Wicked Flagstaff is Susan Johnson’s history of Flagstaff, Arizona’s rowdy early decades: the red-light district south of the tracks, the saloons that outnumbered every other business by 1886, the secret tunnels, the blue laws, and characters like Dutch May Prescott and Commodore Perry Owens. The History Press published it on September 16, 2024; the paperback is 128 pages, ISBN 978-1467156394, $24.99.

No. Wicked Flagstaff is a history book by Flagstaff author Susan Johnson, published by The History Press in 2024. The coffee company is a separate local business with no connection to the book.

Yes. It sat south of the railroad tracks, in the neighborhood now celebrated as the Southside, and the Coconino Sun referred to it plainly as the red light district in print in 1916. The book maps who ran it, who profited, and how the town managed to depend on it and disapprove of it at the same time.

Dutch May Prescott was a businesswoman of Flagstaff’s restricted district who accrued real property south of the tracks. She and her husband were found dead in August 1916, and the Coconino Sun’s front page asked whether it was murder and suicide or a double murder. The question was never settled. Her chapter is in Wicked Flagstaff.

There are real passages under the downtown blocks. The documented core is a steam-heating pipe system from around 1920, but connected basements along the old saloon row and at least one Prohibition-era speakeasy keep the fuller story interesting. The book sorts the dug-for-heat from the dug-for-trouble.

By 1886, four years after the railroad arrived, Flagstaff had more saloons than all other kinds of business combined, and the 1901 Sanborn insurance maps still show them lined along Railroad Avenue. The book covers the era from the railroad’s arrival in 1882 through Prohibition.

Commodore Perry Owens was the long-haired sheriff of Apache County who killed three men in a famous 1887 shootout in Holbrook during the Pleasant Valley War. History remembers the gunfight; Wicked Flagstaff finds him in Flagstaff, at the Parlor Saloon, in the years after the fame.

Tea Cup Sallie is the nickname local telling preserves for one of the madams of Flagstaff’s restricted district, remembered along with a discreet side entrance near what is now Paso Del Norte, built so patrons could arrive unseen. Little else survives in the open record, which is typical of the district and exactly the kind of gap Wicked Flagstaff works to close.

The saloons closed on paper and the drinking moved indoors and underground: the Hotel Monte Vista’s lounge traces itself to a speakeasy that opened on New Year’s Day 1927, and the era’s newspapers record whiskey stills in the woods and bootleggers caught around the county. Wicked Flagstaff follows the dry years in full.

Susan Johnson is a Flagstaff, Arizona author, historian, and paranormal researcher: author of Haunted Flagstaff, Wicked Flagstaff, and Flagstaff’s Walkup Family Murders from The History Press, curator of the weekly Flagstaff History column in the Arizona Daily Sun, and co-founder of Freaky Foot Tours.

Bright Side Bookshop at 18 N San Francisco Street stocks it, one block from the streets in its chapters. It is also available from The History Press, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble, with the ebook on Barnes and Noble NOOK.

No. Wicked Flagstaff is available in paperback and as a Barnes and Noble NOOK ebook. No recorded edition exists.