Name This Peoria Landmark

This is a little bumpy, I guess I need a camera stabilizer when traversing Peoria streets. Since the infamous “Aiken Alley” portion doesn’t exist anymore, I did the next best thing and drove through Emtronic’s stomping grounds and down when remains of Aiken Street. Reprinted below are some references to Aiken- You can find more if you turn off your safety-filter when googling Aiken. PeoriaCountyIllinois.info: Old Aiken Alley & Prairie St were known for prostitution from early in 1920 to the early 1970’s. Prairie St was notorious for gangsters and bootleggers who housed their goods in house of ill-repute. Tunnels (original photos in personal file) connected houses through the basements and root cellars. Most were 4 to 5 feet wide and approx 5 feet tall made of red brick domed at the top and laying about 1 foot beneath the surface of the ground. Most were double layered red brick. Aiken St was shortened to “alley” status in the early 1960’s and ended at Briss Collins tavern fronting Franklin Street. This tavern was demolished in the very early 70’s. JW, in response to a question I posed on Peoria.com: “Aiken Avenue, aka Alley, started from near the intersection of Franklin Street and Adams Street, tho that part between Adams and Jefferson was basically just an alley and easy to miss. It then extended west to near Blaine Street and Seventh Street. This section was just south of First Avenue and North of Hurlburt Street. It then picked up again at the top of Western Hill, near Jumers, and ran down to Sterling. That section was renamed Manor Parkway at the suggestion of residents, sometime in the 1960’s. The notorious part of Aiken, was from Jefferson to about MacArthur Highway.” Reprint of a Journal Star article, dated 3/5/06: PEORIA – Trees are partly to blame for prostitution taking root in Peoria’s North Valley. Now considered the city’s hotbed for prostitutes, that neighborhood north of Downtown is where the sex trade migrated when authorities began cracking down in South Peoria. When first elected in 1988, State’s Attorney Kevin Lyons immediately took aim at the prostitutes he saw lining Adams Street and Jefferson Avenue. “These prostitutes were physically across the street from the Police Department,” he said. “It had become tolerated, and I didn’t like that.” So Lyons, fresh into office, devised the “tree restrictions.” Essentially, a prostitute was banned, as a condition of her bond, from being on any street that had the name of a tree, such as Oak, Elm and Walnut. Those names, not coincidentally, were many of the side streets within the “merry-go-round” district, an area of South Peoria where men seeking sex for cash would drive in circles seeking prostitutes. That map restriction stayed in place for several years but was abandoned when prosecutors and police realized prostitutes had simply taken their business into the North Valley, where it began to flourish mainly around Morton Square Park. “Regrettably, (the tree restrictions) in part caused a migration of prostitutes from that (South Peoria) area,” Lyons said recently. But prostitution has long been associated with Peoria. From the heady days of the 1930s and 1940s, when GIs would come to Peoria looking for fun, to decades later when residents and police largely ignored those on the “merry-go-round,” sex was always for sale. “Peoria had been a wide-open river town in the old meaning of the word,” said Allen Andrews, who served as police chief from 1969 until 1990. Things began to change in the early 1950s, when a federal report chronicled 132 brothels in and around “Aiken Alley” in what is now Southtown. “The public was very upset about the report, and it was not hearsay or rumor. It was believable fact,” Andrews said. Within a year or two, the city held a referendum and voted to change the form of government to a council/city manager type. The reform movement emboldened younger officers of the city’s police force to enforce the laws against gambling and prostitution, until only a few brothels remained, and they didn’t take strangers, Andrews said. “They were very cautious. They only took the guys they knew.” But the final nail in the coffin was urban renewal. Row after row of tenement buildings, abandoned warehouses and row houses were demolished in the 1970s to make way for Southtown, an ambitious redevelopment area just southwest of Downtown below the bluff. Old-fashioned brothels were replaced by prostitutes walking the streets, and thus was born the “merry-go-round.” The main part of that area, roughly bounded by Jefferson Avenue, and Franklin, Adams and Cedar streets, was so dubbed because men seeking to buy sex would drive around and around on one-way streets until they found a prostitute. Police Sgt. Jerry Bainter, a 10-year member of Peoria’s vice squad, says he, too, remembers Aiken Alley, where passing motorists could gander at women posing in windows and gambling flourished. “This was the vacation spot for the mob,” he said. About 1970, politicians and police also began taking on the massage parlors that used to line Aiken Alley. There, women would sit outside on stoops and welcome men inside. Lyons said that was a major issue because prostitution was still inside and difficult to combat. But the massage parlors were shuttered through aggressive police work and the use of city ordinances. Police then turned their attention to the “johns,” those men who sought out prostitutes. Andrews remembers doing a license plate survey in 1980 and finding that most of the johns came from the towns and villages that surround Peoria. He started cracking down on the johns, and prostitution declined for a bit, but only as long as the police could devote the resources to tackling the problem. Eventually, prostitution largely dried up in South Peoria, but at the expense of North Valley neighborhoods. “We’ve cleaned up one neighborhood, but unfortunately it moved to another neighborhood,” Bainter said.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 25th, 2007 at 3:47 pm and is filed under Aiken Alley, Peoria, Prostitution. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.