Even allowing for thirsty tourists, conventioners, and Virginia and Maryland commuters, Washington drinks more than any other U. S. city, including dissolute New York and debauched Chicago.
This is the place where price control was invented, yet the District has no peacetime minimum price law on bottled goods. You can buy standard brands for a dollar less than anywhere else. Many unnamed whiskeys and gins are cheap; it doesn’t pay to cook your own. Whiskey costs less than $2.50 a fifth, and gin can be bought for $1.75. Yet the bootleg business is a major industry. Millions of gallons sold in the District, on which no tax was paid, swell the known figures.
The liquor control situation is an anomaly. Like the District of Columbia, itself, the liquor laws were born of compromise, this between Congressmen from the wet and bone-dry states.
You can drink hard liquor in restaurants and cocktail lounges, but only when sitting at a table. Beer and wines may be dispensed over the bar, but not to standees. You’ve got to find a stool. Some genius figured you can’t get plastered sitting down, forgetting that many who drink and sit can’t stand up again.
Hard liquor may not be sold on Sundays, though beer and wine can be. Bars can remain open until 2 A.M. every night except Saturday and Sunday, when they must shutter promptly at 12. You can’t line drinks on your table; anything in your possession at the closing hour will be swept out of your hand. Most places issue the last call 15 minutes before the limit and in that final quarter-hour there are wild drinking scenes as customers try to get drunk all at once.
Liquor for off-premise consumption is sold in bottle stores, of which there are about 350. They close at nine on weekdays and at midnight on Saturdays and all day Sundays. A package store license costs $815 a year, but it will cost you $50,000 to buy one, as the ABC Board has frozen the rolls.
Those who can’t get a bun on by closing time have no trouble locating an oasis after the curfew. At this writing there are 613 so-called bottle-clubs running in the District, in addition to hundreds of gin flats in Black Town, where almost any cab driver will steer you. Bootleggers work certain street corners, where you can buy bottle goods after hours.
The legal age minimum is 18 for beer and 21 for hard stuff, but this law, like almost all other rules and regulations, is breached more often than honored.
Citizens and Congressmen seek sporadically to rationalize local liquor laws, in hope of cutting down violations. But the dry bloc buries the bills in committees. Everyone was surprised when the House District Affairs Committee managed to bring up a bill permitting sale until two on Saturday nights. This turned out to be a piece of parliamentary jockeying in the fight against the President’s FEPC Bill, of all things. That law, obnoxious to Southerners, would have come up for a vote unless one with legislative priority could be sent in ahead. And that bill, according to the calendar, was a proposed law to liberalize drinking habits in the District. So the Southerners brought it up, side-tracked the FEPC, and, a couple of weeks later, when it came time to vote on the booze act, roundly routed it.
The thirsty visitor finds it easy to find a bottle-club and become a full-fledged drinking member on the spot. The names, locations and owners of these after-hour spots vary from day to day. Occasionally, after clean-ups, all or most close for a couple of weeks or a couple of months. As these words were written the District was recovering from its most painful drought, brought on by revelations before the District Crime Investigating Committee, headed by Attorney Fischbach.
The front-page stories forced the cops and U. S. Attorney Fay to close some joints. Others lay low awhile. A murder in the Hideaway Club didn’t help, either.
We made an intensive study of bottle-clubs. Of the score or more we visited, we found only one apparently operating legitimately and according to law. That was the Lyre’s Club, about which more later. Of the 600-plus such clubs in Washington, it is possible that a few adhere to the book, but we didn’t hear of them.
On paper, bottle-clubs are supposed to be membership organizations, incorporated for social and benevolent purposes. Members bring their own liquor, which is held for them, their names on the labels. The clubs sell setups and food.
Charlie Ford, a Washington attorney to whom we will have occasion to tip our hats in much more detail later, is the lawyer for a number of clubs. He officiated at their births.
Here’s how most of them really work. Regular patrons, i.e., “members,” are supposed to pay annual dues of about $10, depending on the club, but most regulars pay nothing. Transients, i.e., guests, are charged a door-fee of one or two dollars, depending on the club.
Setups are sold, to those who bring their own liquor, at a nominal price of 35 cents and up. If you haven’t your stuff parked or with you, most clubs will sell it to you under the counter or advise you it can be had from a guy seated in front of the entrance in a car.
These clubs are incorporated as non-profit private enterprises, not required to pay Federal amusement taxes even when they provide floor shows and dancing. Nor need they have ABC liquor licenses, because they are supposed not to be selling.
Many of them operate as follows: The prospective owner or owners and a couple of their friends or employes incorporate as a social or benevolent organization. The real owner then rents and furnishes the premises, which he in turn sublets to the so-called social club at a rent which will approximate all the “take” from membership and door charges. The “club” thereupon turns over the kitchen, the sale of setups and the hat-checking and cigaret stand to the real proprietor, as a concession, in return for a token payment, which in turn goes back to the proprietor with the rent.
In clubs that sell liquor illegally or provide gambling, records of such activities are not kept. The proceeds go directly into the owner’s pocket. If raided or threatened by cleanup drives, the clubs disband. The owner organizes a new club under the same terms and repeats the process.
A new twist is being added since the Fischbach exposé. Some club proprietors are making deals with units of legitimate bodies, such as veteran groups, labor unions, etc., whereby the clubs share some of the profits. One, the Amvets, closed after the Hideaway shooting, its Charter lifted by the national organization.
Bottle-clubs find customers in a variety of ways. Some employes of licensed night clubs and restaurants hand out guest-membership cards to patrons who inquire where they can go after two. These steerers write their names on the cards and draw a kickback for every customer, usually a dollar a head.
Many cab drivers shill for the bottle-clubs, as well as for gin flats. Cab drivers’ pay varies with the size of the party. They sometimes get as much as $5 a haul. They are the chief source of prospective patronage for the colored bottle-clubs. More than 500 after-hour spots in Washington are operated by Negroes or in the Negro district. All cater to blacks and whites. The twenty to thirty white bottle-clubs running are segregated as to Negro musicians and actors. In one club we saw three pretty blonde girls with two Negro men. They were all reefer-smokers, palpably.
Cabbies who hustle for the bottle-clubs not only do so in front of hotels and licensed cabarets and restaurants, but try to pirate customers away from opposition clubs. When they see a prospect waiting for the peephole to open, they tout him away “to a better place, where you won’t have any trouble.” The Hideaway, in Georgetown, depended almost entirely on such maneuvers, as it is far out and off the beaten track.
The pirates were acting so brazenly, police stepped in to curb the practice by giving tickets to drivers parked at strategic spots. The law requires cabs to cruise at all times, except in posted hack-stands, which are only outside major hotels.
Food, dancing, entertainment, and often dames are for sale at the clubs. Sometimes waitresses are available, but they work until 6 in the morning, by which time the average rounder has forgotten all about it. The price for a $10 girl picked up in a club is $20.
Some provide craps, stud poker and other games. The night we were there, a crap game ran on the top floor of the Atlas Club, on Pennsylvania Avenue, two blocks from the White House, and at the Stage-crafters Club, another hangout of General Harry Vaughan. The Atlas applied for a private club liquor license, which would permit legal sales, but the application was held up by the ABC Board until the club president, Sidney Brown, who was abroad, could return for a personal appearance. It happened that Mr. Brown, the sponsor of this after-hour spot, was abroad because he is an employe of the State Department. Some months previously, gambler Gary Quinn said he was the president of the Atlas. The license was denied, so it is still running as a bottle-club.