Thought for the day :"I'm very pleased with my new fridge magnet. So far, I've got twelve fridges.."
Finally Got Tris and Emm here to stay for the weekend.Almost got the lawns all cut before they arrived - but had a lovely Greek Evening with Nancy and Stuart, Tris and Emm.
Showed them around the gardens
Not much else to show for the day
So, in other news..
RAINES LAW
On April 1, 1896 — April Fool's Day, as it happened — the Raines Law took effect in New York State.
The timing was not lost on anyone.
The law had been authored by Republican Senator John Raines, a Finger Lakes teetotaler who looked at New York City's approximately 8,000 saloons and saw a moral emergency. His legislation was sweeping: it tripled the cost of liquor licenses, raised the drinking age from 16 to 18, banned saloons within 200 feet of a school or church, and — most controversially — prohibited the sale of alcohol on Sundays.
Sunday was the problem. Most working men in 1896 laboured six days a week. Sunday was the only day off. Sunday was, therefore, the most profitable day of the week for every saloon in New York City. Raines intended to take that day away from them.
There was, however, an exception. Hotels — establishments with at least 10 rooms for lodging — could serve drinks with meals seven days a week, at any hour. This, the law's architects reasoned, would protect the respectable hotel restaurants where the wealthy dined on Sundays while shutting down the working-class dives where laborers drank.
The law took effect on Saturday night.
By the following Sunday, the loopholes were already open.
Saloon owners looked at the law and saw the same thing immediately: all they had to do was become hotels. Over the following weeks and months, basements were divided by flimsy walls. Attics were subdivided. Back rooms were furnished with threadbare cots. Tablecloths were thrown over pool tables. The required 10 rooms materialized in establishments that had previously contained exactly zero rooms. Anything with a surface that could hold a human body lying flat was designated a "bedroom."
In Brooklyn alone, the number of registered hotels went from 13 to 800 in six months. Across New York City, more than 1,500 "Raines Law hotels" opened within a year. Statewide estimates eventually ran as high as 5,000.
But becoming a hotel was only half the requirement. The other half was meals.
Drinks had to be served with food. This presented a challenge to establishments that had never served food, had no kitchen, had no interest in serving food, and employed bartenders rather than cooks.
New York's saloonkeepers stared at this problem for approximately five minutes before solving it.
They invented the Raines sandwich.
The concept was elegant in its awfulness. When a customer ordered a drink, the bartender would produce a sandwich — typically bread with some form of filling — and place it on the bar beside the glass. This satisfied the legal requirement that food be served with alcohol. The customer would drink the beer. The sandwich would sit there, untouched. And the moment the drink was finished, the bartender would sweep the sandwich back behind the bar — where it would wait for the next customer, and the next drink, and the next technically-compliant-with-the-law food service moment.
The same sandwich might be used dozens of times in a single day. Some establishments reportedly kept one sandwich in continuous circulation for weeks. The filling grew desiccated. The bread hardened. By any reasonable standard, the thing had ceased to be food and had become a prop.
Some bartenders dispensed with the pretense of actual food entirely.
Jacob Riis — the journalist and photographer who documented the slums of the Lower East Side with unflinching clarity — wrote in 1899 of saloons where "brick sandwiches, consisting of two pieces of bread with a brick between, are set out on the counter, in derision of the state law which forbids the serving of drinks without meals." Other reports described sandwiches filled with rubber. One account noted that a man who actually tried to eat a Raines Law sandwich — mistaking the prop for food — produced such hilarity among the other patrons that the incident became a neighbourhood story.
According to "The Social History of Bourbon," at least one barroom brawl ended when a man grabbed a veteran Raines Law sandwich and used it to brain his opponent.
The courts were asked to weigh in.
An assistant district attorney in Brooklyn, asked what legally constituted a meal, delivered a ruling that became immediately famous: "I would not say that a cracker is a complete meal in itself, but a sandwich is." The courts agreed. A sandwich — any sandwich, regardless of its age, condition, edibility, or filling — satisfied the requirement. The law said food had to be served. It said nothing about the food being fresh, edible, consumed, or composed of actual food products.
A saloon keeper on the Lower East Side who was brought to court over his brick sandwich was acquitted by the jury.
The law had been written to suppress vice. It had accidentally created a legal framework in which a brick between two slices of bread constituted a meal.
But the real unintended consequences were darker than absurd sandwiches.
The new Raines Law hotels — now legally entitled to operate around the clock, serve drinks at any hour, and rent their rooms — quickly discovered that those cheap cots could generate income in ways that had nothing to do with weary travellers. The rooms became, in the language of the era, "disorderly houses." Prostitution spread through the new hotel network at a rate that alarmed even the reformers who had pushed for the law in the first place.
A letter to the New York Times declared the Raines Law "probably the worst measure which has ever been enacted in this State," noting that it had "plastered the State from one end to the other with innumerable bed houses of the vilest description" and had made "Sunday the best business day in the week for the saloon."
The law designed to close saloons had made them more numerous, more profitable, more legally protected, and surrounded by rooms available for rent by the hour.
Theodore Roosevelt — then New York City's police commissioner, who had enthusiastically supported the Raines Law — sent an undercover officer named Frank Rathgeber into the new saloon-hotels to investigate. Rathgeber reported back that he had seen "many sandwiches but only one bed." The sandwiches, he noted, were mouldy. They were taken away uneaten after every drink. He was never asked to eat one, or to order a second one with his next drink.
Nobody was eating the sandwiches. The sandwiches were not food. The sandwiches were legal theatre.
The Raines Law stumbled along for another 27 years before being repealed in 1923, swept away by Prohibition itself — which was, in its own way, another attempt to legislate the same moral emergency by people who had not entirely thought through how human beings actually behave when they want a drink and someone tells them they can't have one.
The Raines sandwich — that immortal prop, that inedible monument to legal creativity, that bread-wrapped argument against poorly written laws — became so famous it appeared in Eugene O'Neill's classic play The Iceman Cometh, described as "an old desiccated ruin of dust-laden bread and mummified ham or cheese."
Not a meal. Not food. Not even, in the brick variation, sandwich.
Just the law, trying very hard to make people virtuous — and New York, doing what New York has always done.
Finding the loophole. Ordering another round. And leaving the sandwich untouched on the bar.
Not that we ever need to find a loophole in the law !
Cheers
