Museum of the American Gangster tour

Over the past year, I have learned that the more you travel alone, the more you get used to hanging out with yourself. At 24 years old, I had my first meal alone in a sit-down restaurant in Springfield, Massachusetts waiting for my Amtrak to New York. And it was pretty peaceful.

I had already requested last Monday off of work to rest up after Maria’s graduation, and had the city of New York at my fingertips…but no one to do anything with (Oh, people work? And your family can drive back to Chicago?).

What was I to do? After a nice walk through Prospect Park in Brooklyn, I went to two places on my New York bucket list: a free exhibit in Midtown on surveillance photojournalism, and the Museum of the American Gangster in the East Village.

With a huge crowd at the two-room museum on a Monday afternoon (aka: me and the tour guide), I got a solo tour for more than an hour. He provided a refresher on the history of Prohibition and America in the 1920s, and explained the museum mostly portrays how things hit New York but had an impact nationally (about a 70:30 split). Coming out of the tour, I will have to do more research on Al Capone, the Chicago gangster prototype.

Americans, dominated by males, drank six times as much liquor as they do today before prohibition. Once liquor was banned, New Yorkers smuggled it in however they could: shipping alcohol from other countries and transporting it through an underground tunnel from the East River, mixing industrial alcohol with fruit, overstocking before the law was active or getting a prescription for a faux sickness to obtain liquor. People are serious about their liquor consumption!  

Finding the museum was a bit difficult, because when I arrived at the address, it was actually a theater and a bar. I didn’t think much of it, besides “You’re in New York, you can expect anything here.” After the history, the tour guide moved downstairs into the bar and explained that it was called Scheib’s, a popular speakeasy in the 1920s for NYC politicians and businessmen. Getting downstairs was an event in itself - since all basement entrances have been bricked up since Prohibition because the government could have found the bar. The bar was made with Cuban mahogany, an extinct wood, and we walked from the bar, into the theater (pointing out where the dance floor was), to a hole in the wall where servers would drop cash to gangsters. There is even a bullet hole next to it.

Although this was a small museum, I can probably name it one of my favorite museums in America due to the rich history of its location and how I learned so much in one tour. Another highly recommended New York destination!