On a warm summer evening in 1919, throngs of Pittsburghers packed into saloons for what was billed as the “last call” before the dry law took effect . Strangely, the wild debauch many expected never materialized. “Everybody came to see everybody else get drunk,” the Pittsburgh Post observed the next day, “and nobody got drunk” . Little did they know that this calm night was the quiet before a storm. Over the next 13 years of Prohibition, Pittsburgh would earn a notorious reputation as one of America’s most defiant and spirited cities – a place where moonshine stills bubbled in the hills, speakeasies thrived in every neighborhood, and bootleggers (and gangsters) turned the Steel City into a veritable Wild West of the Roaring Twenties. This is the vibrant, tumultuous story of Pittsburgh’s role in the Prohibition era, from secret stills and hidden bars to the police and politicians who often joined in the party.

Whiskey Rebels and a Thirsty Tradition

To understand Pittsburgh’s Prohibition saga, one must know the city’s long, wet history. Western Pennsylvania’s independent streak with alcohol dates back to the Whiskey Rebellion of the 1790s – when frontier distillers (just south of Pittsburgh) rose up against federal whiskey taxes. That early insurrection was quelled, but it foretold a local culture deeply attached to its liquor. By the late 1800s, Pittsburgh teemed with breweries, distilleries, and saloons. In fact, by 1890 the city already had an estimated 700 illicit saloons, or “speakeasies,” flourishing in defiance of Pennsylvania’s high-license law . (The term “speakeasy” – referring to speaking quietly about such illegal taverns – is often said to have originated in Pittsburgh around this time .) Legal or not, imbibing was part of the fabric of local life. Immigrant communities brewed their traditional beers and spirits, from German lagers to Italian homemade wine. Pittsburgh alone boasted three major breweries – Fort Pitt, Duquesne, and the Independent Brewing Company – by the early 1900s, with many smaller brewers and even Benedictine monks at St. Vincent Archabbey crafting beer from local grains . In short, the Steel City loved to drink, and this entrenched drinking culture set the stage for what came next.

Temperance sentiment did exist – local chapters of the Anti-Saloon League and church groups campaigned against the “demon rum” – but in Pittsburgh they faced an uphill battle. Industrial barons like Andrew Mellon (a Pittsburgh financier-turned-U.S. Treasury Secretary) quietly had stakes in distilleries like the famous Old Overholt Whiskey, and even he ensured that brand survived by securing a federal medicinal whiskey license during Prohibition . Many working-class Pittsburghers saw saloons as a social outlet after long days in the mills. So when national Prohibition was looming in 1919, the city approached it with a mix of resignation and sly humor. A local paper even quipped that Pittsburgh might become “the wettest desert in the world,” hinting that folks would find a way to keep the liquor flowing.

Last Call: Prohibition Descends on the Steel City

At midnight on January 17, 1920, the Eighteenth Amendment and Volstead Act went into effect nationwide – and Pittsburgh’s legal taps ran dry. In the preceding days, residents had stocked up. Observers in towns like New Castle (north of Pittsburgh) saw people staggering under heavy loads of clinking bottles as wholesalers’ inventories vanished before the deadline . Pittsburgh’s own final night of legal drinking, June 30, 1919 (when wartime prohibition measures began), was oddly orderly as noted earlier. But once Prohibition was law, the facade of calm quickly evaporated. The region had an estimated $1 billion worth of liquor stored in warehouses and cellars that suddenly became contraband . Rather than destroy this treasure, many locals sought to hide or sell it. Federal agents immediately seized hundreds of gallons of alcohol around Pittsburgh in the early days , but that was just a drop in the bucket.

Enterprising (and desperate) Pittsburghers wasted no time in skirting the new law. Some former brewers and saloonkeepers converted their shops into soft drink parlors, ice cream stores, or “near-beer” manufacturers by day – while serving the real stuff in back rooms by night. Others took more daring steps. In one creative scheme, bootleggers opened fake drugstores to obtain licenses for medicinal alcohol, then sold “prescription” whiskey to healthy patrons . Pittsburgh saw nearly 300 physicians authorized with special prescription pads, and by 1930 over 11,000 gallons of liquor a year were being “prescribed” in the region for supposed ailments . Pharmacies, however, could not quench the entire city. Soon, a vast illicit supply chain sprouted to feed Pittsburgh’s perpetual thirst.

