HOOCH RAID IN A PARK SLOPE SLUM (1922)
******************************************************************************************************************************** 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? ******************************************************************************************************************************** Everybody was “thirsty” in 1922. Not everyone, though, wanted to pay the price of the drink. While the wet laws during the 1920s were none too popular with many Brooklynites, most of these residents, for safety reasons, though, did not want the hooch being made under their own roof. As a result, there was no shortage of citizen reports to the police of active neighborhood mash stills. Even in the slums of Park Slope. A CASE IN PARK SLOPE One of these stills was “uncovered in a flat occupied by Daniel Beshara, at 721 Union street” where it was discovered that the hooch was being made in a makeshift still in the middle of the night. Not only illegal, the operation, powered by open flames, was also dangerous. Beshara and his cousin, James Pamperi, who also lived in the building, were arrested in the act of producing mash. “In the Pamperi home were found fourteen barrels of mash,” claimed the Brooklyn Standard Union newspaper. “That dwellers in the tenements are becoming aroused over the fire peril is shown by the great number of complaining letters which have been sent” to the district attorney, demanding that he stamp out these “moonshine dens.” ASST. D.A. SNYDER TO THE RESCUE In a grand response […]
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, […]
CALVIN COOLIDGE & THE BUNNY HUG (1922)
******************************************************************************************************************************** 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? ******************************************************************************************************************************** Vice-President Calvin Coolidge came to the Eastern section of Stuyvesant Heights one night late in 1922 to stump for the local Republican senator ahead of the mid-term elections. And in so doing, he would wind up in a nite club known for its bawdy dancing and raids on its illegal booze sales. It was the country’s first “working girl’s model dance hall,” The Arcadia. Dedicated specifically, at the time it was built in 1912, to “proper” dances for working girls, the hall – located at the corner of Halsey Street and Saratoga Avenue, across the street from Saratoga Park – had been supported by proponents who had lobbied successfully for anti-tango legislation, designed to outlaw “the turkey trot and other sensational dances.” For several years, the hall was a chaste facility which forbid “bunny-hugging” and tangoing, and kept a number of dance monitors on the dance floor to enforce these rules. You broke them once and you were kicked out for good – never allowed to return to the popular dance spot. Ten years later, though, it was the era of Prohibition, and the hall’s reputation had sunken somewhat in the estimation of its neighbors. Being the largest dance hall in the area, though, Vice President Calvin Coolidge would use it […]
A PROHIBITION WRECK ON ORANGE ST (1922)
******************************************************************************************************************************** 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? ******************************************************************************************************************************** “Tearing through Orange st. with the throttle wide open, in the early hours this morning, a big limousine of expensive make crashed into an electric light pole at the foot of the street, ricocheted against a fire hydrant which it completely demolished, continued on its course and crashed through an eight-foot picket fence.” A flirtation at a dance, a stolen vehicle, a crash, the removal of a set of license plates, and a hasty departure from the scene of the accident was further described in the 12 December 1922 newspaper article. “CRASH WAKENS HEIGHTS” “A blood-stained hand pushed open the door of the limousine. Two gory men stepped out,” wrote the reporter. The two men “then turned and assisted a woman out of the car. They climbed over the wall to the street and stood huddled in a little group as if debating what to do.” After a few minutes of dazed waiting, the three crash victims walked quickly up Orange Street. Then, a few minutes later, one of the men was observed returning and making “a vain effort to wrench the rear license plate from the car.” All that he succeeded in doing, though, was leaving “a number of bloody but well-defined fingerprints on the license number.” A WOMAN APPEARS […]
