‘The worst kept secret:’ Local speakeasies stand more than a century after prohibition
By CJ Fairfield
August 9, 2021
ATLANTIC CITY — There’s a narrow hallway on the second floor, so tight that your shoulders brush the walls, that leads to a stairway to nowhere in the former Elwood Hotel.
Hotel guests staying in the rooms above would open a trapdoor, climb down the stairs and access the bar through the hallway … but only when the feds raided the main tavern on the first floor.
“Rather than say, ‘OK, you win,’ they were smart,” said Cathy Burke, owner of the Irish Pub in Atlantic City. “They had another operation. You couldn’t come in through the front door and act like you’re still open. They created a secondary speakeasy backdoor.”
The Irish Pub opened in 1900 as the Elwood and operated through Prohibition. It’s one of the last establishments still standing in Atlantic City that acted as a speakeasy.
Prohibition, enacted Jan. 16, 1920, barred the manufacturing and sale of alcoholic beverages nationwide until it was repealed in 1933.
The new law didn’t exactly stop the flow of liquor. The seas up and down the East Coast became a major highway for foreign ships transporting the illegal drink. Secret clubs, known as speakeasies, popped up in backrooms of businesses and homes, Americans made gin in bathtubs and organized crime took control of the sale of bootleg liquor as the demand for booze became a lucrative business.
Along the shore, Prohibition was loosely enforced. Speakeasies popped up from Florida to New England and beyond, even in the driest of towns.
“It was the end of the sale of alcohol, except for places like this,” Burke said. “Atlantic City was notoriously an open town.”
The main bar in the Irish Pub operated “under the radar,” but there was never a guarantee that it was safe from the authorities.
And when authorities did raid the bar, operations simply moved upstairs — a place the law never thought to look. During raids, law enforcement would take all of the liquor and throw it in the ocean, “and all of the customers would run after them, beat them up and bring all of the alcohol back to the pub,” Burke said.
Customers looking for a drink would enter through the hotel lobby on the second floor and simply pretend they were checking in. They also walked through an alley and entered the back stairway (where the kitchen now stands) to enter the speakeasy.
Today, the second floor is the lobby to the pub’s hotel and looks nearly identical to how it looked in the early 1900s. A portion of the speakeasy bar still stands in the lobby, which also acted as a dance hall.
While many books have been written about Atlantic City, there are no official records of what went down in those popular backrooms where the liquor flowed freely.
“It’s not something somebody ever made a list of,” Burke said. “They’re not going to document their illegal activity.”