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state police staged simultaneous midnight raids<br />
on the Monticello House in Landing, Schaefer’s<br />
Hotel and Grill in Mount Arlington, and the<br />
Great Cove House and Espanong Hotels in<br />
Jefferson. Alcohol was reportedly found at each<br />
location, with the Espanong Hotel yielding<br />
brewing equipment, hard liquor and 315 bottles<br />
of beer.<br />
As happened nationwide, local officials were<br />
often either lax in enforcing or openly hostile<br />
to Prohibition. In June 1923, popular Mount<br />
Arlington Mayor Richard J. Chaplin pleaded<br />
guilty and paid a $1,000 fine for the sale of alcohol<br />
at a hotel he owned on Howard Boulevard.<br />
The September 5, 1925 Breeze reported that<br />
Mayor Clarence Lee and members of the Mount<br />
Arlington Council denied charges of failing to<br />
enforce Prohibition laws and refuted allegations<br />
of allowing illegal establishments to run openly,<br />
concluding that “the police department and<br />
the officials of the borough would be glad to be<br />
informed of any places still operating illegally.”<br />
While small raids continued occasionally, a<br />
bigger incident during the summer of 1927<br />
brought publicity to the lake. On August 12, The<br />
New York Times reported that 16 state troopers<br />
and six detectives from the Morris County<br />
Prosecutor’s Office raided Lee’s Pavilion dance<br />
hall at Nolan’s Point (now the location of the<br />
Jefferson House) resulting in six arrests, including<br />
one of the co-owners, a Paterson police detective.<br />
Thirty bottles of liquor were found behind the<br />
soda fountain, according to The Bergen Record,<br />
and a reported 100 people were on the dance<br />
floor at the time of the raid. The orchestra leader,<br />
Frank Dailey, (who would later open the famed<br />
Meadowbrook in Cedar Grove) was held as a<br />
material witness.<br />
The New York Daily News on August 13<br />
reported that “police were also on the watch for<br />
nude moonlight bathing parties which have been<br />
distressing the staider sojourners around Lake<br />
Hopatcong.” Assistant Morris County Prosecutor<br />
Frank Scerbo claimed that with the influence of<br />
illegal alcohol “working girls from New York and<br />
Jersey cities go to Lake Hopatcong and Budd<br />
Lake for their vacations and<br />
throw off every restraint,”<br />
adding that “parents in the<br />
cities would be<br />
horrified at the<br />
conditions under<br />
which daughters<br />
are vacationing in<br />
the country.”<br />
Evidently, he<br />
was not offended<br />
by any male<br />
behavior.<br />
A raid of the<br />
Espanong Hotel the<br />
following afternoon<br />
resulted in more confiscated booze and<br />
the arrest of the owner. On August 14, The New<br />
York Times reported that the Lake Hopatcong<br />
Association, a local business group, claimed the<br />
recent raids had calmed everything down and that<br />
“Lake Hopatcong is perfectly safe for one’s family<br />
at all times.”<br />
While most visits by Prohibition agents did not<br />
make the news, New York newspapers reported<br />
on raids at Kay’s Hotel (which had replaced<br />
Lee’s) and the Yellow Bowl (now the location<br />
of Patrick’s Pub) in 1930 and 1931. One of the<br />
most impressive arrests at Lake Hopatcong came<br />
in May 1931 when agents seized a truck filled<br />
with 40 barrels of beer being operated on behalf<br />
of notorious gangster Waxey Gordon.<br />
Lake Hopatcong had its own well-known<br />
bootlegger, John J. Dunne of West New York,<br />
who started Prohibition as a day-laborer and<br />
retired a beer baron in 1930, worth a reported<br />
$15 million. In 1924, Dunne bought the Lotta<br />
Crabtree house in Mount Arlington. He operated<br />
breweries in plain view, was arrested many times<br />
and somehow always avoided jail. Dunne was<br />
extremely generous to lake causes and hosted<br />
many elected officials at the Crabtree house.<br />
Lake Hopatcong’s own Hudson Maxim, an<br />
inventor and businessman with strong opinions<br />
on most subjects, wrote and spoke out vehemently<br />
against Prohibition. Testifying before the United<br />
Hudson Maxim<br />
in a publicity<br />
photo from<br />
1924 when he<br />
threatened<br />
to sue to add<br />
coffee and tea<br />
to the ban as<br />
intoxicants<br />
under<br />
Prohibition.<br />
States Senate in 1926, Maxim stated that<br />
Prohibition did “more harm than good… and is<br />
actually promoting intemperance and breeding<br />
crime” and that “in the interest of temperance and<br />
humanity, we should do our very best to wipe out<br />
the blot of its black hand upon the Constitution.”<br />
(Maxim received much publicity in 1924 when<br />
he threatened to sue to add coffee and tea to the<br />
ban as intoxicants under Prohibition.)<br />
The 1920s ended, the Great Depression struck<br />
and in November 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt<br />
was elected president with a pledge to end<br />
Prohibition. In December 1933, the approval<br />
of the 21st Amendment rescinded Prohibition.<br />
Many locals and visitors would later look back<br />
fondly at those “dry” summers of the Roaring ’20s<br />
at Lake Hopatcong.<br />
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