![]() Over the next decade Volstead nostalgia became a nightlife cliche, with seemingly every new bar insisting on its own banal barrier to entry - passwords, handshakes, mystifying buzzer systems, ever-cheekier passageways, cryptic reservation policies. These were some of the first cocktail bars to nod to the sotto voce traditions of Prohibition-era speakeasies, but they would certainly not be the last. ![]() And I remember when PDT came along a few years later, with its entrance secreted behind a vintage phone booth. I remember when Milk and Honey opened in New York City on New Year’s Eve in 1999 with its unmarked door and unlisted phone number. It’s a funny thing to witness both the birth of a trend and the completion of its slow, strange orbit around the sun. But when a speakeasy landed in Montville, New Jersey, earlier this year, I heard the bell toll. It took 15 years for the trend to traverse the 28 miles separating my own hometown from Manhattan. You can’t walk a country mile in America these days without tripping over a new 1920s-fetish cocktail bar, even though the movement has begun to lose steam in cities like New York and San Francisco. Lately it seems the neo-speakeasy is experiencing a similar arc. Then think of the tiki spike of midcentury America-a trend that first thrived in Los Angeles in the 1930s then crept into the suburbs, where cheap gimmicks replaced the escapist camp and glamour Don the Beachcomber had cultivated in Hollywood. There’s a reason why the website for Tex-Mex giant Chili’s now tells the story of its pickles and “craft lettuce,” years after artisanal canning and locavorism first became zeitgeist in influential dining towns. Forgive the reference, but there’s a scene in The Devil Wears Prada in which a fashion editrix does a tidy job explaining this trickle-down trajectory via couture: from the runways to the department stores to big-box clearance bins. Cultural trends tend to form in the cities too, saturating the market before dribbling out to the rest of the country. ![]() Sprawl is why I grew up in the Garden State, even though both of my parents were born in Queens.īut human beings are not the only things subject to sprawl. Sprawl is what begat bedroom communities, commuter rails and the anti-culture of parts of Long Island and New Jersey. It’s the term we use to describe what happens when people migrate away from the cities and into the suburbs.
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