Island of Vice

by Richard Zacks

  McMorrow agreed to the terms; he went through the normal application process, took the civil service exam, and was appointed a probationary patrolman December 17, 1895, and the following week he paid Devaney $200. He joined the force full time the following month, but balked at paying the balance.

  Roosevelt asked McMorrow if any commissioner’s name was mentioned. “It was to be done through Commissioner Parker.” The board president then reinterrogated McMorrow in front of Commissioner Andrews; the confession was typed up and McMorrow signed it on Monday, April 20, 1896.

  Roosevelt had a four-page signed confession implicating Parker.

  Roosevelt allowed McMorrow, who was deeply frightened, to leave 300 Mulberry. One hour later, he summoned Officer Devaney of the Delancey Street station to headquarters.

  Devaney stoutly denied everything. Roosevelt browbeat and lectured but to no avail. Devaney was a veteran cop and he knew how to stonewall. Roosevelt was banging his head against the blue wall of silence.

  Very irritated, Roosevelt summoned McMorrow back to headquarters to identify Devaney; McMorrow stunned TR by saying he had never seen Officer Devaney before in his life and he denied that Devaney had ever threatened him. (One can only assume that in the hour that had elapsed, someone had a heart-to-heart conversation with McMorrow.) Flabbergasted, Roosevelt tried to summon McMorrow’s fellow Everard employee Coyle, who had first suggested Devaney, but found out Coyle had died a month earlier.

  Mayor Strong was often the last one to know anything. He was flighty, wealthy, and independent-minded enough that party politicians stopped pitching him. He was furious that neither Parker nor Roosevelt had sent their Lauterbach letters to him and he was tired of reading about the feud in the press.

  On Tuesday, April 21, the mayor personally berated TR at a dinner at the Lotos Club attended by sixteen top-ranking administration officials. Roosevelt responded with what might almost pass for an apology. In this rarest of missives, Roosevelt wrote: “We did not suppose you would care to be brought into a personal trouble of this kind, in which the public at that time had no interest. I can assure, you, Mr. Mayor, there was no intention of being disrespectful. We will invariably consult you in advance about every step we take hereafter.” He sent copies of both his and Parker’s original letters and added copies of promotion memos from the police files.

  Roosevelt also informed the mayor about the McMorrow bribe trail leading toward Parker. Roosevelt needed all the ammunition he could get to convince the mayor to start the process of ousting police commissioner Parker and replacing him with a new face who would give TR that fourth aye. (By law, the mayor could bring misconduct charges against a commissioner and then act as judge in a dismissal hearing.) “I had quite a time with the mayor last night,” Roosevelt wrote his ally Andrews, “on the whole, rather friendly but for Heaven’s sake be sure to try to see him and have a long talk over matters Friday or Saturday. I shall see him Sunday. We want to ‘stay with him’ as the boys say.”

  Even though Roosevelt wanted personally to pursue—with ultimate discretion—his investigation of the Parker bribe, he had no choice but to leave it for a week. He had two out-of-town speaking engagements, first in Columbus, Ohio, and then in front of 3,000 students at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

  When he returned the following weekend he wrote to his sister: “I cannot be sure of Parker’s financial honesty and he is exceedingly able and adroit and as finished a liar as Talleyrand. I feel very uneasy lest he compromise us.”

  Roosevelt was convincing himself of Parker’s guilt; he had already told the mayor but now he decided to send the written McMorrow confession to the mayor and to corporation counsel Scott. He certainly hoped this information might sway the mayor to start dismissal proceedings. The mayor and corporation counsel requested instead that TR tell no one else for now and not share the document with anyone.

  All the Police Board turmoil and disagreement between Parker and Roosevelt was grinding down the fifty-five-year-old chief of police Peter Conlin, physically ill with rheumatism and mentally strained. He requested a thirty-day leave of absence and wanted to combine it with his unused twenty days of summer vacation. Parker and Grant both approved the move but TR and Andrews—both perhaps eager to put the chief “in his place” and provoke retirement—opposed it, citing an impending flood of important police matters. TR and Andrews suggested that they would agree if Conlin obtained a doctor’s note but Parker convinced them demanding this would insult the chief. They relented. Conlin told reporters he planned to return in time to lead the police parade on June 1.

