Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/1507551
42 | SIGNATURE MONTANA Helena's two remaining examples of cribs are the Wassweiler Hotel and Hot Springs and the Caretaker's House at Reeder's Alley. Ferdinand Wassweiler operated his hotel from 1883 to the early 1900s. His bathhouse of random fieldstone featured four rooms with doors and windows and wooden tubs for bathers. When the famed Broadwater Hotel opened nearby in 1890, Wassweiler lost his patrons. e bathhouse resembled cribs, so he converted it and imported women to work in them. Ferdinand Wassweiler's hotel and bathhouse/cribs (right) on highway 12 in Helena, now a high end restaurant, lie in ruins circa 1980s before rehabilitation. SHPO photo. e Caretaker's House at historic Reeder's Alley was first a one-room log miner's cabin. By 1892, the cabin, with neat additions and a false front over rough-hewn log walls, marked the red-light district's southern boundary. Historic Sanborn maps show two crib additions at the back. In 1893, the city built a stone retaining wall around the hillside behind and along the adjacent alley. A brick extension of the wall on the cabin's south side blocks the cribs' windows, preventing unwanted solicitation in the residential alleyway. The retaining wall at the rear of the Caretaker's House, now Cotton Top Bakery at Reeder's Alley, displays physical evidence of the obstacles officials imposed on public women. Author photo. Female boarding houses sprang up along Missoula's West Front Street with the advent of the Northern Pacific in 1883. Notorious madam Mary Gleim owned at least eight properties there in the 1890s. Two of her brick commercial blocks survive. Nothing about either suggests their function except for their location. e buildings eventually became legitimate businesses. As with many other red-light properties, National Register listing in the 1990s brought aention to their shady pasts. Until 1948, a thriving red-light district of nine houses along Livingston's B Street catered to traveling railroaders. Four tiny coages built between 1896 and 1904 were originally duplexes with gables and porches that resembled those of larger homes. Each half of the duplexes featured its own front entrance, a brick chimney, and three cribs equipped with sinks, a hallmark of the profession. ese "pretend" homes suggested domesticity but were built without bathrooms and kitchens. The interior architectural layers of Butte's last Mercury Street parlor house, the 1890 Dumas Hotel, dramatically illustrate the district's history. Author photo.