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posted by Fnord666 on Monday June 10 2019, @06:47AM   Printer-friendly
from the life-finds-a-way dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

To Evade Pre-Prohibition Drinking Laws, New Yorkers Created the World's Worst Sandwich

To Evade Pre-Prohibition Drinking Laws, New Yorkers Created the World's Worst Sandwich

Near the end of the 19th century, New Yorkers out for a drink partook in one of the more unusual rituals in the annals of hospitality. When they ordered an ale or whisky, the waiter or bartender would bring it out with a sandwich. Generally speaking, the sandwich was not edible. It was “an old desiccated ruin of dust-laden bread and mummified ham or cheese,” wrote the playwright Eugene O’Neill. Other times it was made of rubber. Bar staff would commonly take the sandwich back seconds after it had arrived, pair it with the next beverage order, and whisk it over to another patron’s table. Some sandwiches were kept in circulation for a week or more.

Bar owners insisted on this bizarre charade to avoiding breaking the law—specifically, the excise law of 1896, which restricted how and when drinks could be served in New York State. The so-called Raines Law was a combination of good intentions, unstated prejudices, and unforeseen consequences, among them the comically unsavory Raines sandwich.

[...] The 1896 Raines Law was designed to put dreary watering holes like these out of business. It raised the cost of an annual liquor license to $800, three times what it had cost before and a tenfold increase for beer-only taverns. It stipulated that saloons could not open within 200 feet of a school or church, and raised the drinking age from 16 to 18. In addition, it banned one of the late 19th-century saloon’s most potent enticements: the free lunch. At McSorley’s, for example, cheese, soda bread, and raw onions were on the house. (The 160-year-old bar still sells a tongue-in-cheek version of this today.) Most controversial of all was the law’s renewed assault on Sunday drinking. Its author, Finger Lakes region senator John W. Raines, eliminated the “golden hour” grace period that followed the stroke of midnight on Saturday. His law also forced saloon owners to keep their curtains open on Sunday, making it considerably harder for patrolmen to turn a blind eye.

[...] Intentionally or not, the Raines Law left wiggle room for the rich. But a loophole was a loophole, and Sunday was many a proprietor’s most profitable day of business. By the following weekend, a vanguard of downtown saloon-owners were gleefully testing the law’s limits. A suspicious number of private “clubs” were founded that April, and saloons started handing out membership cards to their regulars. Meanwhile, proprietors converted basements and attic spaces into “rooms,” cut hasty deals with neighboring lodging-houses, and threw tablecloths over pool tables. They also started dishing up the easiest, cheapest, most reusable meal they could get away with: the Raines sandwich.

Law enforcement declared itself satisfied. “I would not say that a cracker is a complete meal in itself, but a sandwich is,” an assistant D.A. in Brooklyn told an assembly of police captains as the first Raines hotels sprouted up. Remarkably, the courts upheld these definitions of “meal” and “guest.” Reformers were understandably flabbergasted. The law itself was sound, Raines complained. It was the police and the courts that had made it laughable. He and his progressive allies had seriously underestimated just how far New Yorkers would go for a drink.

The court decisions were a turning point. With summer approaching, “Raines hotels” sprang up everywhere. By the next year’s election season, there were more than 1,500 of them in New York. Brooklyn, still a separate municipality at this point, went from 13 registered hotels to 800 in six months, and its tally of social clubs grew tenfold.

For the libertines of New York City, Zacks writes, the second half of 1896 was “too good to be true, a drunken daydream.” The hotel carve-out allowed drinks to flow at all hours. There was no obligatory last call, and the city’s liveliest drinking spots now offered cheap beds mere steps away. For Raines and the law’s other architects, this was the most alarming unintended consequence: their efforts to make New Yorkers virtuous had caused a spike in casual sex and prostitution.


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by HiThere on Monday June 10 2019, @04:48PM (1 child)

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Monday June 10 2019, @04:48PM (#853750) Journal

    Well, but there's more to it than that. At the time a husband usually had legal control over his wife's money and property. Someone who was a drunken gambler could easily impoverish a woman who could otherwise support herself, or even herself and her family.

    So the roots of the temperance movement are multiple. It was the wrong answer, but it was the only one available. Without the support of the wowsers, the women wouldn't have enough votes, so they couldn't just campaign to control their own money and property. Often they didn't even have the vote...which is why the women's movement started in the western states. (Yeah, that needs a more expanded explanation, but enough's enough.)

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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by NotSanguine on Monday June 10 2019, @05:01PM

    Well, but there's more to it than that. At the time a husband usually had legal control over his wife's money and property. Someone who was a drunken gambler could easily impoverish a woman who could otherwise support herself, or even herself and her family.

    Absolutely. Like I said, many of the women involved in the temperance movement had a lot of good reasons (domestic violence just being the most egregious) to want the men around them to be sober.

    Aside from New York and Maine, most states didn't give women the right to control even *their own* (as in those controlled by a women when she married) assets until well into the 20th century. And alcohol had nothing to do with that. Just straight-up, sober as a judge, discrimination

    I'd also point out that credit card companies generally required women to have a male co-signer to obtain a credit card until the 1970s. It's been a long and difficult road for women in the US (and elsewhere). Fortunately, we've made some progress, with safe, affordable birth control and 'no-fault' divorce being two important areas. More recently, police treating domestic violence as a crime rather than just "marital issues" to be ignored is important too.

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