  As April progressed, Roosevelt watched—in shock—as a pillar of his accomplishments, his Sunday saloon crusade, unexpectedly started to crumble.

  The crackdown was working well when a handful of saloon owners—tired of sunning themselves on Sundays outside their closed joints—decided to try one last far-fetched gambit: convert their saloons to hotels. (The Raines Law allowed “hotels” with ten rooms and liquor licenses to serve liquor with a meal to guests round the clock in the restaurants or guests’ rooms—just not in the hotel bar.) Florrie Sullivan, cousin of Tammany’s “Dry Dollar” Sullivan, hired carpenters to chop up his second floor into ten hotel rooms. The workmen framed in the small rooms, applied the plaster and lath, hung the doors.

  Sullivan for years had seen his neighbor Mike Lyons, with his famed restaurant (where TR had eaten at 3 a.m. during a midnight ramble), serve liquor round the clock, thanks to its hotel license.

  Florrie applied to the exiting excise board (not replaced till June 1) and received a hotel liquor license. On Sunday, he sealed tight his barroom. “There’s no fake hotel about this place,” he told reporters. “You fellows have got to eat those sandwiches or you don’t get a drink. I won’t have any funny business around here.”

  Florrie showed little sympathy for the fellow who complained that he had eaten six sandwiches and couldn’t stand another; Florrie was collecting a dime for every beer and sandwich. A few blocks away on Canal Street, the owner of a ratty little bar was also packing in customers. He had rented the empty storeroom next door to serve as his “hotel” dining room and he struck a deal with the cheap lodging house above to deliver him ten rooms. A new “hotel” was born. Captain Kirchner estimated that forty new hotels opened in the first two weeks of April in Devery’s old precinct.

  Silver Dollar Smith, at 64 Essex Street, spared no expense the first Sunday for his “Silver Dollar Hotel.” He threw tablecloths over the pool tables and charged every newcomer five cents for a ticket that entitled him to a sandwich. “Silver Dollar” himself pinned each guest with a boutonniere of violets. The Times called it “one of the busiest places in New York” with 500 guests before noon.

  Bowery celebrity Steve Brodie, famed for jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge, was short of space in his building, and he told reporters he had to convert a basement coal bin to a hotel room. Barkeep Andy Horn—with a joint favored by Park Row newspapermen—sent carpenters to his attic to carve ten rooms, though in some only a midget could stand upright. Customers complained about “eggs boiled to an indigestible degree of hardness.” Mike Callahan—Roosevelt’s nemesis—grabbed ten rooms from his lodging house, and guided guests through a maze of stairways and courtyards to his “hotel restaurant,” since he had to keep his massive barroom locked.

  Tammany Hall building inspectors seemed ready to look the other way at shoddy construction.

  As for the private clubs being forced to comply, lawyers for the wealthiest ones met at the Arion Club on April 2 to fight the new law. The nation’s finest legal minds pored over the fine print pro bono, or for the good of the club’s bar, whose liquor sales generally subsidized the rococo clubhouses and staff. Within a week, they found a judge who agreed that clubs did not “traffick in liquor” and therefore should not be subject to the Raines Law. The nitpick saved the millionaires from taxes and open window shades, and more importantly allowed them to serve liquor around the clock. />
  So now, in addition to the creation of new liquor-friendly hotels, new liquor-friendly clubs began springing up. Any bar owner too cheap or lazy to build ten new rooms could create a new “club” of loyal patrons such as “Knights of the Octagonal Table.” Club incorporation applications would soar tenfold.

  Just a week after the dire Raines thirst headline, the New York World trumpeted: DRINKS? ALL YOU WANT: “Five Hundred Places Sold Liquor Yesterday to the Thirsty; They Were all Called Hotels; Most of them However Were Very Backward about Renting their Rooms.” A plainclothes detective arrested a bartender for selling him a beer and just a sandwich, but Magistrate Brann in Yorkville Court judged that a sandwich constituted a “meal” and another judge decided that a customer off the street qualified as a “guest.”

