{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Pionerd","title":"The Richest Woman in the Underworld: St. Paul’s Red-Light Empire","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":742,"description":"SHOW DESCRIPTION\nThirty feet below the bluff where the Science Museum of Minnesota stands today was the Washington Street red-light district. It was anchored by a $12,000 carved brownstone disguised on city permits as a \"boarding house and seminary.\" Owned and operated by Canadian-born widow Nina Clifford, the luxury bordello catered to St. Paul’s political and economic elite while city officials collected monthly court fines as informal licensing fees. On this episode of Pionerd: The Minnesota Edition, host Robert Thomas uncovers the  history of \"the richest woman in the underworld\" and the hypocritical civic machine that protected her empire. From her cigar box filled with loose diamonds and the brutal physical realities hidden behind velvet curtains to her explosive 1914 courtroom testimony that brought down corrupt police chiefs and the 1937 WPA demolition that sent her parlor chandelier to the Mayor's office and her stone facade to the county morgue, this is the story of how St. Paul built its modern civic foundation on the complicated truths of its past.\n\nKEY TOPICS & HISTORICAL HIGHLIGHTS\nThe $12,000 Boarding House: Johanna Crow’s transformation into Nina Clifford, her 1887 purchase \"under the hill\" on South Washington Street, Walter Ife’s architectural design, and the tactical geography of operating directly across from the police station and city morgue.\nChampagne Parlors & Patent Medicine: The stark material contrast inside Number 147, from Mumm's champagne and diamond payments tossed into the Mississippi River to the 1997 archaeological discovery of opium pipes and unregulated alcohol-and-opiate medicine bottles used by working women to survive daily physical strain.\nThe O'Connor Engine & The 1914 Shakedown: Chief John J. O'Connor’s Layover Agreement, monthly court fines as vice taxation, and Clifford’s explosive prosecution testimony against Police Chief Martin Flanagan and Detective Fred Turner detailing three-thousand-dollar payoffs and $750 graft...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/TBzQA953XT-5pUk9GpM9Lck7NRVoPLOa3qejYqJMdT4/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9kMmRi/MTE5YzRmZTQ3ZjFk/ZjQ0OWUzODdkNGVm/MmVhMC5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}