Aided by hip flasks, San Franciscans flouted Prohibition. And New Year’s Eve was the most flagrant party of them all, year after every long, dry year.
From the Yerba Buena days, when a handful of eccentrics caroused in their moth-eaten Shangri-la at the end of the world, to the Halloween revels of today, The City by the Bay has prided itself on knowing how to party. A piece written after the 1906 catastrophe famously claimed that San Francisco was “the gayest, lightest-hearted, and most pleasure-loving city of the Western continent.” And S.F.’s biggest and wildest celebration has always been on New Year’s Eve.
San Francisco never bought into “The Great Experiment,” as Prohibition was called. Its hard-drinking citizens prized their town’s Wild West roots and free-spirited ways, and scoffed at the moral fervor that drove the national “dry” movement. City politicians engaged in “blatant nullification of the law,” wrote Gilman Ostrander in “The Prohibition Movement in California 1848-1933.
There were apparently at least 21,600 of these portable “wassail bowls” in circulation in The City. According to the Chronicle, “Rumor sayeth” that 900 cases of whiskey, each containing 24 pint bottles, had arrived in town a few days earlier, offering an “explanation of the whyness of many bulging hip pockets on New Year’s Eve.”
But on the next New Year’s Eve, that of 1922-23, federal agents got serious about enforcing the law — and ran into hostile cops and even more hostile revelers. On New Year’s Day, 1923, the Examiner ran a man-bites-dog headline proclaiming “Policeman Nabs Two Dry Agents in Raid.” The paper reported, “A clash between Patrolman Emile Hearn and federal Prohibition officers occurred last night while the dry agents were raiding the Il Trovatore restaurant, 502 Broadway.
“Clubs were drawn by the prohibition squad when it seemed that the argument would end with blows. The policeman finally tagged two of the cars and directed the federal officials to appear in court Wednesday to answer charges of parking improperly.” But the unpleasant reception Hearn gave Wheeler and his men paled by comparison to the one that greeted the federales when they staged a New Year’s Eve raid at three leading beach resorts. Under a headline blaring “Guests Riot As Dry Squad Raids Beach,” a Jan.
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