I want to hear some of your old Chicago stories--I dig old time mafia stuff. That would have been a period of Irish and Italian gangsters.
If you get a chance watch PBS--A Nation of Drunkards. Distilled spirits were around early on and temperance movements came and went. The turning point was alcohol % changes in ciders/beers etc. Fantastic documentary.
http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/prohibition/watch-video/
The book--Low Life by Luc Sante. Great historical view of how much vice in NYC.
Page 311: "There was very little that adult gangsters practiced or enjoyed that child gangsters did not contrive to reproduce on their own scale. There were boys' saloons, with three-cent whiskies and little girls in back rooms, and there were children's gambling houses, in which tots could bilk other tots at the usual menu of faro, policy and dice games." (author states life expectancy was so low many children did not survive much past twenties etc.)
**The book has other tid bits scattered through out. Gangs along with children were part and parcel of economic/political life in NYC and other major cities. Little schooling and forced work at very tender ages. Tough existence.
Deleted info about distilled spirits for they were abused early on in US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tavern
Colonial Americans drank a variety of distilled spirits. As the supply of distilled spirits, especially rum, increased and the price dropped, they became the drink of choice throughout the colonies.
[7] In 1770 per capita consumption was 3.7 gallons of
distilled spirits per year, rising to 5.2 gallons in 1830 or approximately 1.8 one-ounce
shots a day for every adult white man.
[8] That total does not include the beer or
hard cider that
colonists routinely drank in addition to rum, the most popular
distilled beverage available in
English America.
Benjamin Franklin printed a "
Drinker's Dictionary" in his
Pennsylvania Gazette in 1737, listing some 228
slang terms used for
drunkenness in
Philadelphia.
The sheer volume of
hard liquor consumption fell off, but beer grew in popularity and men developed
customs and
traditions based on how to behave at the tavern. By 1900 the 26 million American men over age 18
patronized 215,000
licensed taverns and probably 50,000 unlicensed (illegal) ones, or one per hundred men.
[9] Twice the density could be found in working class
neighborhoods. They served mostly beer; bottles were available but most drinkers went to the taverns. Probably half the American men avoided
saloons, so the average consumption for actual patrons was about a half-
gallon of beer per day, six days a week. In 1900, the city of
Boston (with about 200,000 adult men) counted 227,000 daily saloon customers.
[10]
