The end of Prohibition was not just a time to celebrate when it happened, but it continues to this day.
Especially at a San Diego speakeasy called, well, Prohibition. The cool lounge in the Gaslamp Quarter – you enter at a door marked law offices next to Havana on Fifth Ave. – is having $5 Old Fashioned cocktails on Tuesday, Dec. 5, from 5-8 p.m. Afterward, there is live music by Clifford & Friends playing a set filled with R&B, Motown, soul and funk, starting at 11 p.m.
The Old Fashioned is a classic cocktail is a combination of rye whiskey, house-made demerara sugar, R&D Bitters Aromatic #7 and R&D Cherry Apple Bitters. Other classic cocktails from the era (with a Prohibition twist) are the Hotel Nacional made with Santa Teresa rum, pineapple, lime, demerara, apricot and R&D Aromatic #7 Bitters; Kentucky Tippler, a combination of Elijah Craig bourbon, lemon, honey, R&D Sarsaparilla Bitters and grapefruit zest and the Army Navy, made with Bombay Sapphire, lemon, almond orgeat and R&D Sarsaparilla Bitters.
The Repeal of Prohibition was Amendment 21 to the U.S. Constitution, ratified on Dec. 5, 1933. It repealed the previous Eighteenth Amendment which had established a nationwide ban on the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcohol in 1919.
In Southern California, Prohibition led many people to simply head to Mexico for alcohol, thus establishing Tijuana as a booze-imbibing destination. Smuggling also became a lucrative business and in San Diego, Sunny Jim’s Sea Cave became a place where booze was “secretly” brought in from ships anchored three miles off the coast.
Gambling and alcohol was also consumed onboard ships close to San Diego’s shores; fairly recently one that sunk was uncovered by low tides in Coronado.
Speakeasies became havens for those seeking alcohol on land – several bottles of booze were discovered in the basement of Tivoli sometime after prohibition – and as America experienced “the Roarin’ 20s” drinking was done behind closed doors. Often politicans and cops on the take were a part of it. Today, San Diego has many speakeasies as a kind of tribute to them, one of which is the Prohibition bar.
Eventually the movement ran out of steam and in 1932, the Democratic Party’s platform included the repeal of Prohibition and Democratic candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt ran for president of the United States promising repeal of federal Prohibition laws.
After he was elected, he moved slowly at first on the repeal. The Cullen–Harrison Act, signed Roosevelt on March 22, 1933, authorized the sale of 3.2 percent beer (thought to be too low an alcohol concentration to be intoxicating) and wine, which allowed the first legal beer sales since the beginning of Prohibition on Jan. 16, 1920. In 1933 state conventions ratified the Twenty-first Amendment and it was fully ratified on that joyous December day in 1933.
Leave a Reply