The Epic of New York City (87 page)

In one elegant café two golden slippers were filled with champagne and passed from table to table. The owner of a chili house on Forty-first Street pondered the idea of eluding Prohibition by serving booze in teacups. Pandhandlers prospered with a standardized whine: “Give a guy a quarter for a last drink.” Bat Masterson, the fabled gunfighter from Dodge City, Kansas, now employed by the New York
Morning Telegraph,
finished writing a column about a prizefight, walked to a nearby bar, and sadly ordered a cup of tea. Elsewhere in the city a famous madam, named Polly Adler, scoffed, “They might as well try to dry up the Atlantic with a post office blotter.”

She was right. Before Prohibition a man could get a drink in 15,000 places in town, but soon thereafter 32,000 illegal New York establishments sold liquor. There weren't enough federal Prohibition agents, many were inefficient, and some were downright corrupt. Stanley Walker wrote: “It was a common sight in certain New York speakeasies to see a group of agents enter a place at noon, remain until almost midnight, eating and drinking, and then leave without paying the bill.” The venal agents kept up the price of illegal spirits. Some took protection money and raided other operators refusing to pay off.

Izzy Einstein was a postal clerk when Prohibition began. He lived in a $14-a-month flat on the Lower East Side and was the neighborhood cutup. Forty years old and balding, Izzy stood only 5 feet 5 inches tall and weighed 225 pounds. He had a huge cantaloupe head perched on a pumpkin-fat body. For all of his love of the ridiculous, Izzy was an intelligent man, who could speak English, Yiddish, German, Polish, and Hungarian; could make himself understood in French, Italian, and Russian; and even knew a few Chinese phrases. Bored with his post office job, he asked the chief enforcement agent of the Southern District of New York for a position as a Prohibition agent. The official was dubious, but Izzy convinced him that “this Prohibition business needs a new type of people that can't be spotted so easy.” He got his gold badge.

The fat man showed up at a Brooklyn speakeasy, knocked on the door, and announced, “I'm a Prohibition agent. I just got appointed.” The doorman grinned and let him inside. The bartender poured a
whiskey, and Izzy quaffed it. This was the wrong technique, for it provided no evidence. When Izzy grabbed for the bottle, the bartender became frightened, scooped it off the bar, and ran out the back door. After this fiasco Izzy changed his tactics. In his vest pocket he hid a tiny funnel connected to a rubber hose that led to a flat bottle secreted in his vest lining. From that time forward, when Izzy was served a drink, he would take a sip and then pour the rest into the funnel while the bartender was making change.

After a few weeks Izzy talked his friend Moe Smith into joining him. Moe, who also liked to clown, weighed more than Izzy but was a couple of inches taller. Moe turned his little cigar store over to a relative and teamed up with Izzy. They were a spectacular success from the start.

They wore disguises. They used offbeat approaches. They carried objects tending to allay suspicion. They never looked like Prohibition agents. Izzy disguised himself as a longshoreman, Park Avenue dude, poultry salesman, and football player and even blackened his face with burnt cork to resemble a Negro. Who could suspect a little fat man lugging a pailful of dill pickles or a pitcherful of milk, carrying a fishing rod, or burdened with a violin or trombone? He pinched so many bootleggers and blind pig operators that his picture was displayed in bars all over town.

Izzy was more imaginative than Moe, but they made an unbeatable team. Izzy never carried a gun, and Moe, who sometimes did, fired it only twice. They timed their raids for the convenience of reporters and newspaper photographers, winning reams of publicity. Columnist O. O. McIntyre declared that Izzy had “become as famous in New York as the Woolworth building.” For more than five years newspaper readers chuckled over the antics of the two rolypoly agents.

They were the best Prohibition agents in the service. They confiscated 5,000,000 bottles of liquor, worth $15,000,000, and thousands of gallons of booze in kegs and barrels, as well as in hundreds of stills and breweries. They made 4,392 arrests, of which more than 95 percent resulted in convictions. Despite this phenomenal record, federal officials were annoyed by their burlesque performances, and in 1925 they were dismissed “for the good of the service.” The
Tribune
said: “They never made Prohibition much more of a joke than it has been made by some of the serious-minded Prohibition officers.” In 1962 Izzy Einstein and Moe Smith were the inspiration for a Broadway musical comedy called
Nowhere to Go But Up.

