|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
On May 21, 1971, Palo Altans marked the end of the city’s longtime booze ban with a martini toast at the Shutter Restaurant located at 482 University Ave. in the ground floor of Hotel President. The drink was the first legal cocktail served in a downtown bar.
Prior to that day, hard liquor sales had never existed: The ban on booze had been in effect since the town’s formation in the late 1800s.
According to newspaper accounts, Leland Stanford was concerned that saloons would come to the town that was sprouting up next to his newly founded university, so he encouraged Timothy Hopkins, the original subdivider of the site where Palo Alto now stands, to write a liquor sales ban into the deeds of trust for each property.
By 1889, an alcohol ban was written into the town’s incorporation documents prohibiting the sale of alcohol within a 1.5-mile radius of the university. This perpetual ban essentially covered the area bounded by San Francisquito Creek, Newell Road, Embarcadero Road and Alma Street.
Over the years, some liquor seeped into downtown. Beer and wine with less than 2.5% alcohol was permitted, and two private clubs were allowed to serve hard liquor under a “bottle club” in which members brought their own bottles, but Palo Alto’s “dry zone” essentially remained unbroken for more than eight decades.
Finally, Barry Amato, operator of the Shutter restaurant, successfully took the old Hopkins restrictions to court, according to PaloAltoHistory.org. His lawyer was Frank Crist, who in 1933 had broken similar deed restrictions on the far end of University Avenue near Bayshore Freeway that became known as Whiskey Gulch.
In December 1970, a California Superior Court judge agreed with Crist’s argument, ruling that the university could not prevent a downtown restaurant from serving alcohol.
The judge ruled the old restrictions “invalid and unenforceable.”
He noted the restrictions had been made to make alcohol inaccessible to Stanford students, but pointed out that with the replacement of horses and carriages by automobiles and motorcycles, students had liquor readily available to them elsewhere. He also cited as relevant facts that Stanford had approved a liquor license for its faculty club.
Crist was hailed as the man who made Palo Alto a town where “it’s not a crime to imbibe in spiritous, vinous, malt or mixed liquors.”
When the Shutter became the first in the city’s former dry zone to secure a liquor license five months later, Crist and Amato celebrated the event with a cocktail in front of the camera. It was later revealed that in the photo officially marking the occasion, the men were actually drinking water because the hard stuff didn’t arrive until later, according PaloAltoHistory.org.
Not everyone celebrated the event.
“What I see forthcoming for the downtown, I don’t see a cause for celebrating about,” said then-Mayor Jack Wheatley, who predicted a tripling of liquor applications and a constant increase in bars that would be a threat to the town.
Today, the city has about 230 active licenses permitting the on-site sale of alcohol at bars, restaurants and nightclubs, including about 76 in downtown’s former dry zone, according to the Alcohol Beverage Control’s licensing report for Palo Alto.
