How New Yorkers Celebrated New Year's Eve 100 Years Ago

The original Times Square New Year’s Eve ball took its last bow on December 31st, 1919. Five feet in diameter, made of iron and lit with electric bulbs, it had made its debut 11 years earlier, dropping from the top of the New York Times building in Times Square—which many New Yorkers still knew by its previous name, that of Longacre Square. In 1919, no one knew that the ball would soon be retired, that it was punctuating the end of the old decade and the start of the new with its final fall.

But they knew, as 1920 approached, that change was in the New York City air.

Alcohol was also in the air. With prohibition already in limited effect and racing toward ratification in the U.S. Supreme Court, New Yorkers wanted to drink in public while they could, and the bars and restaurants were happy to oblige. The December 31st Times predicted, “Plenty of Drinks to Welcome 1920—John Barleycorn Will Be the Busiest Man at Hotels Tonight.” In a creative bit of reasoning, the hospitality industry insisted that the current law, which forbid restaurants from offering alcohol, did not prohibit customers from bringing spirits for their own consumption. Establishments therefore saved patrons the effort by ordering deliveries of booze in the names of those with reservations. Shanley’s on 43rd Street had sold 700 reservations for $7 each. The nearby Palais Royal nightclub expected 600 guests at $12.50. Reisenweber’s, a three-story entertainment complex at Columbus Circle, decided it would find room for 3,000 reservation holders paying between $3.50 and $10.

The Reisenweber and the Palais, both of which had closed by the end of the 1920s, were famous for a new, exotic music known as jazz. Starting in 1916, Reisenweber’s had been host to the Original Dixieland Jass Band, who are credited with recording the first jazz record, in New York’s Victor Records Studio. In the early 1920s, patrons of the Palais could hear the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, one of the era’s most popular groups. Both of these ensembles comprised only white musicians playing an African American genre for their establishments’ all-white audiences.

Opening its doors on December 31st, 1919 for the first time was a venue that would have a more lasting musical impact—Roseland Ballroom. It had a huge opening night, partly by inviting customers to to rub elbows with showbiz luminaries including Will Rogers and the power couple Florenz Zeigfeld and Billie Burke, arriving from that evening's performance of the new Somerset Maugham play, Caesar's Wife. Roseland, established at 1658 Broadway between 50th and 51st Streets and which later moved to 52nd Street, was to become an anchor of the city's music industry, showcasing jazz and eventually rock, pop, and disco. It shuttered in 2014. But during the early 1920s, it blazed a trail by hiring Fletcher Henderson’s Orchestra—an African American group publicized as a “race orchestra" that was destined to become one of the most influential ensembles in jazz—and by admitting mixed audiences.

At the time of Roseland's 1919 opening, jazz was not yet the rage it would become, and Henderson himself, attending college in Atlanta, had yet to hear of it, and non-whites who wanted to hear the music would have to travel to Harlem, perhaps to 133rd Street between 7th and Lenox Avenues, a strip becoming known as “Jungle Alley,” where one might catch Mamie Smith singing or Willie “the Lion” Smith on piano. (The following August, the two would record the first ever blues records for Manhattan's Okeh label.) White patrons would also be in attendance, though for the mainstream, Harlem was not yet in vogue as it would be just a couple years later.

Meanwhile, far to the north and west of New York City, but still in the bounds of New York State, a national scourge, the Palmer Raids, were finishing the year in the same city, Buffalo, where they had begun the previous June. Under the pretext of national security, U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer had been using the Department of Justice to conduct attacks of questionable constitutionality on establishments with suspected radical ties, specifically targeting immigrants and foreign residents, arresting and deporting people at will. Palmer’s highest-profile deportation occurred just before the end of 1919, on December 21st, when anarchist Emma Goldman was arrested and shipped to Russia. The program was to continue into the next year.

On December 31st, 1919, Palmer’s protegee J. Edgar Hoover, a rising figure in the Justice Department, was at his parents’ home in Washington, DC preparing his list of subversives to bust. Three days later, the department would conduct the greatest single day of raids in its history. The Palmer raids set off a wave of reactions, including the founding of the American Civil Liberties Union at a meeting in Greenwich Village on January 19, 1920, where the political and disabled rights activist Helen Keller was among the first signatories.

But on New Year’s Eve, as alcohol saturated the crowds, not everyone saw what was coming. One wag reportedly remarked, “With prohibition coming in and Emma Goldman going out, 'twill be a dull country.”

Jonathan Goldman is an associate professor of English at New York Institute of Technology, where he specializes in twentieth-century literature and its cultural contexts. He is currently researching the city's cultural history for a soon-to-launch archival website called NY 1920.

UPDATE: A prior version of this story misstated the date of the founding of the American Civil Liberties Union.