Seattle's Crackdown on 'Wine Rooms'
City officials move to outlaw private booths and closed 'wine rooms' in saloons to curb illicit activity.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Private wine rooms and closed boxes in Seattle saloons will be a thing of the past as soon as Chief of Police Delaney can find time to promulgate the order to the dozens of resorts which are now violating the city ordinance prohibiting their existence. This much of the new chief's policy developed at a conference between the mayor, chief, and members of the police and license and revenue committee held in the mayor's office yesterday afternoon.
“Private wine rooms and closed boxes in Seattle saloons will be a thing of the past.”
The effort to sanitize public nightlife by removing private rooms and 'closed boxes' reflects a persistent American pattern of legislating morality through architectural control. Today's debates over zoning and the regulation of nightlife venues echo this historical attempt to force private behavior into public, supervised spaces.
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