How Prohibition turned everyone into a criminal

Are you struggling in the sludge of planning laws? Helplessly stuck with the granny extension or the loft conversion? Builders taking an age to put those shelves up? You will in that case be interested to know that it took a year and 45 days to construct the Empire State Building. As for the Chrysler building, its gorgeous dance partner in the Manhattan night, that was announced in March 1928 and completed in September of the following year. It was the Roaring Twenties and New York was back. A combination of immigration, energy, speculation and an effective system of backhanders meant that now, after the dreary years of the war and the Spanish flu, almost anything could get done.

Strike Up the Band tells the story of those years, roaming over the city then dropping down to the streets, through the doors of hotels, nightclubs, shady restaurants and civil institutions to examine, in chapters themed by activity, all the novelties of the day. The buildings were new and so were the drinks, the dances, the entertainments and the people, as millions of Jewish, Irish and European immigrants, in addition to black Americans coming from southern states, fled the limitations of their birthplaces to make lives where you could at least hope for better. 

On the top of the Coney Island Ferris Wheel a Greek hot dog salesman, Denos Vourderis, proposed to his girlfriend with the promise that if she said yes, he would buy her the contraption they were sitting in. She did, he did. Such things were possible.

The Ferris wheel, more than the skyscraper, is the appropriate symbol of these years, acting like the medieval wheel of fortune to raise New Yorkers – some New Yorkers – to the pinnacle of the world, and then deposit them back in the shabby queue for the ferry. The chapters on Broadway, jazz, the Harlem renaissance and the new literature have sad tales in common, of heroes who let their luck slip through their hands and ended up where they began, or worse. New Yorkers gleefully exchanged the consumptiveness of the old world for consumption in the new: the conventional thing was to drink or spend yourself to death; the more enterprising, like Fats Waller, could now eat themselves into penury.

Some themes here are better served than others. Broadway, for instance, has seldom been so boring, reduced here to barely more than a list of the shows of the decade. In fact, it sometimes seems that the writers have no great flair for or interest in the arts, and include them out of a dutiful obligation to completeness. But the book fires up in areas like architecture and, especially, Prohibition. The law that introduced this – The Volstead Act of 1919 – didn’t come out of nowhere, but was the ultimate ignition of a legislative machinery that had been sputtering in the background for decades. Crisp and Stewart are concise and ruthless on the shift this law effected upon personal and public morality.