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Television Sat Jun 05 2010
The Columbian Agency
I saw a rerun of an episode of "History Detectives" that featured the Columbian Agency, which was located in Chicago from the late 19th to early 20th century. According to a historian on the program, "If you were in South State Street in the late 1800s, early 1900s, this was the heart of what they called 'Satan's Mile'. It was an area that was like a virtual shopping centre of sin. You could get anything you wanted: gambling houses, houses of prostitution, mayhem." There were also a lot of marriage bureau scams in that area, and The Columbian Agency was one of them.
If you want to read the transcript of that episode, you can see the PDF version or read it as a webpage.