Lying in the grass on a hot summer evening and cracking open a cold beer. Is there anything more satisfying? Away from stuffy apartments and over-air conditioned bars, the pleasures of alcohol are best enjoyed outside. And I’m not talking about terraces, backyards, or upstate retreats; I’m talking about drinking in the backyard for the rest of us city dwellers, the public park.
Yet anxiety haunts this seasonal pleasure: looks over shoulders, delicate pours into paper cups from a bag shrouded bottle. Quaffing from the so-called “open container” is prohibited in much of the States. But until the mid-1970s drinking in public was legal. Only after Prohibition was repealed did public drunkenness become an offense, one directed at people of color and the poor. These laws were stricken in the ’60s and ’70s as discriminatory, but a conservative backlash quickly followed, under the seemingly neutral guise of open container laws. New York City outlawed public drinking in 1976, only six weeks after the repeal of public drunkenness laws. Six glorious weeks!
In Bed-Stuy, a histor…