Silver Dollar Cafe

Although prostitution was not uncommon in some Texas cities in the 19th and early 20th centuries, little scholarly work has been done on the subject. The exception is El Paso, the subject of the recent The Gentleman's Club, a study by historian Gordon Frost. Professor Frost established the context of the Silver Dollar Cafe among El Paso's brothels and cited the structure as one of two remaining buildings associated with that city's flourishing, turn-of-the-century prostitution trade. While very much a vernacular structure, the Silver Dollar is also of note for its unusual, L-shape, courtyard plan.

El Paso has been described as a classic boom town or an "instant city." With the arrival of the railroads in 1881, businessmen, unskilled workers, tramps, thieves, gamblers, and prostitutes poured into this isolated frontier environment. Historian C. L. Sonnichsen writes that El Paso in the gay nineties was one of the most sinful towns in the United States, on a par with other "sporting centers" like New York, New Orleans, and the Barbary Coast.

By 1890 a red-light district was firmly established in the downtown area. A gentle- man's agreement between the civic authorities and the madams drew the original boundaries for the zone at Overland Street on the north, Second Street on the south, Stanton Street on the east, and El Paso Street on the west. As long as prostitution was limited to this area, it was tolerated. By the 1920s, however, the red-light zone found itself pushed against the Rio Grande, between Eighth Street and the river. It is here that El Paso's last early brothel, the Silver Dollar Cafe, was constructed in 1922.

Tom Walker, one of the zone's brothel keepers--with Lucy Stevenson, Fred Lopez, and his wife Ruby, --had a sympathetic interest in the girls' living conditions. "I saw their old cribs on South El Paso Street", he said; "they had no sanitary facilities and only beaver board partitions. I decided to put up some better quarters, got to feeling around, and opened up the district...." Walker financed the operation, which was run by the Lopezes.

The building consists of 14 two-room units (cribs) that were furnished with a bed, a chair, a washstand, and sometimes a chifforobe. The largest unit facing the corner was used as a restaurant serving Mexican food and a bar that, despite Prohibition, served beer and hard liquor smuggled from Juarez.

Architecturally, the Silver Dollar is noteworthy. In most instances, brothels tended to be indistinguishable from other structures in their basic building form. Frequently, older buildings constructed for other purposes were adapted as brothels, or newly-constructed brothels would follow the general configuration of local tenements or apartments, in part to provide a degree of anonymity. South El Paso tenements tended to be rectangular, two-story structures, and thus the L-shaped, single-story, courtyard style of the Silver Dollar was a rarity for the city. That form would seem to anticipate that of motels in succeeding decades. Large-scale urban renewal projects in South El Paso in the 1960s and early 1970s removed much of the early 20th-century housing stock of the area, leaving the Silver Dollar as a one-of-a-kind structure. It should be noted that South El Paso in general had very high-density development, and the relative spaciousness of the Silver Dollar complex was exceptional.

The Silver Dollar was not used as a brothel in the traditional sense. Each girl paid five dollars per day rent for her crib and kept anything over that amount. They determined their own rates and hours and acted independently. In the thirties, the going rate was $1.00 for a fifteen-minute session. The front entrance to each room consisted of a dutch door. Each girl stood or sat behind the door and opened the top half to indicate availability. By closing the interior door that connected the two rooms in each unit, 28 individual cribs could be created opening to the front and back of the building.

The vice squad, under Police Chief Butchofsky, occasionally raided and closed down the Silver Dollar during the thirties, but after a few days, it was always able to reopen. The beginning of World War II, with its vast migration of soldiers, gave the Silver Dollar the opportunity for one last boom. The cribs were filled with pretty Louisiana and Oklahoma girls who now charged $3.00 a session. This boom was not to last, however. The intense competition from Juarez, Mexico, only 300 yards across the Rio Grande, the pressure from the military authorities in Fort Bliss, and, more importantly, the changing times led to the demise of the Silver Dollar, which closed its doors forever in 1944. An era in El Paso's history came to an end and the structure has been used for apartments since that time.