#bordello

Love for Sale: Bordello Blues

Mary's Club is the oldest strip club in Portland, Oregon, and among the oldest in the United States. In 1954, Roy Keller bought the business from Mary Duerst Hemming, who owned and operated Mary's as a piano bar beginning in the 1930s.

Long before Mary's from the mid-1870s through the 1890s, as Portland grew into the largest regional shipping and commercial center south of Seattle, a number of brothels and "parlor houses" became part of the city’s landscape. Most bordellos were north of Burnside Street, on the North End, but Nancy Boggs established one of hers on the Willamette River. The legend of Boggs’s floating brothel survives through the work of Stewart Holbrook, a self-proclaimed "low-brow" historian and writer. Calling Boggs the Madame of the Willamette River.

Pubic wigs (called Merkins) were worn by ladies of the evening as early as the 1820's in Oregon. The reason for this accessory was that pubic hair was considered popular and attractive, but risqué workers shaved their lowers to avoid pubic lice and used merkin to cover up STD’s from their clients.

Today, Merkins are often worn by Hipsters around Hawthorne.