By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo
To avoid being caught violating the Raines law, several men carry a keg to Squaw Island (now Unity Island) by boat in 1897.
New York State Rules in place during the Covid-19 pandemic call for food to be served along with alcoholic beverages at taverns across the state.
It’s not the first time a patron wanting a cold one in the Empire State had to order some “substantial food.”
In 1896, The Raines Law went into effect, requiring that a meal be served with an alcoholic beverage. The far-reaching anti-saloon law also shuttered taverns that weren’t attached to hotels and banned drinking on Sunday.
The Sunday drinking ban had the greatest impact on the working man of Buffalo, specifically laboring immigrants who worked 12 or 14 hour days Monday through Saturday, and often spent their weekly “day of rest” in a tap room.
John Weyand, of Buffalo’s Weyand Brewery, said the law was unjust, because it most directly affected the gin mill proprietors who were just eeking out a living.
Robert Schelling, the treasurer of the Magnus Beck Brewery in Buffalo, said the implementation of the Raines law closed as many as 500 drinking spots in Buffalo.
Brewers called this unjust – but State Senator John Raines and his Republican compatriots saw the law doing what they had hoped.
Testimony in one Senate hearing said that before the law, for Buffalo’s 6,000 Italians, there were 64 Italian saloons. After a year under the new law, the number of bars was cut in half.
“These Italians were the poorest people in all of Christendom, and these saloons were a curse to them,” reported The News in 1896.
In general, according to state testimony reported in The News, Buffalo had one saloon for every 150 people, and that number, according to testimony, had dropped to a bar for every 200 Buffalonians.
“Do you consider that a sufficient number for the irrigation of Buffalo?” asked Senator Raines of one witness, who responded, “it is a great plenty.”
It was the places with a little more capital and imagination that were able to find ways around the rules. Many bar owners constructed ten “rooms” inside their spaces to fulfill the hotel requirements, which allowed them to serve meals – which could be washed down with a beer. The meals served with a beer were often inedible prop sandwiches.
Leviticus and Lodowick Jones – an anti-saloon father and son team of lawyers – became vigilante enforcers of the letter of the law in Buffalo. They first became known for fighting against baseball games being played on Sunday. They took the momentum of getting Sunday baseball shut down into working to have the licenses of fake hotels revoked. On several occasions, they photographed high-profile Buffalonians coming and going from the saloons and caused great scandal in Buffalo in the late 1890s.
The laws stayed in effect right through Prohibition, but were ultimately repealed in 1923.
