GUERRILLA MARKETING IN A DRESS (1903)
******************************************************************************************************************************** Brownstone Detectives investigates the history of our clients’ homes. The story you are about to read was composed from research conducted in the course of one of those investigations. Do you know the history of YOUR house? ******************************************************************************************************************************** When Brooklyn saloon owners saw Carrie Nation entering their Broadway establishments carrying her ax, their first thought was to protect their liquor. But when that grand and radical old figure of the Victorian temperance movement approached their bars, they were stunned at her request. “Gimme a drink – or else!” The original goal of Nation’s ax-swinging was to promote the temperance movement through the visual image of the destruction of its foe – liquor. It brought new prominence to a movement whose most visual image to date had been old women lambasting the drinking ways of men. When she started swinging that ax, though, she got attention, and so, in extension, did the temperance movement. CARRIE NATION – COMES TO BROOKLYN? But Nation, whose anti-saloon message was promoted primarily in Kansas, was a shocking sight in the Eastern District of Broadway. She had recently visited New York City, though, and so no one was willing to challenge that ax in the bars up and down the avenue – even so close to the liquor center of Brooklyn – Bushwick Avenue. “Dressed in a plush sacque, a neat fitting skirt, an old fashioned bonnet and carrying in one hand a dilapidated carpet bag and in the other a wooden ax, a person, […]