Bootleggers began hijacking the very shipments meant to be destroyed or exported. Liquor warehouses and trucks became targets for armed robbers. In a scene reminiscent of the Wild West, some bandits even held up trains transporting liquor out of state – a 1920s twist on Pittsburgh’s railroading heritage. At the same time, rural suppliers geared up: mountains and hollows of Western Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio turned into distilling hotbeds, ready to funnel booze into Pittsburgh’s speakeasies. The dry law was barely weeks old when Pittsburgh’s transformation into a Prohibition battleground began in earnest.

Moonshine in the Hills: Rural Western PA Defies the Dry Law

Prohibition may have closed the big breweries, but it sparked a boom in homemade liquor across the hills and valleys surrounding Pittsburgh. In the wooded enclaves of the Alleghenies and the Appalachian foothills of Western PA, enterprising farmers and out-of-work coal miners set up clandestine stills to cook corn mash into moonshine. The backwoods tradition of “white lightning” production, long practiced on a small scale, became a lucrative cottage industry once legal whiskey vanished. Remote hollows in counties like Fayette, Westmoreland, and Washington were soon dotted with hidden distilleries – their stills camouflaged in barns, basements, and deep forests.

Federal “dry” agents played a cat-and-mouse game across Western Pennsylvania’s rural landscape. The numbers tell the story: in just a seven-month period from late 1925 to early 1926, federal officers destroyed 208 stills in Western PA, which had been churning out an estimated 70,000 gallons of moonshine per day . Yet incredibly, this barely dented the local supply. By one estimate, around 1926 Pittsburgh was ringed by 10,000 operating stills – an astonishing figure illustrating how commonplace illicit distilling was in the region . Tiny home stills and makeshift stills in the woods were nearly impossible to police, and new ones replaced any that got busted .

Rural moonshiners developed elaborate systems to evade detection. They often worked at night by the light of the moon (hence moonshine), kept lookout posts on ridge tops, and paid off local constables for alerts. Country roads became bootleg highways as drivers in souped-up Model T Fords transported jars of “mountain dew” towards the city. Western Pennsylvania’s geography – with its winding backroads and river valleys – actually aided smugglers hoping to bypass police checkpoints. Many a coal truck or produce wagon rumbling toward Pittsburgh had a secret false floor hiding kegs of moonshine beneath the carrots and cabbages.

One infamous local moonshiner, for example, was known to stash whiskey inside hollowed-out logs on lumber trucks. Others floated contraband cases down the Monongahela River at night, retrieving them downstream near Pittsburgh’s city docks. By the mid-1920s, Pittsburgh’s hinterlands had earned a dubious distinction as perhaps the “wettest spot in the United States,” as one report put it . The sheer defiance of Prohibition in Western PA was staggering – an area that once sparked the Whiskey Rebellion was now openly thumbing its nose at the Great Experiment again. All that illegal alcohol from the hills needed customers, and Pittsburgh’s urban speakeasies provided a ready market.

Speakeasy Boom: Hidden Bars in Every Neighborhood

By all accounts, speakeasies – those illicit drinking dens – sprouted like wildflowers in 1920s Pittsburgh. In the early years of Prohibition, makeshift bars popped up in back alleys, basements, and even respectable establishments across the city. Within just three years, Pittsburgh was said to have 2,500 illegal taverns operating , far outnumbering the pre-Prohibition saloons. Practically every neighborhood had them, from the bustling Strip District and Downtown to the Hill District, North Side, South Side, and beyond. Thirsty Pittsburghers, it turned out, could find a drink almost anywhere if they knew the right knock or password.

Some speakeasies were dingy working-class dives, catering to laborers craving cheap “pig’s ear” (slang for foul homemade beer) or raw moonshine. The North Side, for example, had joints like one at East Street and Milroy that served “colored moonshine” of suspicious origin in a filthy barroom . Another tiny tavern on Cajou Way was literally a 10-by-12 foot room where a “frowzy, unkempt bartender” ladled out moonshine “guaranteed to kill at 20 paces,” according to a reporter . Despite its notoriety, that hole-in-the-wall speakeasy operated for two years without a single police raid – a testament to how brazen and protected even the low-end places were.

