100% found this document useful (3 votes)
15 views

Data Communications and Computer Networks A Business Users Approach 8th Edition White Solutions Manual pdf download

The document provides a comprehensive overview of local area networks (LANs), including their definitions, functions, advantages, and disadvantages. It discusses various LAN topologies, modern configurations, and the role of switches and protocols in data transmission. Additionally, it includes practical examples, review questions, and teaching tips related to LANs and their operation.

Uploaded by

haeriforisr6
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
100% found this document useful (3 votes)
15 views

Data Communications and Computer Networks A Business Users Approach 8th Edition White Solutions Manual pdf download

The document provides a comprehensive overview of local area networks (LANs), including their definitions, functions, advantages, and disadvantages. It discusses various LAN topologies, modern configurations, and the role of switches and protocols in data transmission. Additionally, it includes practical examples, review questions, and teaching tips related to LANs and their operation.

Uploaded by

haeriforisr6
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 51

Data Communications and Computer Networks A Business

Users Approach 8th Edition White Solutions Manual


download pdf

https://testbankfan.com/product/data-communications-and-computer-
networks-a-business-users-approach-8th-edition-white-solutions-manual/

Visit testbankfan.com today to download the complete set of


test banks or solution manuals!
Here are some recommended products for you. Click the link to
download, or explore more at testbankfan.com

Data Communications and Computer Networks A Business Users


Approach 8th Edition White Test Bank

https://testbankfan.com/product/data-communications-and-computer-
networks-a-business-users-approach-8th-edition-white-test-bank/

Data Communications and Computer Networks A Business Users


Approach 7th Edition White Test Bank

https://testbankfan.com/product/data-communications-and-computer-
networks-a-business-users-approach-7th-edition-white-test-bank/

Data And Computer Communications 10th Edition Stallings


Solutions Manual

https://testbankfan.com/product/data-and-computer-communications-10th-
edition-stallings-solutions-manual/

Crime Analysis with Crime Mapping 4th Edition Santos Test


Bank

https://testbankfan.com/product/crime-analysis-with-crime-mapping-4th-
edition-santos-test-bank/
Community Health Nursing in Canada 2nd Edition Stanhope
Lancaster Test Bank

https://testbankfan.com/product/community-health-nursing-in-
canada-2nd-edition-stanhope-lancaster-test-bank/

Small Animal Care and Management 4th Edition Warren


Solutions Manual

https://testbankfan.com/product/small-animal-care-and-management-4th-
edition-warren-solutions-manual/

Introduction to Management Science 10th Edition Taylor


Test Bank

https://testbankfan.com/product/introduction-to-management-
science-10th-edition-taylor-test-bank/

Essentials of Statistics 5th Edition Triola Test Bank

https://testbankfan.com/product/essentials-of-statistics-5th-edition-
triola-test-bank/

Ecology Concepts And Applications 5th Edition Molles Test


Bank

https://testbankfan.com/product/ecology-concepts-and-applications-5th-
edition-molles-test-bank/
International Business Law and Its Environment 9th Edition
Schaffer Test Bank

https://testbankfan.com/product/international-business-law-and-its-
environment-9th-edition-schaffer-test-bank/
Local Area Networks – The Basics

Chapter 7

Learning Objectives
After reading this chapter you should be able to:

• State the definition of a local area network.


• List the primary function, activities, and application areas of a local area network.
• Cite the advantages and disadvantages of local area networks.
• Identify the physical and logical local area networks.
• Specify the different medium access control techniques.
• Recognize the different IEEE 802 frame formats.
• Describe the common wired local area network systems.

Chapter Outline
1. Introduction

2. Primary Function of Local Area Networks

3. Advantages and Disadvantages of Local Area Networks

4. The First Local Area Network – The Bus/Tree

5. A More Modern LAN


a. Contention-based protocols

6. Switches
a. Isolating traffic patterns and providing multiple access
b. Full-duplex switches
c. Virtual LANs
d. Link aggregation
e. Spanning tree algorithm
f. Quality of service

7. Wired Ethernet

8. Wired Ethernet Frame Format


9. LANs In Action: A Small Office Solution

10. Summary

Lecture Notes
Introduction

A local area network (LAN) is a communication network that interconnects a variety of data
communicating devices within a small geographic area and broadcasts data at high data transfer
rates with very low error rates. Since the local area network first appeared in the 1970s, its use
has become widespread in commercial and academic environments. It would be very difficult to
imagine a collection of personal computers within a computing environment that does not
employ some form of local area network. This chapter begins by discussing the basic layouts or
topologies of the most commonly found local area networks, followed by the medium access
control protocols that allow a workstation to transmit data on the network. We will then examine
most of the common Ethernet products.

Functions of a Local Area Network

The majority of users expect a local area network to perform the following functions and provide
the following applications: file serving, database and application serving, print serving,
electronic mail, remote links, video transfers, process control and monitoring, and distributed
processing.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Local Area Networks

Local area networks have several advantages, including hardware and software sharing,
workstation survival during network failure, component and system evolution, heterogeneous
mix of hardware and software, and access to other LANs, WANs, and mainframe computers.
Disadvantages include complexity, maintenance costs, and the network is only as strong as the
weakest link.

The First Local Area Network – The Bus/Tree

The bus local area network was the first physical design when LANs became commercially
available in the late 1970s, and it essentially consists of a single cable, or bus, to which all
devices attach. Since then the bus has diminished significantly to the point of near extinction. It
is interesting to note that cable television signals are still delivered by a network bus. Thus,
understanding the bus/tee network is still important.

A More Modern LAN

The most popular configuration for a local area network is the star-wired bus. This form of LAN
should not be confused with an older technology called the star topology. Today’s modern star-
wired bus network acts like a bus but looks like a star. The logical design of operates as a bus
where one workstation can transmit to all other workstations. The physical design, however,
more resembles a star, with the hub or switch acting as the central point.

Contention-based Protocols

A medium access control protocol is part of the software that allows a workstation to place data
onto a local area network. Depending on the network’s topology, several types of protocols may
be applicable. The bottom line with all medium access control protocols is this: Since a local
area network is a broadcast network, it is imperative that only one workstation at a time be
allowed to transmit its data onto the network. In the case of a broadband local area network,
which can support multiple channels at the same time, it is imperative that only one workstation
at a time be allowed to transmit its data onto a channel on the network. There remains only one
basic category of medium access control protocol for local area networks: contention-based.

Switches

A switch is a combination of a hub and a bridge and can interconnect multiple workstations like
a hub but can also filter out frames providing a segmentation of the network. Switches can
provide a significant decrease in interconnection traffic and increase the throughput of the
interconnected networks while requiring no additional cabling or rearranging of the network
devices. Modern switches can provide full-duplex connections, virtual LANs, aggregated links,
support spanning tree algorithms, and provide quality of service levels.

Wired Ethernet

The various versions of wired Ethernet include the older 10 Mbps systems, 100 Mbps, Gigabit,
and 10 Gbps.

Wired Ethernet Frame Format

The IEEE 802 set of standards has split the data link layer into two sublayers: the medium access
control sublayer and the logical link control sublayer. The medium access control (MAC)
sublayer works more closely with the physical layer and contains a header, computer (physical)
addresses, error detection codes, and control information. The logical link control (LLC)
sublayer is primarily responsible for logical addressing and providing error control and flow
control information.
LANs In Action: A Small Office Solution

The first In Action example examines how a small business decides to incorporate a LAN into
their business solution. The business included 35 - 40 workstations with word processing,
spreadsheets, and database applications. In order to add internal e-mail, a central database
system, and print sharing, the company will consider the addition of a local area network.

Quick Quiz

1. What are the major functions of a LAN?

File and print serving, access to other LANs, WANs and mainframes, distributed processing, and
process control.

2. What are the various medium access control techniques?

Contention-based. Round robin systems have essentially disappeared.

3. What is the difference between a hub, a switch, and a router?

Hub broadcasts any input onto all outgoing lines; switch replaces a hub and provides filtering;
router interconnects a LAN with a WAN.

4. What are the basic functions of a network server?

Holds network operating system as well as application programs and data set; may also function
as a hub, switch, bridge or router.

Discussion Topics
1. Couldn’t IEEE have made a single frame format for all the forms of local area networks?

2. Are LANs a stable technology or are they changing just as quickly as other forms of
communication technologies?

3. Is Ethernet that good that it’s the predominant form of LAN? Will everything eventually be
Ethernet / CSMA/CD?

4. Will hubs be obsolete someday?

5. What are the advantages of creating virtual LANs?


Teaching Tips
1. Be sure to emphasize the difference between logical view and physical view. For example, a
star-wired bus logically acts like a bus but physically looks like a star. A star-wire ring logically
acts like a ring but physically looks like a star. A bus logically and physically is a bus.

