As is usual when I’ve finished a big piece, I’ve got lots of leftover clippings, anecdotes and ideas. Such is the case with last week’s piece on early Asian restaurants, Noodle Joints: Cheap, Delicious and a Moral Hazard, where I have so much left over that it would take another ten thousand words to use it all up. And some of it is not even about Asian food.
For example, this question, what was happening with late-night inebriate dining in the rest of the country while noodle joints were rolling in the West?
Answer: if you were in Kansas City in 1910, you might have been familiar with the terrors of the Spaghetti Joint.
There’s a lot to enjoy in this passage, but special props for using the verb “ciceroned”, and for describing the customers of a cheap Italian restaurant as being, “served by the transplanted panderers of Sunny Italy.”
Again, as with the denunciation of Chinese noodle joints, a lot of this has to do with prohibition, women voters, and journalists stirring up moral outrage in the name of politics. (Something we moderns know nothing about.)
In 1910, Kansas City, Missouri, was wet, while just across the river, the state of Kansas was dry, thanks to the efforts of Carry Nation, a fearsome and fearsomely determined woman. Based out of Topeka, Nation had begun to put pressure on Kansans starting in 1900. By 1909, she and her lady stormtroopers had busted up enough bars and strong-armed enough state legislators that Kansas shut its taverns down, driving thirsty Jayhawkers into the neighboring states. Kansas City roared.
Of course, not every one was happy with Kansas City being a resort town. The Kansas City newspapers found a ready audience for tales of debauchery set in the bohemian dives of the North End, the Italian neighborhood. While elsewhere in the country, the term “spaghetti joint” connoted exactly what you’d imagine—a cheap place to eat pasta and drink harsh red wine—in Kansas City, the phrase took on the most lurid associations. Police raids were common and the supposedly worst places were shut down, the owners fined, imprisoned or driven out of town.
We live in boring times; when anything goes, nothing is fun. Think how much more exciting it would be to live in a time when mild, sexy dancing might get you hauled off to jail for a stern talking-to.
By the way, I think we all know what those wild young women were ragging to…
Prohibition, when it arrived a few years later, in 1920, hit Missouri especially hard. Not only was St Louis a major brewery hub, but the state was also the second largest producer of wine in the country. Anheuser-Busch, almost alone among the breweries, managed to survive prohibition, while most of the vineyards were ripped out.
Kansas City, however, largely ignored the Volstead Act, thanks to Tom Pendergast, engineer of one of the most corrupt political machines in American history. So, the spaghetti joints of the North End were back in business, wilder than ever, although few newsmen dared to complain, at least until prohibition was over. The Chicago Mob made sure of that, as Kansas City was well-supplied with gangsters, bootleggers and gunmen.
By the late 1930’s, after prohibition was repealed, Tom Pendergast had begun to lose his grip on power. The Feds jailed him for tax evasion in 1939, and while he was away at Uncle Sam’s expense, the citizens cleaned Kansas City up, electing a new reform government. And, as with the noodle joints giving way to respectable Chinese restaurants, so too with the spaghetti joints being replaced by respectable Italian places.
P.S. Joseph Hamm, keeper of a spaghetti joint that was closed down by the Kansas City police in 1913 (see above), was not an ordinary restauranteur. He was back in business by 1916 with a nightclub called the “Entertainer’s Cafe”, and would own variety of places until after World War II. Over the next 40 years, Hamm would be variously referred to in the Kansas City press as “cabaret owner”, “gambler” and “tenor”.
Yes, Joe Hamm and his partner Tommy Lyman, “the saloon singer’s singer”, invented the torch song in a Kansas City spaghetti joint.
Here’s Tommy Lyman singing a torch song:
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