You can drink hard liquor in restaurants and cocktail lounges, but only when sitting at a table. Beer and wines may be dispensed over the bar, but not to standees. You’ve got to find a stool. Some genius figured you can’t get plastered sitting down, forgetting that many who drink and sit can’t stand up again.
Hard liquor may not be sold on Sundays, though beer and wine can be. Bars can remain open until 2 A.M. every night except Saturday and Sunday, when they must shutter promptly at 12. You can’t line drinks on your table; anything in your possession at the closing hour will be swept out of your hand. Most places issue the last call 15 minutes before the limit and in that final quarter-hour there are wild drinking scenes as customers try to get drunk all at once.
Liquor for off-premise consumption is sold in bottle stores, of which there are about 350. They close at nine on weekdays and at midnight on Saturdays and all day Sundays. A package store license costs $815 a year, but it will cost you $50,000 to buy one, as the ABC Board has frozen the rolls.
Those who can’t get a bun on by closing time have no trouble locating an oasis after the curfew. At this writing there are 613 so-called bottle-clubs running in the District, in addition to hundreds of gin flats in Black Town, where almost any cab driver will steer you. Bootleggers work certain street corners, where you can buy bottle goods after hours.
The legal age minimum is 18 for beer and 21 for hard stuff, but this law, like almost all other rules and regulations, is breached more often than honored.
Citizens and Congressmen seek sporadically to rationalize local liquor laws, in hope of cutting down violations. But the dry bloc buries the bills in committees. Everyone was surprised when the House District Affairs Committee managed to bring up a bill permitting sale until two on Saturday nights. This turned out to be a piece of parliamentary jockeying in the fight against the President’s FEPC Bill, of all things. That law, obnoxious to Southerners, would have come up for a vote unless one with legislative priority could be sent in ahead. And that bill, according to the calendar, was a proposed law to liberalize drinking habits in the District. So the Southerners brought it up, side-tracked the FEPC, and, a couple of weeks later, when it came time to vote on the booze act, roundly routed it.
The thirsty visitor finds it easy to find a bottle-club and become a full-fledged drinking member on the spot. The names, locations and owners of these after-hour spots vary from day to day. Occasionally, after clean-ups, all or most close for a couple of weeks or a couple of months. As these words were written the District was recovering from its most painful drought, brought on by revelations before the District Crime Investigating Committee, headed by Attorney Fischbach.
The front-page stories forced the cops and U. S. Attorney Fay to close some joints. Others lay low awhile. A murder in the Hideaway Club didn’t help, either.
We made an intensive study of bottle-clubs. Of the score or more we visited, we found only one apparently operating legitimately and according to law. That was the Lyre’s Club, about which more later. Of the 600-plus such clubs in Washington, it is possible that a few adhere to the book, but we didn’t hear of them.
On paper, bottle-clubs are supposed to be membership organizations, incorporated for social and benevolent purposes. Members bring their own liquor, which is held for them, their names on the labels. The clubs sell setups and food.