2. The frame is the name of the package at the data link layer. It is the frame that is placed onto
the medium of the physical layer. The IEEE 802 frame formats describe the layout of the frame
and what the data looks like as it moves over a LAN. The frame addresses are the ones used to
address a NIC in a machine. This is not the address that is used to send a packet over the Internet
(that is the IP address).

3. Discuss the non-determinism of the CSMA/CD LAN and how collisions in hub-based LANs
create this characteristic. Discuss how switches and no collisions have changed things.

4. What kind of mix does your school or company have of hubs, routers, and switches? Use this
information as an example in class.

5. Take your students to one or more locations on campus and show them an actual, working hub
/ switch / router.

6. Make sure you emphasize how a switch filters out unnecessary packets.

Solutions to Review Questions


1. What is the definition of a local area network?

A communication network that interconnects a variety of data communicating devices within a


small geographic area and broadcasts data at high data transfer rates with very low error rates.

2. List the primary activities and application areas of a local area network.

File serving, print serving, connection to other networks and mainframes.

3. List the advantages and disadvantages of local area networks.

Adv: Share files and devices, intercommunication.


Disadv: Maintenance, complexity, costs.

4. What are the basic layouts of local area networks? List two advantages that each layout
has over the others.

Bus: Uses low noise coaxial cable, inexpensive taps.


Star-wired bus: Simple to interconnect, easy to add components, most popular.
Star-wired ring: Simple to interconnect and easy to add components (but no more so than star-
wired bus).

5. What is meant by a passive device?

A signal that enters is neither amplified nor regenerated. The signal is simply passed on.

6. What is meant by a bidirectional signal?

A signal that propagates in either direction on a medium.

7. What are the primary differences between baseband technology and broadband
technology?

Baseband is a signal digital signal while broadband is analog and may carry many signals.

8. What purpose does a hub serve?

The hub is a collection point for workstations.

9. What is the difference between a physical design and a logical design?

Physical is the wiring and components, logical is how the software passes the data.

10. What is a medium access control protocol?

The software that allows a workstation to insert its data onto the LAN.

11. What are the basic operating principles behind CSMA/CD?

CSMA/CD: Listen to medium, if no one transmitting, transmit. Continue to listen for collisions.
If someone is transmitting, wait.

12. What is meant by a “nondeterministic” protocol?

You cannot determine precisely when a workstation will get a chance to transmit (because of
potential collisions).

13. What does the term 100BaseT stand for?

One hundred mega-bits per second transmission over baseband (digital) signals, using twisted
pair wiring.

14. What is the difference between Fast Ethernet and regular Ethernet?

Fast Ethernet transmits at 100 Mbps while regular Ethernet transmits at 10 Mbps.
15. What are the latest 10-Gbps Ethernet standards?

10GBase-fiber, 10GBase-T, 10GBase-CS

16. What is the primary advantage of power over Ethernet? The primary disadvantage?

Primary advantage is not having to run a separate power line to power device; primary
disadvantage is making sure the switch has enough power to run PoE devices.

17. How does a transparent switch work?

Observes traffic on a LAN and creates a set of forwarding tables; filters traffic

18. What is the purpose of a virtual LAN?

To create a logical subgroup of multiple workstations and servers.

19. How does a switch encapsulate a message for transmission?

It really doesn’t encapsulate anything. Switch looks at NIC/MAC addresses and forwards
accordingly.

20. When referring to a hub or a switch, what is a port?

The port is the connection that is used to connect a workstation or another hub or switch to this
hub or switch.

21. What are the basic functions of a switch?

A switch examines a packet’s destination address and routes the packet to the appropriate
workstation.

22. How does a switch differ from a hub?

Switch examines addresses, hub does not. A switch has multiple ports and takes the place of a
hub.

23. What is cut-through architecture?

The device is passing the data packet on before it has even finished entering the device.

24. How is a full-duplex switch different from a switch?

Full duplex switch has one set of lines for receiving and one set of lines for transmitting, thus it
can do both operations at the same time.
25. What is meant by link aggregation?

The process of combining two or more links into one logical fat link.

Suggested Solutions to Exercises


1. What properties set a local area network apart from other forms of networks?

Small geographic distances using broadband transmissions.

2. Describe an example of a broadband bus system.

Cable modems, video surveillance systems, cable television.

3. Is a hub a passive device? Explain.

Not completely. A hub does regenerate a digital signal. And there may be some simple network
management functions performed in a hub.

4. Which of the Ethernet standards (10 Mbps, 100 Mbps, 1000 Mbps, 10 Gbps) allow for
twisted pair media? What are the corresponding IEEE standard names?

Currently all but 10 Gbps Ethernet can run over twisted pair.

5. If a network were described as 1000BaseT, list everything you know about that network.

CSMA/CD LAN, 1000 Mbps transmission, baseband or digital signaling, twisted pair wiring.

6. In the IEEE 802.3 frame forma, what is the PAD field used for? What is the minimum
packet size?

PAD field makes sure the frame is not mis-interpreted as a runt. Minimum packet size is 64
bytes.

7. Suppose workstation A wants to send the message HELLO to workstation B. Both


workstations are on an IEEE 802.3 local area network. Workstation A has the binary
address “1" and workstation B has the binary address “10." Show the resulting MAC
sublayer frame (in binary) that is transmitted. Don’t calculate a CRC; just make one up.

HEADER 10 1 5(data length) HELLO PAD(33 bytes) CHECKSUM

8. What is the difference between the physical representation of a star-wired ring LAN and
the logical representation?
A star-wired ring LAN physically looks like a star but acts logically like a ring. A star-wired bus
physically looks like a star but acts logically like a bus.

9. How is a hub similar to a switch? How are they different?

Not too much similar. They both physically connect into the network the same. Both forward
frames. But a switch looks at the MAC address and either forwards or drops the frame.

10. Are hubs and switches interchangeable? Explain.

Yes. But results can be quite different.

11. a. The local area network shown in Figure 7-21 has two hubs (X and Y) interconnecting
the workstations and servers. What workstations and servers will receive a copy of a
packet if the following workstations/servers transmit a message:

• Workstation 1 sends a message to workstation 3:


• Workstation 2 sends a message to Server 1:
• Server 1 sends a message to workstation 3:

All devices will receive all messages.

b. Replace hub Y with a switch. Now what workstations and servers will receive a copy of a
packet if the following workstations/servers transmit a message:

• Workstation 1 sends a message to workstation 3:


• Workstation 2 sends a message to Server 1:
• Server 1 sends a message to workstation 3:

Workstations 1, 2 and 3.
Workstations 1, 2 and the server.
Only workstation 3.

12. A transparent switch is inserted between two local area networks ABC and XYZ.
Network ABC has workstations 1, 2 and 3, and network XYZ has workstations 4, 5, and 6.
Show the contents of the two forwarding tables in the switch as the following packets are
transmitted. Both forwarding tables start off empty.

• Workstation 2 sends a packet to workstation 3.


• Workstation 2 sends a packet to workstation 5.
• Workstation 1 sends a packet to workstation 2.
• Workstation 2 sends a packet to workstation 3.
• Workstation 2 sends a packet to workstation 6.
• Workstation 6 sends a packet to workstation 3.
• Workstation 5 sends a packet to workstation 4.
• Workstation 2 sends a packet to workstation 1.
• Workstation 1 sends a packet to workstation 3.
• Workstation 1 sends a packet to workstation 5.
• Workstation 5 sends a packet to workstation 4.
• Workstation 4 sends a packet to workstation 5.

At the end:
Routing table on ABC’s port: 1, 2
Routing table on XYZ’s port: 4,5,6

13. Give an example of a situation in which a virtual LAN might be a useful tool in a
business environment. What about in an educational environment?

If you want a certain group of users to work together on a project, you might want to place them
on a virtual LAN. Likewise for school.

14. What does it mean when a switch or device is cut-through? What is the main
disadvantage of a cut-through switch? Is there a way to solve this disadvantage of a cut-
through switch without losing the advantages?

Cut-through means the beginning of the data packet is leaving the switch before the end of the
packet has entered the switch. Disadvantage is errors are propagated. Not if you want to keep it
truly cut-through.

15. Give a common business example that mimics the differences between a shared network
segment and a dedicated network segment.

Wide range of possible answers here.

