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January 2011
In 1933 the sale of alcoholic beverages became legal again in the United States—and the speakeasy died. Thus ended the 13-year social-engineering experiment that President Herbert Hoover had called “noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose.” Prohibition had certainly had far-reaching effects, and not only in ways Hoover had anticipated; it also spawned the speakeasies that, in the words of the newspaperman Stanley Walker, “contributed more than anything else to the madhouse that was New York.”
Al Hirschfeld, the famous theatrical caricaturist, knew that madhouse intimately. He even wrote and illustrated a book about speakeasies, Manhattan Oases , published in 1932, while Prohibition was still in force. To mark Hirschfeld’s hundredth birthday, this remarkable book—which describes the era’s cafés, clubs, and dives with a pungent mixture of fondness and scorn—has just been reissued under a new title, The Speakeasies of 1932 , with an introduction by Pete Hamill (Glenn Young Books/Applause, $26.95).
No matter where you travel in the United States, chances are you’ll be close to a worthy tavern. The trick is to find it. To that end, we found The Beer Lover’s Guide to the USA , by Stan Hieronymus and Daria Labinski (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2000), a tremendous resource for any traveling bar aficionado.
Start at the Woodstock Chamber of Commerce and Arts ( www.woodstockchamber.com ) and the
Woodstock Guild ( www.woodstockguild.org ). The heart of town, a half-mile of Tinker Street, is home to shops, galleries, restaurants, and many establishments offering yoga classes.Oddly, for such a tourist-heavy destination, there aren’t many places in town to stay. Not in the mood for a bed-and-breakfast, I chose the Woodstock Inn on the Millstream. Despite its rather grand name, it’s a vintage 1950s motel with some up-to-date flourishes (like air conditioning), set on a very pleasant wooded 14 acres. There is a swimming hole in the back yard, and it’s an easy five-minute walk to town. It was good not to have to drive onto Tinker Street, which gets seriously crowded on weekends. By Monday a relative peace had descended, and on Tuesday I noticed that many shops and galleries were closed, as their owners took a day of rest before visitors began to reappear in numbers toward the end of the week.
After an absence of decades, I rode into Woodstock, New York on one of last July’s hottest days and during the town’s self-proclaimed Summer of the Guitar. Taking up the new civic-sponsored tradition of street art that had brought fiberglass cows to Chicago and, less appropriately, to New York City, the famous village in the Catskills had adopted the idea and reconfigured it. The guitar, after all, “is the true iconic image of Woodstock’s musical heritage,” explained the Chamber of Commerce president. In homage to the town’s artistic past and present, each of the ten guitars placed around Woodstock was handcrafted in a variety of materials. No fiberglass here.
Gee’s Bend, Alabama, was so isolated for so long that its only road out of town wasn’t paved until 1967. But the women of the little African-American hamlet have a tradition of creating such extraordinary quilts from whatever materials were available that a show of their work, from the 1930s to 1970s, was recently a runaway hit at the Museum of Fine Arts, in Houston, and then at the Whitney Museum, in New York City. Gee’s Bend: The Women and Their Quilts (Tinwood Books, 432 pages, $75) is a big, heavy, sumptuous presentation of more than 300 of the dazzling abstractions, with profiles of the women who created them.