Chapter 3 No.3

Come and See!

A CITY DEFILED.

The Cafe Evil-The Rich Man's Girl Trap-The Borderland of Hell-Crimes that Thrive by Night-State Street and Its Pitfalls-The Stages of Sin.

It is night. Over the city of 2,000,000 souls is the light of God's stars and the pale moon.

Thousands tired from the day's occupation, turn to peaceful sleep for relief.

Innocent children are tucked into their little, white beds. The kiss from loving lips goes with them into the land of dreams. The future has no terror for them, because they know not.

While thousands sleep, thousands sin and perish in Chicago!

Crime loves the protection of darkness. Vice breathes more freely in the night.

From his cavern, creeps forth the monster Vice with sun-down.

He is hungry for his victims. They have been fattened for him. The hour has come for the nightly sacrifice on the altars of debauchery.

Come with us! Come, we will show you the City Defiled!

Down into the heart of the loop district we shall go first.

Right across from where God's and man's laws are administered in the County Courthouse, a stone's throw from one of the oldest churches in Chicago, we shall stop.

It is George Silver's "Rialto." It is one of the most popular cafes of its kind in Chicago. It is a place where human souls are valued for just the worth of the body's hire. An alderman is said to be part owner of this place.

It is a typical example of the hundreds of drinking places for men and women that are found in Chicago.

Virtue is slain there every night. Hearts are broken there and lives ruined. It is no worse than other places of the same type.

It is an underground hell.

Down the steps we go and enter.

We are escorted to a table by a colored waiter.

On a raised dais, a bent-over consumptive looking young man plays a piano. The airs are the popular hits of the day.

A pale-faced youth wipes his purple lips after a hasty sip at a beer glass and advancing to the front of the dais sings a song, usually of sensuous import.

He is extravagantly applauded. He is "sent up" a drink by some pleased patron.

But look about you.

There are more than one hundred tables. At each table sit at least one man and one woman.

In every woman's face, if you are observant, is written a tragedy, either beginning that night, or in its unfolding or finished years before.

Do you see that "washed-out" bleached blonde with colorless eyes, who smiles at the drinking youth who sits with her? She has lived through the tragedy. Life to her is but an aftermath of unending agony.

The monster Vice has long ago sucked the life blood from her veins. She has been discarded. She lives from day to day on her passing victims.

They are usually unsophisticated youths, proud to sit with her, buy her more poison and peril their young lives by contact with her.

She is coughing. That is the warning signal she knows well but attempts to forget. It is the signal that death has placed his hands upon her. She has fulfilled her mission. Hell must claim its own.

You are attracted by a merry burst of laughter from pretty lips. You turn.

How her eyes sparkle! How her cheeks burn crimson!

Her body moves sinuously to the rhythm of the music.

She smiles even at you as she sips her "fizz."

She is intoxicated with life. It is lights and shadows, songs and flowers.

She is a favorite among men. A much-sought after girl on the border line of womanhood.

She has no terrors tonight; no haunting nightmares.

Her blood flows fast; her pulse thrills her; her thoughts burn with pleasing fire.

She is reckless. Why not? The world is a bed of roses.

Four months ago she wandered into the paths that lead to hell.

Six dollars a week as a clerk. No clothes, no delicacies, no amusements.

She learned the secrets of the girl who worked beside her; how she purchased the "good things" of life.

Her virginal innocence was the inestimable price!

Tonight she is an habitue of the brilliant cafe.

The path is still one of beauty and fascination. The tragedy is in its inception.

The bright eyes will become dull, the sweet voice harsh, the cheeks pale, the face haggard.

The wine shall have been sipped. Nothing then but the bitter dregs! Oh, the horror of that approaching tragedy!

Her end is inevitable.

An early grave, a house of prostitution or an insane asylum! There is rarely ever a turning back.

Vice buries its tentacles deep in the flesh.

THE FIRST STEP.

"Dearie, don't be afraid of that. Really, it's like a 'soft' drink. It won't make you drunk."

Again you turn on hearing that remark.

He is leaning over the table;-a gray-haired, fashionably dressed man. The young girl he is talking to, is not more than sixteen years of age.

Her face is white. Her eyes are like those of a hunted deer. Her hands tremble.

It is her first night!

The fiendish brute induces her to take the drink. You see her take another. She seems suddenly to become stupid.