16. Your company’s switch between its two networks has just died. You have a router
lying on your desk that is not currently being used. Will the router work in place of the
broken bridge? Explain.

No. Routers operate on IP addresses, while switches operate on NIC addresses.

17. A CSMA/CD network is connected to the Internet via a router. A user on the
CSMA/CD network sends an e-mail to a user on the Internet. Show how the e-mail
message is encapsulated as it leaves the CSMA/CD network, enters the router, and then
leaves the router.
Leaving the LAN:
Data
App + Data
TCP + App + Data
IP + TCP + App + Data
MAC + IP + TCP + App + Data + MAC
Entering router:
MAC + IP + TCP + App + Data + MAC
IP + TCP + App + Data

Leaving router
IP + TCP + App + Data
WAN + IP + TCP + App + Data + WAN

18. Given the following network (Figure 7-22), show how the Spanning Tree Protocol will
eliminate the cyclic path.

The protocol will probably “remove” the bottom link on the far-right switch and the bottom link
on the switch immediately to the left of the far-right switch.

Thinking Outside the Box


1. You can interconnect all cash registers into one or two centrally located switches or hubs. Cat
5e/6 twisted pair should be sufficient. If hubs/switches can’t be centrally located and cable
distance exceeds 100 meters, be careful. Might need better medium. Can also connect using
multiplexing solution from earlier chapter.

Problems 2-6: Many possible solutions here.


Random documents with unrelated
content Scribd suggests to you:
figured we knew something because we were wearing ties and
sitting down.
“What room is this?” he humbly asked.
“This is the President’s private office,” we replied. “No visitors
allowed.”
You should have seen them scram!
The number of transients who enter and leave Washington
annually is in excess of 45 million. Most of them are peasants who
shudder when they ride in an elevator and gape at an escalator. The
sessions of Congress find them in the galleries of the noisy House
and the sedate Senate. The men are negligee with firemen’s
suspenders, the women often suckle babes at their breasts while
some Demosthenes below debates a bill vital to the world.
But the residents of the Washington area are, on the whole,
remarkably well-dressed—not only the natives in Washington but the
government employes drawn from every corner of the map. It is
surprising how quickly they shed their corn-fed looks and begin to
look like Easterners and try to act like them.
One wonders where the hoards of ill-dressed, low-mannered
visitors eat and sleep.
Tourists may wander coatless through the White House and in
the legislative office buildings, but all of the better restaurants and
hotels require men to wear coats and ties at all times. This, of
course, is universal in New York, but in Chicago, horny-handed,
wilted hoi polloi are seen in lobbies of such swell hotels as the
Ambassador and Drake in shirt-sleeves.
Washingtonians are completely white-collar. Its private business
is merchandising. The service trades, such as feeding and sleeping
visitors, form its chief non-governmental activity. Before the New
Deal put a premium on alphabet soup, federal employes got miserly
wages. Washington was a poor city. Now some secretaries make as
much as $8,000 a year and Senators’ assistants drag down $10,000.
We talked to one babe, some kind of an expert in the Treasury, who
draws $15,000 a year on a fee basis. In her spare time she checks
hats in a joint which sells liquor after hours.
The average family income in Washington is the highest in any
big city in the land, despite its disproportionate Negro population.
Colored folk work for Uncle Sam at salaries equal to whites’, in many
cases get preferential treatment, and others draw liberal relief
checks. Another reason for high family income is that in so many
families husband and wife work for the government, and many who
are grounded there also hold outside jobs, after hours. This practice
is permitted in many departments. Even members of the
Metropolitan Police are allowed to accept outside employment after
their eight-hour day. Many drive taxies or are chauffeurs.
The per capita income in Washington is $1820, compared with
the national average of $1330. Even rich New York is second to
Washington with $1758.
Washingtonians file more income-tax returns per capita than do
any other Americans. More than two-thirds of the homes in the
District are worth more than $12,000. The city has the highest retail
sales per capita on earth. Government employes are paid regularly
by a boss who never goes broke—though that isn’t the fault of the
politicians.
Added wealth streams constantly into the city, from the
cornucopias of lobbyists with no-limit expense accounts, tourists and
representatives of foreign governments who let loose a few francs,
shillings or lire before tapping our tills.
Here we have a city which, if mental cripples who believe in
planned economies were correct, should be a happy place, free of
crime and vice. Washington is rich and almost everyone in it is
insured against want for life. Yet it has that apex rate of crime. The
waterfront of Marseilles, the alleys of Singapore’s Chinatown, the
sailor’s deadfalls of Port Said have nothing on it. Washington makes
even Chicago look good. And that’s been going on since Abigail
Adams hung the family wash in the backyard of the then unfinished
White House—and shuddered lest the President’s drawers be stolen.
In the early years of the Republic, grifters and grafters,
highwaymen and conmen, pimps and prostitutes flocked into the
city. Instead of being a community where women greatly
outnumbered men, as they do today, early Washington contained
almost entirely males. The first Congressmen and early office-
holders were easy pickings for the fancy girls and their fancy men,
who arrived a jump ahead of the lobbyists. Lonesome men whiled
their time at cards and dice, and ever since then Washington has
been a gamblers’ garden.
Foreigners and many American political philosophers say one
great fault of our American system is our form of municipal
government. They point out the astounding crime, legal laxity and
municipal deviltry in this country where we elect our local
governments directly and give them great power, whereas most
foreign countries are ruled from above, with cities and provinces
allowed minimum authority.
Well, Washington is ruled from above. It has no votes, no county
chairmen, no campaign funds to be raised, no favors to be returned.
It is policed by a constabulary appointed directly by the United
States government and paid from the public treasury of the United
States. Its judges are appointed by the President with the consent of
the Senate, and all but municipal court judges serve for life. Its
District Attorney is chosen by the President, as are its city
commissioners, and through them all public District officials.
There is no chance for a neighborhood gang boss to establish
himself through floaters and colonized flotsam. Yet there are
neighborhood bosses. There is influence. Judges and police are
bought. Washington has the blackest record of any city in the
country on the F.B.I. ledger of reported crimes. Black is the color of
its crime, too, as will be shown. The proportion of Negro crime to
white is almost eight to one.
Another reason for Washington’s defiance of the law which is
made in Washington is that, except for ogling tourists, everyone who
comes comes to get. To get jobs, contracts, favors, pardons,
commissions, and sometimes social preferment. This acquisitive
horde is not interested in the city. Toward local public affairs there is
lethargy of mind, spirit and body, nothing conducive to enterprise or
local pride.
This potpourri of human beings on the make remained within
bounds until the first World War. There was room for all. As every
schoolboy knows, the original grant of land from the states of
Maryland and Virginia for the national capital was a square, ten miles
wide. This proved too big and the Virginia part was receded more
than a hundred years ago. The remaining area, all in Maryland, was
ample for the needs of the city until overnight, in 1917, it changed
from a country town to a madhouse in which all the residents are
inmates. There was some respite during the 1920’s, but since the
coming of the New Deal, Washington burst its pants and overflowed
back into Virginia and across into Maryland.
As with other large cities, the 1950 census returns found the
rate of growth of Washington suburbs far outstripping the parent. At
this writing there are about 800,000 people in the city limits and
750,000 in the satellite suburbs of Virginia and Maryland. The
percentage of Negroes is higher than it is in Mississippi.
Seniority rules in the Congress, which permit one-party Southern
Senators and Representatives to control more than their share of
committees, account for continuance of its Dixie slant. So
Washingtonians talk like Southerners. Even the Oregonians and
down-Easters fall into the liquid drawl after a few years in the
capital. With the dulcet Dixie dialect comes the Southern attitude
toward the Negro. Fiery FEPCers from New York, after a couple of
years’ indoctrination, wink in private over the “tolerance” they sell in
public. As Negroes move in the whites flee out.
As residents of Virginia and Maryland, these automatically gain
the votes they surrendered or never had. Though still employed in
Washington, they lose all interest in its municipal affairs. They live,
vote, pay taxes, send their children to school and join churches
beyond the borders.
And, as the Negro immigrates and propagates, Washington’s
chance of ever getting the vote dwindles. Even Northern
congressmen, with huge Negro voting constituencies at home, won’t
burn their hands with such legislation. They declare for the principles
of home rule, sign petitions to withdraw bottled-up home-rule bills
from committees, then secretly withdraw their names.
As these pages unfold you will get a picture of how more than
1,500,000 people live. Few would stand for some of Washington’s
nauseating conditions in their own towns. Yet they take them here
complacently. Congressmen, the lords of the city, shrug at what
would throw them out of office if the good burghers in Beloit or
Boonetown suspected—and cared.
Washington has a heritage of “everybody’s business is nobody’s
business.” But the stimulation which sparks its evils is different,
though the result is the same.
Of old, Congress didn’t worry about local crime because all the
people could do about it was write letters to the papers. But now,
since crime is nationally syndicated, some legislators actively protect
Washington crime, because it means more funds back in their
bailiwicks from the branches of the swelling Syndicate of silk-lined
racketeers who are allied with Washington’s criminals.
So this is the nation’s capital: with its panderers and prostitutes;
gamblers and gunmen; conmen and Congressmen; lawmakers and
law-breakers; fairies and Fair Dealers.
It is a city of moods, even drearier when Congress is away
campaigning or vacationing; yet it turns electric when something big
is about to happen.
It is a city of the wistful little people with adding-machine minds.
Over all, a feeling of fear pervades it. People become
conditioned to talking in whispers. Senators will walk you to the
middle of the room, then mumble, even when what they have to say
is inconsequential. The main indoor sport is conspiracy.
We give you Washington: not the city of statesmen, but the
stateless city.
2. “GORGEOUS” GEORGETOWN

