Prohibition in Emeryville (1920-1933)
Prohibition had a dramatic impact on Emeryville. The consumption of wine, beer and liquor was a popular pastime in the nineteenth century pioneer era, and by the turn of the century the saloon had emerged as a major Emeryville institution. In 1916, with a much smaller population than it has today, Emeryville supported 22 saloons located in four distinct neighborhoods: Butchertown, San Pablo Avenue near 40th Street, The Park Avenue District and Stanford Avenue west of San Pablo Avenue.
The Butchertown saloons catered to the large number of employees, mostly Portuguese, who worked in the Stockyard district. Stanford Avenue saloons had a clientele of Red Train commuters and local factory workers. Park Avenue saloon customers included Emeryville baseball fans, Key System commuters and local hotel residents.
Shell Mound Park had a large beer garden that attracted various ethnic groups, members of local trade unions and Bay Area visitors. In addition to drinking establishments, the Emeryville liquor industry in 1916 included a liquor store at 4065 Emery Street and the Gibb Wine Co. at 6701 San Pablo Avenue in Oakland’s Golden Gate district. The wine supply was always plentiful thanks to the large number of Italians who made wine in the basements of their homes.
Prohibition Prosperity
Emeryville’s saloon era came to an abrupt end with the passage of the 18th Amendment. which prohibited the “manufacture, sale or transportation of intoxicating liquors …within the United States.” The Prohibition era officially began in January of 1920 and lasted almost fourteen years.
Emeryville’s liquor industry continued to prosper during Prohibition, but it was forced to go underground. Bootleg liquor was manufactured in private homes equipped with stills. Beer was brewed and stored in sheds and buildings known as “beer barns.” Alcoholic beverages were sold in speakeasies, also known as “blind pigs,” that operated in various places, including the back rooms of legitimate businesses.
There is considerable evidence that large quantities of liquor were manufactured illegally in residential neighborhoods. According to a police report, “Three streets in Emeryville are notoriously bad. They are Hubbard, Doyle and Vallejo. One out of five houses on these streets is a bootlegging joint.”
The distillation of alcohol in private homes may have been profitable, but it could also be dangerous. In March of 1922, an alcohol still exploded in a cottage located at 1266 62nd Street in north Emeryville, setting the building on fire. The woman operating the still, Alice Wentworth, sustained serious burns on her hands and face as a result of the explosion. A fireman fell off the roof of the cottage while trying to put out the fire and was also injured. Police later found 50 gallons of contraband liquor and four barrels of mash on the premises.
The Twin Industries
By the 1920s, Emeryville had the reputation of being a so-called “wide-open city.” Evidently, the Emeryville police knew about the speakeasies, beer barns, and illegal gambling that existed in Emeryville, but they made no serious attempt to shut them down. The twin industries of gambling and liquor, having flourished since pioneer days, could not be easily eradicated.
In 1924, the Alameda Grand Jury issued a report declaring that “Gambling and vice are rampant in Emeryville and the town’s police department should be reorganized to check them.” The term “vice” was loosely used to describe the criminal activity associated with the illegal liquor industry spawned by Prohibition. The Grand Jury report appeared in local newspapers and enhanced the perception that Emeryville was a lawless community.
Many considered the charge that Emeryville was a center of vice to be an exaggeration. A 1925 editorial in The Observer, an East Bay periodical, stated that “vice in Emeryville is purely a myth of common consent.” It averred that “news vendors,” “high enforcement officials.” and Oakland pastors had unfairly condemned Emeryville “as the habitat of criminal viciousness,” and warned that “some enthusiastic person of potential political aspirations is searching for an opportunity to appear as the vigilant protector of the public morals.”
“The Raiding Axmen”
The “protector of the public morals” with “political aspirations” appeared in the person of Earl Warren. In the late twenties, Warren, at the time Attorney General of Alameda County, orchestrated a campaign to drive vice out of Emeryville. In October 1927, Warren organized an army of 75 raiders that invaded Emeryville to shut down illegal gambling dens. Warren’s raiders smashed through locked doors, fired their guns, destroyed gambling equipment, and arrested several hundred customers. An account of the raid appeared in the Oakland Enquirer.
