According to Manhattan lore, the originator of the interwar nightclub was a tall, sad-faced Irish-American named Larry Fay (see Fig. 1). A native to the island, Fay was a taxicab driver with a long record of traffic and parking violations who dabbled in controlling his own fleet of cars. In 1920 Prohibition had begun and speakeasies had sprung up to sell illegal liquor. That year, legend has it, Fay took on a bootlegger as a fare. They drove 400 miles to Montreal, where the passenger picked up a crate of liquor. Earning a sizeable wad of bills for his effort,...

In 1928 Texas Guinan’s instinct for publicity brought her to the office of the Committee of Fourteen. The committee was the city’s celebrated anti-prostitution reform group. For more than two decades it had closed brothels and successfully lobbied for new anti-prostitution laws. In recent years the committee had accused nightclubs such as Guinan’s of helping to revive the clandestine sale of female sexual favors. On this occasion, though, the reform group’s staff welcomed Guinan as she arrived with some female nightclub dancers. The hostess attempted to photograph George Worthington, the committee’s general secretary, together with an entertainer from the Silver...

The earnest reformers at the Committee of Fourteen wrestled with the perplexing modern challenge posed by nightclubs. The clubs helped to promulgate gender interactions that often looked like prostitution, but which usually were not quite the genuine article. Paradoxically, though, the new interaction seemed more pervasive, more insidious, and thus potentially more threatening to the social order than the old streetwalking regime. The committee’s efforts were complicated further by declining support from its benefactors and by allegations of corruption involving its official partners, the police and the courts. The corruption issue resurrected an old fear of New York reformers—the...

In the 1920s national policy had unprecedented peacetime impact on life in New York City. Manhattan’s financial institutions dominated the considerations of the Federal Reserve Board, the decade-old institution that determined national monetary policy. The administration of the immigration portal at Ellis Island continued to shape the city’s population. Most significantly, Prohibition had a greater influence on daily (and nightly) life in New York than any federal domestic initiative since the Civil War.

The Eighteenth Amendment produced dramatic action and reaction in the city. The Volstead Act (the amendment’s enforcement statute) made the saloon obsolete, but it also stimulated the...

The bootleggers’ and “class” clubs were the classic nightlife institutions of New York in the 1920s. Similarly, the concerns and responses that these clubs stimulated in New York’s civic life also were deeply representative of their times. Public action on the nightclubs always hinged on their modernity, on their challenges to established notions of the night, gender roles, ethnicity, race, and economic legitimacy. The difficulties of efforts at reform and regulation showed the limited ability of reformers and governments to understand and control the new modern behavior. In addition, circumstances such as Mayor Jimmy Walker’s clubgoing showed that civic regulators...

The dancers that Nils Granlund paraded before customers at the Hollywood Restaurant were scarcely the only women to make headlines in New York City in the early 1930s. Among all kinds of women were Jean H. Norris, the first female judge in the city’s history, who lost her position when her ethics were challenged; Vivian Gordon, a convicted prostitute who was murdered in the Bronx amid a scandal involving Tammany Hall; and Polly Adler, the notorious young head of a high-priced prostitution ring who was tied to powerful city leaders. Controversies surrounding these women helped to define the new links...

If Robert Moses could have had his way—and he always tried to—the nightclub was the symbol of the Tammany era that the new reform government in New York City, taking power in 1934, would toss most forcefully onto the ash heap of history. A veteran state bureaucrat and political infighter, now Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia’s commissioner of city parks, Moses marked the new era in city government by plotting the razing of the Central Park Casino. To him, the old Calvert Vaux building, renovated and decorated by Joseph Urban in the 1920s and leased and operated by...

The year 1933 had brought the nadir of the nightclub era. However, if customers had left Manhattan that year and spent the subsequent half decade cut off from the city, they would have found a markedly different scene upon their return in 1938.

In that year virtually the only surviving club from the 1920s was the El Chico in Greenwich Village. Desirable locations had hosted numerous clubs in succession, while other buildings were converted to other uses or even demolished to make way for new construction. Nevertheless, by 1938 nightclubs were back in vogue. Liquor again flowed legally. There were...

New York City’s nightlife in 1938 or 1939 featured entrepreneurs as colorful and varied as Barney Josephson, Sherman Billingsley, Max Gordon, and John Perona. In those years, however, they all stood in the shadow of the diminutive Billy Rose. In a familiar fashion for nightclub promoters, the former William Rosenberg had risen from obscurity to the peak of the business in less than a decade. At the end of the 1930s Rose’s reputation rested on the unprecedented success of his two large clubs in midtown Manhattan, the Casa Mañana and the Diamond Horseshoe.

The Casa Mañana, which opened in December...

Billy Rose’s turn to outdoor mass entertainment on the urban fringes was not the only possible indication that, in 1940, a distinct “nightclub era” was coming to an end. War in Europe brought both a palpable stream of refugee nightclub talent from Vienna and other cities and a less tangible sense that the culture as a whole was changing.¹ New financial pressures forced many clubs to close, and the New York Times noted that spectacles in the style of Billy Rose were “disappearing” from the nightclub scene. Nils T. Granlund left the city for Hollywood, where he opened a new...