Lynnteresting!

Little-known, interesting tidbits about this great city’s amazing history.

Lynn, Lynn, the City of … Saloons, but not necessarily Sin

Picture a saloon in your mind. What do you see? An old dusty place with some cowboys playing cards and drinking whiskey? Swinging doors at the entrance and maybe a piano being played and a spittoon in the corner? Thanks mainly to Hollywood, we pretty much all come up with the same image in our minds. But there really was some truth to the images – the saloons of the American Wild West were often pretty wild. The drinks weren’t called Tarantula Juice, Red Eye, and Coffin Varnish for nothing. The rotgut stuff was served at high prices and patrons often got awful rowdy after drinking some of it. So if I told you that at the same time the West was covered in saloons, back in the East, Lynn was covered in them too, you might figure that was when the city got its embarrassing slogan, “Lynn, Lynn, the City of Sin: you never go out the way you came in.” But you’d be wrong.

Lynn in the 1870s had saloons all over the city – but only a few of them served liquor. Fact was, you’d be more likely to see women and children in them than men and whiskey.

In that era, in Lynn, at least, saloon was a popular word to describe a business that catered to people; one where people were being served as opposed to just coming in for something to purchase. For example, you would go to an apothecary shop, pay for a bottle of medicine, then walk out with your purchase. But in Lynn’s saloons, you were waited upon by staff to help you have an enjoyable stay at the place of business. This was certainly true for a liquor saloon, but as the newspaper advertisements of that decade reveal, there were lots of business inviting customers to enjoy their type of saloon:

• Mr. E. F. Rust proudly advertised his new Palace Photograph Saloon on Market Street, opposite Oddfellows’ Hall. The ad promised, “You will find Mr. Rust a young man of honesty and integrity, gentlemanly in his deportment … one who fought his country’s battles in the late struggle for liberty … He has a BEAUTIFUL SALOON and warrants satisfaction to all his patrons.”
• Another ad promised with enthusiasm, “Eureka! Eureka! I have found it. Found What? The Best Dining Saloon in Lynn, C. Sidney Smith, Proprietor. It is located at No. 38 Munroe Street.” A competitor also tried to catch the reader’s eye – and stomach: “Hunger no More. - … In every sense of the word, S. H. Sawtell’s Saloon, in Sagamore Building, is the best and cheapest Dining Room in the City of Lynn.”
• A fire broke out in the early hours of one October morning in 1871 at a hair-dressing saloon, with a shoe shop above.
• Inevitably, there were the drinking saloons as well, but they were not a legal business in town because of the state’s liquor laws, so rather than reading about them in advertisements, the public was reminded about them because of the news reports of police raids on them, “The local police made another butt at the Goat [the name of a drinking saloon], on Market street, last night, relieving the animal of nine gallons of liquor.”
• Sometimes people had different opinions about certain types of saloons. One newspaper article listed among the reasons that Lynn was a popular warm weather tourist attraction, activities that ranged from berry-picking parties and ice cream shops to the billiard and bowling saloons, which constantly promised to be “innocent and healthy amusements.” Yet one Lynn resident complained in a letter to a friend about vice in Lynn, finding billiards and bowling to be anything but innocent, “It is indeed a sad prospect when most of the young men spend their money and evenings in Rum Holes, Bowling Saloons, Billiard Rooms and in places sunk still lower in vice.”
• Saloons proliferated after the Civil War, but they existed in Lynn long before, as well. In 1846 Samuel Soule had won prizes for his “milch cows” in some of the county agricultural fairs; he apparently put them to good use for his ice cream saloon. The Lynn News reported, “We are not going to advise everybody to go and see him, because everybody, already, don’t do anything else. His saloon is crowded, every evening, and no one comes out without ‘feeling better’.”
• In the 1850s Lynn’s new Sagamore Bathing House offered hot and cold baths of fresh water or salt water “rendered at every tide” and there was “a large saloon attached for refreshments after the bath.” Since the bath house was designed for adult males, the attached saloon probably had something stronger than ice cream in mind for them.

In 1855, the Lynn newspapers reported that a travelling daguerreotype saloon (probably a temporary facility made of canvas, like a traveling circus tent) was broken into, and about thirty miniature cases were stolen. Apparently the sin in Lynn was sometimes done to the saloons, not because of them.

-- by Andrew V. Rapoza