Arriving at Roberto’s Speakeasy

ARRIVING AT ROBERTO’S SPEAKEASY

CHANGING THE QUESTIONS

When I first decided to embark, some years ago, on what I imagined to be a quick project to create a new, more comprehensive book about the Deserted Village of Feltville, Dan Bernier, Director of Park Planning and Environmental Services, Union County Parks and Recreation, took me to see the lost murals in House 7. I instantly fell in love with them. I was even more charmed when I discovered that some past occupant of the house had actually wallpapered over these marvels, and that they had been rediscovered only by accident, when some young CETA volunteers were assigned to remove the wallpaper, one rainy day in 1975.

Dan jumpstarted my research with a Union County press release announcing my project. Edward Engel was one of the first people to contact me. He proved to be a crucial contact, because as a nephew to Edward Grassmann, who had owned much of the village in the 1920s, Engel was sifting through Grassmann’s papers, and was happy to search for papers related to the Deserted Village.

It was Engel who found a letter that identified the lost artist of the House 7 murals. The letter was written to Union County by Edward Grassmann, and was sent with a circular for an exhibit by the artist, Nicaraguan Roberto de la Selva.

The identification of the artist solved one mystery and raised many more. All of Roberto’s other known works were sculpture or bas relief. How had he come to do these murals, the only ones he is known to have done? How did Grassmann find and recruit Roberto to do a project which must have taken many months? When had Roberto done the murals? Was he already in the United States, and how had he come to be here?

In all those mysteries, some still not fully solved, but subject to a lot of educated guesses, I failed to ask some other questions. Engel identified the cottage as one of three that Grassmann, a civil engineer and prominent business owner, had fitted out to entertain clients, friends and family members. Guests would move from cottage to cottage for entertaining events, with the murals cottage—the “Mexican cottage”—being where guests had drinks, before moving on to the other cottages for other portions of the meal.

Drinks! Sources indicated the murals were done in 1929. One of the questions I never thought to ask was about creation of an entire cottage for drinks—presumably alcoholic drinks—during the height of Prohibition.

It was learning of Roberto’s speakeasy that reminded me to think about Grassmann’s Drink Cottage in terms of Prohibition. Roberto de la Selva was already in the United States, in New York, a short distance away. In addition to the artistic work he did on commissions for sculpture or Aztec and Mayan style furniture, Roberto was operating a speakeasy in Prohibition New York.

Hey, who doesn’t love the idea of a speakeasy? And so I dived into the topic of speakeasies during this period of time, especially in New York, and as an adjunct, some impacts of Prohibition on the country.

This will be a shorter than usual post, since I have spent much time on presentations about Roberto, one of which I gave on September 25, at the Summit, New Jersey, Public Library, and two of which will be given on October 18 and 19 at this year’s Four Centuries in a Weekend celebration at the Deserted Village.

ROBERTO DE LA SELVA IN NEW YORK CITY

The United States, and New York City in particular was only just beginning to be anything of a cultural center during early twentieth century. Prominent Latin American artists like Diego Rivera or poets like Ruben Dario had been looking to Europe for cultural influences rather than to the United States.

Roberto’s brother, Salomon, a poet who was honored by being the first Latin American to be nominated for the Nobel Prize, had lived in the city, and perhaps raised its cultural status among Latin Americans as he attempted to create a “Pan-American” literature community, organized around a growing notion of “modernism” in arts and literature. Salomon’s efforts in New York City are chronicled in The Dinner at Gonfarone’s: Salomon de la Selva and His Pan-American Project in Nueva York, 1915-1919. Author Peter Hulme has little regard for the way T. S. Eliot arbitrarily chose to limit which poets were included in the accepted list of those in the school of “modernism.” Eliot excluded Salomon along with various other poets, including Edward Markham, the most famous poet in the United States in 1915.¹ Clearly, Hulme thinks that Salomon deserves greater attention.

When Roberto arrived in 1926, Salomon was no longer living in the United States, although it seems he made visits. Roberto, a Nicaraguan by birth, had been studying in Mexico for some time, and had achieved acclaim as a sculptor inspired by native Mexican art. He arrived from Mexico on the crest of a wave of popularity of Mexican art, chronicled in Helen Delpar’s book The Enormous Vogue of Things Mexican: Cultural Relations between the United States and Mexico, 1920 -1935.

Roberto started taking commissions for art or, according to Jorge Eduardo Arellano, who was a Nicaraguan writer, and an enthusiastic promoter and scholar of Nicaraguan literature, he took commissions for “objetos utilitarios”—useful objects, identified by Arellano as chairs and tables showing Aztec and Mayan influence, which were in demand during this time.²

During his four years in New York, Roberto did at least one bas-relief on commission, a study of New York City based Teachers Guild organizer Rebecca Simonson with her young son. The bas-relief was donated to Union County for exhibition at the Deserted Village by Simonson’s grandchildren and is believed by them to have been created in 1927.And, as noted above, apparently in 1929, Roberto was commissioned by Edward Grassmann to paint murals on the walls of his “Mexican Cottage.”

