Each autumn during Prohibition, it was not uncommon for the streets of Greenwich Village and Little Italy to run purple. This was due not to falling leaves or some Barney flash mob gone horribly wrong. It was 50,000 Manhattan residents supplementing their income by illegally making wine for the mob.
This is just one of the many factoids crammed into “Smugglers, Bootleggers, and Scofflaws,” which, based on little-used Coast Guard records, tells the tale of how, and why, New York was the booze capital of the country during the sad, sad decade when alcohol was illegal in the United States.
Prohibition went into effect on Jan. 16, 1920, and New Yorkers mourned as only they can. One party, at the Park Avenue Hotel, found waiters serving booze in black glasses before two couples were seen “ceremoniously taking a black bottle from an open coffin . . . pouring out the last drops and holding black handkerchiefs to their faces to wipe away tears.”
With the ban in effect, the city became speakeasy heaven, with over 30,000 keeping our city “wet,” and one food critic even advising his readers on meals, drinks and remembering to bring bail money for wild nights out.
On the Lower East Side, hot spots included McGurk’s Suicide Hall at 295 Bowery, “a saloon famous for knife fights, flying glasses of ale and a high mortality rate for those brave enough to enter and order a drink.”
While bars were illegal, the area’s plentiful Jewish residents took advantage of the religious exemption, as wine was legal for specific reasons of worship.
Upon visiting the area’s religious wine stores, one investigator found “[that] two hundred people were bootlegging, including rabbis knowingly reselling wine permits, a fake rabbi serving 70 congregations, a genuine rabbi claiming a congregation 10 times its actual size, and rabbis with very Irish names like Sullivan and Moriarty.”
He also discovered synagogues in such unlikely settings as pork stores.
Gangster Waxey Gordon, funded by Arnold Rothstein, led the wet effort on the Lower East Side. Big Bill Dwyer, also using Rothstein’s money, drove the Midtown effort.
Dwyer had headquarters in the Knickerbocker Building, a former hotel at 6 Times Square that became “a warren of bootleggers” both for its convenience to the rest of the city and proximity to Rothstein, who held court at Lindy’s Restaurant, then at 1626 Broadway, making loans “from fifty thousand to one hundred thousand dollars in cash.”
Dwyer also had a fleet of boats near the Hell Gate Bridge and a pocketful of cops, politicians and federal agents bought in part with the finest in theater tickets and hookers.
Another smuggling gang was founded by Joe Adonis and Lucky Luciano, who bought a large quantity of quality booze from Gordon. They were set to water it down but were instead taught a valuable lesson in the nature of New Yorkers, as wise today as it was then, from Rothstein, who “advised them not to dilute the liquor but market it at a high price to rich New Yorkers.” (He also coached them on “the proper suits for businessmen, [and] the importance of good manners so they could relate to wealthy clients.”)
The book says that this gang paid “$100,000 a week . . . in graft to police, federal agents and city magistrates and other court officials,” $10,000 of which was delivered straight to City Hall “in a paper bag.”
As for the speakeasies themselves, they were a very 1920s kind of wild. A Broadway director named Earl Carroll threw one party where “a nude ‘actress’ bathed on stage in a tub filled with champagne while male guests [drank] from the tub with the dipper.” The party became legend when Carroll was investigated for the booze he served there. The actress in question “profitably recreated the event in a show called the ‘Greenwich Village Follies,’ ” and smugglers were known to do their own version of the act at sea, with one pirate placing “a mop on his head” before submerging in his champagne bath.
Bars we know today as some of New York’s longest-serving establishments were prominent then as well. At McSorley’s, “Barney Kelly made ale in its basement, diluting it so it could be called ‘near beer,’ yet customers could get drunk on it. The saloon was never raided because police and politicians, mostly Irish, were steady customers.”
Pete’s Tavern in Union Square disguised itself as a florist up front, while “customers entered through a back room and a dummy refrigerator door.” And Chumley’s, on Bedford Street, had “several entrances and exits including an underground tunnel a block away, as well as a secret door behind a bookcase leading to a side alley.”
In addition to uninhibited nights, this culture of drunken illegality led to big risks and morbid delights. Poisoning from bad booze was common — writer Dorothy Parker once “checked into the hospital thinking that she had been poisoned by bad liquor, only to learn she had appendicitis” — and one popular game had people trying to convince their heavy-boozing friends that they were experiencing the DTs (Delirium Tremens, or acute alcohol withdrawal).
One time, “drinking with friends in a country home, Parker saw rats run through the room while her hosts pretended not to see them.”
Smugglers, Bootleggers, and Scofflaws
Prohibition and New York City
by Ellen NicKenzie Lawson
Excelsior Editions