“At the zero-hour raider’s axes and sledges began crashing in a series of skillfully barricaded doors; officers raced through winding passages into hidden rooms; panic stricken habitues milled frantically toward blocked exits, and hundreds along the streets in the raiding zone flocked about the center of operations…
The raiding axmen left a trail of disaster in their wake. In the Sunset Café, expensive grills before the payoff windows were wrecked, benches, used as shields by terror-stricken inmates, were demolished. The central payoff office was practically destroyed.”
Warren’s men raided numerous Emeryville cafes on this occasion in search of gambling paraphernalia. The raiders confiscated hundreds of pounds of Chinese lottery tickets and numerous slot machines.
Attorney General Warren also initiated a campaign to eradicate Emeryville’s liquor industry. In May, 1928, Warren’s agents raided a brewery at 1028-47th Street owned by John J. Carey. the son of Ed Carey, Emeryville’s Chief of Police. The agents also seized alcohol valued at $25,000 in a barn next door to the home of Police Chief Carey, who lived at 1080-47th Street. This raid convinced Warren that Police Chief Carey was involved in a conspiracy to violate prohibition laws. Warren accused the Emeryville Police Department of having a corrupt relationship with bootleggers and gamblers.
“Vice is flourishing in Emeryville under the encouragement of city and police officials, who are getting their cut. City and county officials have never to my knowledge made a prohibition or vice raid. Within a block of the police station of Emeryville are twelve houses of prostitution and twenty bootlegging joints.”
Warren’s efforts to combat vice in Emeryville appeared to be making progress, but he complained that whenever his agents entered Emeryville on a raiding expedition, they were either slugged, intimidated, or threatened by vice mongers and the criminal element. Warren also was afraid that one of his men would be slain by Emeryville gangsters. Police Chief Carey replied that the raiders put themselves at risk because of their provocative tactics.
“Some of these raiders are going to get killed if they keep on with their high-handed tactics of battering down doors and dropping through skylights without authority. They pounce on here like burglars without showing their badges or authority.”
Emeryville officials did not approve of Warren’s raiding tactics, and they denied accusations of corruption. Wallace Christie, Mayor of Emeryville since 1896, defended his city against charges of vice and corruption. In May. 1928 Mayor Christie stated;
“Charges of graft and corruption among city officials and their cooperation and fraternization with the lawless element are not borne out by fact…There is not as much vice per square mile in Emeryville as there is in many other cities. The people of Emeryville are about as law-abiding as those of any other community, and it seems impossible that they would return their officials to office for such record-breaking periods had they been unworthy of the consideration.”
The last major Prohibition raid occurred in July 1932 when Federal Agents raided a garage at 3900 Adeline Street where the Emeryville Police parked their patrol cars. Federal Agents seized a “liquor fleet” of five automobiles, each one equipped with hidden compartments, that held a total of 565 gallons of alcohol. Agents also discovered gambling paraphernalia and a bookmaking operation in an adjacent room. As a result of this raid, twelve Emeryville policemen, including Police Chief Edward J. Carey, were placed under investigation. Police Chief Carey professed to be “shocked to know that police equipment had been consorting with a liquor fleet in the same building.”
Finally, in 1933, the Prohibition era came to an end with the repeal of the 18th Amendment. The consumption of alcoholic beverages once again became legal and respectable. One by one the saloons reopened, and, in the absence of Federal raids, the lottery emerged from the underground and experienced a revival. The gambling and liquor industries of Emeryville survived the Earl Warren invasion, and Emeryville, as always unrepentant, retained its distinction as the vice capital of the East Bay.
Partly due to his clampdown on Emeryville vice, Earl Warren won the support of the law and order vote, and he went on to become Governor of California and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
This story originally published in 1996 for the Emeryville Centennial Celebration and compiled into the ‘Early Emeryville Remembered’ historical essays book.