"Come on, it is about time to go, Kid," you hear the man say.

The young girl lurches into his waiting arms.

That night another victim is claimed by the monster!

Somewhere a little, gray-haired mother prays that her daughter may be protected from the sins of a great city.

There is an unfathomable abyss waiting for that girl, a chasm in the depths of which lurk torture, sin, disease and death.

In that cafe all is levity and enjoyment. It is a living in the present, a forgetfulness of the past, a shutting of the eyes to the terrors of the unborn future.

In one night while the music pleases the senses, while song brings an ephemeral joy, while drink quickens the pulse, while the atmosphere lulls the conscience to sleep, innocent young girls, barely out of school, are inoculated with the poison of forbidden fruit.

Every year, hundreds of young girls, undefiled and pure, drift into the wickedest city in the world, are carried away by the glare of the "Great White Way" and the sensuous lures of the dazzling cafes and the Bohemian pleasures, and become unconsciously, the recruits of the great absorbing Vice Trust.

As we pass from this cafe,-the type of hundreds of others,-note the attractive pictures on the wall,-pictures of popular actresses, actors, prizefighters and men of the world of sports.

The girl who a year ago knew comparatively nothing of the world outside of her harmless, narrow sphere, can point to the pictures and give you the names with dangerous accuracy. They are now a part of her Bohemian world. She boasts today of familiarity with them.

Late in the night, or to speak accurately, at early dawn, the cafes empty their drunken revelers into the streets. In pairs they stagger away, some to houses of assignation, others to the disorderly hotels where they live, and still others to the "redlight" districts of the city, of which we shall soon speak.

That is the cafe evil of today. It is the outward threads of the enmeshing web of the insidious and poisonous spider-Vice. Once trapped, redemption is scarcely possible.

Two hundred department store girls, according to a reform association's statistics, take the first downward step each year, in these cafes.

It is the outside trap, with luring bait, set by the Vice Trust for the unsuspecting victims. The girls from out of the city are drawn to it for the pleasures of life because other avenues of enjoyment are not open to them. A conscious or unconscious emissary of the vice lords lures them to these cesspools, robs them of their senses by subtle intoxicants and destroys that same night their virginal purity. In a night they have fallen from the highest estate to the bottomless pit of a living hell; they have been stripped of their robes of innocence and clothed in the shameful, sinful, scarlet garb of the thousands of women who have fallen before them.

No mother, no father, who kisses a daughter goodbye as she leaves the fireside to plunge into the foaming sea of Chicago life, can be certain that the child of his or her flesh and blood will return to the fireside undefiled, pure of body and clean of heart, as long as those cancers fester and flourish in the city of Chicago.

We have treated of the girl problem and the cafe.

What of our boys?-you ask.

It is a sociological axiom that a nation's integrity depends on its womanhood.

The depraved woman means the depraved man. Each night thousands of youths, full of physical strength, mental energy and ambition, seek recreation in the cafes. It is there they meet or take the lost women. It is there they wreck bright futures, sow the seed of crime, deaden their moral consciences, and contract fatal diseases and rush unthinking down the path that leads to ruin and to death.

Back of a murder, in which some young man of good parentage and of promising hopes figures as the principal, you can read the word "cafe." It began there, it progressed, until its end meant the gallows in the court yard of the county jail.

STATE STREET AND ITS PITFALLS.

Let us leave the accursed place. We have other places to visit before the sun flares red above the waters of Lake Michigan.

We stroll down Randolph street, through Chicago's well lighted avenues and its "Rialto" to one of the busiest thoroughfares in the world,-during the day-State street.

The bustling, shoving, pushing, army of men and women, has gone home.

Yet, the street is by no means deserted.

As we walk along we are conscious of the number of unescorted women, walking the main loop thoroughfare. We mentally comment on it.

They seem to saunter aimlessly about, jauntily swinging their purses, and looking up into your face in a questioning, puzzling manner.

Would you know the hideous truth?

These are the outposts of the great army of Vice. These are the women, stripped of the last element of self-respect, who like vultures attack their prey in the glare of the arc lights, in the face of the uniformed guardians of the law.

In the vernacular of the street, these are the privates of the army of "street-walkers." Unblushingly they flirt with their victims, catch their eyes, draw them into a side street and quibble over the purchase price of their flesh.

