Green’s Dictionary of Slang

1. (US) a brothel.

1850		Life in Boston & N.Y. (Boston, MA) 10 Aug. n.p.: The biggest kind of cat house, including girls, pimp, French spring bed-steads, three-dollar per bottle chapmagne (cider) and all the other fixin’s.
1867		Nat. Police Gaz. (NY) 21 Sept. n.p.: They took the plunder to a ‘cat’ house [...] kept by one Georgiana St John.
1882		St Louis (MO) Globe-Democrat 22 July 11/3: The word ‘cat’ is often used as an adjective, as a ‘cat restaurant’ or a ‘cat house,’ the latter meaning a house of ill-fame and the former a restaurant where loose women eat. ‘In the wider application of the term,’ the policeman went on, ‘the word “cat” is applied generally to women, though it is restricted among the more aesthetic criminals to loose women.’.
1913		G.J. Kneeland Commercialized Prostitution in N.Y. City 114: The owner knows that the only thing we can let the house for is for a cat-house.
1927		B. Cormack Racket Act I: They made some more o’ those pre-election raids [...] those cathouses out South.
c.1930		(ref. to late 19C) N. Kimball Amer. Madam (1981) 14: Not all men who come to a cathouse are cunt-crazy.
1935		‘George Orwell’ Clergyman’s Daughter (1986) 103: Some t’ink as he’s took her abroad an’ sold her to one o’ them cat-houses in Parrus .
1941		C.R. Bond 22 Nov. in A Flying Tiger’s Diary (1984) 47: The China Hotel [...] a cat house. What a filthy joint.
1952		C. Hamilton Men of the Und. 218: Al Capone [...] built a chain of cat-houses in Chicago.
1963		M. Braly Shake Him Till He Rattles (1964) 125: I think we’re working in a cat house.
1981		H. Gould Fort Apache, The Bronx 282: Hey, I’m gonna open up a cathouse, Murf.
1990		S. Morgan Homeboy 340: There was a cathouse booming in the hills east of the prison.
2000		P. Roth Human Stain 182: Just as at the white cathouse, nobody took him here for anything other than what he was.
2005		L. Theroux Call of the Weird (2006) 131: It would be a chance to see some of the old-style cathouses.
2012		(con. 1943) G.S. Manson Coorparoo Blues [ebook] ‘Hey, you that guy from the cathouse las’ night’.
2020		D. Whish-Wilson Shore Leave 29: ‘Every cathouse in every port, you’ll find sliced pockets in the mattresses’.

2. attrib. use of sense 1.

1946		E. Wilson Pikes Peek or Bust 192: [T]here arrived [...] several crates containing such cat-house apparatus and appurtenances as were not absolutely necessary to the normal operation of the establishment .
1989		M. Amis London Fields 122: The spangled garter-belt and cathouse panties, the riot of underwear she wore beneath.