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 Only after Prohibition was repealed did public drunkenness become an offense, one directed at people of color and the poor.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 historically Black neighborhood in Brooklyn, we find Herbert Von King Park. Designed in 1871 by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux, it is one of the borough’s oldest parks. Then a pre-Prohibition utopia, it is easy to imagine park denizens enjoying an afternoon pint. But Von King Park has little of the topological wildness and surprise of the pair’s more famous designs of Central and Prospect Parks, making it poorly adapted to the illicitness required of modern park boozing.
In pleasant weather, picnicking Black families gather in the park, folding tables laden with home cooked food, and not a bottle in sight to catch the eye of cops walking their beat. A year ago, however, I noticed a new kind of party, populated by young, mostly white dads, wrangling children while taking long swigs from cans of craft beer. No pathetic paper cups, no shameful paper bags; these confident owners of gut-renovated brownstones guzzled unabashedly. The selective application of open container laws highlight what it’s always been: a tool to criminalize bodies of color, the poor, and the homeless. Manhattan, now too rich for good, old-fashioned crime (except for white collar, of course), decriminalized public drinking in 2016.
Early this summer, the park hosted a concert. The crowd was diverse; Black and brown with a smattering fo white faces, young, old, dogs, etc. all swaying to the sound system. What a happy shock it was that nearly everyone joyfully held aloft an open can. A disturbing question arose: did the white dads pave the way for a true people’s party? It is strange to consider how gentrification might crack open some doors while firmly closing others. Less policing in public space is good for everyone, as the city learned first hand with broken-window policing and stop and frisk. But how to separate the liberalization of public space from the economic terrorism of gentrification? Reader, I know this: on that summer evening, music and drinks in the park became an equalizer amongst the crowd, and the crowd became a community.