Not all of Pittsburgh’s speakeasies were grimy shacks. Many were relatively upscale clubs that captured the glamour of the Jazz Age. Downtown and East End elites frequented hidden cocktail lounges offering jazz music, dancing, and quality liquor (often smuggled from Canada or Philadelphia). In East Liberty, one covert bar operated out of the backroom of a clothing store on Frankstown Avenue. During a 1926 visit by a journalist, a Pittsburgh police lieutenant casually strolled in, ordered a “high power beer,” drank it, and wished everyone a good night – then left without any enforcement action . As the reporter wryly noted, “So runs the law in Pittsburgh, Pa., Anno Domini 1926.”

The city’s most infamous red-light area, the Hill District, boasted an entire universe of speakeasies and “buffet flats” (apartments doubling as clubs). The Hill was described as Pittsburgh’s worst “plague spot” of vice by the newspapers . There were so many moonshine joints and whorehouses packed into the Hill District that, as one account claimed, even a team of reporters couldn’t visit them all in a week . At one establishment called the Paramount Inn on Wylie Avenue, a newsman recounted being served beer by a waitress who then hiked up her skirt to perform an obscene dance right in the open . Such sights underscored how Prohibition’s illicit nightlife often mixed with other vices – gambling, prostitution, and jazz – creating a heady underground scene.

From the Strip District’s warehouse speakeasies to secret saloons in Homewood and Oakland, Prohibition increased Pittsburgh’s nightlife rather than subdued it. Even previously law-abiding venues joined the fray. The venerable Original Oyster House in Market Square (opened 1870 and still operating) supposedly kept serving behind closed doors, maintaining a respectable front as a seafood restaurant while slipping regulars a forbidden drink . And in the basement of Downtown’s grand William Penn Hotel, a genuine hidden bar opened in 1920 for Pittsburgh’s high society to imbibe discreetly (a space that has been restored today as a “Speakeasy” lounge). Pittsburgh’s workers, gangsters, politicians, and even police all rubbed shoulders in these myriad speakeasies, blurring social lines in the shared pursuit of a good stiff drink .

“Wettest City in the West”: Corruption and the Law

Keeping all those speakeasies and stills running in Pittsburgh required more than cleverness – it required looking the other way on a massive scale. Local law enforcement in Pittsburgh was, to put it mildly, deeply compromised during Prohibition. The Pittsburgh police earned a reputation for extraordinary levels of corruption and complicity. In many cases, officers and officials were not just tolerating the illegal liquor trade; they were actively participating in it.

Early on, Pittsburgh’s police adopted an unofficial stance of “minimal enforcement.” Their attitude was summed up by a popular sarcastic remark: “Let the federal men raid.” Local cops often drank in speakeasies during their shifts, and their superiors took cuts from the bootleggers’ profits . It was not uncommon for a beat officer to stop into a neighborhood blind pig for a free beer, or for precinct captains to accept weekly envelopes in exchange for warning speakeasy owners of impending raids. One newspaper investigation in 1926 found stills operating within a stone’s throw of police stations, utterly ignored by the constables inside .

In 1926, the Pittsburgh Post ran an exposé series on vice that laid bare the extent of official corruption. It described how ward leaders, public officials, and police officers openly accepted protection money and in some cases even operated their own speakeasies, brothels, or gambling dens . One notorious example on the North Side was a speakeasy/gambling club running on the third floor of the Kenyon Theater, lavishly outfitted with marble tables and a Victrola playing jazz. Directly below it, on the ground floor, was a police inspector’s public office – yet the illegal club upstairs carried on with an “open-door policy” . Such brazenness led outsider journalist Walter Liggett to label the city “politically putrid” in a national magazine, calling Pittsburgh perhaps the most corrupt big city in the country in 1930 .

The anecdotes from this era would almost be comedic if not so telling. When $5,000 worth of confiscated whiskey mysteriously disappeared from the evidence room of a Frankstown Avenue police station, the precinct inspector claimed the barrels must have “leaked” – earning himself the mocking nickname “Leaking Bung” Kirley in the press . The Hill District’s police lieutenant was dubbed “Distillery Joe” Elsner, and the North Side’s aforementioned Inspector Faulkner was known as “Red Light Charlie,” indicating his indulgence of vice in his district . Pittsburgh’s police superintendent, Thomas McQuaide “Big Bill” Walsh, was so entangled with the underworld that he became known as the “Big Boss of crime and vice.” (Indeed, by 1928, even Pittsburgh’s long-indulgent public had enough – a grand jury indicted Walsh and multiple police lieutenants for corruption, a rare attempt at reform amidst the chaos .)

