You may not recognize the name, but Elaine Higgins was a fixture in downtown Toledo for many years in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Sadly, she was better known as “The Bag Lady.” She, her shopping cart, and her multitude of bags were not an uncommon sight in the central business district, either on the move, or hunkered down into an alcove of a closed building. I was one of many who, no doubt, knew very little about her otherwise.
Mostly, people put up with her. Then, as now, unfortunately, the more fortunate went about their business and paid her and the other homeless in downtown Toledo no mind. But by the mid-1980s there was an effort to find a stable environment for her. It started mostly around the opening of the Hotel Sofitel at 444 N. Summit St. in the spring of 1985.
“Shortly after the opening of Hotel Sofitel, Mr. (Michael) Hill (general manager of the hotel) and other tenants in new buildings along the riverfront complained about her presence on Summit Street. The complaints led to more than a dozen arrests,” according to The Blade.
By late summer that year, the Associated Press wrote this story that reported Higgins was being arrested repeatedly.
A 60-year-old woman who lives in downtown alleys and doorways is being arrested repeatedly for minor violations because police say they have to follow up on complaints about her and she refuses to give up her “bag lady” life style.
Elaine Higgins has become perhaps the most well-known homeless person in the city since she began living in the streets about 10 years ago, say police who arrested her Tuesday just six hours after she was released from jail after serving five days for a loitering conviction.
Police Chief John Mason said he has ordered officers to arrest her whenever she is seen breaking the law, because her presence and the large collection of bottles, bags, umbrellas and other possessions she carries with her are sparking citizens’ complaints.
The story also said Downtown Toledo Associates, a disbanded business group, asked the county Probate Court to commit her to the Toledo Mental Health Center but was told Higgins wasn’t a risk to anyone.
She had been arrested at least 23 times in the previous 15 years on charges of loitering, criminal trespassing, disorderly conduct, public indecency, disturbing the peace, shoplifting, intoxication and soliciting.
Part of the effort was an April 1, 1986 fundraiser, held at Theo’s Taverna on Summit St. There, 200 people, at $25 a head, helped create a fund for Higgins she could use as long as stayed off the streets, which she had since February of 1986 (the story didn’t say where, however).
“We’ve got judges. We’ve got prosecutors. We’ve got bankers, businessmen, even some Irishmen. And they’re all here to say they care about street people in general and Elaine Higgins in particular,” according to her attorney, Peter Wagner (who was also an organizer of the event).
Not Hill, however. “There are many street people who I feel sympathy for, but I don’t feel that much sympathy for Higgins,” Hill told The Blade. This letter writer to The Blade felt the same way.
“Mrs. Higgins, who can still be seen wandering downtown streets some days, showed up only briefly last night. Shortly before 6 p.m., she was seen under the overhang of a building at Lafayette and Summit streets,” The Blade said.
Higgins was also a Blade reader, according to Blade veteran Mike Bartell, who recalled her in a 2014 article for the University of Toledo Alumni eMagazine:
We had a notorious bag lady who lived downtown named Elaine Higgins. She had issues, caused trouble downtown and I wrote a lot about Elaine. One of the things that would absolutely fascinate me is I would be walking down the street and Elaine would stop me. She would either compliment me on the article that I had written about her or be very critical of the article, but she was reading my stuff.
Six years to the day after that fundraiser, Higgins died of cancer at the age of 66. It was front-page news the next day in The Blade. Her obituary filled in the blanks.
During the war, she inspected Jeeps at Willys-Overland. Her husband was killed in action in April 1945 while serving with the U.S. Army in Germany. In the 1950s she was a barmaid and manager of the Lorelyn Ranch bar on Monroe St. near Sylvania Ave.
Higgins lived with her father until just before he died in 1961 and lived periodically in mental institutions, being discharged for the last time in 1975. But living in apartments didn’t suit her. “It just got to be too much, honey,” she told a reporter. “I said, maybe if I go live downtown, things will be better.”
“She ended up out in the street, and that was it,” her brother, Norman Haas of South Bend, Ind., told The Blade’s Tom Troy. “We tried to help her.”
The obituary went on to describe how most Toledoans remember her:
Her shopping cart, her tattered clothing, and her abrasive personality made her a center of controversy and a symbol of the predicament of the homeless.
A familiar sight, she often was found nestled under blankets, preferring empty parking garages, doorways and sidewalks to anything that reminded her of an institution.
Several layers of clothing, a tattered glove, and a ragged hat were her year-round wardrobe. She could be menacing, casting angry looks and foul words at anyone she saw as a threat.
A 2017 story out of Wauseon tells a completely different story, and you can take it for what it’s worth. The Blade’s obituary, for example, does not mention Higgins losing her entire family in a fire.
But one thing is true, as The Blade wrote in an editorial April 3: “She could not be ignored, and will long be remembered.”
