Pittsburgh is a city of firsts. Whether it’s sports teams, industries or the arts, there’s no shortage of pride for what Yinzers have accomplished over the past 250 years. But city boosters might find it hard to accept that sex workers and brothels are right up there with the Steelers, U.S. Steel and Andy Warhol when it comes to putting Pittsburgh on the map.

Author Jason Kirin is fleshing out this history in an ambitious project to document the city’s brothel sites and stories between 1850 and the end of the 20 ^th century.

Kirin has a distinct vantage point to this history: His grandmother, Shirley Cavanaugh, was a sex worker who became embroiled in a scandal that exposed police department corruption in the 1950s. Kirin documented Cavanaugh’s life in a 2023 book, “ From the Furnace, with Love: The Multigenerational Tapestry of Shirley Cavanaugh .”

“I felt this sort of kinship to the story,” Kirin said. “So I started to just look to see if there were other stories like this and I found a lot.”

Hundreds, in fact.

Some of them, like North Side madam Nettie Gordon ; Oakland brothel proprietor Mae Scheible , whom the FBI dubbed “Public Hostess No. 1”; and massage parlor mogul Dante “Tex” Gill are enshrined in Pittsburgh’s pantheon of infamous historical characters.

Kirin isn’t the first to research and map the city’s vice dens. In 1930, University of Pittsburgh graduate student Alexander Pittler documented bootlegging, gambling and prostitution sites in the Hill District. He found more than 200 sex work sites.

“Prostitution operates openly in this district,” Pittler wrote. “The writer has often been hailed and stopped by the prostitutes while passing through.”

Pittler and generations of journalists have exposed shocking episodes of human trafficking and exploitation as an insatiable demand for sex collided with an abundant supply of poverty and women from broken and abusive homes.

Enterprising madams

“The city was one giant brothel,” said Richard Gazarik, a former newspaper reporter who has written two books on the city’s vice history. “At the turn of the century and going into the first two decades of the 20th century, there were estimated more than a thousand prostitutes working in Pittsburgh.”

Nettie Gordon is one of Gazarik’s favorite stories. The popular madam’s 1934 funeral attracted 1,000 people.

“Her brother was a policeman in the North Side where she operated,” Gazarik said. “She paid off a lot of the police; they took part of her services.”

“I can point to a couple of buildings like the homeless shelter; 30 years before it became the homeless shelter, it was the home of a woman named Nettie Gordon,” Kirin said. “She used all floors as a brothel.”

In Kirin’s search for Cavanaugh’s story – which included running her own brothel, police payoffs and her shooting and wounding Pittsburgh’s top vice cop in 1957 – Kirin found a sort of kinship with the people he was reading about.

“One of the criminal charges my grandmother got in 1955 was keeping a bawdy house,” Kirin explained. “I had found out that bawd is an archaic word for a woman that owns a brothel and that a bawdy house was a brothel.”

The impact of that resonated in the family.

Cavanaugh had abandoned her children, and Kirin’s mother was deeply scarred by the experience. After decades of emotional turmoil, Kirin’s mother killed herself in 2003. In his search for answers to his family history, Kirin went down a research rabbit hole.

“I found that the history of the 1800s, the Pittsburgh bawdy house trials, and I found so many parents being separated from their children,” he said. “I found so many murders. It’s just the most awful history I could find.”

A few stories stand out to Kirin.

One was an episode in the winter of 1892 when the mayor and a group of progressive reformers calling themselves The Law and Order Society sought to abolish prostitution in Pittsburgh. Then-Mayor Henry Gourley ordered the city’s brothels to be raided and closed in December 1892.

“The estimate was 250 houses were closed in the middle of winter, and 1,200 women were put on what they called ministerial charity: homelessness,” Kirin said.

Public Hostess No. 1

A second story hit closer to home for Kirin than a 19th-century vice crackdown: Mae Scheible.

“I was researching a case involving my grandmother,” Kirin explained. The case involved a 1948 grand jury investigation into the city’s rackets, and one of Cavanaugh’s friends, Ada Hess Ryan, was called as a witness. One year before the investigation, Ryan had been arrested after police raided Scheible’s Downtown brothel, the Hourglass Café. It operated openly across the street from the courthouse where BNY-Mellon Center was later built.

Scheible, who by 1947 was calling herself Sue Ryan, had returned to Pittsburgh a few years earlier after serving two federal prison sentences. She was convicted in 1936 of violating the Mann Act (also known as the White Slave Traffic Act); in 1938, she pleaded guilty to income tax evasion. Scheible had been caught up in a nationwide crackdown orchestrated by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

“She was amongst a number of high-end brothel operators in New York City that the FBI was targeting and investigating and then shutting down or arresting,” said Jessica Pliley, a Texas State University historian who wrote a book about the Mann Act and the FBI. “I realized that this campaign against organized vice or vice rackets, as it was called at the time, was part of the FBI’s publicity machine that was developed in the 1930s by Hoover as a way to protect the agency and to ensure its relevancy, protect it from federal oversight.”