With local enforcers mostly compromised, the heavy lifting fell to federal Prohibition agents and the state police. These agents – often outsiders assigned to Pittsburgh – fought an uphill battle. They pioneered tactics like “smell warrants,” persuading judges to issue search warrants whenever agents claimed to literally sniff fermenting mash in a home . Federal squads would make dramatic raids on breweries and warehouses, sometimes engaging in gun battles with bootleggers. Yet the feds were undermanned and sometimes corrupt themselves. Some agents succumbed to bribes to look the other way or tip off the very bootleggers they were supposed to catch . One cynical Treasury agent, Saul Grill, noted, “It’s almost impossible for a man to go into Pennsylvania to enforce the Prohibition law and come out clean… If he is not a crook when he goes in, the chances are he’ll become one.” This summed up the effect Pittsburgh had even on well-intentioned lawmen.

Ultimately, enforcement in Pittsburgh became a tragic farce: ordinary citizens caught with a pint might face jail, while big-time bootleggers often walked free with a mere $100 fine in court . The dual system of justice bred cynicism and, ironically, even more contempt for the law. By the late 1920s, Pittsburgh’s flouting of Prohibition was legendary, earning it nicknames like “The drinkingest town in the West.” Far from being a law-and-order town, Pittsburgh seemed to pride itself on giving the Volstead Act a black eye.

Bootleggers and Gangsters: Pittsburgh’s Underworld Power Struggles

As speakeasies thrived and enforcement waned, a violent underworld blossomed in Pittsburgh. The illicit alcohol trade was enormously profitable – and with profits came gang rivalries and organized crime. During Prohibition, Pittsburgh transformed into one of America’s most notorious gangster towns, on par with Chicago and New York in the headlines . The city’s large industrial workforce and dense immigrant neighborhoods provided perfect cover and recruits for bootlegging gangs. Soon, gunfire from rival mobsters echoed in the streets, turning quiet ethnic enclaves into battlegrounds.

Early on, numerous small-time gangs vied for turf. But a few kingpins quickly rose to dominance. One was Giuseppe “Joe the Boss” Siragusa, an Italian-born mobster who built a sophisticated liquor distribution network across Pittsburgh’s neighborhoods . Siragusa became an early boss of the Pittsburgh Mafia, dealing in imported whiskey and homebrew alike. He, like many others, met a bloody end – assassinated in his home in 1931 . Another prominent faction was the Larimer Avenue Gang, led by brothers Louis and Joseph Volpe, who operated out of the Larimer/East Liberty area . The Volpe brothers’ racket grew rich on bootlegging, gambling, and extortion. They were known for ruthlessness and for leveraging bribery and political influence to avoid jail . Time and again, the Volpes beat criminal charges in court, underscoring how corruption ran from the beat cop all the way to the courthouse.

By the late 1920s, these larger outfits began to clash violently. Pittsburgh’s bootlegger turf wars featured bombings of rival breweries and drive-by shootings that terrorized neighborhoods. The Monastero gang, including feared enforcer Steve Monastero, battled for control of speakeasies and distilleries, even blowing up a rival’s building when his moonshine encroached on their territory . Scores of unsolved murders piled up as gangsters fought over the lucrative market. Between 1926 and 1933, over 200 gangland killings occurred in Pittsburgh – a staggering body count that locals had never seen before . It seemed the city’s criminal underworld was as fiery as its steel mills, and law enforcement was either unable or unwilling to stem the bloodshed.

The most notorious incident came on July 29, 1932 – the Volpe Brothers Massacre. By this time, a mobster named John Bazzano had become the Mafia don in Pittsburgh, and he viewed the independent Volpe brothers as a threat. On that summer day, gunmen loyal to Bazzano brazenly gunned down three Volpe brothers in broad daylight as they gathered at a coffee shop on Wylie Avenue in the Hill District . The scene was like something out of a gangster film: men with pistols jumped out of a car and opened fire inside the crowded café, killing the brothers where they stood. This triple murder – right in downtown’s backyard – stunned the city and made national news, painting Pittsburgh as a fierce mob battleground . Locals were horrified that such a Chicago-style hit had happened on their streets.

