The Devil's Playground_ A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square - James Traub [41]
6.
THE PADLOCK REVUE
FROM ITS EARLIEST DAYS, Times Square floated on a mighty ocean of alcohol—nickel beer, gin, whiskey, wine, and the fine champagne downed by the quart at Rector’s and Shanley’s. The artistic souls who passed their days and nights along Broadway—the actors and the hoofers and the chorus girls and the composers and writers and stage managers and agents and producers and ticket scalpers—soothed their frayed nerves and bucked up their faltering egos with nightly drafts from the local dives and taverns, the lobster palaces and the hotels. In Mirrors of New York, a thoroughly soused memoir dating from 1925, the essayist Benjamin de Casseres describes Times Square as the central depot of a “Grand Trunk Line of Booze” stretching down Broadway, and the bar at the Knickerbocker Hotel, on the southeast corner of 42nd and Broadway, as “the headquarters of the 42nd Street Country Club.” “At the corner outside one heard for years only one phrase,” De Casseres plangently recalls: “ ‘Let’s have another.’” Nineteen twenty-five was, of course, the heart of Prohibition; and Mirrors of New York is a melancholy recollection of a vanished golden age. “The rapid fall of the booze forts around these corners and the rise of the chocolate and soda centers on their ruins is a matter of near history,” De Casseres writes, in what is possibly the earliest account on record of Times Square ruined by the forces of modernization and propriety.
The Eighteenth Amendment took effect July 1, 1919, but the Volstead Act, which made Prohibition national law, only went into force on January 16 of the following year. It was a bitterly cold night; the temperature dropped to six degrees. The drinking crowd jammed into the old booze forts like condemned prisoners partaking of a final meal. Reisenweber’s held a funeral ball; the waiters at Maxim’s were dressed as pallbearers. For all the chin-up insouciance, the metaphor was no joke for the establishments themselves. Without alcohol, the great lobster palaces felt like overupholstered mess halls. Who would linger until the late hours over a carafe of ginger ale? Within three years, every single one of the great old Broadway restaurants had disappeared. And in their place came the hot dog stands and soda fountains and “coffee pots” that disgusted the likes of Benjamin de Casseres. Prohibition annihilated the splendid eating and drinking culture of Times Square.
What it could not annihilate, of course, was drinking itself; that was much too deeply ingrained in the life of the place. And so drinking changed, almost overnight, from a beloved pastime, like dancing or playgoing, to a clandestine and fugitive act. Within a few years there were hundreds, if not thousands, of speakeasies in the area around Times Square. Most of them were located not in the grand open spaces formed by the convergence of the avenues, as the lobster palaces had been, but in brownstones, and above restaurants, and behind shops, on the cross streets of the Forties. Many of them were just underground versions of the cheap bars that had flourished in the area for years; the patron would show a familiar face or mention a familiar name, or even mumble a password through a sliding window or a barred opening in the door. Others were private homes, where drinkers would be escorted into what had once been the living room of an apartment. Some of these establishments—the kind you might read about enviously in The New Yorker— offered copies of the latest magazines, and soft armchairs, and legitimate Scotch highballs. Others—a great many more—reeked of yesterday’s Welsh rarebit and watered their gin and padded their bills, and occasionally robbed a customer too drunk to notice. A. J. Liebling once wrote a story in The