Ice Cream Parlors Used to be Considered Evil

At the turn of the 20th century, the ice cream parlor was regarded by many as a den of corruption, prostitution, and sin.

There was New York, where a man testified to a senate committee in 1895 that he knew of several ice cream parlors that were “really houses of prostitution or disorderly houses.” But Chicago was really the center of the immoral ice cream epidemic—the city had so many problems in ice cream parlors that it passed a curfew law and even forbade the institutions from erecting “curtains, screens, or partitions of any kind that will serve to divide such places into compartments.”