How Prohibition Killed the Bowery
By Alice Sparberg Alexiou
New York Public Library Picture Collection
Back in the days when the Bowery epitomized New York at its grittiest, most honkey-tonk, warm-hearted best—between the end of the Civil War and World War I—nothing was more important to the well being of the street’s motley population of artists, actors, immigrant poor, and bums than the saloon. Yes, the saloon. It was a Bowery institution. During the Bowery’s peak years, the 1890s, the street boasted nearly 100 saloons, each with its own clientele and reasons for existing. In the days of Tammany, specific saloons functioned as political clubhouses; there were “concert saloons,” where the races mingled and drank and sang and had a grand old time, singing and dancing to songs with dirty lyrics banged out on rinky-dink pianos, and waitresses doubled as prostitutes. In some saloons, homesick German and Irish immigrants found compatriots with whom to drink away their pain. And other saloons were like drunken old grandmothers who gathered all those Bowery bums into their beery bosoms and comforted them, providing shelter and the chance to convene with other bummy alcoholics, all of whom had run away to the Bowery from all over the country and the world with a specific purpose: to drink among others who were just like them.
Then Prohibition came along and closed down the saloons. It was then that the Bowery, which by World War I was definitely getting skankier, went straight down to hell.
“The saloon was the hub around which all vice revolved (on the Bowery). Prohibition blasted it into smithereens,“ bragged the World League Against Alcoholism in 1924, in a glossy 16-page pamphlet devoted entirely to the new, dry Bowery and its then-supposed redemption. But the ecstatic do-gooders didn’t give a thought to what Prohibition meant for the bums. Saloons did not just offer booze: they satisfied any manner of their basic needs that were going otherwise unmet. During the day, the saloon was a place where you could hang out and schmooze, and eat the free bar lunch of pickles and cheese and hard boiled eggs. On cold, snowy nights, a Mrs. Sarah Bird told the Tribune in 1895—she was a woman of great wealth who devoted her life to her “boys,” as she called the Bowery unfortunates--saloons were “the only lighthouses for these wrecked mariners, so brilliant and so glowing that I did not wonder these homeless men were allured to shelter within.” Bums had favorite spots where they hung out with their friends, and an owner looked out for you. You could leave your money with him, and he’d put it in his safe and keep it for you. Or he’d let you use his address like a post office, to where your family could send you letters, to tell you, say, that a loved one had died. If a bum got sick from alcohol poisoning, he headed over to the Alligator, a five-cent-a-shot joint where the British-born “Doc” Shuffield, once a surgeon in a London hospital, whose nose was mapped with the tiny red veins belie chronic alcoholism, had his “office.” Clad in a greasy frock coat and shabby silk hat, the doctor cared for any bum who needed him. Some owners had a “flop room” at the back of their saloon, where they let drunken bums spend the night, sprawled out on the sawdust-covered floor or slumped in chairs, the spit dribbling out of your mouths. It wasn’t much of a bed, but it beat sleeping in a doorway or on the sidewalk under the El, where you might get robbed or worse.
Without saloons, the bums were lost. They had nowhere to go. And there were so many of them: In 1924, the director of the Bowery Mission estimated that there were 250,000 men around the country who considered the thoroughfare their home. “But they are never here at the same time,” he told the New York Times, adding that a recent survey showed 12,000 men living in transient housing on the Bowery. That number didn’t include the ones living on the street, so no doubt it was higher. So what happened to these men without their saloons? They now had to quench their thirst for alcohol in any way they could. The Bowery, like everywhere in New York, had speakeasies—the term referred to any place liquor was illegally served, from the cellar of a
tenement to the “21” Club, and a 1930 census reported that there were 77 speakeasies on the Bowery. Normally you needed to know somebody to get into a speakeasy, but not on the Bowery. No, there you just walked right in and asked for a drink, which now cost four times as much than before Prohibition. But these joints didn’t offer the warmth and protection of the defunct saloons. There was one exception: O’Leary’s, a Bowery speakeasy owned by two brothers, one a former fighter with a broken nose, a pot of homemade soup was always bubbling on the stove for the bums who frequented it. The place was “not for the squeamish, in stomach and nostril, for the sight and smell of a score of sodden derelicts is none too pleasant,” wrote Al Hirschfield, who included a sketch of it in his 1932 collection of speakeasy cartoons.
