Dorsey, Ida (1866–1918)

Employing the racial prejudices and fantasies of elite male clients once used against her, Ida Dorsey established herself as one of the Twin Cities’ most notorious madams, running multiple brothels between the 1880s and the 1910s. As a woman of color in an industry dominated by white women, she demonstrated herself an adept entrepreneur and real estate owner when most women had neither income nor property.

Ida Dorsey was born Ida Mary Callahan (alternatively ‘Ida Marie Callahand’) on March 7, 1866, in Woodford County, Kentucky. Little is known about her life prior to moving to the Twin Cities, though it is assumed that her mother had been enslaved and her father was white. She allegedly ran her first brothel (also referred to as a “bordello”) at the age of sixteen in Kentucky, though by 1886 she had changed her name and established herself in St. Paul at Fifth Street and Jackson Street.

Newspapers described Dorsey’s first establishment as “a very tough place” that catered to soldiers of color. Within the year she relocated to 125 Second Street North in Minneapolis, which served a more affluent and whiter clientele, allowing Dorsey a stake in the increasingly lucrative sex trade. Brothels were subject to segregation, and unlike others in the area that only employed white women, Dorsey employed seven to eight women of color.

Dorsey’s brothel was open only to white men, and she employed the racialized stereotypes projected onto her and her employees to corner a market for herself. Dorsey was selling her white clientele an “interracial sexual experience,” which was both exoticized and socially forbidden. Due to both Dorsey’s work as a madam and her race, she was targeted during raids, and in 1886 she was sentenced to ninety days in Stillwater State Prison for running a house of prostitution and selling liquor without a license. Other madams were caught up in the raid with Dorsey, though the white madams were only fined. Dorsey was one of two madams put in prison during the decade.

After being released, Dorsey moved her operation to 116 Second Avenue in the First Street Red Light District, which occupied the blocks between the Hennepin Avenue Bridge and what is today the Third Avenue bridge. Unlike her previous brothel, the First Street District catered to working-class men. The streets neighbored the train depot, and itinerant lumberjacks and laborers were the primary patrons. Her bordello was subject to relentless raids and fines over the next few years, though Dorsey and other madams used their infamous publicity to further market their businesses.

In November 1890, Dorsey built a new bordello on Eleventh Avenue South, allegedly costing her $12,000 to build and another $15,000 to furnish. She was one of the first to populate the new Eleventh Avenue Red Light District, a shift planned and established by the city’s madams themselves. The geographic containment of the red light districts demonstrated an agreement between city officials and the madams: vice was sequestered while the madams became some of the largest property owners in the area.

Due to the influence of Dorsey’s clients, her brothel was not subjected to frequent raids. She had a publicly acknowledged affair with Carleton Pillsbury, the nephew of flour miller Charles Alfred Pillsbury and the grandson of Minneapolis mayor George A. Pillsbury. After his death, Dorsey occasionally referred to herself as “Mrs. Ida Pillsbury.”

Tensions began to rise as early as 1907 against the toleration of prostitution in Minneapolis. Dorsey was subject to a vice raid and arrested in 1911. This brought her frustrations with the city to their peak, and on March 7, 1913, she relocated her brothel to 151 South Washington Street in St. Paul, a site previously owned by the madam Nina Clifford. Dorsey purchased the house from Clifford for $1,000 and paid a subsequent $3,000 to city officials to run her brothel without the previous hostilities she had faced. Nevertheless, the chief of police ordered all St. Paul brothels closed only months later, and Dorsey was forced to abandon her bordello. The pinnacle of her operations had passed. In her later life, she disregarded the sanctioned red light districts and laws and continued to operate smaller, clandestine brothels for a few years before her death in 1918.