and North Streets.  South to Little River, still on the East Side, was Sheldon Street with quite an impressive number of saloons. However, as opposed to the Front Street area, where saloon business was a key kind of immigrant entrepreneurship throughout the period, Windsor Street and Sheldon Street saloons started to open in the late 1870s and flourished only starting in the 1890s. From the 1890s until the end of the saloon era Windsor Street had around 9-12 and Sheldon between 7-11 saloons. These streets only became part of the East Side wards with the 1895 restructuring.

Outside of the East Side there were three other key locations of public drinking: Spruce Street, Park Street and Albany Avenue. There were between 3-7 saloons on Spruce Street from the 1870s until the turn of the century, between 5-9 on Park Street after the 1890s until the end of the saloon era, and about the same number on Albany Avenue from the 1880s until the end of the period.

There is one important difference between the public drinking establishments of the Front Street neighborhood and those of the above listed streets, namely that except for Spruce Street these streets were the locations of Hartford breweries. The growth of the alcohol trade on these streets coincides with the opening of the breweries during the 1880s and 1890s. While the overall number of Hartford saloons started to decrease around 1895, these streets continued to be the locations of many new businesses in the 1890s and even after. The trend toward breweries gaining control over alcohol retail by directly opening subsidiaries or forcing saloons into dependent positions was not unknown in Boston and was very common in Chicago (Duis 29-40). A 1901 profile of Hartford saloonkeepers and saloon proprietors shows that a few of these saloons were in fact brewer owned establishments (McCook, Poor Law administration). It is impossible to know whether the great majority that was not owned by the breweries were dependent or independent businesses. For instance the Windsor Street saloon area was the core of the Eastern European Jewish community, and most probably, most of these saloons were genuine neighborhood establishments. Still, it is important to note that throughout the period there was a single brewery in the Front Street neighborhood: this was located on State Street and closed down as early as the late 1870s. This circumstance suggests that in the Front Street area the demand for saloons was a factor independent from that of the location of the brewers. In other words, it seems that in the Front Street area the public drinking establishments were standard neighborhood necessities.

The third factor that indicates the neighborhood character of the saloons of the Front Street area has to do with the unique stability of demand for such public drinking establishments. Including State Street, the Front Street neighborhood had between 38-65 saloons throughout the period. Already in 1870, when the city’s total number of saloons was only 97, the Front Street area had 51 saloons registered. Between 1875-1900 the area had 54-65 saloons. At the same time, the number of saloons in the city climbed up to its peak of 176 in 1896. Thus, while the number of saloons in the Front Street area remained stable and high, between 50-60, a great number of new saloons opened citywide. This phenomenon clearly suggests that at least until the late 1890s saloons were a Front Street neighborhood necessity: the demand for them was largely independent of the structural changes that brought into existence many of Hartford’s other public drinking places. After 1900 the Front Street neighborhood followed the same trend as the rest of Hartford: the number of saloons gradually went down to 40 and 137 respectively.

This stability in the number of saloons in the Front Street area is especially remarkable if one considers the instability of the individual businesses in the earlier period. Until the late 1890s the majority of the saloons stayed in business for less than five years. Later, in the late 1890s, however, this trend changed greatly, suggesting that saloons were becoming steadily more stable, business-like operations. By 1909 90% of them had been in business for four years and about two-thirds of them for more than thirteen years.

Another indication of this transformation is the saloonkeepers’ commitment to the neighborhood. The directories of 1870-71 showed every saloonkeeper who ran their businesses on Front Street to have resided on the same address where their saloons were located. From the late 1870s, however, the directories testify to a slow but gradual increase in the number of saloonkeepers who chose to live at a different address nearby. A few of them even moved out of the neighborhood. The real change came again with the 1890s. By 1900 a little more than 50% lived elsewhere than Front Street and somewhat less than one-third outside of the East Side. By 1918 those who lived right next to the saloons they managed were the exceptions, although still about the half of them were East Side residents. These findings again indicate that saloons in the Front Street area were neighborhood institutions, gradually assuming such key business characteristics as spatially fixed location and professional management.

Without a doubt, the Front Street area was the most prominent location of public drinking in Hartford. As the evidence suggests the saloon life in the East Side that concentrated around Front Street and to lesser degrees around Windsor and Sheldon Streets was a result of the particular social needs of the neighborhood’s residents. The same was not necessarily true of the other Hartford drinking areas. Some of them were simply alcohol outlets maintained by the breweries. The downtown saloons were even farther from what one might call a neighborhood institution: they came into existence with the birth of a distinct financial district in the 1890s as a result of the structural changes that took place in Hartford. At the same time, the demand for saloons in the Front Street area was an earlier and until the late 1890s a more stable phenomenon than anywhere else in the city. Due to factors of segregation and special neighborhood demands the East Side maintained its own separate city center around Front, Market, State, Temple and Talcott Streets extending to the smaller side streets nearby. The saloons, these key neighborhood institutions, concentrated right here, in the heart of the neighborhood giving a very special character to downtown East Side.

5. Over-crowding and Living Conditions

“Hardly more then a long stones throw from one principal thoroughfare the alert eye can see sights not surpassed and not often equaled by what takes place in darkest New York” (McCook, Duty of a Hartford Citizen 13). The East Side was notorious for its terrible housing conditions and its tightly packed tenements. Carrying out a nationwide study on the tenement house problem Lawrence Veiller toured the Hartford tenement districts in May of 1900 (Hartford Courant, “Tenement Houses”). The De Forest and Veiller report concluded that, “Hartford with a population of only 79,850, has for its size the worst housing conditions in the country. Not only are there old, dilapidated wooden and brick buildings, which formerly were private residences, now occupied by several families, but […] lately there have been erected a number of flats and tenement houses on the same plan as the New York “double-decker, dumb-bell” tenement, with small air-shafts (155-56).” As the report also highlighted Hartford at the turn of the century had no specific laws regulating housing, which helps explains why these infamous structures were built in the city.

The New York ”double-decker” type with airshafts was, however, not the norm in Hartford. Still, the Sanborn maps reveal a number of constructions in the East Side that clearly resembled New York double-deckers (1885; 1900; 1917). A New York double-decker was usually five or six stories high, 25 feet wide and 90 feet long. In its center run the hallway, almost completely dark, 3 feet wide 60 feet long. Each floor usually had four apartments: the front apartments with four, the rear apartments with three rooms. Out of these fourteen rooms on each floor usually only four received direct light: two from the street and two from the rear yard. On each side of the building run the airshaft, 28 inches deep, to provide light and air to the five completely dark rooms on each side of the house (De Forest and Veiller 8-9). The Hartford variant of the double-decker differed almost only in that they were typically only three or four stores high.

The De Forest and Veiller report also compiled interesting interviews with tenants about their views of the tenement conditions. Clearly, the failure of the airshafts to provide light and air was the most often underlined problem (386). “What I remember the most was the darkness that permeated the whole building, the groping up the stairs and through the hallways to the rooms that were not much brighter” (394). In addition, the airshafts were also responsible for taking what little privacy a family could hope for in the crowded tenement districts as they amplified the sounds and the smells of all the neighbors. “In the ordinary flats there is no privacy at all […] for everything can be heard unless you are as quiet as a deaf and dumb person” (393).

In Hartford’s tenement districts over-crowding was the greatest problem. On the occasion of the regular monthly meeting of the Charity Organization Society in 1896 president Atwood Collins reported having visited a tenement where in two rooms three families resided (Hartford Courant, “Tenement House Problem”). The census figures confirm Mr. Collins’s report. Already in 1880 Hartford with its 7.32 persons per dwelling was among the most crowded cities of the United States (Tenth Census 672). This ratio became even higher by 1890 when in average 8.12 persons lived in every Hartford dwelling (Eleventh Census, part 1: 932). Just for comparison the same ratio in Bridgeport was significantly lower: 6.37. In 1900 ward 1 had an average of 11 and ward 2 an average of 12.3 persons living in one dwelling; meanwhile the Hartford ratio was 8.2 persons per dwellings, which was one of the highest in the nation (Twelfth Census, part 2: 641). By 1910 the crowdedness of the East Side wards became even worse: 13.7 persons per dwellings in ward 1 and 14.8 in ward 2. Although in other wards crowding was also a major problem, their averages came nothing close to those of the East Side. And Hartford, with its average of 8.6 persons per dwellings, continued to be one of the most crowded cities in the United States (Thirteenth Census, vol. 2: 263).

To complete this picture one must examine the widespread institution of lodgers on the East Side. While in 1900 ward 1 had an average of 11 and ward 2 had an average of 12.3 persons per dwellings the respective average family size was significantly lower: 4.2 and 4.73. This huge discrepancy can be explained by the fact that many families in the neighborhood took one, two, occasionally even three lodgers into their homes to share the costs of living. An example is the home of the bootblack Vincent Brindisi at 84 Front Street, living above Hurter Rudolph’s saloon. The Brindisis had been in Italy and had five children – three daughters and two sons – of whom two were also born in Italy, and the three others in Nova Scotia. The seven of them lived together with two single male lodgers, one from Ireland and one from Sweden. Fortunately they all could speak English. The Russian origin Jewish family of tailor Morris Silverman lived at 249 Front Street. Morris and his wife Sarah – both born in Russia – had four daughters all born in Connecticut. They lived with two single male boarders, one from Russia and the other from Romania. Except for Sarah everyone in the household could speak English. Whether Sarah and the Romanian boarder Walter could communicate with each other is hard to tell (Manuscript Population Schedules 1900).

Besides over-crowding, the East Side was also notorious for its filthy and unsanitary conditions. The Hartford Courant dedicated a number of articles to these problems based on the findings of the Board of Health and the Charity Organization Society. Keeping chickens in garrets of houses and in the coops was a common practice on Front Street. Fresh meat was often exposed in the windows and hides were generally thrown in the gangways (“To Clean Up the Filth on the East Side,” 1906). A 1906 tenement blocks inspection found a number of three and four floor buildings – the fourth floor was often only an attic turned into residential use – in the Front Street area with absolutely no second stairs and fire escapes. Dark, dangerous halls and broken stairs were the norm. North Street had no waste collection by the city, forcing the residents to use their yards for such purposes. Yards loaded with ashes and rubbish were common on Morgan, Potter and Mechanic Streets (“Calls Tenements Loathesomely Dirty,” 1907). The widespread erection of rear buildings turned the yards into narrow passageways, and left the rooms dark, gloomy and poorly ventilated. The circumstance that many of the landlords did not live on the premises also greatly contributed to the devastation of the properties (“Bad Housing Conditions Found,” 1911). 

                                                                                      “Laundry”.

Rear yards in the East Side were kept in extremely dirty and unsanitary

conditions, 1912. (Connecticut Women Suffrage Association)

Although the East Side was not the only area where housing was of low quality, the circumstance that the city’s severest housing problems were in such proximity to the downtown exposed middle class residents to the East Side’s realities. By the turn of the century the Hartford public became increasingly concerned with the over-crowding and especially the dirty and unsanitary conditions characteristic of the East Side. For instance, Mr. Veiller’s visit to Hartford coincided with a two week long exhibition organized by the Civic Club and the Charity Organization Society that featured 600 photographs from the US and Europe intending to show how the “other half lived” (Hartford Courant, “Tenement Houses,” 1900).  These organizations campaigned for clean homes and clean streets believing that cleanliness and morality were intertwined values and thus the way to turn the East Side immigrants into good Americans (Baldwin 47-62). Their reforming activities, however, hardly touched the tenants. While middle class reformers praised the sanctity of the home, cleanliness, and temperance, they overlooked the fact that the East Side slums were not the result of cultural but of economic circumstances: they were the spillover affects of the American model of laissez faire industrial capitalism based on a cheap immigrant labor force.

            When one considers that middle-class reformers aimed to attack what they considered social evils – including saloon patronizing – by praising Protestant values of domesticity to people living in the circumstances described above, it is no surprise that they accomplished little. How could anyone call a home a gloomy, smelly dwelling with as many as 11 persons, among them 3-4 strangers, living in it? No doubt, such poor housing conditions were major factors behind the East Side’s high demand for saloons. “In many a tenement-house block” in New York, reported Jacob Riis “the saloon is the one bright and cheery and humanly decent spot to be found […] within its doors only is refuge, relief” (198). Or as Raymond Calkins put it: “The saloon is the center of the social life of hundreds of thousands of the dwellers in our cities. If the question is asked, Where do the other thousands who are not patrons of the saloons find their social recreation? The answer is easy. They have comfortable homes.” (45). On the one hand, it is as simple as that. The poor working-class residents of Hartford’s East Side had no comfortable homes to withdraw to. Their out-migration patterns from the East Side show that once they had a chance they were happy to move. Just like any Yankee family, the poor immigrants would have enjoyed living in comfortable homes to raise their families. Most of them, however, could not move or could move only after a long period of time.

