Sponsored By. The women probably didn't know it in , but their names, along with 95 others, would go down in East Grand Forks history-and for some, more than once. Court records didn't account for the difference in the fines other than to say it depended on the amount of business transacted. The city of East Grand Forks was just 9 years old, but it had a powerful allure of lawlessness.
During the city's early days in the late s and through the first few decades of the past century, the dusty frontier town across the Red River was booming with bootleg booze, loose women and illegal gambling. And, of course, when you have alcohol, you probably get prostitution, too.
A city doesn't really want to have a house of ill repute, but some of it just happened back then because of liquor. Stennes, at age 70, is too young to have lived during the era of the Wild East, but he did know Edwin "Whitey" Larson, the man who in and at age 19 opened the Coney Island Lunchroom, the precursor to what's known yet today as Whitey's.
Stennes started waiting tables for Larson as a college student in and later became a partner in the business.
He heard a lot of wild stories through the years. Some of them probably true. Most of them probably not. There were 40 bars in downtown East Grand Forks, go figure," Stennes said. The city had up to 48 saloons at one time, and Ripley's Believe It Or Not in the s reported a three-block area of downtown had the highest concentration of neon lights in the world.
