Cultivating the '21' Mystique
People had been coming to establishments run by Jack Kriendler and Charlie Berns, who were cousins, since they opened their first speakeasy on Sixth Avenue in the Village, the Red Head. They were prime examples of sons of Jewish immigrants raised on the Lower East Side who found an angle in the booming Twenties and made good. Prohibition offered a great opportunity if you didn't mind flouting the law and dealing with police payoffs and the mob. The grand restaurants of the earlier decades, like Delmonico's, where the elite had wined, dined and danced, and the established bars had been done in by Prohibition, leaving a vacuum. Less conspicuous speakeasies that doubled as steak houses or Italian restaurants took their place. In fact, all four of the pillars of 1940s Cafe Society had begun as speakeasies.
Jack Kriendler was one of eight children of a Brooklyn Navy Yard metalworker who died in the great flu epidemic of 1918. His mother was a midwife. They lived in a tenement where the stove was the only source of heat in the winter. Jack had an uncle who was a success. He owned a shoe store and was a partner in a saloon on Essex and Rivington in the the heart of the Jewish Lower East Side. Uncle Sam offered a connection to bootleggers. A friend knew of a Village tea room that was about to lose its lease. At the time, the two young men were interested primarily in financing their college education.Their speakeasy changed names and locations several times in the 1920s and attracted a young crowd of Ivy League students and recent grads, with Yalies in particular making Jack and Charlies virtually an alumni watering hole. It was a good start.
One problem for the elite with the Jazz Age was that all sorts of people were going out now. One could endure only so much mingling of the classes. Something simply had to be done to separate the sheep from the goats. When Jack and Charlie moved midtown to 42 West 49th Street later in the decade they went after the decade's Smart Set of celebrities, society and millionaires by instituting a "closed" door policy at the new place, called the Puncheon but known as Jack and Charlies or "42" to the regulars. Patrons had to know somebody to get in. The cousins put out the word that actors and newsmen would not be welcomed at the new address, a calculated bit of reverse psychology that had actors and newsmen clamoring to get in. They served fancy foods and French wines and they jacked up prices, further enhancing the aura of exclusivity. The Algonquin crowd began showing up regularly. The restaurant had to move again at the end of the decade when the owners were evicted from their premises to make way for Rockefeller Center. When '21,' known as The Numbers or The Three to regulars, opened in a basement on West 52nd Street, it was the first commercial establishment on a residential street of brownstones. '21' was almost done in by the stock market crash. Jack and Charlie extended credit and chits to desirable patrons who were having temporary difficulties and in short order '21" was on the map.
Jack Kriendler was the public face of the operation, but '21' was a family affair run by a small army of Jack and Charlie's relatives. The establishment's door policy and high prices were the subject of comment, jokes and cartoons in the press, but they were a point of pride to the management, as well as a clever marketing strategy. Jack Kriendler asserted, "We don't charge high prices to rob people, but to keep out the riffraff, bums and heels." Apparently anyone who couldn't afford the tariff was a lowlife. And the tab for a night of revelry at '21' for four or five easily could be higher than the monthly wage of most New Yorkers. According to Peter Kriendler, Jack's brother in his 1999 memoirs, "steep prices ensured that the person sitting next to you or standing beside you at the bar was someone you would not mind having as a guest in your home." That might be true if wealth was your only social criterion. One of the presentable gentlemen among the regulars in the 1940s was Wayne Lonergan, convicted of bludgeoning his wife to death. During the trial it was revealed that Lonergan had been his father-in-law's lover.
The second barrier was the door policy. By law, "21' was a public place which meant it was supposed to be open to the public. Jerry Berns, Charlie's younger brother, is quoted in Kriendler's book as saying "we're glad to welcome any stranger, so long as there is available space." Peter Kriendler added, "What constituted 'available space' depended upon who hoped to occupy it." When Jack met someone he felt might be a credit to the establishment, he handed them his business card with "OK" written on it. This was a guarantee of admission. Sometimes he was caught in a situation where he had to hand a card to someone he did not care to allow in. In these cases he wrote "34" on the card which the unsuspecting dupes thought was their table number but which actually was his code for "Keep this bum out." Securing a reservation was not always a guarantee that you were getting in. If you did not pass inspection on arrival, you would be told that your reservation had been lost or entered on the wrong day and, alas, the restaurant was fully booked.
In a book written to mark the restaurant's expansion in 1936, Damon Runyon, one of several literary regulars who supplied tributes, wrote jokingly "Each guest has to present his bank book at the door to prove that he had a worthy balance. The doorman looked him up in the social register before admitting him." In actuality, the exclusivity of '21' was somewhat exaggerated. The restaurant had tables to fill, and like any restaurant it had off times and slow nights when presentable outsiders were allowed in. And there were the tables in Siberia where no regular would sit. How a prospective patron was dressed was a major factor in whether he made it through the famed wrought iron gate, which had been moved over from the Puncheon. Door man Jimmy Coslove was quoted as saying "The day I'm unable to recognize a Brooks Brother shirt is the day I quit." Unescorted ladies were not allowed to lunch in the barroom or the more formal upstairs dining room until the Second World War. Outsiders who made it inside were endured. They did not get the attention offered favored patrons.
One of the notables barred from the premises was New York's preeminent columnist, Walter Winchell, although '21' was a favored watering hole for many of his rivals, including Ed Sullivan, Dorothy Kilgallen, Ben Hecht and Louis Sobol. The official reason was that Winchell would have intruded upon the privacy of the patrons in his quest for dirt. Perhaps the proprietors also felt that barring someone so prominent enhanced their aura of exclusivity. Winchell bore a long grudge. He wondered in his column why such a flagrant violator of Prohibition somehow never had been raided. The public embarrassment led to an almost immediate raid in which Jack and Charlie and several of their employees were arrested. Through their connections, they had most of the charges dropped. The experience led them to construct an elaborate system of chutes, secret doors and hidden rooms to allow the staff to dispose of all traces of liquor quickly if the law arrived. The next time they were raided, the agents could find nothing illegal anywhere, although the smell of alcohol pervaded the place. After Prohibition ended, the secret rooms became part of the '21' legend. They were photographed for the Life feature story.