Scheible’s route to federal prison began on the North Side in the 1890s. She was born in Allegheny City, now the North Side, in 1894. Her father, Joseph Kagel, was an alcoholic and abusive millworker with a violent temper. Scheible’s mother, Mary, had abandoned Mae and her sister, Grace, and gone to live in West Virginia where later newspaper accounts hinted that she became a prostitute.

In August 1899, Mary Kagel returned to the North Side and committed suicide by swallowing acid.

By that point, Joseph Kagel had begun a relationship with another woman, Mary Williams, who had been taking care of his two girls. Four months after the girls’ mother died, Williams threw acid in Joseph Kagel’s face before swallowing some herself.

Williams didn’t die, and three years later the pair married. The family moved to Youngstown, where Kagel found work in another mill.

In 1911, when she was 17, Mae met and married Fred Scheible, a 27-year-old plumbing supplies salesman.

The couple lived in Youngstown for a while but moved to Pittsburgh around 1925 and lived in a Shadyside apartment building. Mae went into the hospitality business running a Hampton roadhouse and Fred became a bootlegger. Squirrel Hill builder Herman Kamin bankrolled Scheible’s entry into vice, according to FBI and federal court documents.

Things got too hot with the roadhouse. Officials were being pressured to shut it down due to repeated complaints of drunken revelry and drunken drivers.

In 1927, Mae bought a building in Oakland and for seven years operated a brothel that catered to Pittsburgh’s business and political elite.

In 1934, after evading law enforcement by offering cash and favors to police officers, Scheible closed the Oakland brothel and relocated, with several of her employees, to New York City.

The New York move gave Hoover’s FBI the ammunition needed to prosecute Scheible and Ryan under the Mann Act, which makes it a felony to transport women across state lines for “immoral purposes.”

Scheible’s prosecution was an existential threat to many of her Pittsburgh clients and the officials who enabled her business. They feared that Scheible’s voluminous black book, with the names and addresses of her well-heeled clientele, would be made public.

Her trial made international headlines. The story spun by prosecutors included Scheible’s involvement with Robert Miller, a conman who called himself Count Victor Lustig. Miller was infamous for having twice sold the Eiffel Tower and for ripping off Al Capone — and living to tell about it.

The courtroom drama from the 1930s repeated itself for Scheible again in 1947 and 1962. An Allegheny County jury convicted her in the 1947 case and she got probation. Scheible was acquitted in the 1962 case.

In the early 1950s, she became involved with a recent widower, engineering company owner Herbert P. Smith. They lived as husband and wife in a Forest Hills home and the Shadyside apartment where Smith died in 1974. His probate records and the deeds to their home show that Scheible continued to use the name Sue Ryan. After Smith died, Scheible disappeared from public records.

Tex Gill and rub parlors

Tex Gill’s story also hits close to home for Kirin. Gill was one of the nation’s first highly publicized trans sex workers. Gill was a former farrier and equestrian who managed several massage parlors in the 1970s and 1980s that operated as fronts for prostitution and which law enforcement had linked to organized crime.

Gill became headline fodder in the 1970s for his boundary-busting lifestyle and profession. Known for his rough edges and having married a woman, Gill became a key player in what became known as the “rub parlor war”: a turf battle for control of the city’s massage parlors. The conflict included bombings and the 1977 murder of Gill’s business partner, porn entrepreneur George Lee.

A movie documenting Gill’s exploits was scrapped in 2018 after backlash over Scarlett Johanson being tapped for the leading role as a trans man. Gill, who died in 2003, looms large over the city’s sex work and LGBTQ history.

His treatment is what moves Kirin.

“I think one of the things that really was the most devastating thing about him is his obituary written by the Post-Gazette,” Kirin said. “The transphobia was just so intense back then … the whole article is she/her pronouns. Like this dude had a crewcut and wore three-piece suits all the time.”

Lurid legacy

Pittsburgh’s brothels and red-light districts are long gone, replaced by a Liberty Avenue Cultural District and trendy eateries in Market Square.

“We don’t have brothels here,” said Pittsburgh sex worker and columnist Jessie Sage , who credits the internet and the city’s efforts to eliminate vice in the Cultural District with transforming the sex work landscape. “People are working much more independently now. So escorts and people who are doing like service work, for example, are doing it on their own through [online] advertising platforms.”

The law and society criminalized and stigmatized the ways that Gordon, Scheible and Gill made their living. Despite violence, exploitation and disease (sex work became a key vector for AIDS in the 1980s), sex work — what Kirin calls “commodified intimacy” — is a part of Pittsburgh’s history.

Despite the efforts to eradicate it, sex work continues. A stop in any Pennsylvania Turnpike service area, where signs and informational brochures warn about sex trafficking, is a potent reminder that there are no happy endings to this story.