Two inmates of one of Naglee Parke's most elegant brothels, Amber Lynn's Chicken Coop, and their customers, pause for refreshments during a planning meeting for the annual Hat Party, August 1899. Photo courtesy TM Wright Memorial Library and Research Centre
Until it was brutally suppressed last year by the Naglee Parke Police Department's Fashion Fellonies Division, the annual Hat Party was an important event on the social calendar for many residents of the community. The event's origins go back well over one hundred years to the wild days when Naglee Parke was known as Nagleeville and the area was a notorious center for sin and degradation in all their many charming forms. According to legend, the Hat Party was invented by two inmates of Miss Bertha's Chicken Coop, a boarding house for fallen women and tarnished angels that occupied a structure in the middle of the 200 block of South 14th Street, Fifi Latour and Travesty Blaze.
"We're not prone to argue," was the motto of the Coop, where the girls were often prone but never argued. As you can see from the photograph above, the girls liked to dress up when they were dressed at all, and hats were their crowning glory. Men came from far and wide to admire these hats and the girls who wore them and it didn't take long for the girls to compete for the attentions of the visitors. Here are Fifi and Travesty showing off for two gents just off the streetcar, tired and dusty but ready for some refreshments, liquid and social, and happy to share with their new friends.
The Chicken Coop was famous for its Friday evening fashion show -- called Phridae Phollies -- and free refreshments, and of course the menu featured poultry in many forms. The girls appeared promptly at 6pm, always attired in a fancy hat of some kind, but sometimes nothing else, carrying large platters of freshly fried chicken, each calling out, "Breasts! Thighs! Everything's delicious! What'll you have, boys?"
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