November 18, 1927
Los Angeles
Readers may recall my last dispatch from South Main. My goodness, what a cesspool of vice. Wouldn’t something cultural make the place a little more high-hat? Like a museum, perhaps? A mvsevm, even.
Well, they tried a mvsevm down on South Main, and it just didn’t work out. In fact, Mrs. Mary Fraser is downright peeved.
It seems she was shown the Roma Hotel by agents who described it as “a nice quiet place,” and she signed a $33,602, eight-year lease with an eye toward running a rooming-house. And today she’s in court, refusing to pay rental after occupying the place seven months.
It seems she takes issue with the museum that occupies the structure’s ground floor: The World Museum of Freaks. 
Defendant Fraser contends that she’s lost more than $1,260 in her new venture because of the museum’s effects on her health—her weight has dropped from 125 to eighty pounds. Apparently, the persistent demand for liquor every fifteen minutes, coupled with the screams, shouts and howls from the museum below, are not only deleterious to her health but cause roomers to abandon the establishment before they’d even tried out their beds. Her house and the show beneath being repeatedly raided doesn’t help much, either.
A few years from now, we doubt she’ll be first in line to see a certain Tod Browning picture.
