While the party season may have started on Jan. 1 with well-coiffed society ladies attending what is called the Ball Poudre, it reaches its zenith with December’s First Ward Ball, the city’s gaudiest “social” event.
From the first event–held at the 7th Regiment Armory on South Wentworth Avenue in 1896 (and later moving to the larger Coliseum on South Wabash Avenue)–the ball has attracted an increasing number of members of high society, eager to rub elbows (and other body parts) with pickpockets, politicians, police captains, prostitutes, card sharks and all manner of unsavory types.
The Honorable John J. “Bathhouse John” Coughlin arrived at this year’s bash by carriage and was greeted with cheers as he was escorted into the hall surrounded by many of his thick-necked associates.
Already inside was his co-host, the diminutive and less flamboyant Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna and some 15,000 other partygoers.
The two colorful co-hosts, oft nicknamed the Lords of the Levee, are well known to Chicagoans as the aldermen of the First Ward. They began their ball–often referred to only half-jokingly as a “carnival of evil”–as a way to enhance what many would conclude are already handsome incomes.
Inside the Coliseum, there were brawls aplenty, not unexpected given the 10,000 quarts of champagne and 30,000 quarts of beer being consumed.
Tipsy “gentlemen” were seen ripping clothes off unattended females. The madam, French Annie, stabbed her male companion with a hat pin. And one man kept screaming, “The s.o.b. stole my watch,” though precisely which s.o.b. it was impossible to determine.
Outside, reformers screamed “Disgrace!” “Abomination!”
Inside, Kenna stood in the midst of the revelry and marveled: “It’s a lollapalooza! . . . There are more people here than ever before. All the business houses are here, all the big people.
“Chicago ain’t no sissy town.”
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In order to put together this issue of the magazine, certain liberties had to be taken. A few of the photographs, for instance, are not precisely from 1904 but are of that era. The stories have been reconstructed from various sources, including histories, biographies and Tribune files.
Page 8: The First Ward balls continued until reformers succeeded in getting them shut down after the 1911 bash, but Kenna and Coughlin continued to serve as aldermen for many more years.