As the articles and statistical sources show, the East Side was by far the poorest and most crowded neighborhood in the city. And clearly, poverty and crowded living conditions were above all the circumstances of working-class status. In this sense class status was among the most important factors in explaining why the East Side could nurture so many saloons in comparison to other neighborhoods of the city. For the poor working-class immigrant the saloons meant the only possible and affordable refuge from the devastating and depressing reality of their homes. As shown, the sources indicate hardly any improvement over time in the living and sanitary conditions of the neighborhood, which circumstance suggests that the city made little effort to improve the quality of life of the East Side dwellers. At the same time the statistical evidence shows that over-crowding in the neighborhood continuously worsened. Thus it is no surprise that throughout the period observed in this study saloon-patronizing and public drinking remained one of the most popular forms of social recreation for the working-class.

6. Ethnicity in the Saloon Business

The working-class character of the neighborhood was only one of the most important reasons for the high number of saloons in the East Side. The cultural factors are just as important to explaining the high demand for alcohol and the desire for saloons of the East Side residents. Calkins seemed to have recognized this element as well: “The foreign quarters of any large city contain numbers of small drinking-places where the men come to smoke and talk” (20).

The immigrants brought over the Atlantic many of their institutions and customs. Among them immigrant churches were widely recognized ethnic institutions. Immigrants also joined trade unions and were members of various ethnic clubs. Still, workingmen’s leisure was mostly concentrated in the saloon life as social drinking was a traditional custom that most immigrant groups brought overseas. Among Hartford’s immigrants the Irish, the Germans, the English, the Scandinavians, the French Canadians, the Italians and to a much lesser degree the Eastern European Jews all came from societies in which alcohol and especially congenial social drinking were traditions of great importance.

There are many evidences that indicate the ethnic nature of the East Side saloons. First of all, like all business enterprises, saloons responded to consumer demands. As already shown, the neighborhood’s demand for saloons was strong: in 1879, for example, there was one saloon for every 142 residents in the East Side wards. If one considers that saloons were only male territory, this ratio is even more impressive. In reality, this is almost nothing in compared to New York’s Irish 6^th ward, where in 1864 there was one saloon for every six people (Dolan 32). Still, in Hartford the East Side had by far the greatest density of public drinking establishments. Throughout the period the East Side was an overcrowded neighborhood, home of poor working-class first and second-generation immigrants of continuously shifting ethnic composition. Besides escaping from their terrible housing conditions, these immigrants also brought their traditional demand for places of congenial social drinking.

One precise way of estimating the role ethnicity played in these drinking establishments is to look at the ethnicity of the Hartford saloonkeepers and bartenders. In 1880 Hartford employed 55 American born, 43 Irish born and 32 German born saloonkeepers among whom many of the American born were probably of Irish ancestry. The presence of Germans in the saloon business was very high, as in 1880 the Irish were 4-5 times more numerous in the labor force than the Germans. In 1880, out of the city’s 18 brewers, 14 were Germans, suggesting that Germans brought overseas their traditional appreciation for lager beer (Tenth Census 928). In 1890, of the 130 persons categorized as restaurant or saloonkeepers, 80 were foreign born, 30 were second-generation immigrants and only 19 were American born with native parents. Among the bartenders there were 27 native born of native parentage, 56 native born of foreign parentage and 42 foreign born (Eleventh Census, part 2: 672). In 1901, as McCook’s research reveals, Hartford had only 30 American saloonkeepers – he classified all second-generation immigrants according to their parents’ ethnicity –, as opposed to 80 Irish and 48 Germans. The other ethnicities were almost invisible: 4 English, 3 French, 4 German Jews, 2 Scottish, 2 Scandinavians, 2 Italians and 1 Pole (Poor Law Administration). Finally, in 1910 65% of the saloonkeepers in Connecticut were foreign born and 28% were natives of foreign parentage.  The same percentages for the bartenders were 47 and 37 respectively. This suggests that by the early 1910s Italians and the Eastern European Jews were also getting involved in the saloon business (Thirteenth Census 444). This is confirmed by the Front Street sample for 1914: the names reveal about one-fifth of the street’s saloonkeepers to be Italians and another one-fifth to be Eastern European Jews (Geer’s 1914: 1282-83).

To conclude, next to class status ethnic heritage was the other most important reason that explains why there were so many saloons in the Front Street area. The former became an increasingly important factor as the neighborhood became more and more crowded and the housing conditions worsened. The latter factor, on the other hand, showed the opposite tendencies. Saloons were the most deeply rooted institutions among the Irish and the Germans. By the late 1890s as the new immigrants arrived, the Irish and the Germans were already starting to abandon the neighborhood; still, German and Irish saloonkeepers remained in business. Some of them opened new saloons; many of them continued to live in the neighborhood. A few Italian and Eastern European Jews also became involved in the saloon business. At the same time, the saloons were gradually assuming more business-like characters. Overall, from around the turn of the century, East Side residents patronized saloons that were ethnically less engrained in the neighborhood than a couple decades earlier. The saloonkeepers who ran these businesses were rarely from the same ethnicity and often lived in different neighborhoods from their patrons.

III

The East Side Saloon-Culture

1. Introduction

The saloons of Hartford’s East Side hosted a peculiar and exciting culture characteristic for the working-class immigrant quarters of the late 19^th, early 20^th century urban America. This chapter attempts to take a journey into the East Side poor man’s club and recreate the complex reality of these places.

Above all, the study recognizes the saloons as central institutions of social interaction and leisure. By nurturing a milieu of congenial socializing the East Side saloons promoted a sense of class and ethnic based solidarity for which reason they became key establishments of community building in the neighborhood. On the other hand, some of the saloons were tied to certain forms of organized crime, such as prostitution, gambling and gang activities. More importantly, they often enhanced intemperate drinking. Numerous examples show how some individuals and families fell victims to immoderate drinking.

This study intends to give a fair account to both sides of the coins and elaborate as many aspects of the saloons as the sources allow. The chapter is therefore divided into two subchapters. The first one reconstructs the underworld aspects of the East Side saloons, while the second attempts to explore the ways in which saloons were central institutions of community building and leisure for the residents of the neighborhood.

The purpose of this division is by no means to bifurcate the complex reality of the saloons, but rather to balance the disproportions in the sources that would tend to reveal an overwhelmingly negative picture of the East Side saloons. This is because most of the sources were produced by the city’s WASP establishment, for whom the East Side was anything but attractive. Hartford’s Yankee dominated public overall viewed the neighborhood as an underworld threatening the city with social disorder. Reformers who engaged in fighting alcoholism and what they considered as its related evils – tramping, pauperism, the destruction of families, venal voting, street violence, gangs and crime – along with widespread prostitution and gambling, pointed to the saloons as the primary causes of Hartford’s social evils. Above all John James McCook dedicated a great deal of his energies to studying the effects of alcohol and raise public consciousness against intemperate drinking. His papers are among the most valuable sources reflecting the WASP attitude towards Hartford’s saloon-culture.

On the contrary, the East Side residents were not what one may call the ‘literate half’, which circumstance renders their perspective on the saloons a great deal less documented. A fair study therefore must make up for the imbalance in the sources by presenting the WASP accounts critically, while filling in the gaps with analogies from secondary sources. Above all the works of Rosenzweig, Duis and Powers were helpful in this regard.

Even so, this chapter cannot claim to have achieved a complete description of the everyday culture of the East Side saloons. The lack of qualitative sources from the poor immigrants’ side is a more limiting factor than what any analogy or creativity could make up for. Nevertheless, if this chapter gives a good sense of what really was going on in the poor man’s club in Hartford’s East Side, it will have achieved its objective.

2. The East Side Underworld

A, Drunkenness and its Related Social “Evils”

In the US during the period observed intemperance and particularly the saloons were most commonly blamed for being the sources of the great majority of urban social evils. For the American middle and upper classes saloons stood harshly at odds with traditional American morals and were understood as the symbols of a counterculture causing many kind of social disorder: skid row lifestyles, political bosses organizing along ethnic and working-class lines, and most importantly, the destruction of the sanctity of the home and the family. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union took the lead in fighting these evil forces and championing the cause of a sober republic by advocating total abstinence and prohibition (Lender and Martin 103-7, 114-17).

With respect to its social problems Hartford very much resembled the rest of the country and particularly the Northeastern urban centers. Just like everywhere else, the city’s middle and upper classes were greatly concerned with the social threats that they believed the immigrant neighborhood posed for the rest of the city. They tended to blame drunkenness and the saloons for all of Hartford’s social problems. George Leon Walker minister of the First Church of Christ on Main Street in an 1891 sermon asked the rhetoric question whether why the city needed 259 licensed outlets for the sale of liquor (Walsh 3).

The earlier quantitative analysis showed that the East Side was unique for its disproportionately high number of saloons. Here some other accounts complement that analysis by showing that public drunkenness was most pervasive in the immigrant neighborhood. Social reformer John James McCook engaged in fighting alcoholism and what he considered its related social evils. For him drunkenness and the East Side were identical: “In one spot these saloons reach hands to one another.” So “how long can you be in the neighborhood on the corner of Front and State without seeing at least one drunkard? I have counted a dozen within a few minutes staggering along from saloon to saloon […] I have followed these wretched people on their pilgrimage in and out from one to another” (Duty of a Hartford Citizen 14).

Reverend Graham Taylor, the pastor from 1880 till 1892 of the Fourth Congregational Church located on Main Street, took the Social Gospel initiative to seek out the poor in the adjacent slums by aggressive evangelization and direct social work. He realized that very few rescue agencies were targeting to help the poor men who were inflicted with intemperance. Thus, under his leadership Fourth Church’s specialty in benevolence became the rescue work with alcoholics from the neighboring slums, particularly from the East Side. For instance in 1887 Taylor provided a room at Fourth Church for the Yoke Fellows Band which organization primarily targeted to help the intemperate men to regenerate and come into full membership with the church (Walsh 139-61)

Public drunkenness was not only socially unacceptable but also illegal in Hartford and thus resulted in arrests and often court trials. According to the Geer’s directories roughly 60-65% off all the city’s police arrests were made for drunkenness, which means that the number of offenders arrested for public drinking was about 2,000-3,400 a year between 1879-1905.[6] In 1896, for instance, the Hartford police made 5,273 arrests, of which 3,355 were made on the charge of drunkenness (Geer’s 642). Unfortunately, the locations were not specified cumulatively. “The Police Court” column of the Hartford Courant, however, clearly shows, sometimes in an anecdotal manner, that the great majority of the arrests for drunkenness were made in the East Side.

 For example in September 1893, Fred Brink of 28 Village Street was tried on the charges of drunkenness and breach of the peace. The night before his trial, under-aged Brink, in a state of drunkenness, met officer Keegan, the largest man in the force, on Pleasant Street and called him names. Keegan struck him on the forehead, cutting Brink’s scalp so that blood run profusely. Brink was fined $5 (“Yesterday’s Police Court,” 1893).  Alex Sawiskey was arrested in a saloon at 16 Sheldon Street and fined $7 for drunkenness and for having willfully broken a window in front of the saloon (“Yesterday’s Police Court,” 1916). A very picturesque story is Ella Burn’s case, who was arrested in front of the saloon at 1029 Main Street in the state of drunkenness, spreading her “Mary Garden” face powder over the sidewalk and on pedestrians. “Arraignments of the woman in court in the past have showed she had a weakness for face powder, as well as for liquor” (“Threw Her Face Powder on the Street”). Finally, Carlo Brauchero went before the police court for discharging a revolver on Tuesday night at DeBona’s saloon at 69 Pleasant Street with the intention of killing Joseph Mondano. Brauchero was fined $500 ( “Police Court Cases,” 1905).

Hartford’s middle and upper classes were especially concerned about the destruction alcohol caused in working-class families. Many stories described how drunkenness and family tragedies were connected. John Peterson, for instance, sold all the furniture from the house where he lived at 463 Front Street and left the city abandoning his three small children in July 1911. He did not return to the city until November, when he was arrested in a state of drunkenness. The children were found in a condition of horrible malnourishment. Peterson was given a one-year prison sentence on the charge of neglecting his children (“Peterson Gets the Sentence that He Well Deserves”).

More commonly, the amount of alcohol intemperate men consumed was said to contribute to ruining the family budget. A man who had taken the pledge of abstinence in the early 1890s and had been sober for 19 months at that time recalled that he had averaged two to four quarts of gin a day and took one quart to bed which must had meant about $800 of spending a year on his cups (McCook, Possibilities of Social Amelioration, Appendix 2). This is especially noteworthy if one adds that in 1892, according to the calculations of Marcus T. Reynolds, the average working-class family had a budget of $803.47 earnings and $754.42 expenditures (23-24). Although excessive alcohol consumption was more often documented in relation to ‘vagabonds’ than to heads of working-class families, there is no doubt that such examples of costly drinking habits were important factors behind the poverty in Hartford.

Above all John James McCook attempted to establish a quantitative correlation between drinking and poverty in Hartford. He compiled an impressive amount of data and developed tables of numerous kinds. For this reason, his work is an exceptionally useful source for navigating through the social problems of Hartford in this period. Many of McCook’s statistics, however, lack scientific precision and overestimate the city’s and the state’s problems. Even more importantly, his perception reflects an overall WASP suspicion and prejudice towards the poor working-class immigrants. Like most of the city’s Yankees, McCook saw only the negative side of drinking. He tended to explain almost all of the city’s social problems by this single factor and to ignore the structural circumstances that were responsible for the poverty in Hartford and throughout the nation. Thus, one should read the following account of McCook’s findings with critical caution. Meanwhile, it is important to bear in mind that McCook’s perception of the saloons was a commonly shared one by the city’s dominant WASP establishment.

