New York Boîtes in the Golden Days
In a December 1934 article in the New York Sun, Martin Green described the notable bars and saloons of pre-Prohibition New York.
Green was an interwar journalist for the Sun, Herald, Jewish Post, and other newspapers. He explains G. Selmer Fougner, a New York-based food and drinks writer, asked him to record pre-Prohibition New York saloons to show, as we might say, the way things were.
Hence Green made a guest contribution to The Wine Trail, Fougner’s daily column in the Sun between 1933 and 1941.
Green stressed his recollections were highlights only, but he still mentions 40 – 50 establishments. While essentially a catalogue, useful especially to beverage and bar historians, Green’s account includes includes amusing and even cautionary asides.
He notes that erstwhile bar pals, presumed in palmy days to have iron constitutions and kidneys, ended with their ” iron machinery rusted” and “disintegrating”.
Some friends ended “on the water wagon”, and many who did not were no longer present to enjoy Green’s love letter to their, as we might also say, days of wine and roses.
Yet a few, and clearly Green himself, survived the old days well – probably due to observing more than absorbing.
I have discussed many bars here not named by Green such as McSorley’s, The Grapevine, and Billy’s Bar. He covered more high-end resorts, alluding often to their “classy” or “very classy” nature, whereas my focus is beer-centric places, always essentially popular in nature.
Green’s citing of Hoffman House is a good example of the upmarket class of pre-Prohibition New York bars. It is remembered for its lurid, sensualist wall paintings and many distinguished, or notorious, patrons. A 2013 post at the blog Ephemeral New York has good history on Hoffman House.
Green states the great ambition of south Manhattan bar crawlers was to reach the Hoffman House, at 25th Street, or comparable aerie of similar repute. But 14th Street proved the limit every time, even for the most iron-lined. That tells you something about the classic era of American cocktail culture.
When you read enough about North American bar and liquor customs into Prohibition, you get a sense there was a strong strain of licentiousness. Ditto for the more down-market beer saloons or taverns. Many patrons used them responsibly but public drinking then was a devil’s dance that caused many social problems.
The atmosphere was one the temperance movement aimed to stop, and while the ambition was flawed – Green calls the 1920-1933 Prohibition a “blight” – the practical reasons behind the movement were hard to gainsay. Liquor industry self-interest, manifest in various anti-Prohibition initiatives, could not disguise this.
The answer, however, was reformation, not abolition, and this did occur finally, after Repeal in 1933. Tighter controls were placed on the post-Prohibition bar and on liquor distribution, including in Canada. Many sections of both countries continued to remain dry, as well.
N.B. The Russian vodka advert in the same issue shows the Slavic drink was gaining traction in North America well before Russian emigre Rudolph Kunett with New Jersey’s Heublein Inc. made a splash with Smirnoff vodka starting about 1940.