Prohibition closed many restaurants which had depended on the sale of liquor to make a profit. The respectable oases were replaced by speakeasies, nightclubs, and clip joints. With a new type of customer frequenting such resorts, Café Society was born. Socially prominent young men and women now rubbed elbows with criminals, for most speakeasies fell under the control of gangsters.

Greenwich Village started to become an artists' colony in the first decade of the twentieth century. One winter night in 1916 a group of tipsy Villagers climbed to the top of the Washington Arch on the northern side of Washington Square to shoot off a cap pistol and proclaim Greenwich Village an independent republic. By the end of the war the Village was populated mainly by Italians, who were annoyed by the antics of writers and painters, but the influx of bohemians kept increasing because rents were low.

This Manhattan enclave, with its old-world atmosphere, became the mecca for many young people from all parts of America who rebelled against their parents and the materialistic values of the day. College graduates and nonconformists headed for the Village to create or talk about the creation of artistic masterpieces. A hard core of talented people made the Village the center of America's literary movement, but surrounding them was a lunatic fringe. Men wore their hair long, girls wore their hair short, and some wore their morals thin. Poets debated whether love was sex or vice versified.

One of the most romantic figures in Greenwich Village was Edna St. Vincent Millay. Born in Rockland, Maine, in 1892, she moved to the Village after graduating from Vassar. Her first book of poetry was published in 1917, and in 1923 she won a Pulitzer Prize, for poetry. Carl Van Doren wrote: “Rarely since Sappho has a woman written as outspokenly as this.” Burton Rascoe called her “one of the few poets who have been able to breathe life into the sonnet since Shakespeare.” Another critic said that next to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, she was the supreme mistress of sonnets.

A small woman with a wraithlike figure, Miss Millay had bobbed chestnut hair shot with glints of bronze and copper, a long and graceful neck, a fey smile, a snub nose spattered with freckles, and bright-green eyes. Edmund Wilson, one of many men who fell in love with her, wrote that “her eyes had the bird-lidded look that I recognized as typically Irish.” Edna St. Vincent Millay stimulated men and women alike. Restless and neurotic, she boasted about burning her candle
at both ends. For a while she lived in the city's narrowest house, a three-story structure at 75½ Bedford Street. It was only nine and a half feet wide and thirty feet deep.

One of her friends was Eugene O'Neill, the playwright. O'Neill was born in 1888 in the heart of New York's theatrical district in the Barrett House, on the northeastern corner of Broadway and Forty-second Street. He was the younger son of James O'Neill, a popular melodramatic actor. An unhappy and rebellious young man, Eugene was expelled from Princeton, prospected for gold in Honduras, worked as an ordinary seaman, drifted aimlessly for years, endured a bout with tuberculosis, and began writing plays.

During his Greenwich Village days he hung out at a dive, called the Hell Hole, located at Sixth Avenue and Fourth Street. A heavy drinker, O'Neill became a favorite of an Irish gang, called the Hudson Dusters, who made the Hell Hole their headquarters. It was from this place that O'Neill drew most of the character for his famous play
The Iceman Cometh.
The Iceman was Death. O'Neill, like Edna St. Vincent Millay, wrote much about death. Morose and silent, smiling sardonically and never laughing aloud, the mustached O'Neill was a handsome black Irishman, who attracted women. “I'm all Irish!” he often cried. Nothing shocked him. His big brown eyes shifted quickly from softness to savagery, for if Millay was a candle burning at both ends, Eugene O'Neill was a live volcano, seething, boiling, bubbling, and then overflowing with searing dramas. In 1936 he won the Nobel Prize for literature, and he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize four times, the last time posthumously. In their definitive biography of him, Arthur and Barbara Gelb wrote that O'Neill became, “except for Shakespeare and possibly Shaw, the world's most widely translated and produced dramatist.”

A great wave of Negroes from Southern states and Caribbean islands had washed into the city during the war. In 1910 the 90,000 Negroes in New York represented less than 2 percent of the population. By 1920 their numbers had increased to 150,000, or about 3 percent. Before the end of the 1920's the Negro population more than doubled, leaping to 327,000. Most of them wound up in Harlem, which became a city within a city and the Negro capital of the world.