WE SHALL begin this catalog of places with Georgetown,


by far the oldest in the city.
Not all who reside in Georgetown are rich, red or queer, nor do
all Washington millionaires, Commies and/or fags dwell in
Georgetown.
But if you know anyone who fulfills at least two of the foregoing
three qualifications don’t take odds he doesn’t prance behind Early
American shutters in a reconditioned stable or slave-pen in this
unique city within a city.
Georgetown was a thriving Colonial village when the rest of the
District was swampland. It was included in the District of Columbia
from the time of the original grant, but Georgetown remained an
independent municipality until 1895.
If you like that kind of stuff, Georgetown, which lies in the
extreme NW section of the city, has a charm all its own.
Some people like the smell of dead fish in Provincetown. Others
like to climb up four flights of stairs to ratty garrets in Greenwich
Village. Georgetown is quaint that way, too. Now all this is to be
preserved for posterity forever, through an act of Congress setting
up a commission to keep it looking the way it is under penalty of the
law for modernizing anything in the community without the
permission of some bureaucrat.
Until twenty years ago, Georgetown was just another rundown
backwash in a great city. Most of its residents were Negroes. Most of
its real estate wasn’t even good enough for Southern Negroes, and
don’t forget that a Southern Negro is forced to live almost anywhere.
New Dealers and the bright young braintrusters from Harvard
reversed what seems to be a foreordained rule in every city in the
country. In other words, the whites drove the Negroes out—as many
as they could—and took over for themselves what was practically a
blighted area.
This is how it came about: When Washington was suddenly
flooded with a horde of crackpots from the campuses, Communists,
ballet-dancers and economic planners, there was no place for them
to live. They abhorred the modern service apartments. These people
were “intellectual.” The women wore flat-heeled shoes and batik
blouses, and went in for New Thought. The men, if you could call
some of them that, wore their hair longer than we do, read
advanced literature, and talked about the joys of collectivism,
though all of them were so individual they couldn’t bear to live in
skyscrapers.
Most of these people had dough. The others got good
government jobs, became “contact men” or spoke at meetings and
wrote for publications sponsored by rich left-wingers to provide
automobiles and other luxuries for the needier pinks.
Washington had nothing like New York’s Greenwich Village, but
in the early days of the New Deal Mrs. Roosevelt herself, during one
of the fleeting moments she was in Washington, “discovered”
Georgetown and conceived it as a genteel bohemian community
where her sandal-shod friends could find congenial company. She
wouldn’t allow the WPA to alter anything though sewage comes up
from the river. Georgetown is overrun with rats, which frequently
chew up Negro infants.
Ancient wooden houses, much the worse for the wear of
centuries, which could have been bought lot-and-all for $2,500 in
the ’20s, skyrocketed as it became “smart” for society to move to
Georgetown. Some properties are now worth twenty times what
they brought twenty years ago, though terrible odors emanate from
a nearby slaughter house.
Following the discovery of Georgetown, the truly gentle Negroes
who had lived there, some for a hundred years or more, were driven
out. Few owned their homes. Into rickety structures which had once
housed as many as ten Negro families—seventy-five people—moved
one millionaire left-wing carpetbagger and his wife. With
improvements, naturally. Equality is okay to talk about. Hundreds of
thousands of dollars were spent on some of these homes,
modernizing, beautifying, disinfecting and furnishing them. Now they
have house-and-garden tours for visiting Kiwanians.
Not all the Negroes could be ousted. Even today, Georgetown
has a considerable colored population, though it is the only part of
Washington where there are fewer Negroes than there were twenty
years ago. Those who remain live in shanties so undesirable that no
rich white fairies can be found who want to turn them into
something gay. In fact, there’s a saying in Georgetown now that
you’re not “smart” unless darkies live next door to you.
The sight-seeing buses point out historic Prospect House, now
used by the government for visiting notables, but they don’t show
you the tumble-down Negro shacks behind it.
One of Georgetown’s most distinguished residents is Dean
Acheson. Emmitt Warring, king of Washington’s gamblers, about
whom more will be found in succeeding chapters, is in business
nearby.
Warring is the kingfish of Georgetown. He controls its local police
precinct as well as its local crime. As will be shown, he has direct
affiliations with the national underworld syndicate.
Eleanor Roosevelt gave Georgetown that first big impetus after
her son, Jimmy, who didn’t “got it” in California, moved across the
street from the old Imperial Russian Embassy, in the 3200 block of Q
Street. It looked like good business to build up the area.
Soon the section filled up with all manner of strange people.
Many of these were buddies of the First Lady. We have seen a letter
she wrote to one Ben Grey, in which she pats such types on the
head.
One of the queerest sights visible anywhere is the one from a
window on the second floor of Dean Acheson’s quaint home at 2805
P Street. It faces the 28th Street side over a back yard. The
Secretary’s personal lavatory faces that way. His mind apparently
weighted by cosmos-shaking affairs of state, the secretary forgets to
draw down the shade.
It is on the second floor, and Acheson doesn’t know he can be
seen. This is to tip him off to what the whole neighborhood knows,
first-hand and not confidential.
In the next block lives Justice Frankfurter. He and Acheson, fresh
air fiends, walk to town every morning.
Another neighbor is Myrna Loy, out of films while on a special
mission for the State Department. She is developing a “new type
propaganda campaign.” Well, she played enough spy roles in the
movies.
Georgetown is also the home of Georgetown University, oldest
and largest Catholic school in the country. The broad acres of its
beautiful campus were undoubtedly originally responsible for
preserving the historic buildings of the community from the onward
rush of modernity which swept over the rest of Washington.
But also in Georgetown is the Hideaway Club. It is known in local
parlance as a bottle club. A bottle club is a resort which gets around
the law which provides that all liquor dispensaries shall close at 2
a.m. Despite a murder at the Hideaway and a recent Congressional
investigation of such enterprises and a flurry of activity by the United
States Attorney, there are still at least 500 of these unlicensed
places, some say more, in the District, a subject which will be
covered in detail hereinafter.
The area’s favorite gathering place is Martin’s Bar on Wisconsin
Avenue where New Deal and Fair Deal policy is made. It was the
hangout of Tommy the Cork and Harry Hopkins, who changed the
world over bottles while Georgetown students roistered around
them.
Georgetown is relatively free of street-walkers who plague every
other section. That is because there are no hotels and few
transients. But what it lacks in ambulent magdalens is more than
made up for by homosexuals of both indeterminate sexes. It seems
that nonconformity in politics is often the handmaiden of the same
proclivities in sex. Among the thousands known in the capital, a
goodly proportion live in the storied ancient dwellings of the area.
The fun that goes on in some is beyond words and was even worse
when the staffs of the embassies of some of the Iron Curtain
countries still found it feasible to travel about in society.
Some Washington policemen will tell you with a shrug of despair
of the times the patrol wagons pulled up at particular homes as a
result of complaints from neighbors, only to find the prancing
participants in the unspeakable parties were Administration
untouchables or diplomats sacred from interference.
Which, when you consider that Emmitt Warring also seems to be
immune, makes Georgetown seem like a wonderful place to live in—
nobody ever gets pinched there.
3. NW COULD MEAN NOWHERE

