Everybody's Doin' It by Dale Cockrell

Author:Dale Cockrell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2019-06-02T16:00:00+00:00

Israels’s study showed that saloon dance halls functioned differently during the time that Annie began going to them than they had only a few years earlier. For, by her figures, about half of all saloon dance halls in New York had become “hotels.” More precisely, they had become “Raines Law hotels.”11

The so-called Raines Law is the poster child for the Theory of Unintended Consequences. The brainstorm of State Senator John Raines, the 1896 law confirmed a view held by a majority of senators that the sale of alcohol on Sundays in New York City should continue to be prohibited. From the perspective of these senators, it was perfectly acceptable to deny the working classes their Sunday glass of beer at the local saloon, but what about middle-class businessmen and travelers staying in hotels? Should they not be allowed a glass with their hotel meals? Accordingly, the Raines Law banned the sale of alcohol throughout the city on Sundays except for hotels, which were defined in the law as establishments with ten or more lodging rooms. These and only these were allowed to serve alcoholic drink on Sunday and only then with a meal.

Saloon proprietors quickly exploited the definition of a food-serving hotel. They installed thin walls (or even hung sheets) in unused parts of their buildings and thus made up ten “rooms,” into which they piled pallets or cots. They then laid fresh plans to serve food in their newly designated hotel, which often consisted only of “brick sandwiches” (so dry, moldy, and desiccated that they were clearly props). With these strokes the letter of the law was satisfied. Erstwhile saloons had only now to apply for licenses as “Raines Law hotels” and drink would be back on the Sunday menu. Very shortly after the law’s passage, New York City could boast of having ten thousand more hotel rooms than before. Of the 1,407 legal hotels in 1905 Manhattan and the Bronx, about 1,150 were Raines Law hotels.12

Lodging, of course, was secondary to the Raines Law hotels, but there were now so-called rooms with beds where there had been none before. Prostitutes, who had heretofore used saloons as places of solicitation with the contract consummated elsewhere, suddenly had on-site accommodation, the hourly or daily rate for which would be paid by the client. Unmarried couples no longer had to seek out assignation rooms, since rooms for rent were easily at hand in any Raines Law hotel. Furthermore, the business side of prostitution changed dramatically. Brothels no longer afforded prostitutes any special advantage, which pushed that institution’s market share of the commercialized sex industry into steep decline. And the lines of division between solicitation in saloons, concert saloons, or restaurants became fuzzy, as a contract made in one such place could be easily fulfilled at a convenient Raines Law hotel. By the turn into the twentieth century, the Raines Law hotel had become the primary locus of prostitution in the city.13

Prostitutes benefited economically in manifold ways under the new law. Raines

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