“Drunk and Assault”

At the Hartford Police Station, April 6, 1895, 3:15AM

(Antiquarian and Landmarks Society)

McCook’s career as a social reformer began in 1890 when he learned that Hartford proposed a budget of $40,000 for outdoor relief for the next year, while New Haven, a city with a population 30,000 larger than Hartford, appropriated only $15,000 for the same purpose (Courtwright and Shielby, 34). McCook was convinced that to help the poor one should not make them comfortable in their condition, but rather drive them out of poverty by their own hard work. From this perspective, he differentiated between the worthy and the unworthy poor and was supportive of assisting only the former. Clearly, for McCook, drunkards did not belong in the first category.

The 1891 Report of the Special Committee on Outdoor Alms of the Town of Hartford led by McCook was a strong argument against the continuation of Hartford’s costly social relief programs. He found that in 1885 Hartford’s per capita expenditure on all poor-relief was $2.07 as opposed to the average of $1.22 spent by twelve other Connecticut cities. In addition, by 1890 the city aided 6.2% of its residents. McCook argued that more than half of those supported simply took advantage of the generosity and blindness of Hartford’s citizens without really being worthy of any benefit (14). For instance he found a notorious character, a prostitute who was also a confirmed drunkard, living partially on public aid (13). McCook was especially shocked to learn that in the city’s almshouse almost everybody had been committed to jail, workhouse or prison by the police courts – most often for drunkenness – and that only four men out of 149 and five out of the 80 women were temperate (44).  He found that a large proportion of the city’s intemperate drifted in and out of the doors of the almshouse (47). McCook concluded: “The question of alms house here in Hartford is largely the question of drink” (54).

Later, in 1894, McCook conducted a statewide survey of the selectmen of every Connecticut town. Taking the averages of 88 towns from which McCook received responses he concluded that 71% of all pauperism in Connecticut was related to drunkenness (Possibilities of Social Amelioration 5). The same questionnaire answered by Hartford’s first selectmen stated that in 1892 about 90% of the 2,323 persons aided by the city owed their want, directly or indirectly to drink (Drink and Pauperism). Although these surveys clearly lacked scientific accuracy, they further demonstrated that drinking in Hartford was indeed a major reason behind poverty. By 1895, in a presentation to the Twentieth Century Club, McCook concluded that drinking was responsible for almost all the city’s social evils: abused and abandoned children, homicide, vagabondage, pauperism and importantly, venal voting (Liquor Business).

From the viewpoint of Hartford’s middle and upper classes venal voting was an especially alarming social evil directly threatening the Yankee establishment and its democratic traditions. McCook defined venal voting as “the payment of money, food, entertainment, office, place, employment or any valuable consideration or the tender or promise of the same to any voter for giving or withholding his vote at, during, or after any election to public office” (Address 1). According to McCook, venal voting was extremely widespread in Connecticut, and including Hartford. He concluded that about 15.9% of all he votes in the state were purchasable. According to him the first and second generation Irish were the most likely to sell their votes (17%). He found the Germans also remarkable venal. Nevertheless, the American stock – those whose parents were born in America – was in the aggregate 10% venal, not very different from the foreign stock. Furthermore, in the aggregate Americans constituted the largest number of venal voters in the state. Even more important than ethnicity McCook believed was intemperance in the selling and buying of votes. He found that 54% of the state’s intemperate and 79% of its drunkards were venal voters (Alarming Proportion of Venal Voters 9-13).

In the same paper he added that venal voting was of course not equally distributed among the wards and that in general where conditions were the poorer, there was more intemperance and bribery. Whereas eighteen streets were found without a single case of bribery, in one street about 40% of the voters were identified as purchasable by an informant who said that he “can get about all of them on that street” (11-12). Furthermore, he added that “the doors of the Hartford Almshouse were thrown wide open early in the morning of every election day, and that the inmates returned in the evening quite uniformly intoxicated” (2). When McCook served in the election committee of one of the East Side wards, one delegate remarked about the people waiting to vote that “with all that money that they’re going to put up, there’ll be a line of them all the way to the City Hall” (Address 7-8).

If one adds to all of this that saloonkeepers were remarkable successful in Hartford’s local politics the picture is made more complete. One can imagine that besides ethnic and class loyalties a little booze and a few bucks served as quite convincing arguments for the poor to sell his vote. And no doubt this influenced local politics. Still, by no means was Hartford any different from the rest of the country in the workings of its ward politics. Lining up the city’s poor and tramps for voting in exchange of some encouragement was a common practice both in Boston and in Chicago during the period. What is more, in Chicago prior to 1886 voting booths were quite often located in the back of the saloons (Duis 130-35).

“Misfit Parlors”

Business card illustration of an Irishman –

drunkard and threat to American democracy. 

(Connecticut State Library)

Overall, as this section demonstrated, many of Hartford’s social problems were related to intemperate drinking. Most sadly, drunkenness did not only cause tragedies for individuals but sometimes for whole families. The often-depicted scene of the husband in the pub drinking away the family budget was a sad reality for a number of families. Also, venal voting was certainly a source of corruption in the democratic political process that saloons and ward-politics fostered. Drunkard paupers who claimed unfair social benefits were another reason to be concerned in the city. In the aggregate, it is no surprise that these developments greatly worried Hartford’s Yankee public. Still, when social reformers explained all of Hartford’s social evils with the single factor of drunkenness, as McCook tended to do, they simplified a great deal. Whether intemperance was cause or consequence is often very hard to judge.

This section is by no means intended to give the impression that drunkenness and what can be considered its related social evils was as pervasive in the East Side as the sources and particularly McCook suggest. Most saloon patrons were not drunkards, did not abandon their families, did not unfairly take advantage of social benefits, and were not venal voters. Instead, they were hardworking people who took some of their time to enjoy the only leisure they could afford: a cheap drink.

B, Prostitution

It is often assumed that saloons were associated with prostitution, soliciting and brothels. Much evidence suggests that some of Hartford’s saloons and especially those in the East Side were indeed involved in the commercial sex business. The city’s most comprehensive report on prostitution made in 1913 by the Hartford Vice Commission in its chapter ‘Causes of Prostitution’ went as far as to state the following: “As sources of misery to our citizens, the liquor traffic and prostitution go hand in hand. If you want to find where prostitution dwells inquire at some of the saloons. […] If you wish to see women in the role of prostitutes in their worst, go to some saloons. […] Rooms over saloons or connected with them are among the most serviceable places for purposes of prostitution” (74).

These claims, however, clearly exaggerate the extent to which prostitution was tied to the saloons. They give the false impression that saloons by rule were involved in this business. Yet even the 1913 Vice Commission report, with its vehement anti-saloon sentiment, failed to establish such a comprehensive relationship. This section will attempt to give a fair account of the relationship between the East Side saloons and prostitution. It investigates the ways in which certain saloons engaged in prostitution, while emphasizing that the overwhelming majority of them had nothing to do with this business.

“The River House

Hartford’s most famous brothel, facing the Connecticut River, c. 1900

(Connecticut State Library)

Until November 1911 vice was in general tolerated and widespread in Hartford. At that time, the sensational Patsie Fusco trial provoked such public outrage that Mayor Smith decided to open the city’s most extensive anti-vice crusade and ordered all the city’s brothels to shut down. According to George B. Thayer’s report from 1892, in Hartford there were at least four hundred prostitutes, of whom more than one hundred were streetwalkers. The town was also served by twelve brothels, all of them located in the East Side, clustering around State Street. In the 1880s and 1890s the city’s largest and best-known brothel was the so-called River House on 76 Ferry Street. The River House was also identified as a saloon by the Geer’s directories throughout the 1880s and 1890s. It was a four-story brick building with wooden balconies facing the Connecticut-river. The girls lived and worked in the upper floors, while the ground floors were used to store boats (Baldwin 66-68).

McCook’s 1901 findings provide insight into the overall conditions of prostitution in the city (Poor Law Administration). At this time, State Street alone had five brothels, all located closed to Front Street at the very heart of the East Side neighborhood. Another East Side resort was at 110 Grove Street. Among all the brothels in McCook’s list, only one was clearly connected to a saloon: Russell’s saloon located on State Street. McCook’s list also identifies five soliciting places in the city, all of them tied to saloons. Out of the five, however, only two were in the East Side: one was Russell’s saloon, already listed as a brothel, and the other was Cronin’s Saloon on 70 Front Street. Interestingly, the proprietor of Cronin’s saloon was the former Irish saloonkeeper and two terms 5^th ward alderman Thomas Monahan, one of Hartford’s classic Irish political bosses. Assuming that McCook’s list was complete, out of the 79 saloons located on the East Side in 1901, only two were clearly connected to saloons. In addition, McCook’s research suggests that among the saloons engaging in prostitution it was much more common to tolerate soliciting than to function as brothels. Probably, because it was a cheaper and less risky set up, while it also harmed less the reputation of the place.

The overall conditions of prostitution in the city changed very little in the following then years. As the report by the Hartford Vice Commission stated, until Patsie Fusco’s trial in 1911, about eleven brothels operated continuously in Hartford with the knowledge of the city’s police force (21).

Besides identifying the individual brothels, McCook’s list also specifies the ethnicity of the brothel keepers. His findings show that foreign ethnicity was not an important factor in the brothel business. Instead, brothels tended to be American owned businesses often located in the East Side.  If one adds that according to the Vice Commission’s report 89% of the prostitutes were born in the US, the American character of the brothels become even more evident (45). Concerning the relationship between ethnicity and the soliciting places, McCook’s research shows that four out of the five in Hartford were Irish owned saloons. The reason, however, was that the Irish were greatly involved in the saloon business rather than that the Irish were particularly interested in running saloons where soliciting was tolerated.

The most plausible explanation why many brothels opened in Hartford’s immigrant quarter as opposed to other neighborhoods is that the East Side was regarded as the city’s slum area where morally and legally ambiguous activities were more tolerated both by the public and by the Hartford authorities than elsewhere. At the same time, the East Side was close enough to downtown to be accessible for a wide range of customers. Although no specific data is available about the customers, the newspaper articles suggest that many of them were well-dressed gentlemen and so they probably did not reside in the East Side. Based on these factors, one can conclude that unlike saloons, brothels did not organically belong to the East Side. Instead, many brothels opened here because it made sense for the city to segregate prostitution in the poor immigrant neighborhood.

             The above data, on the other hand, ignores the fact that many businesses related to prostitution were small-scale covert operations. As the Hartford Vice Commission report explains, besides the eleven brothels there were a number of resorts all over the city. “These included small apartments, private rented rooms, road houses, cafes, restaurants, private dining rooms or booths, hotels […] all doing an assignation business for prostitutes not residing in regular houses” (10). Based on McCook’s findings with respect to soliciting places, saloons seem to fit much better this category of small-scale assignation places.

To get a closer look at these covert operations one has to turn to the Hartford Courant. “Charles Thompson, a colored man, was arrested for keeping a house of ill repute on Ferry Street and two degraded white girls, who habitually frequented the place, were also arrested” (“Police News,” 1880). Similarly, Maria Coffey at 18 Sheldon Street was arrested at her house along with two other women and five men on the charge of keeping a disorderly house. “The place is said to have a bad reputation and to be frequented by drunken and disorderly people” (“Raided by the Police,” 1895). Although some arrests were made, it is most probable that the police in general preferred not to intervene often in with prostitution.

The famous Patsie Fusco versus Pasquale Pigniulo case in 1911, however, shocked the public in Hartford and resulted in the city’s most comprehensive anti-prostitution campaign. Fusco run a well-known East Side resort at 526 Front Street. The place was also listed as a saloon in the Geer’s directories between 1885 and prohibition and was one of the most prominent drinking-establishments in the neighborhood. It is hard to tell how long the saloon had also been functioning as a brothel, but according to the Courant, by that time, it had been doing so for quite a few years. The place was known as a so-called fifty cents house, which meant that for every visit the prostitute received twenty-five cents, while the other twenty-five went to the proprietor, Fusco (Hartford Vice Commission 22).

“Patsie Fusco’s saloon”

Patsie Fusco’s resort at 526 Front Street at the corner of Talcott, 1912

Notice the child sitting in the entrance of the brothel and the gang of

probably Italian ‘toughs’ hanging out next to the saloon.