Ironically, the Volpe massacre proved to be both the bloody peak of Pittsburgh’s bootlegging era and its epilogue. It occurred just as Prohibition was winding down (1932), and it also spelled the beginning of the end for John Bazzano. In a twist worthy of a Shakespearean tragedy, Bazzano was swiftly punished by the national Mafia Commission for killing the Volpes without approval. A month later, he was found dead in New York – strangled and stuffed in a sack with canary feathers in his mouth as a grim message that he had “sung” out of turn . With his death and Prohibition’s repeal, organized crime in Pittsburgh shifted focus to other rackets, but the legend of those bootlegger gang wars lived on. (Today, tales of figures like the Volpe brothers, Bazzano, and Siragusa are part of Pittsburgh’s infamous lore – explored further in our feature on Pittsburgh’s Notorious Gangsters and Crime Stories.)

The Women of Whiskey: Bootlegging Grandmas and Speakeasy Queens

Prohibition in Pittsburgh wasn’t only the domain of men with tommy guns; women, too, carved out their own niche in the illicit liquor trade. In fact, some of the city’s most colorful Prohibition-era characters were women who defied the law (and social expectations) to make and sell booze. These enterprising ladies often ran under-the-radar operations, earning nicknames like “Bootlegging Grandmas” in later lore. While female involvement in rum-running was less publicized, it was certainly happening in Pittsbuprohibition_argh’s neighborhoods.

Take Goldie Lerner, for instance. Goldie was a Jewish mother in the Hill District who saw an opportunity in the early 1920s. She allegedly operated a speakeasy in the back of her family’s butcher shop on Wylie Avenue , serving homemade hooch to locals. Under the guise of selling cuts of meat up front, Goldie’s clandestine tavern in the rear became a neighborhood fixture. Her enterprise was so successful (and tolerated) that Goldie continued plying the trade even after Prohibition, and she became known affectionately as the queen of the Hill’s bootleggers.

In Pittsburgh’s working-class West End, a formidable woman named Freda “Mama” Pope made headlines as well. Freda and her husband August ran a hotel and saloon that turned speakeasy once the dry law hit. In 1920, federal agents finally raided the Pope establishment, arresting August and their sons for illegal liquor – but it was widely known that Freda had been the brains and brawn behind their bootlegging venture . After her family’s arrest, this indomitable widow kept the business alive by moving operations to a roadhouse outside city limits, earning her own spot in Pittsburgh’s crime history.

Then there was Jennie Friedman, another Hill District woman who dabbled in the booze trade, and Mary “Polly” Jablosky, a Polish American known to distribute moonshine on the North Side . These women often started by brewing beer or distilling in their kitchens – after all, making wine at home for “personal use” was technically legal – and then gradually expanded into small-scale sales. Because they didn’t fit the typical image of a gangster, they could sometimes fly under the radar. Neighbors might have suspected the kindly grandmother down the street was selling more than tea out of her parlor, but police often overlooked them in favor of chasing flashier male racketeers.

Their motivations varied. Some needed to support their families in hard times; others relished the adventure and independence that came with subverting a law they saw as unjust. And at least in Goldie Lerner’s case, their legend only grew with time. Today, Goldie and her contemporaries are remembered as Pittsburgh’s “bootlegging queens” – unlikely folk heroes who proved that Prohibition-era rebellion cut across gender and age lines. (For more on these hidden figures, see “The Hidden History of Pittsburgh’s Bootlegging Grandmas and Roadhouse Queens” on Steel City History.)

Cracks in the Crackdown: Public Backlash and the Path to Repeal

By the late 1920s, it was clear that Prohibition in Pittsburgh (and the nation at large) was failing dramatically. The law intended to eliminate liquor had instead spawned rampant crime, corruption, and a populace that drank as much as ever – albeit in secret. Public opinion in Pittsburgh gradually shifted toward opposition to Prohibition, especially as the Great Depression hit in 1929. Law-abiding citizens were tired of the violence and hypocrisy, and now economic hard times made the prospect of legalizing and taxing alcohol very attractive.

Local politicians who once went along with the dry laws began to speak out. In 1923 even Pennsylvania’s Governor William Sproul admitted enforcement had been a failure, lamenting “we are raising a fine brood of criminals” via Prohibition . Pittsburgh’s own leaders saw that the city’s court system was overwhelmed with trivial liquor cases and its police force utterly corrupted. The costs of enforcement were rising while potential tax revenue from beer and whiskey went untapped – a painful tradeoff in a Depression-era city suffering high unemployment.

