Radnor Hotel site (1956 raid)

About a block and a half east on Pine, on this block, stood the hotel where the second Philadelphia arrest happened, nine years after the first — and the differences matter. This one, in the pre-dawn hours of a February morning in 1956, was not the federal government. It was a Philadelphia city vice squad, coming up the stairs before sunrise to search her room. They arrested her and the man who would become her husband, Louis McKay, on a narcotics charge.

Notice what she did next. She made bail — and she finished her engagement that same week, downstairs at a club you're about to pass. The performances didn't stop for the police; if anything, the police were one more thing to be gotten through so the show could go on. That's not defiance for a movie. That's a working singer who had learned, expensively, that the law would keep coming and the rent would keep coming too.

Two smaller details tell you who she was. When she and McKay married soon after, part of the reason was strategic — a wife can't be forced to testify against her husband. And when the officers took her in, she insisted on bringing her chihuahua, Chiquita, to the lockup with her. A woman being hauled to jail, refusing to leave her dog behind: that's the human being underneath the legend.

The exact records of this night are the kind of thing that lives in newspaper morgues and court dockets, and a footnote in our research still wants pinning down. But the shape of it is clear, and it happened on this block.

The heart of her Philadelphia is one block south. Go south one block to Lombard Street and head west, toward Broad. A state historical marker on the sidewalk at 1409 marks the place she called home.