(Connecticut Women Suffrage Association)

Patsie Fusco’s case was a quite sensational story of bribery. Pasquale Pigniulo, agent of the Bureau of Investigation of the United States Department of Justice, who earlier had raided a brothel at 103 Commerce Street, threatened to arrest Fusco on charges of white slave trade, unless he would fix him up for $500. Fusco had paid about $300 to Pigniulo when he learned that there was no arrest warrant made against him. Still, Pigniulo was after the other $200. At this point, Fusco decided to report the story to Detective Sergeant William Weltner of the Hartford police. Before Fusco’s arranged secret meeting with Pigniulo to exchange the money at Union Station on November 23, Weltner marked the thirty $5 bills that Fusco was supposed to give Pigniulo at the time. While the transaction was being performed, Weltner and a colleague grabbed Pigniulo’s hands and arrested him on the charge of blackmailing. The trial started on Dec 19^th and lasted only six days before the judge accepted the jury’s declaration that it was deadlocked.  But already two days after the sting, on November 25, Judge Clark ordered Fusco to close down his resort, which he did not refuse. There is no information whether later, when the saloon reopened, it engaged in prostitution or not. Still, the resulting public outrage demanded a termination of the policy of toleration for prostitution in Hartford  (“Detective Caught”; “Judge Clark”; “Pigniulo is Held”; Wilbur 8-11).

After Mayor Smith opened the city’s largest anti-vice crusade on Dec 30, 1911, the police shut down the city’s eleven well-established houses of ill fame and raided a great many smaller resorts, many of them operating on the East Side. The ‘experiment’, as the policy of intolerance was referred to, reduced overall prostitution in Hartford, at least according to the Vice Commission’s report from 1913 (11). As the State’s Attorney for Hartford County said “they traveled around among the saloons looking for girls [and] they could not find them” (Hartford Vice Commission 13). On the other hand, the same report shows that arrests for prostitution, disorderly house keeping and especially streetwalking increased after the anti-vice campaign started, indicating that vice in Hartford became an increasingly covert activity (15-16). 

The Hartford Courant reported for many of the arrests made during these raids. An interesting white slave trade case emerged out of the raid on Nov 13 1913 on Lee Dayton’s house of ill fame at 245 State Street: he and two girls, Mary Walker and Mary Arsino, known as “French” Mary were arrested on the premises. Walker accused Dayton of having held her in the house against her will with a shotgun and beat on her brutally with a leather strap to keep her under submission. While Walker entertained her guests at the place, Arsino was forced to solicit for Dayton on the streets. Interestingly, on the same day the Court tried a less brutal case of prostitution about another house of ill repute on the very same address: the proprietor Anna Christopher, two girls, a colored man and three guests went before the court on various charges related to prostitution (“Police Court Cases”; “Find ‘White Slave’ a Prisoner”).

A covert agent of the United States Department of Justice pretending to be a madam with the intention of buying one of Hartford’s house of ill-fame, visited a great many covert resorts and gave detailed description of these places. Resorts like those of Dayton’s or Christopher’s were most probably places of quite low quality. The agent described one similar place in the following way. “There were two bedrooms divided by a wooden partition. The two beds had no linen on them, just a piece of dark, dirty oilcloth; there was a pillow on each with a case on, which was the only piece of white on the bed. There were three girls there. They appeared to be not more than seventeen” (Hartford Vice Commission 23).

Many times these small covert places relied on saloons and restaurants to solicit for them.  In the cases of Dayton’s and Christopher’s brothels, while men were getting sexual services upstairs, downstairs on the same address they could get booze in Harry Schwartz’s saloon (Geer’s 1909: 1036). It is quite possible that Schwartz had agreements with both resort-keepers to allow soliciting to take place in his saloon for some extra income or for the increased consumption these resorts generated. This seems even more probable when one realizes that Schwartz was probably not a very fastidious person: in 1905 the Geer’s listed him as the saloonkeeper of what was later known as Patsie Fusco’s resort on 526 Front Street (856).

One saloon was particularly engaged in soliciting according to the Hartford Vice Commission’s report. Unfortunately, the report keeps the name and location of the businesses that engaged in prostitution anonymous by assigning codes to the individual places. This particular saloon was coded as CX79’s saloon. This so-called “Ladies and Gent’s Dining Room and Cafe” which advertised as “Order Cooking A Specialty,” was heavily engaged in soliciting (27). The place had no bedrooms, and thus it served exclusively as a meeting place for the prostitutes and their clients. Most commonly, the girls took their clients to one of the many hotels in Hartford that registered rooms for immoral purposes. Overall, four girls interviewed by a covert agent by the Commission said that they regularly solicited in CX79’s saloon (49). 

In general, soliciting and ‘rolling’ remained very common in the East Side even after the anti-vice campaign was started. Front, State and Market Streets were among the most popular locations of streetwalking in the city (Hartford Vice Commission 49). For instance, a young Lithuanian, Margaret Amick, regularly hunted for her drunken clients in and out of the Front Street saloons. She was seen “walking along Front Street, accompanied by a well-dressed man, who had been drinking more than he could carry comfortably”, while Peter Lewis, Amick’s confederate, warned away the other East Side ‘rollers’ from their intoxicated source of income. The gentleman was sent home in a taxicab $80 shorter (“East Side Woman”).

In the 1910s, however, restaurants and cafes became more typically tied to houses of ill fames than the saloons. Some of them even had bedrooms where the girls could withdraw with their clients (Hartford Vice Commission 27-30). One interesting aspect of these restaurants is that they were most typically Italian owned businesses. For the Italians restaurants did what the saloons did for the Irish and the Germans. By the 1910s, the East Side became a characteristically Italian neighborhood. The Courant’s articles report a number of Italian places that were involved in soliciting and prostitution. For instance the police raided the restaurants at 212 and 420 Front Street in the night of December 10 1913.  Patrons of these restaurants were allowed to bring beer and whiskey into the place and share it with other guests, males and females who created “serious disturbances”. In the restaurant at 420 Front Street, Joseph Patsy, the proprietor of a disorderly house was arrested in the company of two ill-reputed women – one of them was Marry Walker from the Lee Dayton case (“Two Front Street Restaurants Raided”). Similarly, Carmelio Legio and James Lenza, who had their restaurant at 59 Sheldon Street were charged and arrested with keeping a disorderly house (“Restaurant Men”).

Overall, this section has attempted to describe as precisely as the sources allowed the ways in which the East Side saloons were involved in prostitution. Clearly, saloons were important places for the assignation business and thus common locations to look for prostitutes in the city. Seldom were they brothels, much more often they engaged only in soliciting. That sex and drinking were connected, however, is not a great surprise. More importantly, the evidence shows that the saloons that engaged in such business were more the exceptions than the standard.

This is because the factors that made the East Side the central location of prostitution in the city, were external. Prostitution – the brothels and the soliciting places – was not an organic element of the East Side culture. Though segregated in the East Side, it served the whole city. On the other hand, even though many saloons engaged in prostitution for the extra income it generated, the majority of the East Side saloons remained establishments for the neighborhood’s residents. Most saloonkeepers probably found their reputations in the neighborhood too valuable to ruin by allowing prostitutes to solicit in their saloons. Nevertheless, prostitution without a doubt gave a peculiar character to East Side nightlife and to the saloons whose owners decided to profit from this business.

C, Gambling and Gangs

Gambling is also often believed to be a characteristic feature of the saloon life. In fact, according to McCook’s list in 1901 almost all of Hartford’s 11 gambling places were associated with saloons. Interestingly, only two of them were located on the East Side: the German Republic House at 165 Front Street owned by the Jewish Isaac Rosenfeld and P. B. Smith’s saloon at 98 State Street on the corner of Market Street (Poor Law Administration). This of course does not mean that there was not more gambling in the East Side. When in 1891 Walker complained about the numerous liquor outlets in the city, he also raised his voice against the widespread prostitution and gambling in the adjacent slums (Walsh 3). However, with respect to gambling there are simply no sources available. Even the Hartford Courant fails to help in this case. One can only suppose, without any certainty, that over the period studied here a number of the East Side saloons were also engaged in the gambling business.

Another interesting topic is the relation between the saloons and the numerous East Side gangs. In 1914 the Courant dedicated an extensive coverage to the history of Hartford’s gangs. According to the article the East Side contained by far the toughest and most aggressive gangs in the city, and almost every street in the neighborhood had its gangs. Reardon, the best remembered tough in the East Side, member of the Dutch Point gang, was said to be willing to do anything for a pint of whiskey. According to the legend, his favorite way of earning a pint was to bite the head off a live mouse (“Gangs of Today and Yesterday in Hartford”).

More related to saloons were the various ‘roller’ gangs. Many victims of these gangs encountered them in the saloons on Front or State Streets in the evening and the next morning when they woke up in a cheap lodging house or a dark alleyway with a terrible hangover, they found all their money and jewellery gone. Usually, they also did not remember anything.

“Fire Escape Leading to Gambling Rooms”

Asylum Street

(Connecticut Historical Society)

Rollers usually worked in groups waiting in a saloon for a man who was already well on the road to a serious buzz. Then, one of them gained the victim’s confidence, introduced him to his fellow gang members and engaged him in a treating and social drinking ritual. This game usually went on only until the man was turned completely drunk so that he would be unable to go home safe. The next step was to generously offer him to take him to one of the cheap East Side lodging places and on the way or at the place during the night carefully separate him from his money.

Of course, the scenario had many variations. Some gangs did all their work in the saloon in one or two places where they were tolerated by the management in exchange for a little contribution. These gangs usually pick-pocketed the victim right in the saloon. Another type was the ‘dope’ gang, usually waiting in the back room of a saloon. They operated with “doctored” whiskey, meaning that they slipped a small amount of sleep-inducing drugs into the liquor. In general the police knew almost all the East Side roller gangs, but evidence against them was almost never found (“Gangs”).

One must note that such rolling schemes were by no means common. They certainly happened and most often in the East Side where gangs were very numerous and many of them often hung out in the saloons. In many cases, these rolling schemes took place with the approval of the saloonkeepers. Still, it was not at all the interest of the saloonkeepers to scare away their clients, and therefore it is most likely that the great majority of them did not allow such rolling schemes to harm the reputation of their business.

D, Fake Alcohol and Minor Violations of Alcohol Retail Laws

Finally, it is necessary to dedicate a short section to how certain municipal regulations on the alcohol retail trade were broken in the East Side. Most of them were what one can consider rather insignificant tricks simply to increase alcohol consumption in the saloons. Faking alcohol by chemical manipulation, on the other hand, could result in terrible tragedies such as happened in 1919 in the last year of Hartford’s saloon era.

Since acquiring a license for running a saloon was an expensive and complicated process, selling liquor without a license was a very common offence. The fee for a saloon license in 1895 was set as high as $1000 (Hartford Courant, “Temperance Bills”). No surprise that many preferred to take the risk of evading the law. Hurter Rudolph, for instance, who later became a prominent East Side saloonkeeper, was fined $40 on the charge of selling alcohol without a proper license (Hartford Courant, “Robbed of His Money,” 1899).

This charge was most commonly lodged against the alcohol peddlers who by the nature of their business conducted illegal operations. Samuel Wheale, a 43 years old English gun worker, complemented the family budget by selling whiskey on Kilbourn Street at 6 o’clock on a Sunday morning. He was found with only 93 cents on him, indicating that he did the business only on credit and could trust his clients with to pay him back. The Courant article added that such Sunday morning sales were very typical in the East Side (“Home News – A Walking Saloon,” 1893). 

Saloonkeepers also often disobeyed the law that required the saloons to close down on Sundays. For many working-class men this was the only day of the week when they could really take some time out and so saloon patronizing was particularly popular on Sundays. Many saloonkeepers took the risk of staying open for the high revenues Sunday sales could generate. According to the Courant, John J. Flannigan, for instance, was charged for keeping his saloon on 97 Windsor Street open on a Sunday for the sale of liquor (“Police Court Cases,” 1900). 

“Newsies”

 Just about entering a Hartford saloon – location unknown, 1909

(Hartford Studies Project, Trinity College)

Another common offence was to allow minors to enter and serve minors alcohol in the saloons. This was most common with the newsboys and newsgirls who often accomplished a great deal of their sales in the saloons. As one columnist at the Courant warned: “at the very least, the girls should be forbidden to go into saloons, restaurants” (“’News’-Girls,” 1895). Although the saloons were certainly not the most desirable places for children to hang out, for many working-class families the newsies’ contribution to the family budget was essential. 

Finally, when in 1913 the so-called free lunch was made illegal, many saloonkeepers chose to ignore the law. The free lunch was a staple service in almost every American saloon at the time. It allowed the saloon patrons to help themselves to food for the price of a drink. Several saloon men told the reporter for the Courant that the law seemed very easy to evade. And in fact, they were not hesitant to evade it. For example, Frank Francolini, who managed the saloon at 244 Windsor Street, was tried on this charge (“In the Police Court,” 1913).

Unlike these rather insignificant, even picturesque offences, faking alcohol was probably the most serious crime one could charge against some saloonkeepers. As usual, it was again McCook who dedicated the greatest effort in Hartford to learn about the intoxicating effect of alcohol. He conducted a series of analyses of samples of whiskies from various Hartford alcohol outlets. He found that “pure” whiskey in Hartford was almost unknown. Especially samples from the cheapest East Side saloons were likely to be diluted alcohol with some burnt sugar added for the sweetening. Sometimes saloonkeepers added a little fuel oil, so insignificant that is hardly even worth mentioning, and similarly small quantities of bead-oil that was supposed to make the bubbles less transitory when the glass was shaken. Most generally, the whiskies were watered. As one of the saloonkeepers said: “You know water don’t hurt nobody” (Possibilities of Social Amelioration 9-11). The percentage of alcohol found in McCook’s samples were always less than 43% that was considered the norm for whiskey. In the average saloon the alcohol percentage of the whiskies served tended to be 34-35% (“Tanglefoot” and Other Whiskies).