“Nigger Heaven,” as Negroes themselves called Harlem, lay in the northeastern corner of Manhattan. Its approximate boundaries were Central Park and 110th Street on the south, the East River on the
east, the Harlem River on the northeast, 168th Street on the north, and Amsterdam Avenue and Morningside Park on the west Many were unable to find jobs, and there was no such thing as public relief. Hard pressed to find dwellings as well, the Negroes lived jammed together in this black ghetto. Some held rent parties, also called whist parties or dances, to raise money for rent. These affairs were publicized by cards such as the one saying: “We got yellow girls, we've got black and tan—Will you have a good time?—YEAH MAN!” A welcome was extended to anyone, Negro or white, who had cash to spend. Some white people considered the rent parties more amusing than nightclubs.

It became commonplace for whites out on the town to say late in the evening, “Let's go uptown for yardbird and strings.” Yard-bird was Harlem's vernacular for fried chicken, and strings were spaghetti. This food—together with steaming chitterlings, good fried fish, and bad bootleg booze—could be enjoyed at low cost at the rent parties, and the impromptu singing and dancing often went on until dawn.

White New Yorkers and visitors also flocked to Harlem's famous nightclubs, such as the Cotton Club and Connie's Inn. There they drank illicit whiskey, listened to the blues, and watched some of the greatest talent in the world. Harlem catered to the ofay, the secret Negro word for the white man—foe—in pig Latin. Anyone with enough money could find anything he wanted—girls, liquor, narcotics, perversion. As composer Duke Ellington later said, “That part of Harlem was degrading and humiliating to both Negroes and whites.” Considering the fact that many Negroes masked their hatred of white people behind smiles and that most Harlem hot spots fell into the hands of mobsters, there was amazingly little violence. Decorum was demanded in all of Harlem's big nightclubs, but in small cellar joints and private apartments anything was likely to happen.

Negroes knew that they were unwelcome in other parts of the city, most held menial jobs, and only the exceptional individual could claw his way out of this crippling environment. About 1925 Harlem's literary renaissance began. A group of talented young writers depicted Negro life with such skill and honesty that they won the admiration of literary critics.

In 1920 Harlem elected its first Negro alderman, an independent Republican, named George Harris, and ever since then Harlem has been represented on the board of aldermen. More than politicians,
however, the one man who gave the Negro a sense of his own dignity was a pure black man, named Marcus Garvey.

Born in Jamaica in 1887, intelligent but unschooled, a newspaper writer in Jamaica and Costa Rica, short chunky mustached Garvey came to Harlem in 1917. The next year he began publishing a weekly, called the
Negro World,
in which he urged Negro unity, nationalism, and the resettlement of Negroes in Africa. He appealed to racial pride at a time when Negroes felt that they had little cause to hold up their heads. A skilled orator, clever organizer, and shrewd psychologist, Garvey touched off the first real mass movement among American Negroes.

He asked the League of Nations for permission to settle a colony in Africa and entered into discussions with Liberia. Unable to negotiate the return of American Negroes to Africa, Garvey organized the Universal African Legion, the Black Eagle Flying Corps, and the Universal Black Cross Nurses to force white people out of that continent. Establishing the African Orthodox Church and promising a Utopia under the African sun, Garvey became the uncrowned dictator of an imaginary black empire. Some Negroes hailed him as God.

Between 1919 and 1921 Garvey collected $10,000,000. In 1923 he claimed 6,000,000 followers. This was an exaggeration, but even his critics admitted that 500,000 Negroes had pledged blind loyalty to him. Garvey set up two steamship companies and bought three seagoing ships in the name of his Universal Negro Improvement Association. He intended to man the vessels with Negro crews and sail from the United States to Africa and the West Indies. In 1923 he was found guilty of using the mails to defraud in raising money for his steamship lines and was sent to the federal penitentiary at Atlanta for five years. In 1927 President Calvin Coolidge pardoned him but had him deported as an undesirable alien. Marcus Garvey, who had touched both glory and shame, died in London in 1940.