Green’s Dictionary of Slang

1. (also house of call) a brothel to which men can come without making any prior appointment.

1729		Life of Thomas Neaves 35: Being ask’d whether he had Correspondence with those detestable Set of People call’d Molly’s, or Sodomites; Neaves reply’d that he never frequented any of their Abominable Houses of Call.
1771		R. King New London Spy 128: One of their houses of call, where he would be sure to be eased of his money.
1825		Pierce Egan’s Life in London 282/2: [T]he prisoner was a ‘fancy man’ of Miss Honor Connolly, who resided with her (Bridget), and some other ladies of pleasure, in a ‘house of call’.
1916		H.N. Cary Sl. of Venery.
1929		W.R. Burnett Little Caesar (1932) 240: Sometimes at night he would go to one of the call-houses on a nearby street and spend a couple of hours with one of the women.
1930		G. Milburn ‘Down in Lehigh Valley II’ in Hobo’s Hornbook 52: Down in the Lehigh Valley, / Me and my pal, Bill, / Pimped three years for a callhouse / And the work was all uphill.
1941		J.M. Cain Mildred Pierce (1985) 357: I’m not running a house of call.
1949		R. Chandler Little Sister 5: The call houses that specialize in sixteen-year-old virgins.
1956		J. Stearn Sisters of the Night 5: Call houses are a thing of the past in New York.
1966		Trimble 5000 Adult Sex Words and Phrases.

2. (UK und.) a form of office, used by confidence tricksters.

1732

Progress of a Rake 22: The Rascals had a House of Call / [...] / That when they ’spy’d a Man a fretting, / They were such ready Rogues at Setting, / They cry, Your Bus’ness, Sir, be brief.

3. a hetero- or homosexual brothel to which women or men are summoned by telephone after they have been selected, via some form of visual ‘menu’, by the male clientele; thus call trade, prostitution arranged on this basis.

1910		Committee of Fourteen Social Evil in N.Y. City 18: A‘call house’ is the term used where immoral women living in apartments supply their patrons by telephoning to certain other places for girls to come in.
1921		H.B. Woolston Prostitution in the US 139: The call house is really an employment exchange for prostitutes.
1933		(ref. to 1907) H. Asbury Barbary Coast (2002) 235: A call house; that is, the members of the — well, staff — were not actually resident upon the premises, but were chosen from photographs, and from charts which furnished all needful information as to [...] physical details. Once selected, the male Magdalen was summoned by telephone or messenger.
1939		D. Maurer ‘Prostitutes and Criminal Argots’ in Lang. Und. (1981) 116/1: call house. An assignation house to which girls are called to serve a selected clientele.
1941		F.S. Fitzgerald Last Tycoon 88: ‘You mean she was a tart?’ ‘So it seems. She went to what you call call-houses.’.
1941		G. Legman ‘Lang. of Homosexuality’ Appendix VII in Henry Sex Variants.
1952		(con. 1920s) ‘Harry Grey’ Hoods (1953) 112: She ran a ten dollar joint. And for the call trade, she charged thirty bucks.
1965		K. Marlowe Mr Madam (1967) 21: He informed me he was operating a male callhouse.
1986–7		Maledicta IX 144: Or perhaps they work out of an escort service or male call-house (bullring camp, hardware shop, the latter emphasizing the necessary horn, US hard-on).