Prohibition fostered the emergence of tens of thousands of speakeasies, or “blind pigs.” “Clip joints” and illegal night clubs far outnumbered the legal watering holes—mostly saloons—that had been closed the night Prohibition went into effect. These illegal places were everywhere, but it was along the Atlantic Seaboard from Boston to Baltimore and Washington that the Wet spots merged into a continuous belt, and here was the real focus of hostility to the Eighteenth Amendment. New York City was the epicenter of resistance to Prohibition. As journalist Pete Hamill pointed out in his introduction to The Speakeasies of 1932: “The gaudy saga of Prohibition has generated an extensive literature, of course, but in New York, the story has a special, almost personalized vehemence. From the beginning, millions of citizens felt that the national movement to make drinking illegal was directed at cities in general, and New York in particular. Most New Yorkers believed that the anti-booze people were a combination of right-wing rural politicians, severe (when not addled) Protestant clergyman, and feminists who unjustly linked Prohibition to the just cause of women’s suffrage.”1
A map prepared in 1924 by Mrs. Mabel Willebrandt, assistant attorney-general, showed the degree of non-enforcement in different sections of the country to vary from 5 percent in Kansas, Utah, and Idaho, to 95 percent in New York City.2 By 1929, Police Commissioner Grover Whalen could tell The New York Times, “Nowadays all you need is two bottles and a room and you have a speakeasy. We have 32,000—in contrast there are 4,200 restaurants operating in all five boroughs.” At one point during Prohibition, the Danish firm of Georg Jensen reported that it was selling more of its cocktail shaker sets in Manhattan than in the rest of the world combined.
A crowded bar in New York City, the night before Prohibition went into effect. June 30, 1919.
Manhattan was the Wettest of the boroughs. The great concentration of illegal booze was in the city’s “white light district,” which stretched from 14th Street to 59th Street along Broadway and two to three blocks on either side. Humorist Robert Benchley once walked the north and south sides of 52nd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, and counted fifty-eight speakeasies. Texas Guinan, Manhattan’s most famous speakeasy hostess, managed more than half a dozen joints herself in or near the district, including the 300 Club, the Texas Guinan Club, the Century Club, Salon Royale, Club Intime, and the Club Argonaut.
The establishments within the white light district generally catered to a class of drinker who wanted the “good stuff,” and the price of a glass of uncut Scotch of high quality ranged from fifty cents to a dollar a drink. A May 1925 New York Herald-Tribune report on conditions along Rum Row pointed out that even after a recent attempt by the Coast Guard to cut down on waterborne deliveries, the only thing in short supply was champagne, but that you could get just about anything else you wanted. The better speakeasies boasted of expansive wine lists.3
In New York and other major cities, there was, as historian Preston William Slosson during the period called it, “a curious and almost comical inversion of class relations … Instead of Lady Bountiful visiting the slums to redeem the drunkard, the slums were now shocked at the conduct of the gilded youth.” A janitor’s wife in New York asserted, “It’s not our people that are drinking so much. It’s the rich bums that come from outside … It used to be some lively down here before Prohibition, but that was our own people and you could say to them, ‘Jim, you go along home to Maggie ’till you get sobered up.’ But these rich bums, you don’t know where to tell ’em to go.” After studying conditions in Massachusetts, Dr. Richard C. Cabot of Harvard declared: “The rich may, for all we know, be as foolish as ever, but beyond any question the poor are better off.”4
The other irony is that the saloon had been mostly driven from the major cities. Saloons had become ubiquitous, aided in large part by new technology. As Hugh F. Fox testified in 1919 as secretary of the United States Brewers’ Association: “The invention of artificial refrigeration practically doubled, or more, the capacity of the breweries, and the result was an enormous over-competition and tremendous increase in the number of saloons. The result of that over-competition was, as you gentlemen of course have observed, in all our large cities, a very much greater number of saloons than were needed for the reasonable convenience of the people.” The very same technology that had aided the saloon was a boon to the speakeasy where ice was the essential cooling agent for all cocktails, coolers, and mixed drinks.5
New Yorkers, in the meantime, witnessed an unparalleled show on and off shore as the Prohibition agents and the Coast Guard took on the battle to stop illegal imports. The Times (London), of May 9, 1925, reported that the U.S. Federal Government was making a most determined effort to enforce Prohibition. Off New York, for one hundred miles along the coast, it was maintaining a virtual blockade of the so-called “Scotch Armada,” the new name for the rum fleet. Every rum vessel was surrounded by government vessels, so that in three days not a drop had reached the shore. Seaplanes were being used in patrolling, it was said.6
The Manhattan speakeasies, in the words of the newspaperman Stanley Walker, “contributed more than anything else to the madhouse that was New York.” The speakeasy had become a symbol to New Yorkers who saw it as a patriotic institution. “I predict the day,” wrote newspaper columnist Louis Sobol in 1935 shortly after Repeal in Hearst’s International Magazine, “when the New York speakeasy will shine on the pages of history, niched in honor beside the Boston Tea Party.”
The illegal sites provided a fertile ground where jazz and swing flourished. The male “crooner” and the female “songbird” styles of singing gained a foothold there. Nightclubs displaced legal cabarets and thrived on payoffs to Prohibition agents and police and with the support of organized crime. The best example was Harlem’s Cotton Club. In his autobiography, Of Minnie the Moocher and Me, Cotton Club jazzman Cab Calloway explained that Prohibition was indirectly responsible for his becoming a star because it allowed him to get his big break in Harlem. As Calloway explained: “The underworld saw to it that there was booze all over the country in those days, but there was more of it in Harlem, just like there was more and better music in Harlem in those days. The Jazz Age in Harlem. Hell, jazz grew up in Harlem after it left New Orleans and Chicago … Harlem was swinging.”
Calloway added that those were the places where highsociety white people came to hear jazz, and where, during most of those years, “Negroes weren’t allowed in the audience. They were okay on the stage or in the kitchen, but not in the audience. Well, those white people came uptown to hear the music but they also came to drink.”7
At the high end, these clubs were elegant places with white tablecloths and elegant décor. “On Friday nights in the smart clubs, people dressed black tie or white. You saw top hats everywhere,” recalled renowned restaurateur Toots Shor in a 1958 interview. During Prohibition, Shor had been a bouncer in several Manhattan speakeasies (The Five O’Clock Club, The Napoleon Club, and Maison Royale, among others). “Despite reports to the contrary,” Shor added, “the whiskey was good in the good speakeasies.”8