“Prohibition New York City: Speakeasy Queen Texas Guinan, Blind Pigs, Drag Balls & More” by David Rosen; (192 pages, $21.99)
———
Last call.
On Jan. 17, 1920, Prohibition became a sobering reality. Bars were padlocked, liquor stores shuttered, and thirsty Americans sent home. Beer banned, vodka, verboten; the teetotalers had finally won.
The party was over, they proudly proclaimed.
They didn’t realize it was just beginning.
After a World War, a pandemic, and political upheaval at home and abroad, not everyone was ready to go on the wagon. Plenty of people still wanted a stiff drink and a bit of fun. And those weren’t hard to find, for a price.
The drunken ’20s started roaring almost immediately, but they were loudest in Manhattan. David Rosen’s “Prohibition New York City: Speakeasy Queen Texas Guinan, Blind Pigs, Drag Balls & More” has all the snazzy, jazzy details.
By 1925, there were an estimated 100,000 illegal watering holes in New York City, “ranging from upscale speakeasies, to middle-class bars and cabarets, to working-class ‘blind pigs,’” Rosen writes. “The gangster replaced the neighborhood barkeep as the boss of the good time scene... Nightlife was reinvented.”
Technically, the 18th Amendment only criminalized the manufacture, transportation, and sale of alcohol. It didn’t bother with the purchase or consumption. Bootleggers took almost all the risk. The profits, too. Before the ban, a quart of rye cost $1.39. After, it was three times that. Hipsters of the day kept their supply in flasks, stuffed into hip pockets.
Swells flocked to the posh 21 Club, hidden in the basement of a 52nd St. brownstone. If a cop crossed the threshold, secret alarms were triggered for workers to hide bottles. The liquor was legit, too, mostly brand-name booze smuggled from Canada. But all that came at a price. Lunch alone was $20 – more than $300 today.
Those who couldn’t afford 21 went to neighborhood joints for a jolt of bathtub gin, a mix of tap water, glycerin, juniper juice, and alcohol. The warning “That stuff’ll kill ya” was often literally true. Bootleggers who couldn’t get grain alcohol substituted lethal wood alcohol. Hundreds of New Yorkers died every year.
When the new law failed to rein in consumption, the government coldly decided to ruin the supply. Starting in 1926, it began adding poison to industrial alcohol. It was sold on the black market anyway and resold to countless unsuspecting consumers.
And yet speakeasies flourished, a club for every taste.
“Each place had its own clientele,” recalled the artist Al Hirschfeld, a speakeasy habitué who once had hundreds of membership cards. “Some of them were three-dimensional, a little ball-and-chain; some of them were keys with which you opened the door.”
It wasn’t the booze Hirschfeld went for, but the music. “If you wanted to hear good swing, or anything, you had to go to a speakeasy,” he said. “Anybody you could mention, from Louis Armstrong to Bix Beiderbecke, performed.”
Speakeasies were, by definition, hidden places. Even their name suggested caution – “speak easy,” pal or the cops will hear. It was in those quiet shadows, more than drinking was done. Gambling, prostitution, it all flourished.
Harlem hosted extravagant drag balls, with music and prizes. Greenwich Village was more intimate, with small clubs – The Flower Pot on Christopher S., Paul and Joe’s on West 9th, Julian’s on West 10th – catering to particular clientele. Eve’s Hangout, at 129 MacDougal, was popular with lesbians, offering cocktails and poetry readings. “Men are admitted but not welcome,” a sign advised.
The club was run by an immigrant businesswoman named Eva Kotchever until one night in 1927 when a patron started asking her about gay sex. Kotchever reached for her unpublished short-story collection, “Lesbian Love.” The woman reached for her police badge. The club was shuttered. Kotchever was deported to Poland and murdered in Auschwitz.
Although big speakeasies required capital, amateurs got into the nightlife business, too. If you had a room and a bottle, you could sell drinks; if you had some pretty people, you could sell more. Private apartments were turned into “buffet flats” because, one writer explained, in addition to drinking, “they offered a variety of sexual pleasures, cafeteria-style.”
The establishments could be quite posh, attracting celebrities like Cole Porter and Cary Grant. A’Lelia Walker, daughter of beauty-products mogul Madam C.J. Walker, not only ran one out of her stately brownstone on 136th Street but was an eager participant. “Soft music filled the room, gentle lights emanated from the floor, and men and women lay in each other’s arms,” one visitor recalled.
If Harlem and Greenwich Village sometimes seemed like red-light districts, midtown was a bit more circumspect. The lonely often had to content themselves with dime-a-dance clubs, where working girls and boys would grind up against patrons for a fistful of change, then hustle them for drinks. Customers dubbed the busy employees taxi dancers because the meter was always running.
If you had more money, though – and all you wanted was an overpriced cocktail and some music —you had plenty of lush choices in The Wet Zone, an informal neighborhood of illegal clubs that ran from Madison to 8th Ave., from 45th to 56th Sts. Some were even openly run by celebrities, like Sophie Tucker and Jimmy Durante.
Speakeasies created their own celebrity in Texas Guinan. A rambunctious entertainer from Waco, she notched careers as a vaudevillian and silent-movie cowgirl before entering the hostess business in 1922. Blonde and brassy, she worked the El Fey Club, sporting a Stetson and greeting customers with a cheery “Hello, suckers!”
The buxom Guinan would inspire several movie characters, including Panama Smith in “The Roaring Twenties.” Guinan’s wisecracks read like lines from a Mae West comedy. “Never let a fool kiss you and never let a kiss fool you,” she advised. And “Virtue pays – if you can find a market for it.”
Speakeasies like Guinan’s entertained a generation of New Yorkers and gave early breaks to star-struck teens like Ruby Keeler and Barbara Stanwyck. George Raft used to dance at one; it was a step up from his last job, working as muscle for mobster Owney Madden, owner of the Cotton Club.
Of course, gangsters were the hidden evil behind all this giddy fun. Someone had to drive those trucks down from Canada. Somebody had to pay off the cops. Speakeasies and crooks depended on each other, and ruthless killers like Dutch Schultz and Legs Diamond ruled ’20s New York. Entire wars were fought over beer.
By 1929, though, it was painfully evident that Prohibition had failed. The government had destroyed over 170,000 stills nationwide since 1920. Unfortunately, it admitted, more than 1.6 million were still operating. Three years later, Franklin Delano Roosevelt campaigned as an anti-Prohibition candidate, and after his election, the 21st Amendment, repealing the 18th, was passed.
Drink up.
Except puritanism remained. Some states clung to Prohibition — Mississippi stayed dry until 1966 — while the federal government found new vices to try to stamp out. Four years after alcohol was legalized, marijuana was outlawed. Next up would be the war on drugs.
Although history proved enforced abstinence didn’t work, nobody in Washington seemed to have learned the lesson given the national campaign of “Just Say No.” However, the fact was when it came to pleasure, plenty of Americans have always just said yes.
And still do.
