B. Virginia
The Virginia suburbs present a more respectable exterior, though under the surface there’s plenty going on. The policy of the Old Dominion is policy.
Virginia’s laws do not permit the sale of hard liquor for on-premises consumption. Only beer and wine may be drunk that way. Hard stuff must be bought at liquor stores and taken out. This isn’t conducive to anything like gay night life. Virginians go into the District or up to Maryland if they want hi-jinks. Otherwise, most of their fun-making takes place at house parties. There are a few dives. But the after-hour “bottle-clubs” which plague Washington are to be found in Virginia too. One of these is the Commonwealth at South Pitt and Wolfe, in Alexandria.
The average resident of Virginia’s suburbs is financially a step or two above his Maryland neighbors. There are more fine homes and estates on this side of the river. The Negro problem is not so incendiary, because this is Virginia, where Jim Crow is king by statute, and colored people live in restricted areas and behave, or else. This is one of the reasons why the Negroes floated into the District, where they changed places with the whites, who overflowed back into Virginia. Remarkable was Prince Georges 64-percent population increase in the decade; but Arlington County, Virginia, had 125 percent.
The absence of night life in the nearby Virginia suburbs has been noted. This minimizes prostitution. Gambling is an important industry, as it is all over the nation.
Virginia authorities are disturbed by an influx of bookmakers and policy-sellers, white and black, from the District. Recently a Negro woman was arrested in Arlington with $3,000 in a paper bag, which was picked up that day in pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters—for numbers bets.
Sam Lano, who used to operate the Syndicate slot-machines in Prince Georges, is president of the Arlington Music Corporation, which flooded the county with pinball machines, many being used as gambling devices by local merchants. Lano came here from New York two years ago. Over a year ago he was convicted in Marlborough Circuit Court for having threatened a Prince Georges tavern-owner with prosecution on a bad check if he didn’t keep Lano’s machines in his place. He was sentenced to a year and his conviction was upheld by the Maryland Court of Appeals. So far, however, Lano hasn’t served one day in the cooler, and no effort was made to detain him when he transferred his operations to Virginia. The police of Bangor, Me., are looking for him for the removal and concealment of mortgaged property.
Considerable moonshine liquor is available in the Virginia suburbs. It comes from stills operated in the mountains in the western part of the state, and from Georgia.
On the whole, you might compare this area to the best of Westchester, or Chicago’s North Shore outskirts, or Beverly Hills. That doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty of dirt. It does mean it has to be something special before it hits print.
Meanwhile, considerable friction is developing as well-heeled northerners flock in; a repetition of the carpetbag days.