[1][2] In 1884, to attend her sister Hattie's wedding in style, Hannah borrowed a ball gown without permission from her employer, leading to a sentence at Moyamensing Prison and her banishment from home.

[2]: 157-158 Supporting herself as a sex worker at a "resort" owned by Emelyn Truitt in Manhattan's Tenderloin neighborhood, she met wealthy glass-factory owner John R. Platt, forty-five years her senior.

[1] After Elias reunited with Platt, he gave her large sums of money, "volunteerd [sic] to start her in the boarding-house business", at 128 W 53rd Street, where as proprietress she rented a room to Cornelius Williams.

[9] In 1906, newspapers reported that Elias evicted white tenants from several apartment buildings on West 135th Street with a note reading, "in the future none but respectable colored families were to occupy the flats".

[2]: 255 [10] She was rumored to have continued in this vein, named in a 1912 article titled "Negroes Crowding Whites" as the purchaser of a $250,000 apartment building at 546–552 Lenox Avenue;[11] however, she disputed these claims through her lawyer, Andrew F. Murray, in 1906.