There is an army of 2,000 of these women infesting the loop district and its adjoining neighborhoods every night in the year. To the shady hotels within the loop or just outside of it, where no embarrassing questions are asked, these brazen prostitutes take their temporary masters.

No decent woman is safe on a downtown street after dark when alone. The haunting evil is about her wherever she goes. She is good, but the men who walk the streets do not know it and they may offer her insults at any moment.

At times the evil becomes so open that police regulations are issued, driving them from their byways of crime. Invariably within a few days, the same painted faces and expressionless eyes are to be found on the old corners, carrying on their disease-distributing trade.

These women are not free agents of evil any more than other slaves of the Vice Trust. They pay toll for every step their tired feet take during the night and the early hours of the morning. They take their victims to the cafes of which we have spoken and lure them into buying poisonous intoxicants. For every drink they bring to the house,-and they must bring many if they are to enjoy the favor of the vice lords,-they are given a commission. The "drink check" is a part of the nightly income of every woman of the underworld.

But let us pass on. We have only scratched the superficial, outer covering of the crime life of Chicago. There are a thousand more revolting sights to be seen, not for the purpose of morbid curiosity but in order to prove to our readers the magnitude and the power of the Vice Trust in Chicago.

We are taking a trip through the greatest kingdom in the world, the empire of unhampered, bold-faced, threatening sin.

THE STAGES OF SIN.

As we pass down the well lighted streets of the loop district we are halted in our progress by a man standing in front of a garish-appearing theater just south of Van Buren on State street.

The cry that reaches our ears is:

"Come on, I know every man here is dying to take a peep at Chicago's only and original Salome lady! She's inside in all her glory and all her-well, you know, Gents, the best ever. Come on, it's a whole pile of fun for a dime. You will thrill all over when the cutest girl in the world hugs a man in a grizzly-bear wiggle!"

Strains of music float from the place and a swarm of men of all types and conditions wedge their way to the inside.

That is another of the sore spots of the big city. It is just one of hundreds of indecent forms of entertainment that have enough air of respectability about them to exist on the borders of Chicago's loop district. Here they flourish and reap their harvest.

In such places, many a promising young man has committed, in mind at least, his first moral murder. It is in this kind of places that vice sows its first seeds-they are the first stepping stones down the abyss ending at the dishonored grave. Every night young men pour out of these places with their minds poisoned and with the fiery hand of temptation on them, and from there they drift southward to the great whirlpool of iniquity, falling victims to the deadly perils about them and tasting the deadly but subtle poison for which they return until they die at the source.

Every form of indecency may be found on the small and poorly lighted stages of these theaters. Suggestive songs are sung, obscene witticism spoken, until pent up, disastrous passions burst forth with demoniacal fury and slay their own masters.

But let us go on down the roadway of crime and sin.

THE RICH MAN'S GIRL TRAP.

We have crossed over to Michigan avenue-to one of the main boulevards of the world. It is the promenade of men of millions and women of blood. It is the location of some of the most exclusive, most fashionable and most expensive hotels in the world.

Surely, you say, these hotels do not figure in the great vice plot which exists in Chicago?

They do! They figure in a way that will make every father and mother who reads this narration, tremble with fear and horror.

These hotels are infested with men of wealth and time, men of dead consciences, men of diseased moral senses, who are always in search of young, innocent, pretty prey for their decaying passions.

Under the pretense of respectability, and with the false counsel that they are safe and protected from harm, these parasites bring their young victims to these hotels, dazzle them with the beauty and luxury about them, rob them of their senses with new and intoxicating delights, and then steal the only priceless gift that God gave them.

That is one phase of the hotel evil, as we see it from a superficial glance. There are a score of others.

In one of the leading hotels of the world, there is a great crime center. Let us enter it.

Down the corridors we walk until we enter the portals of a new vice palace. It is a cafe scene but not of the character witnessed at the place first visited. Everything bespeaks luxury. The music is subtly and softly sensuous. Obsequious waiters tread softly from table to table, taking their orders from rich patrons.

The men sitting about bear the marks of wealth and prosperity. They are money lords, feasting at the table of life and toying away the moments with women who are ready to be purchased for pretty clothes, suppers with wines, and hard, cold dollars and cents.