Faking alcohol was, however, not simply the common practice of adding a little sugar and water to the whiskey but real chemical manipulation. Some of the “wood-alcohol” produced had lethal effect. Hartford’s worst alcohol poisoning happened in the very last moments of city’s saloon era, in the last days of December 1919. The Hartford Courant dedicated almost the entire newspaper to these event on December 28 and 29. By this time, because of the wartime prohibition, the sale of whiskey was illegal in Hartford. The fake whiskey or “wood-alcohol” arrived from New York City and was served at Frank Rose’s saloon at 277 Windsor Street, who himself was an important figure in smuggling the stuff into the city. Bronnerwine, the next-door saloonkeeper who had already been charged with illegal alcohol sale, was responsible for spreading the word that Rose had some whiskey.

The alcohol poisoning was extensive: by December 29, in Hartford, thirteen individuals lost their lives and six were held in hospitals. The same day the Hartford Courant released a map titled ‘Hartford Wood Alcohol District’ that showed the locations of the homes of the victims and those of the saloons of Rose and Bronnerwine. Nine out of the eleven dead and two out of the six hospitalized lived within a couple minutes distance from Rose’s – a quite morbid sign of the neighborhood character of an East Side saloon. Also, it seems from the names that the victims were mostly Eastern European immigrants. Another raid at F. P. Denello’s Panama café at 270 Front Street found a complete distillery for manufacturing fake alcohol in the basement (“Fifteen Gallons”; “Hartford Wood Alcohol District”).

This last story of alcohol poisoning is probably the darkest aspect of the saloons of Hartford’s East Side. Indeed, people like Rose gave critics a lot of reason to worry about alcohol and public drinking. The other offences mentioned in this section are ‘crimes’ of much lesser magnitude. For instance, the Courant mentions free lunches only in relation to saloonkeepers not obeying the law. But the free lunch fed hundreds of poor people who had no other way to feed themselves. Also, the puritan rule forbidding the sale of alcohol on Sundays was greatly inconsiderate of the everyday circumstances of the poor working class. Hartford’s poor immigrants, just like everyone else, needed time for relaxation and socializing. Overall, it is no surprise that many saloonkeepers tried to get around certain regulations that they considered unreasonable and inconsiderate. Still, there can be no excuse for the poisoning that took place as a result of faking alcohol.

E, Conclusion

This chapter has provided a comprehensive description of the “underworld” character of the East Side saloon-culture. It elaborated on the ways in which certain saloons become engaged in organized crime and particular types of illegal activities. The sources showed that a number of saloons engaged in Hartford’s widespread prostitution business. Also, the saloons were important factors behind ward-based local politics and thus influenced and somewhat corrupted the city’s democratic process. Most importantly, the section discussing Hartford’s alcohol problems has demonstrated that in the aggregate the East Side saloons enhanced immoderate drinking, and so they were partially responsible for the social problems alcoholism created among the poor working-class.

            On the other hand, this chapter tells only one side of the story. By itself it would present an unfair and unbalanced portrait of the East Side saloon-culture. As earlier said, the predominantly Yankee sources tend to misguide the researcher and paint a much darker and simpler picture than the reality. Therefore this chapter has emphasized that even though many saloons were connected to what one might call the underworld of Hartford, the great majority of them were by no means places of criminal or morally dubious activities.

To give a more balanced account of the East Side saloon-culture the next chapter will cross Main Street and approach the saloons from the point of the view of the neighborhood’s residents. It will show that above all the great majority of the East Side saloons were central institutions of community building and social leisure in Hartford’s immigrant quarter.

3. Community-Building and Leisure

A, Introduction

Saloons were among the most important social and cultural institutions accessible to he immigrant working class in industrial urban America. As Rosenzweig says: “only the church and the home rivaled the saloon as working-class social centers” (56). Findings concerning the saloons of Hartford’s East Side confirm Rosenzweig’s statement. The following microanalysis of the public-drinking establishments of the East Side will show that the remarkable popularity of the saloons as social centers derived from what can be considered a set of profound social relationships that bonded the saloons and the neighborhood to each other.

The study will analyze the components of this complex set of social relationships. The analysis will discuss how the various ethnic, class and neighborhood based social bonds manifested themselves in the relationship between the saloons and the neighborhood. Much attention will be paid to the central role of the saloonkeepers as social axis and reference points within the community. Concerning the key role saloons played in enhancing community-based organization and activism in the neighborhood, the study will provide evidence of certain saloons serving as meeting places for different working-class or ethnic-based organizations. Similarly, the analysis will describe particular services that saloonkeepers provided for the individual patrons and for the whole neighborhood. The analysis is intended to reconstruct the atmosphere of congenial socializing and leisure characteristic of the working-class saloons of the era. Due to the lack of qualitative primary sources, research for the analysis heavily draws on analogies drawn from the related findings of other scholars.

B, The Saloon in the Neighborhood

Opening a saloon, especially in the 1870s-80s, required relatively little capital. As the demand was high enough to keep in operation 60-80 saloons in the East Side throughout the period – including the Sheldon and the Windsor Street areas –, the saloon business must have provided decent revenues. However, a closer look reveals that until the late 1890s most of the saloons were very unstable operations: only a few of them remained in business for longer than five years. This circumstance suggests that the East Side saloons, at least until the 1890s, were small-scale, small capital operations and easy entry and exit were characteristic of the saloon industry. This was true especially in the 1870s and 1880s, when some of the saloons apparently operated in the dwellings of the saloonkeepers.

Knowing that at this period the East Side saloons were most typically managed by Irish saloonkeepers and were patronized by Irish immigrants, it is possible that a few of the establishments listed as saloons in the directories were in reality nothing more than so-called ‘kitchen barrooms’. Both in Worcester and in Boston the majority of such businesses were unlicensed operations. Since Irish traditions designated a central role for women in such kitchen sales, the kitchen barrooms were most likely to be managed by Irish women (Rosenzweig 41-44). Hartford in this regard should not have been any different from these other Northeastern centers. Probably the East Side also had a great many kitchen sales and only a very few of them were licensed operations and thus listed by the Geer’s directories. It is possible, for instance, that the Miss. Winkler listed in the 1879 directory was operating such a small kitchen business (230). Importantly, these kitchen sales indicate that a sense of cohesion existed within the community. As Duis observes, the location of places where alcohol was sold was common knowledge among neighborhood drinkers (106). Thus the woman who operated such a business must have trusted her clients to keep the secret.

East Side peddlers also engaged in informal and unlicensed alcohol retail. Especially on Sundays, when saloons had to close down, often only the peddlers and the kitchen barrooms served whiskey or beer to their clients. And for many of the working-class residents of the East Side, Sunday was the only day they could take off. As the peddler Samuel Wheale’s case from 1893 showed, these informal operations had something of a genuinely neighborhood character. Wheale could conduct his whole business on credit, which indicates a level of trust and a sense of community present beyond the sole values of market exchange (Hartford Courant, “Home News”). 

Nevertheless, most of the East Side alcohol retail was conducted in saloons that opened directly to the streets. As already shown the Irish and the Germans were by far the most involved ethnic groups in the saloon business. This is because, especially until the late 1890s, the Irish and German saloonkeepers could draw on large and stable clienteles of fellow countrymen on the East Side. Thus, the ethnic bond between the saloonkeepers and the patrons was reinforced with the neighborhood bond. These factors, shared ethnicity and neighborhood or, to put it in another way, a shared community, ensured the saloonkeeper the loyalty of his clientele.

One clear indication of this shared community is that until the mid 1890s most saloonkeepers lived at the same address where their saloons were located. The directories of 1870-71 showed every saloonkeeper who ran their businesses on Front Street to have resided on the same address where their saloons were located. From the late 1870s, however, the directories testify to a slow but gradual increase in the number of saloonkeepers who chose to live at a different address nearby. A few of them even moved out of the neighborhood. Still, in 1885 there were only 3 saloonkeepers who lived somewhere in the neighborhood other than his saloon on Front Street and only 2 who decided to abandon the East Side. The real change came again with the 1890s. By 1900 only a third of the saloonkeepers lived on the same address of their saloons, about a quarter of them already left the East Side, and 3 lived elsewhere than Hartford. By 1918 those who lived right next to the saloons they managed were rather the exceptions, and almost two-third of the saloonkeepers were not East Side residents.

Even though by the late 1890s the Irish and Germans had largely left the East Side, Irish and German saloonkeepers continued to operate their saloons in the neighborhood. Meanwhile, they too followed the trajectory of their compatriots. As a result, by the early 1900s the still largely Irish and German run saloons were patronized by a clientele that was mostly Italian and Eastern European origin. The fact that predominantly Irish and German saloonkeepers of Worcester demonstrated the very same dynamics suggests that the loosening of the community bonds between the saloonkeepers and their patrons might have been a general tendency in many American industrial centers from around the turn of the century (Rosenzweig 52-53).

Table III

Residences of Front Street Saloonkeepers in Relation to Their Saloons[7]

Parallel and complementary to this trend, from around the 1890s, saloons gradually became spatially more stable operations. Before, most saloons appeared only once in the directories showing that prior to the 1890s saloons were very unstable operations. By 1918, more than 90% of them had been in business for four years and about 70% of them for more than thirteen years. If one considers that a saloon license in 1895 cost as much as $1000, it is clearly understandable why saloons gradually became spatially more fixed and more professionally managed operations (Hartford Courant, “Temperance Bills”). Also, over time they probably became better furnished, more sophisticated places. Probably the increased costs associated with opening a saloon was the key factor that delayed the entry of the Italians and the Eastern European Jews into the business until the early 1910s.

Table IV

Front Street Saloons in Operation Over Time[8]

Meanwhile, the ethnic character of the East Side was constantly changing. For a short while, with the arrival of the new immigrants and the still significant Irish, German and Scandinavian communities, it became a remarkably multiethnic neighborhood. Thus, most probably, the majority of the East Side saloons at the turn of the century hosted a rather multiethnic clientele. For instance, one of the East Side’s most steady saloons was located on 60 Front Street under a lodging house. Hyde Andrew, who managed the saloon, did not live at the same address. The lodgers were all males, mainly first and second-generation German and Irish immigrants. The downstairs saloon was most probably patronized by all of them, regardless of ethnicity. Another saloon at 61 Front Street managed by the second-generation Irishman William Hudner probably drew on a similarly diverse clientele. Hudner and his family lived on the same address where the saloon was located. The building was home to Irish, Italian and Hungarian families. As the tragic wood-alcohol case shows, most saloon-patrons preferred to go to places within a few minutes of walk from their homes. Thus, in such multiethnic surroundings the majority of saloons also had to become multiethnic and neighborhood based rather than ethnocentric establishments (Manuscript Population Schedules 1900).

Duis refers to the Irish and German saloonkeepers as ethnic “universals” since they operated their businesses all around Boston and Chicago and hosted a rather multiethnic clientele. At the same time, he identifies traits that distinguished the saloons of these two ethnic groups. As there is no reason to believe that the Irish or German saloons of Hartford’s East Side were different from those of Boston, Duis’ findings are helpful for giving us a sense of the basic characteristics of these places (153-54). According to him, “most Irish barrooms were more distinguished for the facilities they lacked than for those they contained”. They had the least spectacular interiors, wore the signs of thousands of kicks and were most often so-called “stand-up” saloons. They served mostly whiskey, but over time they accepted the German’s brew as well. Importantly, they were strictly male only territory. As opposed to the dimly illuminated rough Irish bars, the German places were brighter, quieter and much more family oriented businesses. They were also furnished with tables. And of course, they served most of all beer. In the 1870-71 Hartford Geer’s directory almost every German Front Street saloonkeeper found it important to advertise his saloon as a ‘beersaloon’, a ‘lagerbeersaloon’ or a ‘beeroom’ (449). The contemporaneous observations confirm Duis and describe German run saloons as quiet, respectable and law-abiding businesses, unlike those of the Irish that were commonly viewed as intemperate, temperamental and often criminal places (Powers 60).

            Nevertheless, even during this period of remarkable ethnic diversity, many saloons preserved their ethnocentric orientation. The best example in Hartford’s East Side was a Swedish saloon and lodging-house on 80 Front Street, another one of the oldest and most stable drinking places in the neighborhood. Both the saloon and the lodging-house were managed by the thirty-four years old Gustaf Olson and the twenty-seven years old John Jacobson. The lodgers were all Swedish born males between 20 and 40. One Swedish family with two children also lived in the building. The sole female lodger was also from Sweden and worked as a servant, quite possibly in the lodging house (Manuscript Population Schedules 1900). These factors strongly suggest that Olson and Jacobson run a Swedes-only establishment. Both in Boston and Worcester Scandinavian, and particularly Swedish, saloons were among the most ethnocentric drinking establishments located within tightly concentrated ethnic neighborhoods (Duis 146; Rosenzweig 112).

