Dry New York: The Mob, Jazz and the City That Never Stopped Drinking

You are in Battery Park, at the southern tip of Manhattan. Look out at the water. To the left, the Statue of Liberty. Closer, to the right, a red brick building with towers: Ellis Island. Between 1892 and 1954, some twelve million immigrants passed through that island. Irish, Italians, Jews from Eastern Europe, Germans, Greeks. By 1910, four in ten New Yorkers had been born in another country. The city spoke dozens of languages. Many of those immigrants brought a drinking culture with them. German beer, Italian wine, Irish whiskey. Bars were the center of neighborhood life. In the rest of …

You are on Wall Street, outside number 23, a low marble building that was the headquarters of J. P. Morgan's bank. Go up to the facade facing the street. Look at the stone. You will see small craters, gouges, scrapes. Nobody repaired them, on purpose. On 16 September 1920, at noon, a horse-drawn wagon stopped here. It was loaded with explosives and shrapnel. It blew up in the middle of the crowd of clerks heading out to lunch. Almost forty people died. Hundreds were injured. It was the worst attack in New York's history up to that time. The culprits were never found. Police suspected Itali…

You are at the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge. If you have time, walk a little way along the wooden promenade to the first tower and look at the East River. The bridge opened in 1883. For years it was the longest suspension bridge in the world. Below, the river was the smugglers' highway. Under Prohibition, alcohol had to come in from outside. It arrived by ship from Canada, the Bahamas, Cuba, France. The big ships stayed anchored at sea, outside United States waters, off Long Island and New Jersey. That line of ships was called Rum Row. At night, fast motorboats went out to collect the c…

You are in Columbus Park, between Chinatown and the courthouses. Today old men play cards and kids play basketball here. In the nineteenth century, this was Five Points. It was New York's poorest and most dangerous neighborhood. Five streets met over an old pond filled in with garbage. The houses were sinking into the mud. Newly arrived Irish immigrants, free Black people, later Italians, lived crammed into dark buildings. There were cholera epidemics, taverns and brothels. And there were gangs. The Dead Rabbits, the Bowery Boys. They fought over the streets, over votes, over control of the…

You are on Mulberry Street, in the heart of Little Italy. Look at the checkered tablecloths, the Italian flags, the waiters inviting you in. In the early twentieth century, these blocks were packed with immigrants from southern Italy. Calabrians, Sicilians, Neapolitans. Sometimes ten people in two rooms. During Prohibition, at this corner with Kenmare Street, something incredible operated: an open-air liquor market. They called it the Curb Exchange. Bootleggers stood in the street and traded shipments of whiskey as if they were stocks. They bought, sold, set prices. In broad daylight. Poli…

You are outside 240 Centre Street. Look at the stone building with its dome, columns and sculptures. It looks like a European palace. It was the headquarters of the New York police from 1909. During Prohibition, the fight against alcohol was run from here. And a block away the bootleggers' exchange was doing business. The explanation is simple: money. A patrolman earned little. A bootlegger could pay him in one night what he made in months. Corruption reached every level. Patrolmen, judges, prosecutors, City Hall officials. There were weekly payment lists. The mayor of those years, Jimmy W…

You are on East 7th Street, steps from the Bowery, outside McSorley's Old Ale House. Look at the old front, the sign, the sawdust on the floor if you peek in. It opened in the mid-nineteenth century. It is one of New York's oldest bars. And according to its own history, it never stopped serving during Prohibition. Officially it sold near beer, beer with almost no alcohol, which was legal. In practice, McSorley's beer had rather more than was allowed. The Bowery was then the street of the down-and-out. Ten-cent flophouses, homeless men, dive bars. There, cheap alcohol was also a way to survi…

You are outside 97 Orchard Street, the Tenement Museum. Look at the five-story brick building with iron fire escapes on its front. It was built in 1863. Until 1935, some seven thousand people from twenty different countries lived here. In a single building. Each apartment was about thirty square meters. Three small rooms, only one with a window. At first there was no running water or bathroom: there were privies in the yard. Many families worked at home. They sewed clothes by the piece until the small hours, with the children helping. If you go in on a guided tour, you will see apartments …

You are on Delancey Street, on the Lower East Side. Look east: the Williamsburg Bridge stands in the distance. A hundred years ago, these sidewalks were lined with pushcarts and peddlers shouting in Yiddish. Meyer Lansky grew up around here, a Jewish boy from Belarus. He was short, quiet and very good with numbers. His best friend was another local kid, violent and impulsive: Benjamin Siegel, known as Bugsy. And on these same streets they met a Sicilian named Charles Luciano. Their mentor was Arnold Rothstein, the Brain, a high-rolling gambler who understood the liquor business before anyon…

You are on Bedford Street, in Greenwich Village. Look for number 86. A wooden door with no sign, no name. Nothing suggests there is a bar inside. It is Chumley's, one of the most famous speakeasies of Prohibition. It opened in 1922. It was founded by Leland Chumley, a socialist who also ran a pamphlet press. The word speakeasy comes from speaking quietly. To get in you had to know someone, give a password, keep the noise down. At its height the city had tens of thousands of them. Chumley's had two exits. One onto this street and another onto a courtyard leading to a different block. When th…

You are on West 52nd Street, outside number 21. Look at the iron railing and the little painted jockey statues on the steps. It is the 21 Club. The restaurant closed in 2020, but the front is unchanged. In 1930, in the middle of Prohibition, this speakeasy moved here. It served millionaires, actors, politicians. It was elegant, expensive and discreet. The owners designed a system against raids. When the police came in, a button triggered a mechanism: the bar shelves tipped and the bottles slid down a chute into the basement, where they smashed. No evidence remained. And there was more. In t…

You are on Lenox Avenue, at 142nd Street, in Harlem. Today there are apartment buildings. From 1923 to 1936, the Cotton Club stood on this corner. Its owner was Owney Madden, an English-born gangster raised in the Irish gangs. He opened the club partly to sell his own bootleg beer. Harlem was then the capital of Black America. Writers, musicians, painters. It was called the Harlem Renaissance. The Cotton Club stage featured the best Black musicians in the country. Duke Ellington led his orchestra here for years. Cab Calloway sang. The chorus girls danced. But the audience was white only. B…

You are on Lenox Avenue, between 140th and 141st Streets. This was the site of the Savoy Ballroom, Harlem's great dance hall. Unlike the Cotton Club, Black and white dancers shared its floor. Meanwhile, another business ran on Harlem's streets: the illegal numbers lottery. Penny bets, every day, with winnings paid out in the neighborhood. The queen of that business was a woman from the Caribbean: Stephanie St. Clair, known as Queenie. She controlled a huge betting network and employed hundreds of local people. As Prohibition neared its end, white gangsters saw that alcohol was running out. …