In the majority, the women we see, are dressed in the latest fashions, brilliant with delicately rouged faces and penciled eyebrows, set off by large and attractive picture hats.

If you study the majority of the faces you will see that they are cut as if of stone. They are faces of women who have lived through tragedies, have thrust those tragedies aside and have reduced life to a mere living from day to day, prepared every hour to barter flesh and blood for cash. But, as in the less pretentious cafe, we find here also the type of girls and women who are just beginning to stray into the broad path of destruction.

Money buys a false air of respectability. It has purchased that pharasaical atmosphere for the big hotels.

It is in these fashionable hotel cafes and restaurants that sin is suggested and the road to ruin prepared. Of course, we must not lose sight of the fact that the vast majority of the women who enter such places, have long since drunk the first glass of poison and eaten the first piece of forbidden fruit.

Into these places, nightly, thousands of men and women bent on shameful missions come and depart, inebriated by wines and liquors and forgetful of respect to each other. There are, however, hundreds who enter and depart without being contaminated by the vice that haunts the handsomely furnished apartments.

Out in the lobby of the hotel, we notice a nattily-dressed man of mature years with the gray showing in his hair, holding a conversation with one of the hotel attaches. We are curious. We notice he is being given directions.

We follow him to a room in one of the hotels adjoining the one we have just visited. He is taken to a certain room and is admitted by a rather flashingly dressed woman of about forty-five years, of florid complexion and sharp, raucous voice.

She smiles at the man. He speaks to her in a low voice. We might overhear this conversation or one similar to it in import:

"I am Mr. Edwards from Cincinnati. I am a business man and the evening is boring. Mr. ... the hotel clerk, tells me you can find me a companion?" queries the caller.

The woman smiles knowingly, stops and thinks and then says in a half jesting manner:

"Why, certainly, Mr. Edwards. I can make the evening agreeable. I can find you the best little partner in the world.

"But"-and she smiles some more-"what do you want, something rather young and new to the game, or a 'woman of some experience?' I can certainly produce a choice assortment." Then she laughs that meaningless laugh again.

Mr. Edwards hesitates a moment, laughs off a possible embarrassment and then answers in assumed flippancy:

"Oh, as long as they are numerous, serve me up a young blonde chicken of about seventeen summers, one that will go the limit and not try to put mucilage on her fingers to stick to the long green. I'll pay her right for her trouble."

Then he makes his first flesh payment at that moment to the mistress of a dozen women's bodies. He strolls down to the lobby and waits. A few moments later he is "paged" by a bellboy and a note is given him. If we should follow him we would find that the note named the rendezvous and that the purchased woman waited for him there to do his bidding during the night of shame.

This is not fiction but shuddering fact.

In a Jackson boulevard hotel, there is a "Miss Harris," who is the procuress of girls of every description, character, temperament and physical type, for men of wealth.

There are a dozen of such women with headquarters in Chicago's big hotels. They are the fashionable panderers for the rich human beasts, who live or stop at the hotels or who go there to find their victims.

These places in the criminal world have a name. They are named "Houses of Call." They are employment agencies for young and old prostitutes. If a man is willing to pay the price demanded, the woman, "Miss Harris," or other such women, will produce for his pleasure, a young virgin and turn her over to the merciless, insane lust of human Satan.

These places are the fashionable flesh-markets, the slave blocks where women are sold to men of wealth.

That is another phase of the great Vice Trust, for those women panderers, and those girl slaves pay tribute to carry on their traffic to the great kings of the underworld. Of the relation of these classes of criminals to their protectors we shall speak later.

"Miss Harris"-we shall use her as a type-has a secret directory to the covert, hidden but expensive haunts of vice.

After Mr. Edwards departs, we might see another caller on a similar mission. He is not a new customer. He is an old one. He makes his demand without hesitation. He wants a young girl of innocence. He wants a girl in the first flush of maturity, a girl who fears the things of sin, but who, paradoxically, craves for the cloying sweet things of life.

The girl is found for the monster. His crime must be committed in the dark, in a secure and safe place, in a place where no one shall see him committing his soul-murder.

Again "Miss Harris" comes to the front. She directs her customer with the trembling, wondering and frightened girl, to the "Arena," a pretentious residence in Michigan avenue near Fifteenth street.

