Truer words may never have been spoken on the silver screen. That is when the late John Huston, playing Noah Cross in “Chinatown,” utters these immortal lines: “‘Course I’m respectable. I’m old. Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.”

An Atlanta based author, Karen Abbott, who has specialized in romance novels, has set out to prove this axiom true. In Sin in the Second City she seeks to rehabilitate the reputations of two brothel owners who were driven out of Chicago by the express orders of Mayor Carter Harrison, Jr., nearly a century ago. It is the most recent book to revisit the notorious and opulent Everleigh Club. The former bordello was located in Chicago’s infamous segregated red light district, the Levee which was the city’s old red-light district which in its early 20th century heyday was a conglomerate of door-to-door gambling dens, clip joints and more than 500 houses of prostitution (to retrace the old ground take Clark street as it runs south from the Loop and becomes Wentworth. The area peaked from 18th to 22nd streets adjacent to today’s Chinatown.

The story has been chronicled before, but never in such explicit detail. Despite the lurid subject matter, Abbott labors to make the operators of the Everleigh Club look as refined and respectable as members of the Junior League. Surprisingly enough, some people are buying into this revisionist argument.

A critical review in “The Chicago Tribune” faulted Abbott for inventing some of the dialogue quoted in the text and for relying on too many questionable sources in the book. In the author’s own afterword, Abbott summarized the three earlier books published on the subject more than fifty years ago and listed their various shortcomings. As the Tribune reviewer noted, in the main text, however, Abbott repeatedly cited the one book that she had rated as the most seriously flawed and unreliable.

One remarkable thing I noticed is the number of glowing reader reviews submitted online by women who seemingly admire the “Everleigh sisters” ( actually the sisters were named Ada and Minna Sims) as if they were prototypical feminist entrepreneurs battling an oppressive and patriarchal economic system that deprived women of meaningful career options rather than two notorious madams. Some representative comments praise the book as being racy and titillating. With the passage of time, the Everleigh establishment is seen as nothing more than naughty. Certainly the activities taking place there were no worse than a televised episode of “Sex and the City.” Prostitution exciting, glamorous, pleasurable and profitable? What a pity the prudish moralists shut the Levee down! The historic Everleigh Club deserved recognition as a Chicago cultural landmark! Mayor Carter Harrison ordered its closing after discovering the club was being advertised as such.

Unfortunately, having ornate furniture, expensive drapes, silk sheets and lush carpets did not change the essential nature of the business. The Simms sisters’ preferred clients far wealthier than the sweat-begrimed laborers visiting shabbier two dollar cribs. Or the country yokels who were fleeced in panel houses. Or that “the Everleigh butterflies” had access to a capable physician who could spare them from the ravages of venereal diseases does not elevate the flesh-peddling enterprise. Nonetheless, some women readers of the book emphasized that many girls sought work at the Everleigh Club because conditions were better and more sanitary, clothing was more fashionable, the pay higher, food and wine exquisite. Celebrities patronized the club, including Theodore Dreiser and Jack Johnson the prize fighter. Johnson enjoyed unique privileges as the brothel was otherwise off limits to African Americans. His repeated associations with prostitutes would eventually lead to his prosecution, exile and eventual imprisonment for violating the Mann Act.

What is one to make of a culture where commercialized sex is simply good fun and pop tarts dominate the headlines by appearing half naked as they lip synch the lyrics to their banal tunes? A decade and a half ago, the film “Swoon” depicted Leopold and Loeb, not so much as two sadistic perverts who kidnapped and murdered a boy for thrills, but as misunderstood gay lovers stigmatized by a cruel and uncaring society that unfairly condemned their homosexuality. Unchecked moral relativism means that no one is ever guilty of any crime. Only society can be rightfully blamed for the evil that men do and the greatest of all sins is hypocrisy. I thought hypocrisy was the tribute that vice paid to virtue, but I have been accused of being out of step with the new world order.

How realistic is it to promote the Everleigh Club as the norm for vice operations in the Levee District? Not very. One can gain a better insight into the harsh realities of so called victimless crimes by reading the novel “Never Come Morning” by Nelson Algren which contains a graphic description of a rejected young woman who is ruined by an uncaring lout. She becomes a prostitute and is gradually destroyed as a human being in the process.The middle aged madam operating the brothel copes with her business success by developing an addiction to cocaine.

It is worth noting that much of the Prohibition Era violence that plagued Chicago in the Roaring Twenties was made possible by the vice profits that provided the criminal gangs with their working capital. The politicians from the First Ward, Bathhouse John Coughlin and Hinky Dink Kenna, shared in the wages of sin and the dirty dollars helped fund all types of vote fraud and political corruption.

Is this a historical legacy worth celebrating?

To those who admire the owners of the Everleigh Club, the Simms sisters, one can only respond by quoting Cicero’s lament “O tempora, o mores!”

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Lawyer and writer Daniel Kelley is a regular columnist for The Chicago Daily Observer