A nervous opium-eating individual was hammering away at a piano. … Not a woman was to be seen in the row of seats… Around the sides of the room and at the end opposite the stage were built out of thin pine boards apartments with an opening toward the platform and a barn-like door leading into the narrow passageway along the wall. In each room was an electric torch button which communicated with a bar set up behind the stage. The boxes were unlighted… In these boxes were women, one in some, more in others. … Women with dresses () nearly to the point above their knees, with stained and sweaty tights, with bare arms and necks uncovered halfway to their waists〔Unnamed writer for ''Coast Magazine'' some time in the 1890s, quoted in Morgan 1960, p. 119–120.〕