We just found a great piece on this week’s daily news from Joe Sixpack about Philly during Prohibition. It turns out that, much as one might suspect, Philly didn’t go in for Prohibition that much. An estimated 8,000 speakeasies throughout Philadelphia opened up and the city government turned a blind eye to much of it. The Weisbroad & Hess brewery (now the site of Yards) was caught multiple times brewing beer and a secret North Philadelphia brewery passed convoys of beer trucks past the police unnoticed. The Feil Brewery on 6th & Susquehanna used off-duty cops to deliver its beer. The Rising Sun Brewery used secret walls and hidden entrances to get beer trucks onto the street.
But, best of all, New Jersey’s Camden County Beverage Company stretched a rubber hose through the Camden sewers to pump beer from their brewery to a hidden beer drop four blocks away. The genesis for the idea came from a company executive who was a former administrator of Philadelphia’s prohbition office.
Raise a glass to mark Prohibition’s end [Daily News]
