“Before there was Harlem, there was U Street,” and before there was national Prohibition, there was the Sheppard Act. Passed by a Congress intent on making the District of Columbia a beacon of temperance for the saloon-soaked nation, the Sheppard Act closed Washington’s four breweries and nearly three hundred licensed liquor establishments on November 1, 1917—two years before it outlawed the sale of alcohol in the rest of the country. Congressman Morris Sheppard successfully had brought his Texas values to bear on Washington. Washingtonians faced this congressional fiat with our typical aplomb: the part of town we now call Adams Morgan became a distillery hotbed, and, within a few short years, the District was home to thousands of bootleggers.

The Great War presented Washington with its first affordable housing crunch. Working class families who could not afford the drastically rising rents soon found themselves living in shanties in the alleys that cut through the city. One alley located just south of U Street, NW was called Temperance Hall. The rent for a two-room shanty was about six dollars a month. Today, six dollars at Temperance Hall will buy you a draft beer, a glass of wine, or an Old Overholt Rye on the rocks, unless it’s happy hour, in which case five dollars will do the trick and you’ve got yourself a reason to hold a Five O’Clock Meeting.

Photo of Temperance Hall chandelier from Intangible Arts.