  By the following weekend, the World headline was RUM RULED THE CITY. And the reporter gleefully announced: “The Tenderloin glistened with its brilliant evil; the eastside wallowed in beer.” Some joints served the same sandwich over and over. The city almost seemed giddy with its newfound freedom, especially in the sudden ninety-degree heat wave. Raines Law jokes were springing up.

  BARTENDER: We’ll have to stop the drinks for a few minutes.

  OWNER: Why, what’s the matter? Beer give out?

  BARTENDER: No. Nothing like that. Some idiot has eaten the sandwich and there aint another one in the whole block that aint in use.

  The police force and the police brass were baffled by this sudden new development. They sent repeated requests for clarifications to the board and to the mayor’s office. Roosevelt was outraged. “Ten beers and one hard boiled egg scarcely constitute a meal,” he complained at the Tuesday board meeting.

  Not unreasonably, Roosevelt expected a sane interpretation of the words hotel and meal and guest. He complained that the outgoing excise board was granting hotel licenses with “extraordinary rapidity.” “The police have special instructions just now to be vigorously on the look-out for ‘fake hotels’…Hotels must be bona-fide ones or they will be suppressed … The Health board will also see that its regulations are strictly and properly enforced.” Roosevelt reported that the police had sent twenty-five cases against “fake” hotels, such as Mike Callahan’s, to the district attorney, and he was confident that “no little schemes of the liquor sellers to evade the Raines law” would prove successful.

  Parker, too, opposed this sudden free-for-all on Sundays. He suggested that Parkhurst Society agents could go to these so-called hotels in the middle of the week and request rooms. “Saloon keepers will soon find out that in order to be exempt from the salient limitations as to Sundays, they must keep honest and bonafide hostelries,” he pronounced in his usual lawyerly manner.

  With nothing to lose, hundreds upon hundreds of saloons raced to convert to hotels.

  Max Hochstim, who had his finger in every lucrative vice, was especially proud of his new hotel’s bridal suite, with a big fireplace and chromolithographs of Niagara Falls, overlooking the bustling street corner of Delancey and Suffolk. “Who says Max Hochstim aint running a genuine hotel?” he asked a touring reporter.

  Hochstim borrowed (or swiped) fancy printed menus from Silver Dollar Smith and crossed out “Smith” and wrote “Hochstim.” The canny owner even bought silverware but then had misgivings. “Can I get it with chains?” he asked the salesman, who gave him a confused look. “To fasten to the table,” he explained. “I guess you don’t know the people round my way.”

  Hotels, even these quick-start hotels, could now serve guests round the clock. And so could clubs. And Sunday, blessedly, was now the same as Monday. For New Yorkers, deprived by Roosevelt for almost a year, this seemed too good to be true, a drunken daydream, from which the Sunday revelers and barkeeps would soon awake with a horrible hangover.

  The Police Board was perplexed. (At least the legislature in Albany had closed its four-month session without removing them.) At the Friday, May 1, meeting, Commissioner Parker suddenly interrupted the discussion of Raines Law issues to point out that the one-year term of board president Roosevelt expired on that day. The other commissioners looked shocked, and Andrews stammered something about needing to postpone any vote. Parker demanded that Chief Clerk Kipp verify the law on the length of the president’s term. After a few minutes Kipp returned and confirmed that the term had expired. Commissioner Parker said he wished to make a nomination. He paused dramatically. “I nominate Theodore Roosevelt.” The Evening Post considered it all a “practical joke” by Parker.

  Still very perturbed over the Raines Law loopholes, Roosevelt on Sunday, May 3, decided to set out on a tour of the Tenderloin and the East Side to see the law in action. He rode in a carriage with a reporter from Hearst’s Journal and was accompanied by his new “handy man” at headquarters, patrolman Frank Rathgeber. The patrolman would do the investigating, since Roosevelt was now too recognizable. (Though TR had relinquished Roundsman Tierney at Parker’s request in January, he had added Rathgeber since his public spat with his fellow commissioner.)

  The carriage rolled to a stop and Rathgeber, in plainclothes, alighted and walked to the side door of a famed saloon on Sixth Avenue. He tried to enter but a man asked for his club membership card. Without one Rathgeber was out of luck, since they didn’t have a hotel license. Rathgeber returned to the carriage.

