Tobacco Speakeasys Are The Inevitable Result of Prohibition
or, Titans Baby Titans, Santo26 Is Right Again
referred by alert reader Nick O'Teen
from NY Times [registration required]

Quietly, and without the contraptions or planning of Prohibition, the cigarette smokers of New York have created their own modern rendition of the speakeasy, where their outlawed pleasure can be enjoyed once more. There are no passwords. You just have to wait.

The proper hour can be 11 p.m., or midnight or later still in places where the patrons do not like to go home. There is no schedule, no phone call, no listing in The Village Voice. The moment comes by common assent, by a shared appraising of all the people remaining in the bar and all the forces around them - the darkness of the windows, the breath of the staff.

"I hear from lots of people, especially in the four outer boroughs," said Audrey Silk, a leader of a group that seeks to repeal the city's smoking ban. "They're letting you smoke."

Sweet.

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Waiting to Inhale
By MICHAEL BRICK

uietly, and without the contraptions or planning of Prohibition, the cigarette smokers of New York have created their own modern rendition of the speakeasy, where their outlawed pleasure can be enjoyed once more. There are no passwords. You just have to wait.

The proper hour can be 11 p.m., or midnight or later still in places where the patrons do not like to go home. There is no schedule, no phone call, no listing in The Village Voice. The moment comes by common assent, by a shared appraising of all the people remaining in the bar and all the forces around them - the darkness of the windows, the breath of the staff.

"I hear from lots of people, especially in the four outer boroughs," said Audrey Silk, a leader of a group that seeks to repeal the city's smoking ban. "They're letting you smoke."

When the ban took effect nine months ago, disagreements over the public health and economic implications prevailed. Some establishments searched for loopholes in the law, like the Oak Bar at the Plaza Hotel, which sought to present itself as a cigar bar exempted from enforcement. In large measure, these efforts failed, and smokers moved to the streets, the warm weather making the ban's first months somewhat easier on them.

Open resistance to the ban has been muted, coming mostly in the form of lawsuits, including one filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan just before Christmas by the Players Club, seeking to overturn the city and state antismoking laws. As the weather has turned, though, smokers have taken up secretive civil disobedience.

In the past few weeks, it has happened in about half a dozen bars that were visited over five or so nights. Smokers themselves discussed the phenomenon freely; bartenders were interviewed with the assurance that they would not be named and that identifying details of their establishments would not be revealed.

In each place, it was clear when the moment to light up had arrived. It was preceded by a sensation of being unmasked - a relief, of sorts - the kind that comes of knowing one is among friends.

It is a phenomenon not unlike what happened to Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani's crackdown on jaywalking, when police officers working the streets seemed to decide that, you know what, some New Yorkers were just going to jaywalk at some intersections.

With smoking, too, the setting can be almost as important as the hour of the night. The occasional sudden transformation into a smoking club does not happen in every place. Stay late on a temperate night at Union Pool, a shiny pickup joint in Williamsburg that offers pictures of naked women on the walls and the rattle of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway overhead, and it is likely the moment will never come. There are too many people, and too many windows, and besides, outdoor space is ample.

The opposite also holds. Setting can trump the hour of the night, and smoking can start before 9 p.m., but usually only when the nature of the place is so entwined with notions of decadence and indulgence that few behaviors are questioned. At the Buzzcocks show at Irving Plaza last month, for instance, even the uptight young woman who turned her head to shush other patrons (apparently she was having trouble hearing the punk rock music) held a lighted cigarette.

Ordinarily, though, even in the bars most amenable to smoking, time is the common controlling factor.

There is, for instance, a bright and festively ornamented bar in Brooklyn where a tight group of regulars gathers nightly to drink away the day's frustrations, to work crossword puzzles and argue word derivations. Among other attributes, the place is perhaps the only etymology bar in the city, and its character changes depending on the hour of the day. After a certain point, when only those well-known customers remain, the bartender, who has long since forsworn smoking and drinking, will sometimes lock the door.

And all who remain know the significance of the turning of the bolt.

What happens after the silent declaration that the rules have been lifted is the same wherever you go.

In the far East Village on Christmas night, a silvery Zippo lighter rested on a pack of Marlboro Lights, right there on the bar just a short walk from the Ms. Pac Man machine. The sight was jarring in its familiarity. What bar did those same items not decorate just a year ago?

The smoke that filled the air announced itself, if only because it had been gone long enough to let eyes and noses forget its taste. The smoke-filled bar, it said, was back.

"It never really left," the bartender said, "depending on the time of night or what the clientele is."

Over in a corner, Michael Reiss, of Brooklyn, sat talking with friends. They arranged themselves loosely around a table by a window.

"Smokers in New York City are going to find what they need to do, what they want to do," Mr. Reiss said. "Here, even if you have an outdoor patio, you're going to freeze. You have bars that are going to let it go."

So, knowing that the moment will come, the smokers sit inside these days, and they hold off their cravings as long as they are able. They may even bundle up and go outside once or twice for a light, putting napkins over their drinks like Southern Californians.

In between trips, they wait.

And then the moment comes, and it is like dancing - it is shared and exuberant and wild. It came after midnight one night last week to a dark and narrow room the shape of a railroad apartment in south Brooklyn, where Christmas lights and candles flickered. A sign on the wall announced that smoking was disallowed. Bodies were sloped lazily on couches. A man on a bar stool had his hand inside the low-slung waistline of his date's jeans.

Boots and Converse All-Stars slapped the floor as the revelers negotiated one another, moving and talking and yelling and smoking. They were in for the night. Long after 3 a.m., a bartender out from his post flicked lighted matches at his customer's feet, laughing and watching the matches expire on the wet floor.

"Dance," the bartender cried.

Up and down the bar from the door to the back wall, the air grew thick and tight and noxious and hazy.

"O.K.," said Matt Taylor, 23, a tourist visiting from Texas. "Everyone's smoking cigarettes. I'm just making sure. . . . "

He let the thought trail off, and was quickly reassured that despite what he had read about New York, smoking was permitted in this bar, on this night, at this hour.

His verbal reaction was overwhelmed by the magic of jukebox speakers, through which Joe Strummer announced from somewhere beyond the great divide that he was still, in fact, the all-night drug-prowling wolf who looks so sick in the sun, and furthermore that he was only looking for fun. His voice faded out and Paul Westerberg's replaced it, reminding a flight attendant who once told him not to smoke that she ain't nothing but a waitress in the sky.

"Who's got an extra cigarette?" called the bartender, and it turned out that just about everybody did.

posted by prof_booty | 11:58 AM