His coming is known before his arrival. "Miss Harris" has informed the "Madam" that a "live wire with a young kid" is on the way to the place. The man and his victim are received politely and ushered into a luxuriously furnished room, delicately scented with perfume and stripped of any suggestion that it is a crime-chamber where sin is intangibly present, waiting for the next victim.

The desecration of soul and body begins and ends in that room. If the man wishes it, supper with delicate morsels of food and wines of choice and expensive brands are served. The atmosphere wooes to sleep the last moral rebellion and all is lost.

The "Arena" is mentioned here as a type, again. Chicago is infested with such places. They may be found in our best residence districts, near fashionable churches and adjoining homes where purity is sacred.

To state more specific facts on such places we will name several more similar "flats."

A "Mrs. Clouds" conducts a similar place on La Salle avenue near Erie street. It is necessary to have a letter of introduction or be known before entrance can be effected. Here, nightly, men of wealth and even of prominence with wives and families, ignorant of their orgies, take young girls.

The automobiles of the wealthy drive up to this place every evening and their occupants seek their pleasure within.

Here many-course dinners with wine as a zest giver-usually champagne-are served to the patrons for $12 a plate. It is the vice haunt of the millionaires and their purchased women.

Then there is the place of Mrs. Mohr in Erie street, west of Rush street, where the same luxuries are in evidence, where the same vices are committed and where the range of prices eats deep into anything but a plethoric bank account.

These places run without intervention. They are known to few outside the patrons. They pay, as do all other forms of vice, for police toleration. Reform movements have not attacked them because they are scarcely aware of their existence. They are but a small part of the contributing elements of graft and corruption.

We have digressed, but it was necessary to show the source and end of a vice evil starting in the big hotels. In these "flats" of secrecy, girls will be furnished in the same manner as they are furnished by "Miss Harris" and her ilk of panderers.

But let us resume our trip in the underworld. From the hotels, we move southward again.

THE BORDERLAND OF HELL.

Down Michigan avenue, Wabash avenue, State street, Fifth avenue and many other prominent thoroughfares leading out of the loop district, are the "assignation hotels" of Chicago. These are the houses where men bring their victims at a cost of one dollar to five dollars a room, where street walkers "steer" their customers and where vice festers with the roar of the business world outside the windows.

Within the loop district alone there are fifty hotels of this vicious character. Their average earnings, according to a prominent investigator and reformer, are $600 a night. As we move southward we pass them at every step, little dreaming of the lives that have been ruined within and the tragedies that have begun and culminated there.

The part of the South side in which we have entered was at one time a fashionable neighborhood of wealthy and respectable residents. The Vice Trust drove them away by its encroachments. Today those same buildings are tenanted by lost women, living there and carrying on their nefarious trade in the district but a short distance away.

From Twentieth street south on Michigan avenue, in sections, and in Wabash avenue and State street, vice reigns openly and supreme. There is no pretense at respectability. Vice has thrown off its masks and flaunts its hideousness, its diseases and its crimes in our faces.

It is the Borderland of Hell,-it is the city's death-spot. Similar borderlands are found on the West and North sides.

As you look farther south you can count the electric signs flaring over the haunts of vice-they spell saloon, cafe or hotel. They run into the hundreds.

The interiors of these cafes are similar to the loop cafe we have described, stripped of its air of hidden sin. Here sin stalks about as the fearless master.

The woman who a year ago reveled in the pleasures of a night at some fashionable restaurant with a "friend" may be found drunk and maudlin, vulgarly and cheaply clothed, dropping "dope" into her glass of whiskey to revive her tired brain and body to attract another victim and stave off the wolf of starvation a little while longer.

These are the "hangouts" of the women who are going down and down. They have ceased to attempt to appear respectable; they have tired of hiding their shame and infamy; they have torn off the mask and their faces peer leeringly at you and their blue-colored lips seem to cry out in hellish abandon:

"I am a damned, lost creature. I sold my birthright. I bartered the body my good mother gave me. I drank to the last lees the glass and I am accursed. Death has placed his seal upon me and I am struggling to cheat him of a few days longer. Life, life, more life!"

Here women smoke cigarettes openly, embrace the men they are with, expose their limbs in licentious manner to attract prospective customers. Here a sign is made, and a half drunken waiter brings a half crazed creature sitting alone in the shadows of a pillar, a white powder, which she snuffs. That is cocaine.

