S.F. toasts the repeal of Prohibition again

Today is the 75th anniversary of the end of America's "noble experiment" - the prohibition of intoxicating liquor.

San Francisco celebrated the day 75 years ago by raising a glass or two, and the city will do it again today.

At exactly 2:31 p.m. on this day in 1933, word reached San Francisco that the 21st Amendment abolishing Prohibition had been ratified. The siren on the Ferry Building sounded, and a parade of 14 trucks loaded with legal liquor headed up Market Street to City Hall to present Mayor Angelo Rossi with California wine and a case of gin.

A parade is on tap today, too. The 21st Amendment, a San Francisco restaurant and brew pub, is sponsoring a parade led by a band at 3:30 p.m. from the Ferry Building up Market and down Second Street to its bar near AT&T Park to celebrate the occasion.

The repeal of Prohibition was the end of an infamous era in the United States, when the whole nation seemed to turn its back on the law. When booze became illegal, gangsters took over the booze business, and it became fashionable to break the law. Although President Herbert Hoover famously observed that Prohibition was "an experiment noble in purpose," prohibiting liquor made drinkers of nearly everyone.

"It didn't work," said Robert Chandler, an author and a historian for Wells Fargo Bank. "You can't legislate morality."

Although San Francisco didn't have the reputation that places such as Chicago had for breaking the law, the Volstead Act, which enabled the 18th Amendment establishing Prohibition, was widely ignored in Northern California.

"San Francisco always was in favor of, shall we say, 'pleasant living,' " Chandler said.
The San Francisco way

In fact, toward the end of Prohibition, The Chronicle estimated that 6,000 speakeasies sold beer and liquor illegally in San Francisco. Enforcement of the liquor laws was so lax in the city that Shanty Malone's bistro on Turk Street occasionally staged phony police raids to keep the customers amused.

San Francisco's position on Prohibition became apparent when the city landed the 1920 Democratic national convention.

Prohibition had just been enacted, but Mayor James Rolph dispatched a corps of society ladies, dressed in white, to present each delegate to the convention with a bottle of fine Bourbon whiskey, compliments of the city and county.

Though Prohibition and crime were closely linked, San Francisco police claimed they kept eastern gangsters out of the city. In his book, "Dangerous Strangers," former Deputy Police Chief Kevin Mullen quoted Prohibition-era Police Chief William Quinn as saying eastern gangsters "would be met at railroad and ferry stations and turned back ... or if they slip by the cordon of watching policemen, they will be slapped in jail."

The San Francisco police, apparently, favored what The Chronicle called "honest, hardworking bootleggers."

In 1932, however, a local bootleg gangster named Luigi Malvese was shot and killed in broad daylight on Columbus Avenue in North Beach. Police action was swift. "They set out in the words immortalized by Claude Rains in the movie 'Casablanca' to 'round up the usual suspects,' " Mullen wrote.

The cops filled six patrol wagons with "gangsters, crooks, known and suspected, and undesirables." Then, Mullen wrote, they came back again and rounded up 1,000 "known hoodlums and drug addicts." The raids were led by police Capt. Arthur Layne, the grandfather of California Attorney General Jerry Brown.

Some San Francisco saloons survived Prohibition by turning into soft-drink parlors, serving the stronger stuff in the back room. Among them were the Elixir at 16th and Guerrero, which dates to 1858, and the Little Shamrock on Lincoln Way near Ninth Avenue, which opened in 1893.

Although San Francisco led the region in consumption of illegal alcohol, the rest of the Bay Area was the center of vast liquor smuggling networks, mostly by sea.

The Marin, Sonoma and San Mateo coasts had plenty of secluded beaches and quiet ocean coves where smugglers, operating fast boats called rum runners, ferried liquor from large vessels that brought liquor from Canada and lurked in the ocean just outside the 12-mile limit of U.S. jurisdiction.

On the San Mateo coast, fishing boats and small vessels landed booze in gunny sacks in places such as Princeton, Half Moon Bay and El Granada by the dark of night, and it was transported by fast trucks into the cities.

Sausalito was so famous for its illegal activities that Baby Face Nelson, the noted gangster, hid out there for awhile in the 1920s. He must have felt right at home.

"Much of the rum running and bootlegging action on the West Coast was centered in Sausalito," wrote the late Phil Frank, one of the founders of the Sausalito Historical Society.
Sausalito and bootlegging

Frank often lectured on Sausalito's role in the liquor trade. He said the town was ideally situated for bootlegging: It is just inside the Golden Gate; the Marin and Sonoma coasts have a number of secluded ocean coves; and all commerce between San Francisco and the North Bay came through Sausalito by ferryboat, because the Golden Gate Bridge had not been built.

Federal officials, he wrote, were "highly suspicious of the little town across the bay." They thought the Sausalito cops were in cahoots with the bootleggers, and that the bootleggers were tipped off by ferry crews when Prohibition agents on a raid came aboard a northbound ferry.

Sausalito's boat yards built many of the fast launches that bootleggers used to outrun the Coast Guard, and many of the rum running boats anchored in Richardson Bay between operations. Business was so good that repeal brought an economic downturn to the town.

Sausalito was not the only place that scoffed at the law in Marin. Richard Torney, an expert on Marin lore, likes to recount a tale about a San Francisco man who stepped off a train in Fairfax. "Where can you get a drink around here?" he asked. "Anywhere except at the post office," he was told.

Even now, said Chandler, the historian, half the older restaurants and bars near the coast advertise themselves as old speakeasies or road houses with shady reputations. "The legends get better as time goes on," he said.
Repeal parties today

Speakeasy Ales and Lagers, a San Francisco Prohibition-theme establishment, will have a "dissipation, relaxation and celebration" starting at 4 p.m. at 1195 Evans Ave. at Keith Street.

Elixir will serve Prohibition-era cocktails starting at 9 p.m. Founded in 1858 and one of the oldest bars in San Francisco, the Elixir is asking for a $10 donation to the Boys and Girls Club at the door. Inside, drink prices will be rolled back to 1933 levels - 25 cents a drink. 3200 16th St. at Guerrero Street.

The 21st Amendment is sponsoring a parade led by a band at 3:30 p.m. from the Ferry Building up Market and down Second streets to its bar near AT&T Park.



Source: sfgate.com