But it is Roberto’s speakeasy which forms the focus for this post. The following is my translation of Arellano’s description of the establishment:

 

For four years, Roberto de la Selva lived in the grand cosmopolis running a small restaurant which he owned: El Charro, on Fifth Avenue, where gathered his brother Salomon, Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Sherwood Anderson, Waldo Frank and the Nicaraguan Jose Roman. In addition to partaking of tequila and mezcal, they conversed about social problems, political follies, and the dish of the day: Sandino.³

Scholar Luis Bolanos confirms the existence of Roberto’s speakeasy, which he, apparently mistakenly, calls “El Burro,” in an email to me dated July 23, 2013. Bolanos notes that it was frequented, as Arellano indicated, by Diego Rivera, and adds another guest name, Cocteau, presumably French poet and playwright, Jean Cocteau. I don’t have time to tell you about all those who hobnobbed at El Charro, but they were highly regarded artists and writers.

Anita Brenner, a Jewish-American writer who had been born in Mexico, and considered it her true home, and who seems to have been involved with everyone culturally prominent on both sides of the border, describes an evening which included a visit to Roberto’s speakeasy:

The parranda [party] was a very gay and innocent one, beginning over at Chamaco Covarrubias’ with the playing of their mariachi, (Tamayo, Chamaco, Harry Bloch and brother) and then dinner at Tovar’s with Chamaco, Rose, Tamayo, and then we went walking and rowing in Central Park, eating cherries, and then we ended up at “El Charro” of Salomón de la Selva’s brother, drinking tepache, and then I came home at about midnight. . .⁴

“IT’S EASY TO OPEN SPEAKEASY HERE”

Prohibition took effect in the United States with the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919 and lasted until the passage of the Twenty-First Amendment repealed it in 1933. Prohibition is credited with jumpstarting organized crime, because it enormously increased the revenue possibilities offered by distributing illegal alcohol.⁵ Reportedly, for every legitimate drinking establishment closed by Prohibition, six speakeasies opened.⁶

An article in the New York Daily News, on Wednesday, May 22, 1929, under the headline “It’s Easy to Open Speakeasy Here,” details how to open a speakeasy in New York City, perhaps tongue in cheek, but surely with some truth:

It is almost as simple a matter to open a speakeasy in Greater New York as it is a grocery store—and almost as safe. You pick a logical spot and after fixing it up with the landlord—he’ll charge you double rental, but that’s reasonable—you go see the inspector of the district.
He’ll offer no objections. Why should he? There’s no state enforcement law. But for purposes later to be seen, he’ll inform you that your place will be raided by police.

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Well, you open up, behind curtained windows and camouflaged sign, but with your door open to customers. The patrolman on the beat promptly reports you as a “suspicious place” and a week later the raid comes off.

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EVIDENCE SEIZED

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A squad from the station strolls in, arrests you, and seizes the evidence behind your bar. Then you and the liquor are turned over to the federal authorities for prosecution.

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Right there is where the catch comes in, revealing the clever manner in which the New York police department handles the prohibition problem. The charge against you is the “possession” of liquor. And the chances are that when you are arraigned before the United States commissioner, you will be discharged.⁷

The article goes on to indicate that the record shows that “there is not one conviction in twenty-five of such cases.” At the same time, the New York police were using these arrests as “their while alley,” to prove that they were enforcing the federal law.

The article estimates that there were 32,000 speakeasies in New York at the time, based on the reports of “suspicious places.” While the article suggests that the speakeasy owner, after that first arrest, is generally safe from further police problems, it alludes to shakedowns for money by prohibition agents in plain clothes, to whom the hapless speakeasy owner has sold liquor.

Another article in the same series is entitled “Hangovers Make Sexes Equal,” and demonstrates the rise of drinking among women during Prohibition, where drinking had been more confined to men before Prohibition. The article describes one speakeasy for women only:

There’s no longer any double standard, so to speak, for drinking—thanks to prohibition—and there certainly is no double standard for a hangover. Hence the speakeasy for women only.

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This place is located on an upper floor of one of the best known skyscrapers in lower Broadway, and its sole business is catering to the stenographers and other women employees of the building and those nearby. Here the secretary who has done much partying the night before may go for a pick-me-up. And just before lunch time, the place is crowded with the fair sex, drinking appetizers.⁸

The establishment described operated only during the day, closing promptly at 6 p.m.

Although the headline for the article proclaimed it as being about women partaking of alcohol, the stated main purpose of the article was to describe how speakeasies obtained hard liquor. Apparently, the Coast Guard and New York state troopers had stopped the flow of hard liquor from previous sources in Canada, and now hard liquor was being brought in from New Jersey, Long Island, and even from Manhattan. The article details how bootleggers had switched to smaller stills, which were not only less expensive but easier to conceal from authorities.

ONE FINAL NOTE

In doing my speakeasy research, I discovered that speakeasies are even credited with helping promote the rise of “finger foods.”

To help soak up the booze and drive up sales, some enterprising speakeasy proprietors began offering more than just gin fizzes, whisky smashes, martinis and other popular cocktails of the day. Rather than heavy meals, their inebriated customers were given assorted bite-sized canapes to snack on while mingling in the illicit dens’ loud, crowded rooms.

NEXT MONTH

Please join me at Four Centuries in a Weekend at the Deserted Village, which will take place this year on October 18 and 19. I will be speaking each day at 2 p.m. about Roberto de la Selva. On Sunday, I will have the great pleasure of co-presenting with Ron Burkard, who owns more than 40 of Roberto’s works, and has spent decades keeping Roberto’s fame alive.