THE FIRST question asked by members of the new


Seventh Congress, after taking the oath in the draughty and
unfinished Capitol in 1801, was “where is a saloon with dames?” or
the early 19th century equivalent thereof.
The chief usher escorted them to the steps on the Hill, which
overlooked what there then was of the young city, a collection of
boxes resembling nothing so much as a rude Oklahoma oil-boom
town on a rainy day, and pointed northwest. “There,” he replied.
Ever since that historic moment, anything that matters and much
that doesn’t is in that part of the city known by its postal address as
“NW.”
“North West” is the only section of Washington which counts. It
is the capital of the capital. NW is the works.
When Major Pierre L’Enfant accepted the commission to plan the
capital, he went Caesar’s Gaul one better and divided it into four
parts. These he laid out like spokes around a wheel, with the hub
“The Hill,” on which he built the Capitol. He named each section
after compounded cardinal points of the compass, NW, SW, NE and
SE. The others you can throw into the garbage-can—NW is the city.
Other municipalities have distinctive sectors. In Washington
everything, the rialto, marts of commerce, homes of the wealthy, are
piled into this one corner, where they rub shoulders with the lowly,
the dirty and the wicked, not to overlook Washington’s No. 1
problem, the colored.
Washington’s Main Drag is F St. if you could call it such. The
crossing at 14th Street is its Times Square, its State and Madison—
an insult to both. Most of the 1,500,000 who live in the District and
environs, plus a half-million tourists, pass it daily.
Here are the movie palaces, but its sole legit theatre is almost a
mile away. Its best-known restaurants are around the corner. Any
night, Saturday included, the heart of America’s heart is dark and
quiet.
Washington’s Main Stem is somewhat more somnolent than
those of most villages. Don’t get us wrong—things do happen after
dark. But—those who do them don’t want them seen.
When one seeks the reason for the empty dreariness of
Washington at night, where trees swaying in the wind often are the
only living things, he is told what seems the obvious—Washington is
a town of early-to-bedders who do not go in for night life. That is
not true. Washington has hundreds of sneak-ins that remain open all
night. Your hardy reporters almost collapsed before they could
complete this assignment—to visit every place openly or
surreptitiously breaking the law. Almost all are in NW, which should
have made it easier.
After-dark Washington is the way it is because it has the
smalltown mentality. People do their sinning in homes and hotels or
in pseudo-private “clubs.”
Now let’s get on with NW.
Most Congressmen live there. That’s a break for all except cab-
drivers. Hack rates are regulated by zones. Passengers pay the same
fee regardless of where they ride to in a zone, with a surcharge for
each extra zone the cab enters. The Congressmen, who make all the
District’s laws, talked the Public Utilities Commission into
gerrymandering the zone map in such a way it ended up allowing
them and you and us to go almost anywhere from the Capitol into
NW for a minimum fee. No one wants to go elsewhere, so it’s a fine
deal for all but the cab-jockies.
All the big hotels are in NW. That includes everything from
popular-priced tourist fall-ins near the station to the luxury hostelries
like the Mayflower, Statler, Carlton and the residential ones in the
outskirts, such as the Shoreham and Wardman Park. And the
assignation hotels are downtown, smack in the middle of everything,
very snug.
Perhaps the most famous hotel is the Willard, at F and 14th
Streets. They call it the New Willard now, though the new section
was built during Teddy Roosevelt’s first administration. For almost a
century, VIP’s from all over the world stayed here. Julia Ward Howe
wrote the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” in one of its rooms. Now its
cocktail bar is a hangout for lonesome government girls and other
fancy-free women, best time after 5 p.m.
The new and modern Ambassador Hotel is at 14th and K, one of
the many holdings of Morris Cafritz, husband of Washington’s “first”
hostess since the elevation to the Diplomatic Corps of Mme. Mesta.
The High Hat Cocktail Lounge in the Ambassador is a gay drinking
spot, much patronized by the lonesome of either sex because of its
informality. When we asked a cab-driver where we could meet a
“friend” he directed us to the Ambassador. We sat there five
minutes, not long enough to attract a waiter’s eye. But the eyes of
two blonde things, young and not bad-looking, were quicker. One
asked us to buy her a drink. We did.
Before long we were old friends. They told us they’d spend the
evening with us for $20 each. We said we had to catch a train. They
thought we meant the price was too high and reduced it to $10—“if
we had a place to take them.”
We returned to the Ambassador half a dozen times, and all
except once we were approached. That time it was too late, about 1
a.m., and all the volunteers had already booked themselves. We also
saw other stags talk to girls with whom they hadn’t come in, but
with whom they left.
Another cash-and-carry supermarket is the gracious old Peacock
Alley of the Willard Hotel, a broad indoor parade where once world
statesmen sat and sized up famed society beauties.
These hotels are not unique. All of Washington’s respectable inns
and cocktail bars are plagued with loose ladies; there’s nothing much
can be done about it, because the muddled situation of District law
and law enforcement makes it impossible for the managements to
bounce that sort of undesirables—if they are so regarded. The cops
would refuse to eject them for fear of suits; the hotels and saloon-
keepers are subject to the same liability. We saw hookers, or busy
beavers that looked remarkably like them, speak to strangers in the
cocktail lounges of the Statler and Carlton, and we were approached
by one in the former place.
The hotel situation is never static. Comes war or emergency and
the town is always short on rooms. In times of depression or
recession there are too many rooms. When your authors began their
regular trips to the city in search of material for this book,
Washington had not started to take on its Sino-Korean war dress.
We and our money were welcomed with open arms. We spent
lavishly throughout the summer at the Carlton, a haunt of New Deal
and Labor aristocracy, where John L. Lewis and White House
assistant David K. Niles maintain luxurious suites.
As the summer wore on, Washington filled up with hoards of
businessmen, manufacturers’ agents, lawyers, fixers and other
finaglers. They had unlimited expense accounts. Remembering what
happened in Washington during the years of World War II, some
leased permanent suites. Others slipped large and welcome tips to
room clerks and executives. Then reservations at the Carlton for
mere confidential reporters were bitched up. They were
unceremoniously moved from room to room, given second-class
accommodations, notified they must get out; so better spenders
could get in—and our bills had been running to $100 a day.
The Shoreham asked permanent guests to leave. Included were
many Congressmen who had been living there for years. Some had
voted against rent control in the District. But now they were
Displaced Persons.
It was no secret that among the permanents who were in
danger of being forced to go house-hunting were several statuesque
blondes whose rents were being paid by high officials, diplomats and
senators. The swank Shoreham, one of the most beautiful hotels
anywhere, has figured prominently in police court and divorce court
news more than once.
Washingtonians smile when they wonder if the Shoreham’s
managing director, Harry Bralove, asked his pretty ex-wife to find
other lodgings, too. There was a lot of gossip when she and Bralove
were divorced. Once, when unable to meet an overdue $900 alimony
bill, he convinced the court he no longer had an interest in the hotel,
merely worked for it. Meanwhile he and his former spouse renewed
their sentiments, but figured they’d be happier as friends than as
man and wife. So the former Mrs. Bralove moved into the Shoreham.
A very pleasant exception to the general rule about kicking the
guests around is the Mayflower Hotel, after three decades, still the
choice of Washington’s smart set. In the wing devoted to private
apartments are housed some of the most prominent people in the
nation and they haven’t been moved to enable the management to
snag profiteer revenue.
What there is of show business is in NW. That is little. Yet it was
not always so. In the early days Washington was a hell of a show
town. There was gaiety then. Long before the streets were paved,
dignitaries attended the theatres and dined sumptuously at famed
eating spots.
The theatre figures prominently in Washington’s history. The
martyred Lincoln was slain in Ford’s Theatre, now a museum.
President Wilson was an incurable vaudeville fan with the real habit,
attending the same theatre every week on the same night. He used
to slip out of the White House to Keith’s, a block away, where the
management held a seat in the back row, where he tried to be
unobserved. Washington had top vaudeville before the demise of
that medium. Today Keith’s is a grind movie house. The only thing
resembling variety is at Loew’s Capitol, where four or five modest
acts are sandwiched in between runs of a picture.
Washington’s sole remaining legit theatre was the National. Once
Washington was a hot road show town. Many New York hits-to-be
had their tryouts there. Successes played week stands after leaving
Broadway. Washington had minor population but supported many
houses. Its residents were avid show-goers. The National gave up
the ghost and turned into a movie house because of the race
problem. Few Washington theatres permit colored patronage,
though Negro theatres allow whites.
The National was restricted against colored attendance in its
lease. A couple of years ago, a race-conscious Actor’s Equity
Association, steamed up by Eleanor Roosevelt and her “we’re-all-
brothers” group resolved not to permit its members to appear in any
theatre in Washington while racial discrimination was enforced.
Equity did not issue the same edict against theatres in the rest of
the South, all of which are so restricted. The operators of the
