A Museum Talk on Raleigh’s Historic Madams and Sex Workers

View This Email In Your Browser

Good morning, readers.

Up until the 1930s, the area around Transfer Co. Food Hall in the eastern end of downtown Raleigh was home to a thriving red-light district. It was a place where illegal liquor flowed, johns brawled, and local police tangled with working women. It was the scene of more than one high-profile murder.

While many of the original buildings that housed the capital city’s turn-of-the-century brothels no longer stand today, there’s plenty of evidence of their existence and the women who controlled them. Madison Phillips, a historian, archivist and City of Raleigh employee, has combed through that evidence—census records, Sanborn maps, old newspaper clippings—to get a fuller picture of the city’s historic madams and sex workers. Today at noon, Phillips gives a talk on that research today at the City of Raleigh museum on Fayetteville Street for its Lunchbox Lecture series. 

Get to know Louise Price, who controlled a vast real estate empire, or Blanche McCade, who was known and feared “by many a swarthy cop.” Learn about a prominent Virginia doctor who met an unfortunate end after visiting a “blind tiger”—an illegal bar, in Prohibition-era lingo—of another notorious madam, Bertha Brown. 

My colleague, INDY arts and culture editor Sarah Edwards, said she’d watch an HBO series on this history. There’s nothing in the works yet, but Phillips’s talk promises to be just as riveting. 

Read more below.

 —Jane

---

---

Durham

ICYMI: INDY’s Justin Laidlaw has the details on next year’s proposed Durham County budget and property tax rate.

Wake

Raleigh’s downtown economy is booming, but a new survey of business owners finds “a ‘chasm of mistrust’ between local businesses and the city,” INDY’s Chloe Courtney Bohl reports.

Orange

An Orange County nonprofit that prepares women, nonbinary people and other underrepresented demographics for trade jobs has lost a $300,000 federal grant due to the organization’s equity mission, WCHL reports.

North Carolina

A judge ordered that public records related to former Columbus County sheriff Jody Greene (who made national news for racist remarks) be turned over to our partners at The Assembly and Border Belt Independent, BBI reports.

The EPA plans to weaken limits on certain “forever chemicals” including kinds found in North Carolina, WRAL reports.

---

If you’d like to advertise your business to the Daily’s 30,000-plus subscribers, please contact [email protected]

---

---