  The next joint was a big saloon converted to a hotel. Rathgeber entered the crowded place; the bartender told him he must order a sandwich with his beer. He did, and described the sandwich to Roosevelt as “pretty bad, it looked like it had seen better days.” He didn’t need more food to get his second beer. (Rathgeber would drink enough beer and nibble enough sandwiches to wind up calling in sick the next day.)

  At the following place, a hole-in-the-wall saloon, the barroom was closed but in a “dining room” upstairs near the “rooms,” Rathgeber ordered a nickel beer. His sandwich was a “crust of bread” that looked like it had aired on the table for a week. (Playwright Eugene O’Neill once famously described a Raines Law sandwich as “an old dessicated ruin of dust-laden bread and mummified ham or cheese.”)

  Each time the policeman returned to the carriage, Roosevelt asked him many questions such as: Did you see any other food served than sandwiches? Did the place bear any resemblance to an ordinary hotel? Were you asked to register as a guest?

  He clearly was gathering material for a legal challenge. Rathgeber said he saw many sandwiches but only one bed. He never registered. He never was asked to buy a second sandwich or even to eat the first one.

  Roosevelt was also curious about a certain Avenue B saloon that he had heard was staying open on Sundays without pretending to be a hotel because the owner, William Fagan, was the brother of a police sergeant. Roosevelt told Rathgeber to knock at 205 Avenue B. The bouncer cracked open the door, took one look at Rathgeber’s face and shoes, and allowed the patrolman inside; Rathgeber drank a beer from a keg in the back room. No food anywhere. Roosevelt, while waiting, saw a teenage girl come out carrying a “growler.”

  Roosevelt was so irritated by this blatant disregard of the law that he had the carriage driver head over to the neighboring precinct, the 14th, to find an officer to make the arrest inside the 13th Precinct. He wanted to make certain no local cops would tip off the joint. Roosevelt, with his zero-tolerance policy, soon had charges brought against 13th Precinct captain Theron Copeland, a well-respected thirty-nine-year veteran of the force without a single prior complaint, and against roundsman John Kirzinger and beat cop James Donnelly.

  Several reporters the next day asked Roosevelt for his observations on the Raines Law. He said the law was in a “transition period” and he expected improvements when the state’s “special agents” started their jobs on June 1. He also displayed a streetwise understanding of its impact. “The practical effect is merely to charge double [on Sundays] for the first glass of beer (ten cents). In other words, if a man will buy one sandwich for five cents, he can have all the beer he wants.” He noted that the poli
ce had made arrests for that behavior “but the City Magistrates have discharged the prisoners in every instance, and the Grand Jury has refused to indict.”

  Bar owners and others citywide quickly began to realize this might be an “Alice in Wonderland” moment, a Mad Hatter’s tea party where a sloppily written law aimed at repression would lead to wondrous new freedoms and cocktails for all, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

  Could the “hayseeds” have really bungled the new legislation that badly? Could Tammany clerks and judges of all stripes really interpret the law that way? Could glasses down and “last call” really be “bottoms up” and another round? Could New York really become the city that never sleeps?

  Though Roosevelt certainly had not created the Raines Law, these events, especially the demise of Roosevelt Sundays, played out like a slap in the face of the commissioner. New Yorkers were drinking openly in “fake” hotels and “fake” clubs on Sundays and also at three in the morning. And they were not only drinking. The frantic conversion of hundreds of saloons into hotels was bringing thousands of cheap affordable beds within a drunken stagger of the bar, very convenient for couples on their fourth cocktail or for prostitutes. And unmarried young women—shopgirls and factory girls—who might never walk blocks to a sleazy hotel, might just stumble up the convenient barroom stairs to one of the ten Raines Law rooms.

  Roosevelt, who for a year had delighted in describing sober workingmen picnicking with their families on Sundays, was not amused by any of it.

  olcanic Roosevelt finally erupted on May 5.

  On that day, he attended a Board of Estimate meeting in place of Commissioner Andrews, department treasurer, who was vacationing in Texas. Representatives from various branches of government, such as sanitation or fire, often appeared at these meetings to deal with budget matters and pry loose funds tangled in red tape.