National were bound by the terms of their lease and could not
change their policy. Rather than risk a long, costly fight, they
converted the house into a cinema. Meanwhile, for two years, the
capital of the world’s most literate nation was barren of all living
drama.
Within the last few months, the owners of the Gayety Burlesque,
on 9th Street, which is Washington’s Skid Row, converted it into a
legit house. The Gayety had offered pretty low entertainment,
because practically anything is permitted. But trade wasn’t too good.
The cagey operators, not hampered by contractual restrictions,
switched. To accent the fact that they were going all out on this new
line of race tolerance, they booked as their first attraction a show
with a mixed cast, “The Barrier” starring Lawrence Tibbett and
Muriel Rahn, who is a Negro. Its theme was miscegenation in the
Deep South.
The opening in the old home of burlesque, surrounded by
shooting galleries, tattoo artists and cheap sex movies for “adults
only,” was attended by the top layer of Washington New Deal and
left-wing weepers and critics for the Negro press and the Daily
Worker. The show was panned by the other reviewers. It closed
prematurely, after five days. Producer Michael Meyerberg said, “We
shouldn’t have opened in Washington.”
After that, the theatre limped along, sometimes lighted,
sometimes dark. The Negroes showed no zeal to patronize it. The
whites passed it up. Now the Theatre Guild is sending shows there,
subsidized by highbrow subscribers.
Many who want to see good drama go to New York. There’s
usually a Broadway hit playing in Baltimore.
During the summer, attempts are made to present road shows of
New York companies on The Water Barge, in the Potomac, and in
some neighborhood playhouses. Regardless of the success of some
individual play, Washington can be written off as a theatre town.
Despite all the hardships, there are always optimists, especially
when they can get their names in the papers. One of these is
Congressman Klein, of New York, a screaming New Dealer, who
represents one of Gotham’s most poverty-stricken neighborhoods.
Klein is trying to get the government to spend $5,000,000 for a
national theatre. Naturally it is to be named the Franklin D.
Roosevelt Memorial Theatre. Some of his constituents need shoes,
but F.D.R. needs another monument. His bill forbids barring any
person from appearing in it or attending it because of race, creed,
color, religion or national origin. It would be conducted by the
Secretary of the Interior, who at this writing is that well-known
showman, Oscar L. Chapman, of Denver, Colorado, who is a co-
founder of the Spanish-American League to Combat Exploitation of
Mexican Workers in the United States, an arty cause, no doubt.
For most of the area’s 1,500,000 permanents and 500,000
transients, movies offer the big night out. How much longer, in the
face of TV competition, remains to be seen. At the present time,
attendance runs 100,000 a day. Most film houses in white
neighborhoods are restricted to whites. Negroes have their own.
One of the most famous is the Howard, in the NW colored section,
which often augments its shows with top-flight Negro stage shows.
At such times the place is apt to draw more white customers than
black. Washington has its hep-cats. Many of the younger social and
diplomatic sets get a bang out of hot licks. These people who
willingly sit next to dark folks in the Howard refuse to permit them in
their own theatres or restaurants. That’s typical Washington
thinking.
The high-class shopping street—the Fifth Avenue—is Connecticut
Avenue, running from La Fayette Square, past the Mayflower Hotel,
and out into Cleveland Parkway, past residential hotels and swank
apartments.
There are plenty of first-grade shops here, with chic imports,
expensive antiques and other gewgaws to lure the feminine dollar.
Despite the great wealth of the District and the presence of an
international set, all is not pheasant for these merchants. New York
and the magnet of its style-conscious stores is too near. Even
Baltimore gets some of the trade which can’t find enough smart
things at home. But a curious reverse process has been taking place
in recent years. Whereas many Washingtonians travel to New York
to shop and to dine, a couple of Washington’s best-known
institutions have been reaching out and taking over some of the
same places in New York which Washingtonians travel 225 miles to
patronize.
Garfinckel’s is Washington’s high-fashion department store. A
couple of years ago, its proprietors bought out the ancient and
aristocratic New York men’s furnishing house, Brooks Brothers.
Within a few months, the Garfinckel octopus reached out and
gobbled up one of New York’s oldest and best-known Fifth Avenue
stores, de Pinna.
While this was going on, a couple of smart Swedes, who had
made a tremendous success at Olmsted’s Restaurant, a popular
eatery with fine food in the NW business section, bought New York’s
oldest and most famous restaurant, Luchow’s, on 14th Street, one of
the last places left in the country where dining is still a fine art.
Reference to the appendix will show many other Washington
eating places, some good, some bad and not all recommended, but
most of them are in NW.
One of the best-known and best is Harvey’s, on Connecticut
Avenue, near the Mayflower. This is J. Edgar Hoover’s nightly eating
place when he is in Washington. Like most Washington restaurants,
Harvey’s has been in business long. It specializes in sea food. The
room does a sell-out business and it’s almost impossible to get a
table at the height of the dining hour. Service by ancient Negro
waiters is slow. Best time to eat is after 9, because most
Washingtonians dine early; 6 o’clock is the standard time. Many start
at 5. Those are the homely habits. Some restaurants close at 8, and
a few at 7.
Julius Lully, who owns Harvey’s, is the butt of J. Edgar’s robust
sense of humor. Once Hoover had a batch of wanted-fugitive-
identification “fliers” made up showing Lully in his World War I
private’s uniform. He had them nailed up on posts for miles around
Lully’s country place. When the hick sheriff locked up the
restaurateur, who sputtered and gave Hoover as a reference, J.
Edgar said he had never heard of him.
On another occasion Hoover sent a letter, purporting to be from
Oscar of the Waldorf, threatening to sue Harvey’s for appropriating
his salad dressing. Lully hired a lawyer and told him to offer the
Waldorf $2,500, but J. Edgar advised him it wouldn’t be enough.
The Occidental is hoary with age and legend. Pictures of
presidents, cabinet officers and generals cover the walls. This was
our favorite, but the Occidental has succumbed to the new boom. An
officious head waiter, with a typical Prussian attitude toward
customers, lined us up like prisoners of war, then heaped
contemptuous abuse when we dared question his excellency about
the possible chances of being seated and served. Washingtonians
take it. They are used to being kicked around. Senators or cabinet
officers they may be, but at heart most are grass-rooters overawed
by the big city. We didn’t take it. We walked out. We are used to
consideration and hospitality, spoiled by the good manners of
heartless Manhattan.
When Major L’Enfant plotted the city, he provided that the
streets should run in three directions, north and south, east and
west, and diagonal. Where the diagonal avenues, which are named
after states, cross the rectangular streets, generally numbered or
alphabetically lettered, there are wide circles or broad squares. One
of those is Lafayette Park, known to all Americans because it is the
square in front of the White House. Here, less than a hundred yards
from the President’s front door, is one of the most sordid spots in the
world. At night, under the heroic equestrian statue of Andrew
Jackson and in the shadow of the foliage of overhanging trees, there
is a constant and continuous soprano symphony of homosexual
twittering.
The President knows about it; he reads the papers. The police
superintendent knows about it. Congress, which governs the District,
knows about it. Recently, the secretary of a Senator was arrested
there, charged with indescribable misbehavior. He was acquitted by
a jury. There are few convictions.
Lafayette Park is one of the showplaces of NW. Another is
Thomas Circle. Years ago, the circle and all the streets leading into it
were lined with mansions. Now you can pull up in your car in front of
a newsdealer there, at any hour, day or night, and place a bet on a
horse, buy a deck of junk or get a girl—$10 asking price, $5 if you
put up a struggle.
Another NW cynosure was Dupont Circle. It was social. There
were the homes of such as Princess Eleanor Patterson. Now they’ve
been razed or cut up because of taxes, death benefits, estate
distributions and the high cost of maintenance. Those that still stand
have been turned into embassies, headquarters of national
organizations, and rooming-houses in between. One triangular
corner was torn down to make way for the Dupont Plaza, a glassy
and glossy apartment hotel, swell for lobbyists, flashy girls and 5-
percenters. What happened to Dupont Circle hit all the way out the
length of 16th Street, which runs off from the White House, and
Massachusetts Avenue. These two long, broad avenues run through
all NW. They are the “Ambassadors’ Rows.”
Of the sixty embassies, legations and chancelleries, almost all
are on one or the other. Both have a liberal sprinkling of organization
headquarters, such as unions, trade associations and eleemosynary
institutions, with the ever-present furnished-room coops and
apartment hotels.
The complexion of NW is changing, growing darker. The area
always had a large Negro section. There are no racial zoning laws.
Restrictive covenants cannot be enforced. There are no longer any
racial boundary lines and some people think that is dandy. They
have been in the driver’s seat since 1933.
You will find colored people living within a half a block of an
embassy or around the corner from a new luxury apartment house.
There is no reason why this should not be so, but the property-
owners and the white residents do not agree. As the process
continues, NW grows less swank and less desirable, while many of
its rich residents move into Maryland suburbs such as Chevy Chase
and across the river into Virginia.
The Negroes and other specific phenomena of NW will be
considered in specialized chapters.
4. NOT-SO-TENDER TENDERLOIN