Similarly to the Swedes, the Italians of Boston and Chicago also ran many ethnocentric bars. While their presence in the East Side saloon business was hardly felt before the 1910s, by that time, the Italians managed about one-fifth of the Front Street saloons (Geer’s 1914: 1282-83). By that time too, the neighborhood had become mostly Italian. It is important to add that Italians also ran most of the street’s restaurants, which places also served alcoholic beverages and provided space to socialize. As most Italian households kept the community’s staple beverage, red wine, the Italian saloon was less of a drinking place than a space for social gathering where the immigrants had their beer and played card games. Quite typically, Italian saloons also served as employment agencies where the saloonkeeper often took the role of the labor boss serving as an intermediary between the individual worker and the labor market. Some of them exploited the dependency of their fellow countrymen and thus became involved in what was to become the ‘padrone’ business (Duis 146-48).

For the Eastern European Jews saloons were less important social institutions than for the other immigrants (Duis 162-64). Although by 1914 quite many of the Front Street saloons were managed by Jewish saloonkeepers, the Jews were more likely to spend their free time in one of their alternate institutions (Geer’s 1914: 1282-83). Like most American Jewish communities, Hartford Jews had a great variety of institutions to choose

“Yellin’s saloon, exterior”

Yellin Meyer, in 1910, holding probably his grandson’s hand, is posing proudly

for the camera in front of his saloon at 177 Windsor Street. Yankees most often

demonized the saloons by arguing that they endangered the children and ruined

the families. This picture reflects a very different relation to the saloon, one that

suggests the possibility that saloons and family life could co-exist in peace

with each other.  (The Greater Hartford Jewish Historical Society)

“Yellin’s saloon, interior”.

 Yellin, in 1910, is posing behind the bar of his quite simply furnished saloon. The

little plaque on the wall behind his head reads: ‘Union Bar’. To which union Meyer’s

saloon was related is not clear. (The Greater Hartford Jewish Historical Society)

from whenever they wanted to socialize, such as the YMHA and the YWHA (Silverman 51). Still, the Windsor Street neighborhood could boast a few Jewish saloonkeepers who operated their drinking establishments partially for the Jewish community. For instance, on the festival of Purim, when it was customary for the Orthodox Jews to drink freely, they would often stop in a saloon to “buy a bottle of whiskey to bring home and celebrate the holiday ” (Dalin and Rosenbaum 55). On the other hand, this also shows that the Jewish saloonkeeper was more an entrepreneur than a social reference point for the community, for his clients did not find it particularly important to stay and socialize along with their drink in his saloon. In addition, the tragic story of Rose’s wood-alcohol poisoning showed that almost all of Rose’s clients were Eastern European immigrants who lived in the Windsor Street neighborhood, and probably many of them were of Jewish origin. Thus many Windsor Street Jews patronized the non-Jewish saloons of the area.

            To conclude, saloons became imbedded in the East Side through ethnic, class and neighborhood based bonds that were the main cohesive forces within the community. The particularity of the saloons was that unlike many other institutions they became inseparable from the neighborhood’s everyday life. They were manifestations of the social instinct of the East Side residents: the East Side saloons were working class neighborhood or ethnic based social centers. For saloons to become integral parts of the neighborhood the saloonkeepers had to capitalize on these bonds. Many assumed leadership roles within the community. Others facilitated community building by providing basic facilities for class, ethnic or community based organizations. All of them showed interest in and solidarity with their individual patrons and provided basic services for them.

C, In the Core of the Local Network

Saloonkeepers, especially among the Irish and the Germans, were key social figures, as they maintained the deeply engrained traditions of social drinking for their communities. The milieu of a saloon as a center for the community to socialize depended largely on the personality of the saloonkeeper. A good saloonkeeper functioned as a cultural magnet for his fellow countrymen and the neighborhood (Powers 59). “He is above all else a man of the people. He knows his men and knows them well. He knows often about their families and their circumstances, and thus has a hold on their sympathies” (Calkins 11). No doubt, a good saloonkeeper knew very well what it meant for the poor immigrant to be treated with respect. He called his faithful patrons by name and often engaged in conversations with them.

In the following, George Ade recalls a typical barroom conversation (147-48). The saloonkeeper clearly appears as an intimate friend of his faithful patron.

            “Same as before, Fred”

            “I got you Gus. What fetches you back, after you kissin’ all of us good-night?”

“Fred, you’ve known me for ten year – huh? Ain’t that ri?”

            “All o’ that, Gus.”

“In all that ten year did you ever know time when ole Gus couldn’t carry his licker – huh? Did you?”

            “I sure never did, Gus”

            “You seen me when I left here, didn’t you – huh?”

“Sure.”

            “Listen! Wuz I cocked? Wuzn’t I all ri’ – huh?”

            “Certainly you wuz all right - never better.”

            “Fred, this is jus’ one frien’ talkin’ to ‘nother. You know my wife.”

“No, Gus, I never have, but she’s a lady I hear very highly spoken of […].”

“Lissen! What does the ole sea gull pull on me? Huh? Git this, Fred. She says, ‘ What you mean comin’ home ‘is con’ition? Them’s the words she used, Fred. What you know ‘bout that - huh? ”

“She done you an injustice, Gus, but you know how women are […].”

“Don’t take it so hard, Gus. I wouldn’t cry about it if I wuz you. Everything’ll be all right tomorrow.”

Saloonkeepers not only maintained a friendly and personable milieu for their guests. Since the saloons were the most popular social centers in the neighborhood, they also functioned as major repositories of information (Duis 120). A good saloonkeeper was among the best-informed members of the neighborhood concerning both local and outside matters. For the newly arrived immigrant this meant that the local saloonkeeper was the key to becoming acquainted with other members of the community. In general, saloonkeepers disseminated and interpreted essential information for the community. They were important discussion leaders. Also, they distributed information about new hiring, politics or important local matters. Without a doubt, being central figures in the neighborhood’s communication network saloonkeepers could largely influence local public opinion (Calkins 8-20; Powers 65-70; Rosenzweig 53-57).

            Finley Peter Dunne’s famous Mr. Dooley series inspired by saloonkeeper Jim McGarry of Chicago is one of the most successful evocations of the stereotypical Irish saloonkeeper. Mr. Dooley, in his witty conversations with saloon patron Mr. Hennessy, formulates opinion on every possible matter. Topics range from American immigration policy to the Boer mission to the question of polygamy. They discuss history, the Negro problem, local and national politics, platform making, newspaper publicity, work and sport, the Paris exposition and the arctic explorations. In other words, with their authentic Irish dialect, they talk about everything.

“What’s goin’ on this week in th’ papers? Asked Mr. Henessy.”

“Ivrything,” said Mr. Dooley. It’s been turbylint week. I can hardly sleep iv nights thinkin’ iv th’ doin’s iv people. Th’ campinily at Venice has fallen down […].”

“Th’ king iv England is betther. He’s off in his yacht […].”

“Me frind, J. Pierpont Morgan, has been takin’ dinner with th’ Impror Wilum […].”

“A lady down East woke her husband up to tell him there was a burglar in th’ house. Th’ foolish woman […] this man got up an’ was kilt […].”

“Willum Jennings Bryan is readin’ me frind Grover Cleveland out if the’ party […]”

“Ain’t I a good newspaper?” (Observations by Mr. Dooley 183-88).

In addition to assuming the role of local information network, saloonkeepers also made a remarkable range of actual services available to their patrons. One should never forget that like any other neighborhood institution, saloons were typically open from 5-6AM until midnight. Except for Sundays the poor workingmen could go to the saloons not only to socialize over a pint of beer or a glass of whiskey but also to access various services.

In Boston and Chicago the majority of the saloons were regularly supplied with newspapers. Thus the patrons along their drinks could comfortably read and discuss the current news. Most typically, of course, they discussed the sport news. Occasionally, in some ethnic saloons the saloonkeeper even provided newspapers from the home country (Duis 147). In Hartford, like elsewhere, the ‘newsies’ often stopped by the saloons to sell their papers. As reported by the Hartford Courant Officer Gavin had a considerable amount of trouble with the newsboys “who persist in staying out all night” possibly to just hang out, but mostly to sell papers to the saloons’ evening crowd (“Newsboys Out All Night,” 1895).

Often, especially in the early years, saloons were the poor immigrants’ post offices and thus key institutions for the immigrants to maintain ties with relatives oversee. Deriving from the factor that saloonkeepers were central figures in distributing local information, many saloons also functioned as informal labor bureaus where the laboring man out of employment could turn for assistance; this service was a particularly important attraction of the Italian saloons. In addition, many saloonkeepers ran basic bank services such as cashing paychecks or establishing small credit accounts for the loyal patrons. In some saloons there were safes available for the immigrants to keep their valuables secure (Calkins 8-20; Powers 65-70, 119-33; Rosenzweig 53-57).

An example of banking combined with saloon business in the East Side was the establishment of Donato Leroy. Leroy was registered as a saloonkeeper at 212 Front Street from the turn of the century until the end of the period studied. At the same time he was a steamship ticket agent and later a banker. By 1909 his steamship ticket agency was listed at the same address as the saloon, and in the next building Donato ran his banking operation (Geer’s 1900: 705-6; 1905: 855-56; 1909:1035-36; 1914: 1282-183). Not very different from Leroy’s banking operation was Harry S. Bond’s saloon at 25-27 Temple Street in the late 1890s. A photograph reveals that related to Bond’s saloon operated Bartholomay’s stock brokerage (“Bond Café”).

            The most popular of all services saloons provided for their clients was the free lunch. If a saloon patron bought any drink he was free to help himself to the food. Even though the free lunch was the least spectacular in the Northeast, usually only cold food, it still contained a selection of the followings: bread, crackers, wafers, cheese, bologna sausage, wienerwurst, cold eggs, sliced tomatoes, cold meats, salads, pickles and other relishes. Sometimes the food varied with the ethnic composition of the saloon patrons (Calkins 15-16).

            As state archivist Mark Jones pointed out, the Hartford Board of Health recognized that saloons provided public toilets for their clients, including the homeless. For many, the only other option was the police lodgings, where according to McCook’s study in 1895 treatment was most likely to be terrible and no food was served (Chief of Police). If one considers the fact that for the price of a beer one could find relief in a warm, comfortable setting, use more or less clean public toilets and eat food for free along his drink, it is no surprise that saloons were extraordinarily popular.

            Because of a tuberculosis infection that may have been related to the free lunch, in 1913 the state of Connecticut passed a legislation that prohibited the free distribution of food in the saloons. When one of the patients was asked to name the saloons where he had possibly consumed the ‘disease-spreading’ food, he simply answered: “If you will give me a written agreement that you will provide me with food for the rest of my life after I leave here, I can give you twenty names, but otherwise I may have to depend on the free lunch for existence”. Similarly, another patient explained that were the free lunch to be abolished, “The commission would have to build two more shacks to accommodate the men who would be driven in by the inability to get food” (Hartford Courant, “Free Lunch”).

            Saloonkeepers also objected to the new law. They said that free lunch had been a long established custom in the saloons. They added that the new law was easy to evade (Hartford Courant, “Saloon Men,” 1913). And as it was earlier shown, they did not hesitate to evade it. Frank Francolini, saloonkeeper at 244 Windsor Street, evaded the law by passing the soup and the bread behind the bar to each individual customer, as opposed to the common practice of displaying the free lunch on the bar for the clients to help themselves (Hartford Courant, “In the Police Court,” 1913).

Relying on the ethnic and neighborhood bonds and their central role in the local communication network, certain saloonkeepers with leadership talent could eventually become real community leaders. The strongest indication of this is the success of Irish saloonkeepers in local politics. Relying on the support of their fellow countrymen, some East Side saloonkeepers became important local leaders in the neighborhood. Between 1875-1896 saloonkeepers gave 5 aldermen and 5 councilmen to their East Side wards (Geer’s 1875: 262; 1879: 278; 1885: 540; 1890: 554; 1896: 641). As the bond between the saloonkeepers and the East Side residents loosened from the late 1890s on, the East Side wards stopped electing saloonkeepers as their aldermen or councilmen. Not until 1909 would an East Side saloonkeeper again become engaged in local politics, but by that time the most active were those of Jewish origin (Geer’s 1909: 1068).

Thomas Monahan, for instance, served two terms as alderman for Hartford’s fifth ward from late the 1870s till the early 1880s (Geer’s 1879: 278; 1885: 540). Meanwhile, he maintained the saloon he established in the early 1870s at 70 Front Street and continued to live right next door to his saloon until the early 1890s. Interestingly, in 1901 McCook listed his saloon as one of the soliciting places in the East Side. One has to have a little imagination to assume that during election times Monahan was probably not too shy to mobilize voters and influence the outcomes in his favor with a couple of free drinks or other extras. 

