She ran it with her sister, Ethel Byrne, a registered nurse, and Fania Mindell, an interpreter from Chicago.
The clinic wasn't hiding. The team canvassed the neighborhood with flyers printed in English, Yiddish and Italian. Time reports that the flyer asked, "Mothers! Can you afford to have a large family? Do you want any more children? If not, why do you have them?" It listed the address and added: "Tell your friends and neighbors."
They did. According to the Papers Project's 1991 newsletter, the line of women stretched almost around the block that first morning. The Papers Project's clinic page says the clinic served more than 100 women on day one and some 400 before it closed; the newsletter puts the first-day number at about 140.
For their dime, each woman received Sanger's pamphlet What Every Girl Should Know, a short lecture on the female reproductive system, and instructions on using various contraceptives, per the Papers Project.
It was also against the law. The newsletter says Sanger deliberately violated a New York State law that classified contraception as obscene, and that she knew the clinic would be quickly closed.
Someone told the police. According to Time, they sent an undercover policewoman, and the clinic was raided 10 days after opening. The Papers Project dates the arrests of Sanger, Byrne and Mindell to Oct. 26.
Sanger reopened it anyway. The Papers Project says she restarted operations on Nov. 14, was arrested a second time and charged with maintaining a public nuisance, then opened once more on Nov. 16. This time the police forced her landlord to evict her, and the clinic closed for good.
Byrne was tried first, convicted and sentenced to 30 days at Blackwell's Island prison. She went on a hunger strike and, after 185 hours without food or water, was forcibly fed, per the Papers Project. Sanger and supporters pushed New York's governor to issue a pardon before her condition proved fatal.
Sanger's own trial began Jan. 29, 1917. The court offered her a suspended sentence if she promised not to repeat the offense. She refused and chose 30 days in the Queens County Penitentiary instead. Her trial included testimony from about 25 Brownsville women, the newsletter says, who described miscarriages, failed abortions and an endless cycle of pregnancy and childbirth.
Her appeal lost, but it moved the law. In January 1918, the New York Court of Appeals upheld her conviction, yet Judge Frederick Crane's decision interpreted the state's law more liberally, allowing physicians for the first time to legally prescribe contraception for general health reasons rather than only for venereal disease, per the Papers Project.
That ruling laid the legal groundwork for physician-staffed clinics. Sanger founded the American Birth Control League in 1921 and opened the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau, the first doctor-staffed birth control clinic in the U.S., in 1923. In 1942, the merged organization became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, according to the newsletter.
The newsletter says Sanger understood that changing the law meant first changing public opinion, and that she designed the Brownsville clinic partly as a media event to get birth control argued about in the open.