Taverns & Saloons

By 1900 there was roughly one saloon for every three hundred Americans, and in working-class city wards the ratio was far tighter than that. It was the most common commercial building in the country after the general store.

The interior photographs are worth reading carefully because almost everything in them was supplied by somebody else. The bar, the mirror, the fixtures, the signs and often the building lease came from a brewery under a tied-house arrangement, in exchange for the saloon selling that brewery's beer exclusively. A photograph showing one brand on every surface is documenting a contract rather than a preference.

The free lunch is the detail people find hardest to believe. Buy a five-cent beer and eat as much as you liked — bread, cold meat, cheese, pickles, boiled eggs, sausage, sometimes soup. It was deliberately salty. For a great many laboring men it was the main meal of the day, and reformers attacked it precisely because it worked.

The back bar itself was a piece of furniture worth serious money. Carved oak or mahogany, a mirror four feet high, columns, a canopy, and shelves stepped up to display bottles. Firms in Cincinnati and Chicago manufactured them to order and shipped them anywhere by rail, which is why a saloon in a Montana mining town could have joinery as good as one in Boston.

What the saloon actually did went well beyond drinking. It cashed paychecks before banks would touch a laborer's wages. It held mail. It ran the only toilet on the block. It functioned as a union hall, a hiring office, a courtroom of last resort and a political clubhouse — ward bosses ran their operations out of back rooms, and a saloonkeeper who could deliver votes was a person of consequence.

The saloons were also sharply divided along lines the photographs record without comment. German beer gardens were family places with music and tables outside. Irish saloons were male and political. Black-owned saloons existed in every city and were among the few businesses in the neighborhood not owned from outside. Most barred women entirely, which is exactly why the temperance movement was led by them.

The bar itself was almost always for standing. Stools are a later idea. A man came in, put a foot on the brass rail, drank and left, and the rail existed because standing with one foot raised is more comfortable than standing flat. Tables were at the back and were where the serious business happened.

Prohibition closed the whole trade in January 1920 and the photographs from the last months before it are their own genre — stock being sold off, mock funerals for John Barleycorn, men lined up along a bar for the final time and looking at the camera.

The exterior photographs are frequently better documents than the interiors. A corner saloon with its name painted on the brick, a brewery sign hanging over the door, men standing outside in shirtsleeves — that image gives you the building, the trade, the neighborhood and the weather at once.

For dating, look at the light and the floor. Gas fixtures give way to electric around the turn of the century. Sawdust on the floor and a rail with spittoons is earlier; tile and a brass rail is later and grander.

The Machine That Built the Suburbs