I’ve been going to Chicago bars and restaurants since I was a kid. Some of them still brag about having been speakeasies during the Prohibition era.
The National Prohibition Act, also known as the Volstead Act, prohibited the manufacturing, selling, and transporting of all alcoholic beverages, and was ratified as the 18th Amendment on January 19, 1919. It was not a great success, and we can still learn something about what happens when a government bans something that people want because they’ll go around the law to get it.
Over a century later, we can look back and see that the manufacture, sales, and transport of alcoholic beverages simply went underground and continued illegally until the amendment was repealed on December 5, 1933. During that 14-year period, fortunes were made, many were arrested or lost their lives, and organized crime flourished.
When Prohibition ended, all those places that sprang up to secretly serve alcohol could suddenly open their doors to the public. Some of those places, like the Green Room (a great place to hear jazz) were well-known mob hangouts – Al Capone is known to have kept a table with a good view out the front windows so he could escape if the prohibition police showed up. Some places disappeared, but there are dozens, like Butch Maguire’s and The Exchequer, that are still in business a century later.
In my third culinary mystery, it’s 2020 and the pandemic is raging, so there are no customers coming into the Whipped and Sipped café. Alene hires a former employee to fix wobbly furniture, sand splintered parts of the floor, and repaint whatever needs repainting. He surprises her by finding a doorway that had been drywalled over. They opened it up to find that it once led down to what had clearly been a basement speakeasy.
The idea for using a hidden basement cropped up when we were invited for dinner at a friend’s apartment just a few blocks away from where we live in Chicago. Her building had gone up in the early 1920s and she pointed out where the old speakeasy had been converted into parking on the first floor. She told us about another nearby building that still had a secret passage from the basement out to the alley.
We started asking friends and neighbors and heard more stories about hidden bars where Chicagoans partied through the 1920s. We learned about great-grandparents who played in a speakeasy band, grandfathers who bussed tables but worried about being caught, and grandmothers who waited tables. That’s when I decided to include an old speakeasy in the book I’d started writing. Charred: A Whipped and Sipped Mystery is going to be published February 21, 2023.
I don’t want to ruin the mystery by saying anything else about the basement under the Whipped and Sipped café, but speaking of illegal activities here in Chicago, I learned as an adult that my grandfather had worked as a bookie (making illegal bets) during those heady prohibition years. There were a few incidents, but that’s a story for another time. (G.P. Gottlieb 2023)
© G.P. Gottlieb
G.P. Gottlieb is the author of Charred: A Whipped and Sipped Mystery (D.X. Varos 2/21/23) third in her culinary mystery series. She is host for New Books in Literature, a podcast channel on the New Books Network, and has interviewed over 170 authors. You can read more about her at gpgottlieb.com.
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