to write about for all the men in uniform caught in the middle of a horrible war [Music] i leave all the lovely hotels to the boys who have worn the stairs down low these many years i leave all the 3.2 beer and the imitation to the gi's who don't seem to care what they drink i leave the moana hotel to the officers they had it all the time anyway i leave all of this island to those who love it but as for me i am darn anxious to see how that golden gate bridge is doing aloha friends harry

Channel: The Hawaii Theatre

Views: 55,229

Keywords: WWII, hotel, street, harry, honolulu, world, war, two, GI's, Hawaii, Theatre, Theater, Chinatown

Id: iuFdONa2ZDk

Length: 42min 36sec (2556 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 30 2020