Nearly 20,000 drunken, yelling, brawling revelers filled the Coliseum on South Wabash Avenue and clogged the street by the time the Honorable John J. Coughlin arrived by carriage on this December night.

It was a satisfying sight to the alderman, better known as "Bathhouse" John. A loud, yearlong campaign by reformers had failed to stop the annual festivities. "A real description of (last year's) ball is simply unprintable," Arthur Burrage Farwell, the president of the Chicago Law and Order League, had thundered. "(We) must stop this disgrace."This "disgrace" was the First Ward Ball, for more than a decade the city's most notorious party, hosted by "Bathhouse" and Michael "Hinky Dink" Kenna.

The tiny, cigar-chomping Kenna was a genius at political organization and the owner of the Workingman's Exchange, a popular saloon at Clark and Van Buren Streets. Coughlin had been a bathhouse masseur, wrote terrible poetry and wore garish clothes. He blustered while Kenna said little. They shared the aldermanic duties of the ward, an area that included dwellings of the rich, tenements and the notorious Levee, home to pimps, prostitutes, and pickpockets.

They conceived the First Ward Ball as a way of further stuffing their pockets, already bulging with graft, through imposed ticket and liquor sales. The first ball, held at the 7th Regiment Armory on South Wentworth Avenue in 1896, had attracted a wild mix of society thrill seekers, police captains, politicians, prostitutes and gamblers.

The 1908 ball made that affair look tame. During the course of the evening, revelers slopped up 10,000 quarts of champagne and 30,000 quarts of beer. Riotous drunks stripped off the costumes of unattended young women. A madam named French Annie stabbed her boyfriend with a hat pin.

"It's a lollapalooza! . . . There are more here than ever before. All the business houses are here, all the big people," Kenna proudly proclaimed. "Chicago ain't no sissy town."

The reformers inevitably triumphed and soon the gambling houses and brothels of the Levee were closed.