The Bad Law That Made Good Bars

New York's Raines Law meant to crack down on drinking, but it instead gave rise to an industry of hotel brothels.

When you step into the Raines Law Room at The William hotel on East 39th Street in Manhattan, you'll find a series of tastefully decorated lounges. Softly upholstered chairs, tufted leather couches, and low-light sconces create an atmosphere that's more swanky club or private living room than hotel bar. But although there's a boutique hotel with a few dozen rooms above (rates run anywhere from $275 to well over $1,000 per night), the Raines Law Room is a bar.

Like its sister location in Chelsea, the bar at The William hotel is one of New York City's finest cocktail lounges, with elaborately designed riffs on classics. There's the Led By Moonlight, a kind of Old Fashioned with aged rum, sotol, dry Curaçao, muscovado, and both mole and orange bitters. Or you might prefer the Desert Bloom, a twist on the spicy margarita, with mezcal instead of tequila, plus bergamot, aji amarillo pepper, passion fruit, and lime juice.

It's a classy joint, but New York hotels bearing the Raines Law moniker weren't always that way.

In 1896, the state legislature passed a bill that would become known as the Raines Law, named for its chief backer, Republican Sen. John Raines. That law, Raines explained in an essay that year for The North American Review, was aimed at taxing and regulating the sale of alcohol in New York to generate government revenue and reduce the number of booze-selling businesses.

The previous system, Raines said, was understood to be corrupt, as it relied on discretionary licenses and a host of largely unenforced provisions. In addition to taxing saloons, the Raines Law imposed new rules about when, where, and to whom they could serve alcohol. It raised the drinking age to 18, restricted sales "in the vicinity of public institutions" such as asylums, and prohibited alcohol sales on Sundays or on any day between 1 and 5 a.m.

There was, however, an exception to the ban on Sunday sales: hotels, which could sell liquor to guests with their meals. To be classified as a hotel, a place of business had to have at least 10 rentable rooms and a few other amenities. Thus the Raines Law Hotel was born.

Saloon operators converted their back spaces into hotel rooms so they could legally sell booze on Sunday. By one 1902 count, there were just 13 hotels in Brooklyn before the law passed; a few years later, there were more than 1,000 in that borough alone. Some estimates put the total number of such establishments between 4,000 and 5,000 statewide.

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Saloon operators incurred some costs in setting up the rooms that would qualify their businesses as hotels. To offset that expense, many became brothels and gambling dens as well as bars. Rather than a more orderly system of liquor control, the result of the Raines Law was a boom in houses that trafficked in vice—much to the consternation of the citizenry.

In 1898, The New York Times published a letter to the editor complaining that "every man about town knows that the operation of the Raines law has done more to throw our cities and large towns 'wide open,' as the expression goes, as respects gambling and other vice, than all other influences combined." The letter writer said he'd been "told by commercial travelers that since the Raines law went into effect there is scarcely a considerable village in the whole State in which there is not a 'hotel' which is at once a gambling hell and an assignation house, where rustic beaus are fleeced and rustic belles debauched."

Two years later, another Times letter writer declared that "the so-called 'Raines law' is probably the worst measure which has ever been enacted in this State," decrying the way it made "the liquor interest directly dependent upon the political boss." The writer groused that the law "has plastered the State from one end to the other with innumerable bed houses of the vilest description; it has been the cause of more indiscriminate drinking than ever before, and it has made Sunday the best business day in the week for the saloon."

So much for cracking down on alcohol sales. Thanks to the hotel loophole, the Raines Law had been deformed by the law of unintended consequences.

There were other unplanned results as well. The requirement that booze be sold with food, for example, gave rise to a new kind of sandwich—the kind that wasn't intended to be eaten, and perhaps couldn't be.

In an 1899 Atlantic article on the low-class slums of New York, Jacob A. Riis wrote of "the day laborer, who drinks his beer in a 'Raines law hotel,' 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 that were reused for every patron and never meant to be consumed.

What could be done? Very little. Without reform to the law, a 1902 New York Times article lamented, "saloon keepers who call themselves hotel keepers will continue to enjoy an unfair advantage over saloon keepers who pretend to be simply what they are."

Eventually, reformers pushed back. In 1900, a group of New Yorkers formed the Committee of Fifteen, which was devoted to stopping the spread of prostitution and gambling, largely by inspecting saloons, hotels, and pool halls and then filing complaints about violations of various codes. In 1908, the group produced a book-length document, The Social Evil Book, that contained a special appendix focused on the Raines Law.

The committee's report had all the hallmarks of a moral panic. "No one who has lived in New York City can have failed to realize that there is a close connection between what is popularly known as the 'Raines Law hotel' and professional vice," it said. "This abnormal and pernicious state of affairs is easily explained by reference to the local excise laws." As is often the case with moral crusades, the report's argument invoked the poisoned innocence of youth: "Most serious of all, however, is the fact that the Raines Law hotel which stands on the line between vice and harmlessness is very frequently the place where the growing boy is introduced to the mysteries of immorality."

Most Raines Law hotels were shut down by 1911, thanks in part to the committee's investigations and lobbying. Any that remained would have been rendered illegal and either closed or forced underground by Prohibition.

Looking back, it's not hard to see lessons for today's policy makers about the inevitability of unintended consequences and the unexpected ways that tax laws shape behavior. The Raines Law sandwiches bear more than a passing resemblance to the bags of chips handed out at bars when food requirements were imposed during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. And the rules about alcohol sales near public places eventually gave way to laws prescribing longer sentences for selling drugs near schools, playgrounds, churches, and the like—which in some cities meant just about everywhere.

New York's contemporary Raines Law Room bars, where exquisite cocktails and a luxurious atmosphere prevail, offer a counterbalance to those policy errors. They may be an unintended consequence of a terrible law, but in their sophisticated comforts, they are also a welcome one.