Ironically, some of Pittsburgh’s wet politicians had long been quietly undermining Prohibition from within. The city was so soaked in graft that, as noted earlier, local ward bosses and even state lawmakers had financial interests in underground breweries. (One colorful anecdote held that Pittsburgh politicians went so far as to use an old brewery in eastern Pennsylvania to secretly brew beer for the Pittsburgh market, dividing the city into supply “zones” for efficient distribution .) Such collusion meant that by 1930, the “wets” effectively ran the city.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt campaigned in Pittsburgh in 1932, he tapped into the city’s frustrations by promising repeal and the return of jobs and tax revenue from brewing . The cheers he received indicated Pittsburgh was ready to call time on the dry experiment. Nationally, momentum for repeal built rapidly. After FDR’s landslide win, Congress passed the Twenty-First Amendment to repeal Prohibition in early 1933. Pennsylvania ratified it by year’s end. Pittsburgh’s congressional delegation, once split, solidly supported repeal by that point, reflecting the will of their constituents.

Cheers and Aftermath: Pittsburgh Rejoices as Prohibition Ends

Finally, on December 5, 1933, Prohibition was officially repealed. In Pittsburgh, jubilation broke out in a way that hadn’t been seen in years. The city’s old breweries – Fort Pitt, Duquesne, and others – fired up their kettles once more. Workers lucky enough to still have jobs eagerly awaited the return of legal beer. In fact, months before full repeal, the Cullen–Harrison Act had already legalized 3.2% beer in April 1933, and on that day some 50,000 people crowded around Pittsburgh’s breweries awaiting their first taste of legal brew in 13 years . It was as if the Steelers had just won a championship – throngs in the streets, celebratory toasts (of actual beer), and a sense of relief washing over the city.

Breweries and taverns reopened en masse in 1933–34. Beloved watering holes like Jack’s Bar on the South Side threw open their doors (Jack’s had actually been quietly stockpiling beer and was ready to serve the minute it became legal ). The state of Pennsylvania quickly moved to impose order on the revived liquor trade – Governor Gifford Pinchot, a Prohibition supporter to the end, established the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board (PLCB) and state-run liquor stores to prevent a return of the old free-for-all saloon culture . So, while Pittsburghers could legally drink again, they had to buy spirits from strict state outlets (a system that endures today).

In the immediate aftermath, Pittsburgh’s courts saw an unusual situation: about 250 individuals awaiting trial for Volstead Act violations in Allegheny County were freed, as the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that pending cases had to be dropped once the law was repealed . These small-time offenders walked out of jail as free men and women, their “crimes” no longer crimes at all. Many federal dry agents in Pittsburgh were reassigned or let go, some ironically joining the very breweries as security or salesmen. The underworld figures who had made fortunes in bootlegging shifted to other rackets (gambling, racketeering, and later, narcotics), but the gangster era lost much of its roar without the easy money of illegal booze.

Pittsburgh’s experience during Prohibition left a complex legacy. On one hand, it showcased the city’s gritty resilience and ingenuity – Pittsburgh did not bow quietly to a law it found disagreeable, and in true rebellious spirit, found clever ways to keep the party going. The era enriched the city’s folklore with tales of moonshiners, speakeasy jazz joints, and flashy mobsters that still captivate imaginations. On the other hand, it was a time of great upheaval: lawlessness and vice on a scale the city had never seen, deep-rooted corruption that took years to purge, and violent crime that claimed innocent lives as well as gangster ones. Prohibition, in effect, remade Pittsburgh’s social landscape, for better or worse.

When the taps flowed legally again, Pittsburgh – a hard-working, hard-drinking town – largely sighed in relief. The saloons did return (under new rules), and the city’s inclination for a drink after a long shift at the mill became respectable once more. But the wild Prohibition years were not forgotten. They lived on in the countless anecdotes swapped at bars, in the cautionary tales of police academies, and in the very infrastructure of the city (many secret rooms and tunnels built for hiding booze still lie beneath old buildings). Pittsburgh’s role in Prohibition remains a testament to how a community can adapt and even thrive in defiance. As one local historian mused, if anything, the 18th Amendment turned Pittsburgh into “the wettest dry city” in America – an era that proved you just can’t keep Steel City spirits down.