Wow…I have not thought about “the Bag Lady” in decades. I saw her often downtown, and like a lot of people, was on the receiving end of a string of obscenities from her when I walked by her once (my old man worked downtown, and several times he saw her defecating right in the gutter). People tried to help her all the time–she didn’t want it. That aspect of her story would probably get lost (or deliberately ignored) if her story was told in the paper today. You can’t have it both ways: you can’t make it next-to-impossible to lock up someone long-term who’s mentally ill and a menace…and then complain that they’re out on the street and bemoan the fact that no one is helping them. A lot of people would say, “Thank goodness we see things differently today about these people,”…but I bet some citizens of San Francisco, for example, would now agree with the old ways.
Elaine Hass Higgins? She was my grandparents neighbor for years, lived with her father George Hass on Arletta St. If you ever encountered her I bet she was talking to herself using Georges name in derogatory ways. She was married a short time to a GI Mr. Higgins who lived a couple of doors down, he was killed in the service, and left her a pension. She was pregnant by him at the time of his death, Sometime in the forties(?), she was involved in a traffic accident where she was brain damaged. I lived time with my grandparents, and they told me she was a little nuts. She would call me over when I was outside and I would help her bring in her packages from the car, and she would tip me with some change. At one time she even had a small store on Tremainsville near the Prosperity Dry Cleaners and Wernert Corners. She always drove Caddys so she wasn’t penny less. In fact, she was always nicely dressed in the mid-fifties. She attended the old Whitmer high, what years I don’t know but my Aunt Betty in the picture and the other two women were her friends. She also tended bar at Krotzers on Monroe St, West of Sylvania AV. Her dad died around 1960, which made her seek a new residence. I recall her living in cars (early to mid-sixties) around the area where we lived, in the Laskey Tremainsville area. My mom said she followed her home from the bus stop once, on foot, asking her to come in. I ran into her quite a bit when I worked the patrol wagon downtown. I arrested her for public indecency, once back in maybe 85′. If you go into the main library and look up the Whitmer yearbooks (the 1940’s?), you will find her listed as Elaine Hass. She was very pretty in a high school picture. The picture above was in courtesy of Jerry Miller, a classmate of Elaine’s and my neighbor. Taken in a bar on Lagrange St.
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I remember her well driving her Cadillac filled with her possessions, wearing a mink coat, coming into Tom’s on Alexis.
She was known as Poochie in our neighborhood
Ah! Elaine Higgins, the infamous Toledo Bag Lady. She had also escaped my memory.
I remember seeing her downtown during my childhood in the 80s. P.S. wasn’t there also a Purple Lady in the later 80s as well…another homeless woman who always wear a purple outfit?
The lady in the purple dress, isn’t she the one that rode the bicycle around town? One time some time back, my wife and I were having a hot dog lunch at Rudy’s in the Point Place area and she was in there. As I walked by she threatened to punch me in the jaw!
Julie you remember her from where you grew up??
where did she hang around? I was from Trilby area too, but only remember her from downtown.
I remember Elaine when I worked at Toledo Edison downtown. I would cross the street. She would be cursing and rambling
I also remember the lady in purple I remember seeing her walking across the MLK bridge
Elaine was my uncle’s sister by marriage. Prior to her migration downtown in the very early 60s she was a fixture in West Toledo and would use the phone booth by the A&P store at tremainsville and laskey as her shelter. Prior to this she had a station wagon around 1959 that she would sleep in and my mother would tell stories that her cans of soda pop would explode because it got so cold in the winter where she was sleeping in the back. For a few years starting in 1978 I rented the upper floors of the national loan company at Monroe and Erie and would often see Elaine on the streets listening to the blues music we’d play wafting out of the upper floor windows. I was working at the time and about once a month I’d sit down next to her to see how she was doing and her mind was still sharp as attack and remembered all of the extended family to which I was related and would ask relevant questions about their well-being. She still had her sense of humor, but I would not be one to argue with anyone accusing her of the ability to be cantankerous. One of a kind she lived life on her terms.
Around 1976 when I was a young girl of about 13, I’d ride Tarta buses downtown to transfer to Toledo’s north side. Every time she saw me she would yell at me (sure she treated everyone like that). Once while aboard a bus and seating in the downtown bus lineup (waiting for others to connect with their bus) I looked at her through the window (window open) and she started cursing at me and then threw a cup of ice water at me (got my face wet). I was always afraid of her.
I’d see her when I was young, we knew her as poochie, I ask my dad about her and he said, yeah when I had my body shop in the early 60’s I worked on her Cadillac, as she was living in it. And one time on the streets of downtown, I ask if she knew my grandfather and she said, is he still living on Clover lane and I said he’s dead. I went home and told my Grandmother and she said, that Elaine had driven Krotzer around when he had the restaurant and bar. I was shocked, but my grandfather knew a lot of people when he was a deputy sheriff.