THE DISTRICT’S “red-light” region may be the largest


on earth. That is because almost all of it is such, neither restricted
by law, custom nor local habit to a particular part of town. But, more
than any other, NW is the Tenderloin, in some ways more blatantly
open than ever was New York’s infamous Satan’s Circus or Chicago’s
22nd Street.
Of all places, you would think Washington would be the last
location a practical, professional prostitute would pick to pitch her
camp. With so many more women than men, so many dames
lonesome and far from home, on the eager upbeat for a meal, a
drink or even a kind word, you’d figure mathematically,
psychologically and pathologically that this would be a ghost town
for the trollops.
Part of such traffic is always supported by tourists and strays.
Washington has a large and constant visitation of these, but many
other places have more and have virtually expunged street-walkers
and entirely eradicated the sweatshops where such operators do
homework. Yet in Washington they flourish, though they are
supposedly verboten, and the Weary Winnies parade the pavements.
It made a couple of graying Chicago boys homesick for their
childhood.
Lorelles—as the Parisians call them—are in the Washington
tradition, claim the capital by long-established squatters’ rights,
almost by right of discovery.
The same stagecoaches which carried the first Congressmen to
Washington 150 years ago brought also the first whores. They and
their descendants have been here ever since, an integral, important
segment of the population.
For the first 113 years they were protected by law. Segregation
in the District was expunged by act of Congress in 1913, in the first
year of the presidency of the school-teacher from Princeton.
In the early days of the Republic, whoring flourished as an
essential and honorable trade. Transportation facilities were so
primitive, many Congressmen and officials from backwoods sections
had trouble getting to Washington themselves and would have found
it impossible to transport their women. Trollops became an adjunct
to legislation. Without them, it is doubtful whether a quorum could
have been maintained for transaction of public business, which
might not have been a bad idea sometimes.
The last compound of the trade was in what is now the Federal
Triangle, between Pennsylvania Avenue and the Mall, from 10th to
15th Streets. The Willard Hotel, the Treasury and the White House
are nearby—which made it convenient for all concerned.
In the Civil War, General Joe Hooker’s division was encamped in
Washington to protect the President. It was bivouacked in what later
became the official restricted district. One story, accounting for the
term “hooker,” now worldwide, ascribes its origin to the habitat of
local prostitutes, who gathered near the camp to pick up soldiers
and remained after the soldiers left. When local blades went out for
a night of hell-raising they said, “Let’s go over to Hooker’s.”
Another version ascribes the origin of the word to the Hook, in
Baltimore, the town’s sailor section, where tarts picked up sea-faring
men.
In the absence of a determination by H. L. Mencken, we will
remain neutral as to the competing claims of the two neighboring
cities, except to say that the residents of either ought to know what
they’re talking about, because there are so many hookers in both.
Leaving out all occasionals in Washington who do it for fun or
because of temporary monetary embarrassment, and counting only
pros—those who have no other form of livelihood, some say there
are at least ten thousand floozies actively in full-time business at this
moment. We were solicited by half that number.
Most of these girls work as loners on the streets or in the
cocktail lounges and bring their earnings back to their pimps. Some
function through call services, via a headquarters phone-number, a
cocktail lounge bartender, or a switchboard operator in a cheap
hotel.
Many are tough and predatory. A 20-year old youth was stabbed
and slashed after he turned down a street-corner proposition at
Third and E. He fled when the woman drew a knife, but two colored
men caught up to him and gave him the business.
Until recently, Washington was loaded with whore-houses, was
in fact the last large city where this ancient and storied institution
existed.
That’s because it was necessary to take care of the transients
and the male government employes and officials away from their
wives. The war and the post-war housing shortage virtually put the
final kibosh on such dives here as it had done a few years earlier in
other towns. Property became so valuable, landlords could do better
by running it legitimately.
We spoke to a police captain who told us that obstacles were no
longer placed in the way of the vice squad when it came to raiding
these premises; but it is impossible to keep the girls off the streets
and out of the hotel lobbies and cocktail lounges where they had
transferred their business addresses.
Under the law of Washington, as well as all other municipalities,
vice-squad detectives are forbidden to partake personally of
forbidden wares while on raids. If they do, they have no case, for a
prosecution then becomes “entrapment” and they are agents
provocateurs.
During a recent raid, an operational plan was drawn up in
advance. One of the cops, the handsomest, made the pick-up, and
his confederates were supposed to crash in five minutes after he
entered the room, which would give both time to disrobe, and that is
enough evidence to make a collar.
But the raiders were late. The honest, hardworking cop went
through the motions of undressing. Finally he had to get in bed with
the wench; 15, 20, 30 minutes passed, and still no raiding party. He
couldn’t stall her off any more.
By the time the doors were busted in, the evidence was null and
void.
The figures in this chapter refer solely to white tarts. The black
sisters are mentioned in another one.
Health records indicate that 50 percent of Washington’s white
street-walkers are infected with venereal disease. With the colored
ones, it goes up to 99 percent.
Many of the white women who solicit on the streets are young;
it takes some time for these girls, fresh off the farms, to get the
nerve to hustle in high-class hotels. Police have arrested girls 14, 15
and 16 hawking their bodies on the public highways. Many of these
children, who should be home doing their schoolwork, left the hills
when they were 12, after first having been raped by a local lout,
usually a relative.
This story is not apocryphal. A very young street-walker was
formally charged by the arresting officer with “practicing
prostitution.”
“That’s not so, your honor,” she piped up. “I don’t practice any
more. I know how now.”
The going rate for whores, the pick-up kind, is $20 and down.
Pretty fair ones will take $10, and many will come along for $5.
These prices are low compared with the current tariffs in other large
cities, the reason being the extraordinary amateur competition.
Many of the girls roll their customers, mugg them or use
knockout drops and then go through their pockets. But Washington’s
prostitutes are not so hard-hearted as the street sirens in New York,
where it is commonplace for one to be taken to a hotel-room and
wake up doped and robbed, but never loved.
Many Washington nymphs conscientiously give value received.
In other cities the cops take stern measures against the
untrustworthy whores. It is considered the lowest form of larceny to
take advantage of a man with his pants down. New York police
recently sent a young married woman to the penitentiary for five
years for just such an outrage, but in Washington the appointed
judges, many unrealistic and some downright dishonest, condone
and encourage such unethical practices.
David L. Miller, 43, a resident of the Soldiers’ Home, picked up
Alma Lee Dugent and took her to a 16th Street, NW, room. He said
the 33-year-old woman robbed him of $2 in bills and a $30 wrist
watch while he lay asleep. The woman pleaded guilty of petty theft.
“This man is as guilty as the woman,” thundered the judge. He
ordered Miller to pay half of Mrs. Dugent’s $25 fine.
At this writing there are few really big madames operating in
Washington. One of the last big operators was Carmen Beach,
deported to Spain. But Nancy Pressler, who figured prominently in
the conviction of Charles “Lucky” Luciano, international Mafia
overlord now in Italy, when she turned state’s evidence against him
in New York, is in business in the capital.
Though many of the girls work as independent contractors,
except for the inevitable pimp, they are loosely organized for
emergency purposes in the event of arrest, through bail-bond
brokers and lawyers who specialize in underworld cases. The law
staff of Charles Ford is frequently in court defending intercepted
prostitutes, who usually get off with a small fine or a warning.
Many singed doves get their weekly check-ups from a physician
in the 1700 block of K Street, who charges them $5 a visit. They
learn about him through their community of interests.
We have studied commercial vice in most large cities. It is as a
rule confined by public tolerance to certain streets or sections. When
we wrote about New York and Chicago we were able to name these
thoroughfares and state exactly what kind of merchandise was for
sale in each. That is not so in Washington, where the city seems to
be one huge red-light range, with tramps falling over themselves
trying to grab unattached men.
We made a contact on the southeast corner of 14th and New
York Avenue, NW, in front of the cigar store, with a young pedestrian
