You find the door because someone told you where it was. There is nothing on it to find on your own — no sign, no name, no light over the lintel, just an ordinary door in an ordinary building on a block you have walked past a hundred times without once looking up. You knock, or you don’t; sometimes a slot opens at eye height and a face you can’t quite see decides about your face, and sometimes the door simply gives because you came in with the right person. Then a stair — narrow, dim, going up or going down, because the room is never at street level where a passing eye could catch it. And at the top or the bottom of the stair, all at once, the thing the street had no idea was there: heat, and light, and a band running hot, and a room full of people who climbed up out of the cold to spend money they’d sworn to their wives they didn’t have.
That was a night out in Prohibition Chicago, and the whole design of it was to look, from the outside, like nothing at all.
The word itself tells you how it was meant to work. You spoke easy — quietly, in public, about where such a place was and how you got in, because saying it too loud was how it stopped being there. The older names were blunter: a blind pig, a blind tiger, a place that kept its eyes shut about what it was. By the mid-twenties there were a great many of them, and they ran the whole range of the city’s money — from back-room dives with a plank across two barrels, up through neighborhood rooms with a piano and a regular crowd, all the way to the chrome-and-jazz palaces where a doorman in a good coat took your hat and the cocktails had names borrowed from movie actresses. Same law broken in all of them. Very different odds of surviving it.
Because the law had teeth, and the teeth were pointed at exactly one thing: being noticed.
The Volstead Act — signed in October 1919, in force from the first minute of January 17, 1920 — did the obvious thing and made the manufacture, sale, and transport of liquor a crime. But its sharpest tool wasn’t the criminal charge. It was a quieter provision that declared any place where liquor was sold or kept a public nuisance, and let federal authorities go to a judge and have the premises padlocked shut for up to a year. No trial of the owner. No jury weighing his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. The government only had to show that the building was being used for the thing everyone knew it was being used for — and the doors chained, the year lost, the lease dead. It was cheaper than a prosecution and it hurt more than a fine, and it turned an ordinary storefront into the most dangerous thing a speakeasy could have: an address that could be proven.
You can see the whole architecture of discretion fall into place once you understand that padlock. Everything about how these rooms were built was an answer to it.
The front, first. A speakeasy wore an ordinary business over its face like a coat — a laundry, a barber shop, a cigar store, a delicatessen, and in more than a few cases a funeral parlor, which had the twin virtues of respectability and a lot of quiet coming and going. Behind the counter, or through a back room, or up a stair the customers of the front never used, was the other business. The liquor itself was built to vanish: at the Green Mill up in Uptown — still standing, still pouring a century later — a trapdoor behind the bar dropped the bottles to a lift the moment a raid came through the door, and the trapdoor is there yet. Peepholes and passwords weren’t theater; they were a filter, a way to keep the man who might be a Prohibition agent on the wrong side of the door until someone had a good look at him. And the rooms that lasted longest tended to want, above all, to look old — to look like a private club that had stopped keeping up with the world sometime around 1899, the kind of place that had always been there and therefore drew no second glance. The newest illegal business in the city dressed itself up to look like the oldest legal one.
Prohibition officers raid a lunch room at 922 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C., April 25, 1923. National Photo Company Collection, Library of Congress. No known restrictions on publication.
The chrome palaces couldn’t do that, and it cost them. A place with a name people said out loud, a place the columnists wrote up and the photographers loved, was a place that had already handed the government its nuisance case. When the papers ran the picture — and they loved the picture: the chained doors, the grinning policeman, the pyramid of seized bottles — they were also, without meaning to, drawing the map. Spectacle was the whole point of the glamorous rooms, and spectacle was precisely the thing the padlock rewarded you for not having. The federal machinery got heavier as the decade wore on, too; in 1927 the government pulled its Prohibition agents into a dedicated Bureau of their own, a sign of how much apparatus a supposedly simple ban had grown to need. The loud rooms fed that machine. The quiet ones tried to starve it.
Which leaves the record itself lopsided, in a way I find hard to stop thinking about. The speakeasies we remember are, disproportionately, the ones that got caught — because getting caught is what put them in the newspaper, and the newspaper is where the memory comes from. The rooms that did it right, the ones that meant never to be photographed and never were, are the ones we have the least of. They kept no sign, drew no camera, left no chained-door picture behind. They survived by being forgettable, and history obliged them by forgetting.
That is a hard thing to build a legend on — a room whose entire genius was that no one was supposed to notice it. It is also exactly why I wanted to set a novel inside one. Ruth keeps the books above a Chicago speakeasy called The Velvet Hour, a quiet room up a back stair behind an ordinary door — the kind of place that outlasted the flashier ones precisely because you could walk past it your whole life and never look up. It’s invented. Its discretion is not. Rooms like it are all through the real history of women and men remaking their lives in early twentieth-century America, and most of them kept their secret so well that the only way left to visit one is to make it up.