A majority of the women who live in and about the levee districts of the city, are the slaves of the opium, cocaine and morphine habit, and fourteen per cent, according to a conservative estimate, are yearly sent to the state insane institutions as hopeless victims of drugs.

In the "near-levee" cafes we come across a vice-creature, whose type we have not yet encountered in our night tour.

Watch that young man, dressed in a stylish, brown suit of clothes, who is talking to the painted unfortunate beside him. His voice rises as he shakes his finger at her. Her hand trembles as she reaches down in her stocking. He curses her and tells her to hurry. Then she gives him a number of bills.

"Damn you, you cheap cur; have you quit hustling or have you another man?" he yells at her above the jarring music of a tin-pan piano and the cigarette voice singing to it.

"Get out on the street and get some business!" he says to her hoarsely, striking her across the face.

Pale and trembling the pitiful creature rises and hurries out into the street to search for more prey.

That man is the woman's "cadet." That is the more polite word for the old word "pimp." That is her master:-the man who takes from her the infamous earnings of her body.

Lower than the murderer, in the moral scale, are these debased creatures. They are men stripped of every instinct of honor, lost to every sense of shame. They are the lowest form of the human parasite.

In the borderland of the levee they live, breathe, eat and drink off the earnings of thousands of depraved women. From the earnings of their slaves they pay the police to grant their women immunity from prosecution.

These men are also termed "macks." The name means nothing; it is the character of its bearing that is the horrible fact.

In the South side levee district, including the places that encircle the open houses of prostitution, there are 800 of these low vile creatures. We are but describing one of the levees of the city. Conditions are similar in the others.

We have seen them in the notorious cafes of the South side but they exist in swarms within the levee zone proper.

The hours are swiftly passing and our trip is by no means over. Let us leave the haunts we have just visited.

Let us go down to one lower level of crime and vice. We have reached Twenty-second street and Wabash avenue and we stand on the edge of the Great White Ulcer.

ANTE ROOMS OF HELL.

Let us follow the crowd of men and women into that large building on Twenty-second street.

A novel sight greets us as we enter. Our hats and coats are checked and we walk out from behind a mirror used as a screen into a large hall on the floor of which several hundred couples are dancing to the strains of an orchestra in a balcony above.

Some of the faces which we saw earlier in the evening within the loop district have also "come south," as the expression is. They are here to revel until dawn. There is no letup until the bright sun drives vice blinking and blinded back into its holes.

Every type of woman, from the woman who is simply "slumming" to the most depraved and degenerate creature can be seen in this notorious levee dance hall. As the music dies down, the couples with unsteady steps, caused by the whirling about the floor and the drinks which have been freely imbibed, seek rest at the dirty, wet chairs and tables which encompass the room. Drinks are served in profusion, regardless of the state of inebriety of the patrons and regardless of the one o'clock closing law, which the police declare is in effect.

Women, rendered senseless by drink, are dragged from the place nightly and carted away-God knows where!

Let us get away from the reeking atmosphere, from the smell of stale beer and sickly, perspiring women.

Before we enter the biggest cesspool of all, let us stop at Buxbaum's Cafe at Twenty-second and State streets,-the most notorious outside-levee dive in the city of Chicago.

Its habitues, with few exceptions, are the overflow, the outcasts of the levee, or the women who seek a few moments of so-called relaxation from their labors of sin.

All night this place reeks with infamy; all night orgies impossible to portray are carried on; all night the saturnalia of vice wrings the blood from women's hearts and crushes life in its ever grinding mill.

South of the street where we have stopped, the cafes continue. Again they take on an air of respectability and trap the young and innocent girls and with hands dripping with blood the vampires of vice push them on and on, until they reach the point where we have stopped.

We are on the shores of a Lake of Infamy. The tributaries flow from the north, the south and the west, coursing through every section of the city, sweeping their victims in a surging current, without hope of rescue to the waters, whose eddies close forever over the drowned. The cafes and disorderly saloons and dance halls are the traps at the beginning of the avenues of vice. They are the feeders to the infamous hotels. The chain has no missing link. The Vice Trust has made it in perfect manner.

We are standing on the shores of a lake-that lake is one of the "redlight" districts of Chicago.

EAT, DRINK AND BE MERRY ... AND TOMORROW?

By Courtesy of The Chicago Daily Journal.

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