who told us her name was Sue. She came originally from Florida and
had been hustling in Washington for four years. We asked how to
get in touch with her again and she said, “Just call the Astoria Hotel
and ask the operator for Sue.” When we inquired her last name she
said she was the only Sue there. The Astoria is a cheap hotel on
14th Street.
About two weeks later we were walking through the plush lobby
of the new Statler Hotel and saw Sue ensconced in one of the
comfortable armchairs. We stopped to watch. The slender blonde
leaned over to a gent in another chair and asked for a light. In a
couple of minutes they struck up a deal and walked into the elevator
together. When she came down half an hour later we asked her how
much she got.
“Ten bucks,” she exclaimed, “and the tight-wad stiffed me out of
luck money.”
When we first came to Washington to work on this book almost
everyone we spoke to, except cops who knew better, said we
wouldn’t find any professional whores, because why should anyone
pay when so many government girls are easy?
We took some of these friends—government officials, members
of Congress, newspapermen and others, on our tours. And this is
what we showed them:
We were solicited by two girls at Jack’s Grill, 3rd and G Sts.
Three broads came up to us at 4th and G NW and asked us if we
wanted company. We also saw girls bracing strange men at the
Purity Lunch and Grill, 3rd and G NW, and at Mitchell Grill on the
same corner. Mitchell’s is the hangout for precinct cops who saved its
license after charges.
A white prostitute tried to date us at the Mai Fong restaurant, in
Chinatown, and two other girls spoke to us at the China Clipper on
14th.
We could have made pick-ups—$10 asked, $5 bid—at the corner
of 14th and R. We were approached by girls at the Casablanca
Tavern, 421 11th St., NW, and the Covered Wagon, 14th and Rhode
Island. The manager of an all-night diner back of the Statler offered
to get us a bed companion for $15 if we bought a bottle of
Seagrams for $8.50—cheap when you consider it was after hours
and he didn’t have a license.
Few if any restaurants and bars employ B-girls. These are
women who in Chicago circulate from table to table and hustle
drinks on commission. They are illegal in the District, though quite
common in Maryland, near the border and in Baltimore.
The femmes fatale who frequent Washington joints usually do so
in free-handed reciprocity. The management steers lonesome men to
the gals who hang around regularly. They, in turn, bring their
customers in for drinks or tell them that’s where they can find them.
A saloon which gets a reputation as the hangout for the best-looking
dames finds its gross up.
When a girl closes a pitch, she usually has a place to take the
guy, if he can’t or won’t bring her to his own room. Most Washington
hotels, including the largest, are very broadminded about this, and if
you don’t make noise they don’t make trouble. But this situation is
changing as the hotels are getting more crowded and more
independent.
Few small hotels, even if so inclined, properly police their guests.
Some of the girls take their clients to the New Colonial and the Fox.
A former madame named Jackie is now running a rooming-
house at 703 Mt. Vernon, where some of the girls steer their
customers. You can usually find seven or eight girls hanging around
Ivy House Inn, on New York Avenue.
Among the most active hookers are Kay Saunders and Peggy
Proctor, both 29, who were once arrested while entertaining 15 male
customers. At this writing they are still in business on the second
floor of a house in the 2300 block, Lincoln Road, NE.
One of Washington’s most famous characters is a toothless old
hag known only as Diane. She hangs around 14th and Florida. Diane
reminds old New Yorkers of the fabulous Broadway Rose, who used
to panhandle in front of Lindy’s until she was carted to the bug
house.
But, unlike Rose, Diane is an out-and-out hustler. Once upon a
time, they say, she was a good-looker. But her main trouble seemed
to be that she liked her work too much to commercialize it.
We spoke to a man in his late 30’s who remembered her when
he was a school boy. He said the kids used to pick her up because
she would take “small change.” Now some of her old customers,
matured and prosperous men of the world, occasionally drive by her
corner to stake her to a hand-out.
All she can get now are colored men, “winos” and dregs. But she
refuses to retire.
We picked up a girl by the name of Doris who had just been
discharged from the Federal Hospital for narcotic addicts in
Lexington, Kentucky. The story she told us illustrates how girls are
recruited for prostitution in the District.
Doris said she lived in a small town in West Virginia. She and a
girl high-school mate occasionally did a little free-lance whoring on
Saturday nights, on call of a bell-boy in the local hotel. Once he sent
them to a room occupied by two men. One, whose name was
Grigsby, tried to sell the girls on coming to Washington. He said he’d
put them in a swell house. The teenagers were afraid of the big city.
Grigsby told them the landlady of the house was in the next room
and called her in. She was a motherly sort. They consented to come
with her.
They found themselves in the house of a madame named Billie
Cooper, on 7th St., in the 1000 block. Doris told us she was an
instantaneous success in the Cooper menage. She was only 17,
fresh, buxom and bucolic. Madame Cooper’s clients were charmed.
After she’d been in the house a few weeks, the madame asked Doris
if she’d like to get a “kick.” She produced a hypodermic needle and
gave the child a shot in the arm. Doris liked the sensation, wanted
more. This went on for several weeks, Doris said, and every day
Billie Cooper increased the frequency of the shots.
One day Doris woke up, nauseated and ill.
Billie Cooper exclaimed, “You’re hooked!”
She informed Doris she had become a dope fiend, that
henceforth Doris must pay for the shots.
The girl went into debt, though she was taking in up to $50 a
day and, no matter how much she made, the dope always cost
more. She knew no one else who sold it. She was truly hooked,
which was Billie Cooper’s original purpose, to keep the young girl in
her joint and take her money away from her.
Billie Cooper’s clientele was mostly Chinese. When U. S.
narcotics agents raided her establishment at 5 a.m., gaining entrance
with a ladder borrowed from a fire-house, so two T-men would get
into Billie’s bedroom before she had a chance to flush the narcotics
down the drain, they found several Chinese customers in the place.
While the search was still on, 15 more came to the door and were
admitted; of these two were officials of the Chinese embassy.
In the trial it developed that Billie Cooper, who was sentenced
for violation of the narcotics laws, was charging Doris $7 a deck for
heroin, which she bought at half that price from Chinese peddlers.
The F.B.I. proceeded against Grigsby for white slavery violation and
he, too, was convicted.
Doris swore to us that she was off the stuff now. She said she
was living with a Chinaman who worked in a gambling house in
Chinatown.
The glamorous brothels are no more. Not since the notorious
Hopkins Institute was closed by the F.B.I. some years ago has there
been anything operating on a lavish scale. Now there are some so-
called masseurs who use that classification as a blind, but nothing
on the grand scale.
When F.B.I. men raided the Hopkins Institute, an innocuous-
looking massage parlor in the 2700 block on Connecticut Ave., they
uncovered one of the most sensational call-houses ever in
Washington. Not only was the clientele accommodated at the so-
called Institute, but a phone call could arrange a date on short
notice almost anywhere in the District. The establishment kept a
detailed and up-to-date written record on each patron, fees paid,
dates of service, and eccentricities. Girls there said this list contained
entries that could flabbergast some very prominent persons, in and
out of Washington.
The proprietor of the Hopkins Institute was one George Francis
Whitehead, who lived in New York and seldom visited the place.
Profits were sent to him weekly by the “resident manager,” Diane
Carter, who was vice-president in charge of the operation. The
Institute was established originally by someone else and was bought
by Whitehead in 1941. He ran it for several months, then engaged
Diane Carter to manage it at a salary out of earnings. Her principal
duties entailed accepting calls, arranging to send girls to answer the
calls, and to have girls available on the premises.
Whitehead left Washington in 1941, after the girls began to
complain that his presence was hurting business because of his
excessive drinking, untidy habits and uncouth deportment. He did
Welcome to our website – the perfect destination for book lovers and
knowledge seekers. We believe that every book holds a new world,
offering opportunities for learning, discovery, and personal growth.
That’s why we are dedicated to bringing you a diverse collection of
books, ranging from classic literature and specialized publications to
self-development guides and children's books.

More than just a book-buying platform, we strive to be a bridge


connecting you with timeless cultural and intellectual values. With an
elegant, user-friendly interface and a smart search system, you can
quickly find the books that best suit your interests. Additionally,
our special promotions and home delivery services help you save time
and fully enjoy the joy of reading.

Join us on a journey of knowledge exploration, passion nurturing, and


personal growth every day!

testbankfan.com

You might also like