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| Chumley's, '21', the
300 Club, and Thousands of Other Illegal Bars |
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NOTHING BROUGHT HIGH AND LOW New York society together like
the Eighteenth Amendment, a.k.a. Prohibition. Chumley’s, at
86 Bedford Street (where F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eugene O’Neill,
and William Faulkner got tanked), and ‘21’ (the former
Jack and Charlie’s Puncheon Club, Dorothy Parker’s favorite)
were famous, but there were upwards of 100,000 illegal bars in the
city between 1920 and 1933. It was a surreptitious underworld filled
with secret knocks, miscegenational music, unbridled corruption, and
“Runyonesque” characters like Texas Guinan, sometime Broadway
showgirl turned hostess-owner of the 300 Club (151 West 54th), the
Salon Royale (310 West 58th), and the Club Intime (203 West 54th).
Texas’s basso profundo yowling “Welcome, suckers—come
in and leave your wallet on the bar” let Jazz Age skulkers know
they had reached the right place. As Fitzgerald later wistfully noted
of the time, “The parties were bigger, the pace was faster,
the morals were looser.”
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