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!