From McCook’s perspective Monahan was the kind of Irish political boss a good and self-conscious Hartford citizen had every reason to worry about. For the Irish community, however, Monahan was a real community leader. In addition to his career as an alderman, Monahan was the treasurer of a prominent Irish organization, the Ancient Order of Hibernians, in 1875 (Geer’s 1875: 299). Later, in 1890 he was secretary to another Irish organization, the Knights of St. Patrick (Geer’s 1890: 576). Finally in 1900 he was listed in the Geer’s directory as the president of the Emerald Benevolent Society (785). Monahan’s career as a community leader and local politician was deeply rooted in the community bond he developed as a saloonkeeper with his native patrons. Moreover, as a saloonkeeper politician, Monahan played an important role in shaping public opinion within the East Side Irish community (114-42).

“Interior of Otto Henning’s café”

 Henning’s saloon at 31 Temple Street in 1905. Behind the bar stand saloonkeeper

Henning of 33 Temple Street and bartender William Schmidt of 4 Orchard Street,

also in the East Side. The national flag suggests that the saloon currently hosted

some ethnic event. The bar displays the famous free lunch - in the bowls ham

and other meats are offered. Also, while the others are drinking, one of the

man is reading the newspaper probably also supplied by the saloon.

(Connecticut Historical Society)

Many of the Irish and German saloonkeepers were, like Monahan, involved in various ethnic or class based community organizations. This was especially true for the 1880s and 1890s. Quite amusingly, they were most often the treasurers and sometimes the financial secretaries of the organizations. Among the Irish organizations the Ancient Order of Hibernians had a very significant saloonkeeper membership. In 1875 for instance Jeremiah Sullivan, who had a saloon at 164 Front Street, was the financial secretary and Thomas Monahan the treasurer of the organization’s 2^nd division. The vice-president of the 3^rd division was Patrick B. Smith, saloonkeeper at 101 Commerce Street, and the treasurer was Martin Conway, who run the saloon at 136 Front Street (Geer’s 1875: 299). In 1879 and 1885 the saloonkeeper membership of the organization was similarly thriving. Throughout this period, the president of the 3^rd division was Martin Conway (Geer’s 1879: 306; 1885: 551). Interestingly, in 1890 Conway was the only East Side saloonkeeper who succeeded in becoming a functionary of the Hartford Retail Liquor Dealers Association as well (Geer’s 1890: 570). After the early 1890s the Hibernians lost their saloonkeeper membership. Besides the Hibernians the Emerald Benevolent Society, the St. Patrick’s Benevolent Society and the Knights of St. Patrick had Irish saloonkeeper members occasionally from the 1870s till the 1890s.

The German saloonkeepers were similarly active in the city’s different ethnic organizations. The German Rifle Club is such an example. According to the 1879 and 1885 Geer’s directories the organization was headquartered in a saloon at 135 Front Street (315; 562). Later as the club moved out from the East Side its membership also lost the East Side saloonkeepers. Another example is the German Independent Mutual Aid Society whose vice-president in 1890 was Reinholt Lotze, saloonkeeper at 44 Temple Street (Geer’s 1890: 565). Similarly, one German Masonic organization, the Teutonia Lodge had one East Side saloonkeeper member in 1890, the treasurer Joseph Kastner, who at that time, ran a particularly important saloon for community organizing, the one at 50 Market Street (Geer’s 1890: 576).

In the US at the time saloons were among the most common birthplaces and meeting venues of ethnic charities and labor unions (Powers 127-33; Calkins 10). In Hartford, 50 and 52 Market Street served as meeting places for a great number of organizations. 50 Market Street was usually registered as a saloon while 52 was listed as a hall. These two places were clearly tied to each other. Although their proprietors changed over time, from the late 1870s till the 1910s various ethnic and class based organizations used 50 and 52 Market Street as their regular meeting places. The proprietors of these places were always of German origin. In the 1880s both places were in the hands of the influential and affluent Heublein family – 52 Market was called the Heublein hall (Geer’s 1879: 230; 1885: 378-79). In 1879 the Heubleins owned five saloons, a bottler’s, and a grocery in the city (Geer’s 1879: 318). By 1890 Joseph Kastner took over the saloon at 50 Market Street and soon he became the proprietor of the Heublein hall, which he renamed Kastner hall (Geer’s 1890: 473-73). By 1900 both 50 and 52 Market Street were owned by Philip Conrad (Geer’s 1900: 705). In 1905 in the Geer’s 52 Market was registered as Aetna hall and later in 1909 as the Venetian Café (855-56; 1035-36).

The earlier mentioned German Independent Mutual Aid Society had its regular, monthly meetings in one of these saloons from the late 1870s until around 1905. Similarly, the Emerald Benevolent Society met in one of these establishments from the 1880s till around the turn of the century (Geer’s 1879: 315, 1885: 561- 62, 1890: 565; 1896: 688; 1900: 785; 1905: 953). Another non-ethnic benevolent society that met here in the mid 1890s was the Universal Workmen’s Sick and Death Benefit Society (Geer’s 1890: 701). 50 and 52 Market Street also hosted the meetings of two German Masonic organizations: the Uhland Lodge around the late 1870s and the Germania Lodge from the mid 1880s all way until the late 1890s (Geer’s 1879: 318; 1890: 574; 1896: 699). In addition, some of the local trade unions rented their meeting place here at Market Street. Around 1890 the Tailor’s Progressive Union met every 2^nd and 4^th while the Tailor’s Progressive Union of America met every 1^st and 3^rd Tuesdays at Kastner’s saloon (Geer’s 1890: 569). In 1909 the Baker’s and Confectioners Journeymen International Union held twice monthly meetings at the Venetian Café (Geer’s 1909: 1147).

Market Street was not the only place where trade unions met. Quite commonly the Irish saloons provided back-room places for the unions to hold their regular meetings, especially in their formative years (Calkins 9). As Clouette points out Hartford’s Irish immigrants, like the Irish elsewhere, were active in unionizing (90-95). An interesting example of an Irish saloon that was friendly to unions was James F. Lawler’s at 32 Front Street. According to the 1890 Geer’s directory the Bricklayer’s and Plasterers’ Union held its regular meeting here at Lawler’s place. Perhaps in exchange for the back room space, the bricklayers and plasterers made Lawler the president of their union (564). Similarly, the Waiters’ Union met in Breton Hubert’s saloon at 167 State Street (576).

But close ties between the saloons and the trade unions in Hartford were rather short-lived and only important in the formative years of the unions. After 1890 with very few exceptions the trade unions of Hartford held their official meetings at 7-11 Central Row at the City Hall. One plausible explanation has to do with the fact that trade unions were very often accused of drawing their membership from common drunkards. In 1914 the Reverend Dr. Herbert Judson White in a sermon at First Baptist Church claimed the saloons were responsible for all the social evils related to labor in American cities. “The saloon has ever been the nemesis of labor-unionism […] In all the history of labor-unionism the men who have misled and dishonored the cause have been men who drank and plotted at the saloon. This poison-seller has been an accursed dead weight about labor’s neck” (Hartford Courant, “Says Liquor”).

White’s words show that even in 1914, when saloons in Hartford were not nearly as important institutions for the labor unions as earlier, the Yankee establishment identified labor unionism with drunkenness and the saloons. Thus it is understandable that most unions quickly abandoned the saloons as their officially registered meeting places and headquarters in favor of the less suspicious Union Hall at City Hall. Still, union members were very likely to have been among the most regular and consistent saloon patrons. By informal socializing in the saloons, union members could further reinforce their class loyalty. Like anywhere else in the country, the East Side saloons probably hosted hundreds of informal union meetings unlisted by the Geer’s directories. 

These examples clearly show that many East Side saloons were openly and officially engaged in providing meeting spaces for various ethnic and class based organizations. Besides these connections documented by the Geer’s directories, the informal and irregular meetings between the members were certainly more numerous. Saloons were thus institutions, essential to a thriving working-class and ethnic organizational life. Relying on the central institutional role saloons played in the neighborhood, some saloonkeepers could also become important political and social leaders, in which position they could contribute a great deal to politicize and represent the community.  For the individual saloon-patrons the wide range of services offered by the saloonkeepers served as further encouragements to enter the swinging doors. Moreover, for the working class, saloons were the most appealing places to socialize because of the relief they offered from the hardness of their everyday life. Along with and inseparable from all the factors considered above, saloons were above all the “poor men’s club”, places where the East Side residents could engage in social drinking in an atmosphere of comfort and congenial society. Here, as the Hartford documents reveal very little, the research must turn to analogies drawn from other secondary sources.

D, Congenial Social Drinking

The saloon was more than anything else a social place for the working-class man. It was often referred to as the poor man’s club. In the East Side saloons, thousands of Hartford’s poor immigrant laborers gathered every night to spend their leisure hours in an atmosphere of congenial society and comfort. Here, even the poor workingman could afford the beer for 5 cents or the whiskey for 10. And as an old patron later recalled the saloon had a “spirit” (Hartford Courant, “Liquor Men,” 1919).

For the poor immigrant the saloon also meant an alternative to his everyday life in the rough world of market exchange and competition. Outside of the swinging doors, he was valued only for his labor. But once he entered an East Side saloon he received the treatment and the respect he felt he deserved. He found himself in a world that emphasized such core principles as mutuality, friendliness and communality (Rosenzweig 59). Collective acts like treating, singing, joking, storytelling, talking, playing cards or shooting billiard all ensured a sense of equality and solidarity among the patrons (Rosenzweig 57-64). In this sense, the swinging doors gave entry to a different world, one that was structured according to the values of the working-class.

One has to emphasize that the saloon’s regular crowd constituted predominantly a working-class male peer group (Powers 30). Saloons were the poor-man’s club, a masculine world, where no respectable women were welcome. By today’s standards this aspect of the saloons culture can clearly seem as a sexist one. At the time, however, for most working-class saloon patrons, this was the norm (Powers 31). A few saloons allowed courted women to enter through the separate “ladies’ entrance”, which even further demonstrates that the saloon trade did not regard women as integral members of this culture (Powers 32). Rather, women were considered as outsiders, occasional guests but by no means regulars.

For working-class men, however, saloons meant a real alternative to everyday life. As Jack London writes: “In the saloons life was different. Men talked with great voices, laughed great laughs, and there was an atmosphere of greatness. Here was something more than the common every-day where nothing happened. Here life was very live, and, sometimes, even lurid… (Powers 35).”

What made saloons so different was what Rosenzweig calls its system of “internal democracy” that manifested itself in an ethic of mutuality and reciprocity and represented a kind of implicit resistance to the increasingly market oriented outside world (Rosenzweig 58-59). In the every-day life this simply meant that when a regular entered his saloon, he could expect to receive respect and equal treatment from everyone.

“Bum Beer Saloon”

McCook’s picture from 02/22/1895, 11:30 PM, NYC. A genuine poor-man’s club in the

Lower East Side during the night crowded with neighborhood folks. The saloons of

Hartford’s East Side, were probably not very different from what this picture shows.

(Antiquarian and Landmark Society)

More than anything else, treating rituals confirmed the value of reciprocity. According to Powers drinking in the saloons was a social action, and so clubbing was at the heart of the working-class drinking lore. Two forms of clubbing were popular: the treat, which meant that participants took turns in buying drinks for their group, and the collection, in which participants contributed for a drinking fund with which they paid together. The latter suited more the formally organized groups, whereas the former was more spontaneous and suited better informal barroom encounters. The so-called “Dutch-treat”, not without any irony, referred to the rather down-looked practice when every individuals bought their drinks separately. This is because for most working-class saloon patrons, treating was a serious matter; drinking alongside was considered very different from drinking with peers and friends, which was considered much more genuinely sociable (Powers 76-79).

Treating was the first-rule of the barroom. As Jack London wrote: “they treated, and we drank. Then, according to the code of drinking, we had to treat” (Powers 94). In other words, reciprocity in treating was mandatory; to neglect it, meant a loss of prestige among the barroom patrons. Once, ‘Young Scratch Nelson’, a man of great reputation, treated London in the ‘Last Chance’ bar. London, however, missed the chance to return Nelson’s offer. “I had let him buy six drinks and never once offered to treat. And he was the great Nelson! […] I could feel myself blushing with shame” (Powers 98).

Occasionally, when there was a reason to celebrate, a customer could call-up the whole house to drink on his account. This could happen on any of several occasions such as births, deaths, weddings, meeting friends, a great fortune or simply a desire to celebrate (Powers 101-2). Legendary for celebrating his triumphs, prizefighter John L. Sullivan, the ‘Boston Strong Boy’, “slapped a large bill on the counter and called up the house and often tried to slug the bartender who pushed any change back to him. A man’s a man!” (Ade 32).

Most Yankees interpreted the custom of treating as a sign that the immigrants lacked the virtue of thriftiness. McCook even recalled a Hartford ‘bum’ who called up “the whole roomful, 125 in number, at one time, to drink with him, and that repeatedly, spending finally $28 before leaving” (Possibilities of Social Amelioration, Appendix 3). Even though such extreme cases occasionally may have happened in the East Side saloons, most patrons were not megalomaniacs. No one who has insight into the immigrant working-class culture could assume that such mindless treating was the standard. Treating was by no means a drunkard’s foolishness, but on the contrary, a deliberate gesture emphasizing mutual respect.

