Mr. Dater’s Whorehouse; Revelations Abound When A Cincinnati Bordello Falls Down

When a “house of ill fame” collapses, secrets spill out. The sort of secrets that embarrass the unclothed clientele, the city’s building inspectors and the wealthy landlord.Such was the case at 3:00 p.m. on Monday, 3 September 1877 when a very narrow building at 74 Longworth Street collapsed, killing four unfortunate souls. Longworth, a long-vanished Cincinnati street, once ran westward from Vine between Fifth and Sixth streets.In the autumn of 1877, workmen were engaged in demolishing a building next-door to the Weighell Brothers Excelsior Tobacco Works. The Weighells occupied the northeast corner of Longworth and Elm and planned to expand eastward along Longworth, acquiring and demolishing the building at 76 Longworth.As that building came down, the workmen noticed that the next building over, at 74 Longworth, was unstable and needed shoring up. It seems that 74 Longworth had relied on the now-demolished building at 76 Longworth as a sort of retaining wall. The Weighells contacted a…