If a bum could no longer afford bona fide booze, for a nickel he could buy “smoke,” a mixture of wood or denatured alcohol—the latter was used in antifreeze--and water. (Water poured into a bottle of alcohol caused a vapor to snake up the neck, hence the name.) It was “one of the deadliest fruits of the Volstead Act,” wrote a concerned citizen in a letter to the New York Times in 1929 (February 3). “It’s the drink a man will take to only when he’s down and out, desperately cold and hungry, with no prospect of a job.” If smoke didn’t outright kill you—in 1930, 31 men died after ingesting it in just one month--it made you very, very sick. Federal agents made frequent raids of these so-called “shock houses,” which, along with their poison, sometimes filled in the void created by the boarded-up saloons by offering shelter on cold winter nights.
During the day, if a bum had a dime, he could sit and doze in one of the Bowery’s cheap moving-picture houses until somebody threw him out. Otherwise, he wandered the streets. “All day, the bums patrol the Bowery. They fill the vacuum in this region of inertia. They walk, as on a tightrope, the razor edge of vacancy between the turbulence of the east side and the racketing traffic of the warehouses,” a New York Times reporter wrote in a 1924 story “The Street That Died Young.” “Slowly, in draggled procession, they move from the “Y” on East Fifth Street to the Salvation Army and down to the drinking fountain at the Branch Y. Not to go in—simply they follow herd-like as the crowd moves, to stand, and spit and watch the movement of the street—and then down for an afternoon on the benches of the Manhattan Bridge.”
And it wasn’t just the loss of saloons that doomed the Bowery: Another unintended effect of Prohibition was to further depress the value of its real estate. All those the shuttered saloons resulted in a lot of empty spaces, which owners then frantically leased to whoever could pay the rent. Low rents attracted certain kinds of businesses: The former Steve Brodie’s (at 114) became a dingy second-hand shop; other saloons were reconfigured into cigar stores, shmatte emporia, hardware stores—one sold bar fixtures to people who ran speakeasies out of their homes-- restaurant supply businesses, lighting fixture stores, clam houses and lunchrooms. At 351, Louis Ruhe ran an animal shop, where he displayed—yes!-- live lions, and sold monkeys,
canaries, and other exotic birds. Dan Carey, who ran a saloon at number 100—he owned the building—was one of those who converted his place to an eatery, but he continued to use the back room for his lucrative sideline: renting out crutches, wheelchairs, and blood-tinted bandages to beggars faking physical deformities. But in 1924, the number of Bowery vagrants decreased, and his business was no longer profitable. So Carey shut it down. Moreover, “It is said that beggars are able to make more these days without simulating deformities. An extended trembling hand will produce greater results, for New York since Prohibition knows the pang of a hangover,” wrote O.O. McIntyre in 1924 in his syndicated column “Bits of New York Life.” A few longtime jewelers remained, and diamond merchants opened an emporium at the intersection with Canal Street. (This remained the center of New York’s diamond district until after World War Two.) The Bowery seemed an anomalous choice of location for the diamond business, but rents there were low.
“For two centuries, the Bowery was the place where everything happened,” a New York Times reporter wrote mournfully in a 1924 nostalgia piece, in which he castigated the Volstead Act for ruining the Bowery’s ambiance. “And now suddenly, it is the place where nothing happens at all.”
Alice Sparberg Alexiou is the author, most recently of The Devil’s Mile: The Rich, Gritty History of the Bowery as well as Jane Jacobs: Urban Visionary and The Flatiron: The New York Landmark and the Incomparable City That Arose with It. She is a contributing editor at Lilith magazine.