Ogden — and particularly its main drag, 25th Street — once had a notorious reputation, where people disembarking from the trains at Union Station could find places to gamble, drink, take opium or visit a brothel.
In those rough-and-tumble times, according to Sarah Langsdon, head of special collections at Weber State University’s library, two characters stood out: Rose Davie and Belle London.
Rose Davie
In the 1940s and ‘50′s, Langsdon said, the building at 201 25th St. where the bar Alleged now sits “was a brothel called The Rose Room. It was run by Rose Davie and her husband William, who went by Bill.”
Rose came to Ogden in the ‘40s. By 1947, the second floor of the building was leased into what would become a thriving brothel. On a monthly basis, the couple would accumulate around $30,000 in revenue, Langsdon said.
“You would walk in and she would have a parlor,” Langsdon said. It was decorated in pink and animal print. “She had a pet ocelot that she took with her everywhere. She even had a pink Cadillac that she would drive around town,” she said.
Inside the brothel, Langsdon said, Rose had a secret intercom system to make sure girls weren’t getting hurt or stealing money.
The Davies were both arrested several times for running a house of prostitution, but would pay their fine and go back to what they were doing, Langsdon said. Rose was even arrested for narcotics once, Langsdon said, after a single opium pill was found in her car.
“What actually got them caught and the charges that stuck were tax evasion. They were making $30,000 a month, but they weren’t reporting that, obviously,” Langsdon said.
The couple, Langsdon said, were “sentenced to three years in federal penitentiary. Bill actually served down at Point of the Mountain, but Rose was transferred to Virginia.”
Langsdon had a chance to interview Rose’s lawyer, years later. He didn’t go into detail, she said, but he informed her that, after serving their sentences, Rose and Bill met back up in Vegas and got into trouble there, too. The lawyer said he was called to get them out of trouble but wouldn’t specify what that trouble was.
(Special Collections Library, Weber State University) A photograph of Belle London, an Ogden brothel owner at the beginning of the 20th century who was sometimes called "queen of the underworld."
Belle London
Belle London came to Ogden in the 1880s. Within 20 years, Langsdon said, she owned a fair chunk of 25th Street.
London was one of the most notorious madams of the era, and Langsdon said a preacher once wrote in a newspaper that she was the “queen of the underworld.” (In fact, The Salt Lake Tribune, in a 1908 article, quoted an Ogden city councilman who used the phrase to describe her.)
In Ogden, the London Ice Cream Parlour was a front to hide one of her brothels. The parlor’s sign remains on the building today.
“She was actually the one that Salt Lake asked to come and run their stockade, when they decided in 1908 to move all their prostitution to one area in Salt Lake, right behind where The Gateway is currently,” Langsdon said.
London put in $300,000 of her own money into building the area. She ran it for about two years.
“When she was in Salt Lake, she would host dinner parties, with all the well-to-do prominent women in the area,” Langsdon said, adding that she suspects a lot of those women were the wives of LDS leaders, who willingly went to a known madam’s house.
According to an item in The Tribune, London died in December 1924 in San Francisco, when she was hit by an automobile. In 2019, the London Belle Supper Club — named in her honor — opened in downtown Salt Lake City.