            The fact that the most important custom of the saloon culture developed around the modes of drinking is not a great surprise. Among all the services saloons provided, they were primarily places of drinking. The popularity of treating rituals even suggests that alcohol substituted for money as the saloons’ commodity of exchange (Powers 78). A real saloon regular drank only beer or whiskey; every other drink was regarded as subversive of his manhood. What also mattered was the quantity one could drink. Tests of drinking capacity and drinking contests were quite common. London recalled many occasions when he “engaged in drinking-bouts with men [as] it was a matter of pride … to show as strong a head as they” (Powers 89-90).

            Like elsewhere in the country, originating from the Irish traditions, every saloon in Hartford served whiskey. The quality of the whiskey in the East Side saloons was, however, quite low; as McCook’s samples showed, the East Side whiskey was extensively watered (Possibilities 9-11; Tanglefoot). From the islands also came ale and porter. Ale is a generic term for many English-style top fermented beers, usually with a copper or dark color. Porter developed in London; it was a mixture of beer and ale with a dark brown color, a bitter, dry taste and a relatively high alcohol percentage (Malley and Parrish).

Although, ale and porter remained popular throughout the period, the Germans made the largest contribution to American appreciation for beer. They successfully established in the US the traditions of brewing lager beer. Lager is a generic term for all bottom-fermented beers. It has a light color and a quite low alcohol percentage (Malley and Parrish). Like elsewhere in the country. Lager became by far the most successful brew in Hartford. This is indicated by the fact that by the late 19^th century Hartford had three large breweries: the Charter Oak/ Ropkins brewery at the corner of Sheldon and Front Streets, the New England Brewing Company on Windsor Street and the Hubert Fischer Company on Park Street. While Ropkins produced ale and porter, the other two companies produced almost exclusively lager beer (Clouette, Charter Oak 3-4). Which kind of beer a saloonkeeper served depended largely on which brewery supplied the saloon. If a saloonkeeper could remain independent, he most probably served lager along with some English brews.

Along with drinking saloon customers also engaged in various social activities. The most common form of amusement was playing cards. The proprietor provided tables and cards and sometimes even card-rooms for the customers (Calkins 12). Poker was among saloon patrons’ favorite games. Interestingly, playing cards was particularly common among the ‘new immigrants’ such as those of Slavic or Hungarian origin (Powers 151).  Dice games such as ‘poker dice’ or ‘craps’ were also played widely in the working-class saloons (Powers 144-45). In some places saloon-goers could also gamble on these games; however, their wagers remained rather small scale (Powers 142). Concerning this aspect of the saloon culture of Hartford’s East Side, no specific information has been available.

“Front Street North of Kilbourn”

The Kilburn Café at 138 Front Street. 04/01/1906, 10:55AM.

Saloonkeeper, Michael Coppelli served lager, ale and porter.

(Connecticut State Library)

With respect to playing billiard and pool, other beloved games of the saloons, the sources related to Hartford are more numerous. Even though the Geer’s directories did not specify any billiard or pool saloon in the East Side, other evidences show that many East Side saloons provided these amusements for their patrons.  In the late 1890s right next door to Harry S. Bond’s saloon at 25 Temple Street a billiard hall was located (Geer’s 1896: 591). About a decade later, Rock Teroux, who ran his saloon at 116 Front Street, offered “pool room, cigars and tobacco” for his clients (Faude 82; Geer’s 1905: 856; 1909: 1036).

An earlier example of a billiard parlor from the late 1870s is John Lynn’s saloon at 66 Market Street. Lynn’s was also a cheap ‘theatre’ and entertainment place (Geer’s 1879: 230). To advertise his ‘theatre’, Lynn distributed business cards all over the East Side and perhaps elsewhere in Hartford with this little poem on the back (Lynn’s Theatre).

“A good hot fire and a smiling face,

You always find at Lynn’s place;

He has a Theater, Billiards and other games too,

And of other attractions not a few;

And Johnny serves you the stuff with a smile so bland,

That in a moment more you’ll another demand;

And without exception the Boys all say,

That Lynn’s is the boss place to pass an evening away.”

Those “other games” might have very well been card or dice with gambling on the side.

Lynn’s theatre was probably not the home of high drama. Cheap theatres originated in the US in the 1850s. They usually contained a bar in the front and performing space surrounded by chairs and tables in the back, so that interaction between the performers and the audience was quite easy. The performance was not highly sophisticated: usually a dance by female entertainers, or short plots with simple themes that emphasized physical feats and conflict. The point was above all to entertain (Chudacoff 133-34). Lynn’s was probably an example of such a cheap theatre.

            From around the late 1890s bowling also became a very popular form of working class entertainment. Harry S. Bond’s saloon in the late 1890s was an early example of such a bowling alley (Geer’s 1896: 591). However, by far Hartford’s most important bowling club was the one located at 66 Temple Street. Throughout the period it was also listed as a saloon by the Geer’s directories. For a short period, around the turn of the century, John Kroher managed the saloon. Later, Richard H. Kirsche took the place over and run it for about a decade (1900: 705; 1905: 856; 1909: 1036; 1914: 1283). There can be little doubt that 66 Temple was a crowded place and a profitable business. In 1900 for instance all the thirteen registered bowling clubs in Hartford met on a regular weekly basis at Kroher’s place to spend their evening bowling along with a few drinks (Geer’s 1900: 794).

“Bond Café”

Exterior of Harry S. Bond’s saloon, Temple 25-27, c. 1896. Bond’s saloon offered an

impressive range of services. Besides drinks and food it also offered cheap lodging.

Furthermore, the little table behind the window reads “Bartholomay Stock Broker”

suggesting that the saloon was also involved in the stock business. Concerning

entertainment services, Bond maintained a billiard parlor and a bowling alley in

combination with his saloon. (Hartford Public Library)

Sports were another important element of the saloon-life. Many saloonkeepers supplied their customers with sports publications. Some even installed telegraph connections to make sure that their patrons received the most up-to-date information on sports news. Later, the telephone made it even easier to follow distant sport events with a congenial group of fellow saloon patrons (Powers 159-61). Among all sports, prizefighting enjoyed the greatest popularity, probably because it was closely tied to the “cult of masculinity” that was without a doubt an integral part of the working-class saloon culture (Powers 156). A clear indication of this relationship is that many ex-prizefighters like John L. Sullivan later continued their careers as saloonkeepers, capitalizing on their popularity (Calkins 10).

            Even though saloons offered a variety of organized entertainment, spontaneous singing remained a very common activity. According to Ade due to the prohibition amendment “the humble citizen who has the urge to recite poetry or listen to folk-songs or be a rough second tenor in close-harmony quartet […] now has absolutely no place to which he can go and blow off his stored-up emotions” (118). All across the United States, working-class men brought songs of various kinds from many different sources – indigenous folk tunes, immigrant airs, labor anthems and the era’s popular Tin Pan Alley hits – to their local saloons to sing (Powers 181).

One of the most popular of all saloon songs was the famous Tin Pan Alley hit ‘Sweet Adeline’ composed by Harry Armstrong and Richard Gerard (Powers 204):

“In the evening when I sit alone a-dreaming

            Of days gone by, love, to me so dear,

There’s a picture that in fancy oft appearing

Brings back the time, love, when you were near;

It is then I wonder where you are my darling,

And if your heart to me is still the same,

For the singing wind and nightingale a-singing,       

Are breathing only your own sweet name.

Sweet Adeline, my Adeline,

At night, dear heart, for you I pine;

In all my dreams your fair face beams,

You are the flower of my heart,

Sweet Adeline”

As the above examples showed, saloon drinking was accompanied by a great many diverse social activities. Still, most often, along their beer or whiskey, saloon patrons simply engaged in every-day conversations. For the working-class man, the local saloon was the most obvious if not the only place to spend an evening out with his peers to relax and converse freely. And in the saloon, his opinion mattered; he not only listened but also was listened to. The proverbial reciprocity of the saloon culture created refuge for the working-class laborer. Even if he didn’t take advantage of any of the services that the saloon provided for him, the saloon remained the most comfortable place to meet his peers after a day’s labor. In the saloon he was always welcome and was treated with respect.

As Rosenzweig claims, drinking was not restricted to the working-class, but saloon patronizing was (51). All across the United States, the immigrant working-class maintained its colorful culture closely tied to the saloons. In Hartford the social instinct of the East Side residents kept alive a remarkably large number of saloons and a thriving saloon-culture. This is because saloons were many-sided institutions. As the evidence shows, the East Side saloons were deeply integrated into the neighborhood. They were central places for the local communities and for the individual residents. In the saloons, people could socialize both formally and informally. They were places to relax and to get involved, to withdraw from the outside world, or on the contrary, to get informed about the most current news. They served as centers for local politics and social activism.  At the same time, they were the places where one could drink, chat, sing a song and play pool. The secret to the saloon’s success was its unique ability to adapt and serve so many needs of the immigrant working-class. The saloon responded to almost every aspect of workers’ social instinct. It abstained only from those that belonged to the church and the family.

IV

Conclusion

For the most part this study of the saloon-culture of Hartford’s East Side is a micro-analytic local history. Its findings confirm and complement what other researchers of the era’s working-class and immigrant history have found. The intention has been to focus on the local while being open to the larger context of the theme. To understand how larger historical schemes manifest themselves in every-day life, the local level must be considered. Here, the researcher can step beyond presenting the sum of things, and instead turn to the actual. The point of this research was not only to reconstruct the saloon-culture of a particular neighborhood somewhere in Northeastern America, but also to contribute with details and specifics to a much more general theme: the everyday working-class culture of industrial urban America.

The study took a double-sided approach. First, by a detailed analysis of the census data, the chapter ‘Socioeconomic Portrait and Saloon Business in the East Side’ reconstructed the demographics of the neighborhood. The figures clearly indicated that the East Side functioned as the city’s port of entry. Throughout the period the neighborhood’s population remained predominantly first and second-generation immigrant, within a constantly shifting ethnic composition. Next to the demographics, living conditions and entrepreneurship in the East Side were also factors considered. Extensive quantitative data showed that the demand for public drinking establishments was uniquely and consistently high in this working-class immigrant neighborhood. This finding was interpreted as an indication that saloons were ‘more’ than simple alcohol outlets in the East Side: they must have assumed certain functions that the neighborhood greatly needed.

The chapter titled ‘The East Side Saloon-culture’, by using a large variety of qualitative sources, attempted to reconstruct the complex working-class culture of the saloons. On the one hand, it discussed the different factors that explain the remarkable popularity of the saloons in the neighborhood. Above all, saloons were identified as key social centers for the neighborhood. Much evidence was presented to demonstrate that saloonkeepers and saloons were focal points in the neighborhood’s information network and were central to the organizational life of the East Side communities. Especially for the Irish and the Germans, saloons were genuine neighborhood institutions that helped to sustain ethnic and class loyalty within their communities. Furthermore, saloons were politically active. A few saloonkeepers engaged in local politics and thus helped to politicize their neighborhood.

Next to the saloons’ role as centers for the community, saloons were also identified as essential institutions for the individual residents. The study discussed in details the remarkable variety of services saloonkeepers provided for their patrons. Along many other services, saloons were places to look for a job, to cash a paycheck, to read newspaper, or even to eat for free. Most important of all, they were the only affordable leisure available for the working-class residents of the neighborhood. Here, the poor immigrant could withdraw to from his demanding job and harsh living conditions to meet his peers and socialize freely. The congenial atmosphere of the saloon was proverbial. Through the swinging doors the poor laborer entered a world that emphasized such values as reciprocity and mutuality, which by sharp contrasted with the outside world of free market exchange and competition.

The chapter also discussed the other side of the coin, which is indeed less appealing. The study showed how drunkenness and what were considered its related social problems were most pervasive in the East Side communities. Much evidence shows that alcohol consumption was very high among the East Side residents from which many working-class families’ budget suffered. There can be little doubt, that saloons had their share in facilitating immoderate drinking. Also, the sources indicated that certain saloons engaged in prostitution, gambling or other petty crimes. Particularly soliciting was an illegal business that saloons promoted. Overall, the East Side underworld was certainly tied to the saloons and capitalized on their potential as focal points in the local network. However, East Side crime was not the result of cultural but of social and economic factors. It is not a big surprise that criminality flourishes where poverty is pervasive. Also, the sources suggest that only a few of the East Side saloons were regularly involved in criminal activities. The majority of them remained genuine working-class establishments where the saloonkeepers guarded the good reputation of their place.

Overall, regular life in Hartford’s East Side was very similar to that in the immigrant quarters of other American industrial centers. Like elsewhere in the country, saloons in Hartford were an integral part of everyday working-class life. They adapted so well to the needs of the neighborhood that they could survive all the drastic population shifts of this turbulent period. Next to the church, saloons represented the most essential social establishments in the East Side. All day long, they were accessible for the neighborhood’s residents, who came to the saloons for many different reasons. And in the evenings, the neighborhood was filled with the loud voices of locals who appreciated their glass of beer or whiskey in the congenial social milieu of their regular saloons.

Works Cited

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