Prologue: An Atmosphere of Evil In the eerily still silence of the mid-day, a broken and blighted strip of Chicago industrial real estate lying on a ragged edge of Chicago''s Near South Side between Twenty-second Street and Twenty-third Street on South Wabash Avenue stands desolate and ominous. Wabash Avenue, south of Sixteenth Street is a dreary and depressing sliver of Chicago; be-spoiled by events of a sordid nature occurring in the years leading up to and after World War I. The asymmetry of this jagged South Side landscape provided the setting for an incubation of organized crime rings 125 years ago. On the west side of this ancient pot-holed street stands Crash Champions, an undistinguished two-story warehouse and automotive repair shop. It is a solitary structure on an empty parcel of city land, secured by a rusty, bent chain link fence topped by rolls of razor-edged barbed wire. The fence encircles an abandoned lot strewn with rubble and concrete barriers. Grass and weeds grow between the cracks of the broken sidewalks. The parking lot on the north side of the building is littered with damaged passenger vehicles and rusted junks awaiting repair.

It is a scarred cityscape cloaking buried secrets and old infamies. At the dawn of the twentieth-century the Follansbee Flats, a row of four conjoined utilitarian two-and three-story brownstone walkups towered over Wabash Avenue. The landlord rented private apartments atop first floor stores, restaurants and saloons. A fiendish class of men comprising a nascent organized ring of human traffickers, seducers and pimps rented flats inside these otherwise unassuming buildings. Shady t heatrical agents working the district promised young women exciting and glamorous stage careers before luring them into brothels. Observed from the outside, these dwellings presented a false façade of ordinary 1907 urban living. Trapped inside a warren of small, windowless rooms however, scores of young women caught in a web of sexual imprisonment awaited an ominous fate. These women were victims of an underground white slave criminal prostitution ring.

Chicago, because of its prominence as a railroad transportation hub at the crossroads of the nation''s commerce, over the span of four decades evolved into the nation''s largest sexual trafficking enterprise. The sponsorship and sanction of politicians capitalizing for selfish means the perpetuation of geographic spheres permitted controlled vice and sexual enslavement to flourish here with minimal intervention. The Follansbee Flats as a halfway house for pimps and unfortunate women steered into sexual servitude at this location is a long-forgotten and ignored episode of city history. Today, Wabash Avenue and its intersecting streets fanning westward is a hodge-podge of sooty warehouses, vacant lots, liquor stores and fast-food restaurants. To the immediate north and west is Chicago''s Chinatown, a flourishing ethnic community of commerce and tourism and to the east stands the sprawling McCormick Place convention center. Parking lots, weeds and rubble cover up much of the tawdry neighborhood history. In abandoned sites of desolation these lots exist in calm repose. They have remained undeveloped for decades, scarred by toxic memories of violent incidents from a troubled past that seem to poison the ground.

It is a curious but not so surprising phenomenon observable in many dicey big city localities where criminality once proliferated. This blighted dystopian landscape struggles to overcome its fractious past and public anxieties worried about rising inner-city crime. Depressed real estate values discourage developers from making an investment pointing toward a better future. Modest efforts to gentrify the vacated land where the South Side Levee once thrived took root in the 1980s. Efforts have been sporadic and slow and did not gain traction until the Millennium. As recently as 2007 celebrated Chicago restaurateur Jerry Kleiner opened Room 21, a pricey white table-cloth dining experience inside an abandoned Wabash Avenue warehouse at 2110 South Wabash, sandwiched between a former Al Capone wildcat Prohibition distillery and a parking lot once occupied by "Big Jim" Colosimo''s Café during the salad years of Levee wantonness. After a promising start, Room 21became yet another notable casualty in the restaurant wars and a failed effort to draw in dining sophisticates and true crime history enthusiasts, some desirous to vicariously commune with the Capone past. Room 21 went dark in 2009.

Cursed by reputation? Realistically the dining public, fearing the ominous neighborhood environs demonstrated its unwillingness to support a high-end culinary haven in this dreary locale. The empty lots of South Wabash Avenue are a silent echo of thirty-five-years of saturnalia in this former set-aside vice district. The Levee was once served by the South Side Elevated Railroad. In the district''s worst years, the elevated line conveyed sexual adventurers from the sterility of their downtown skyscraper offices directly into the steamy prostitution dives. The Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) South Side Elevated Redline trundles past the weed lots and broken sidewalks where the worst of the brothels once stood but no-one exits the trains any longer for that intended purpose. It is the culinary pleasures of the Chinatown restaurants at 22nd Street and Wentworth Avenue visitors seek out today. If the ghostly apparitions of the Levee''s lost lives wander about this place today, they are buried in the recesses of a troubled but mostly forgotten past. [end of excerpt].