Flood’s Park: Notorious Resort Gave 1890s Baltimore A Place to Drink, Carouse
“Ship me somewhere south of Brooklyn,
Where the best is like the worst,
Where there ain’t no Ten Commandments
And a man can raise a thirst.”
Long before America’s thirteen years of prohibition started in 1920, the beer was freely flowing at a well-known resort at the mouth of Curtis Creek, just south of Baltimore, Maryland. The resort, known as Flood’s Park, was one of many beer gardens, resorts and amusement parks that freckled the rivers, coves and creeks that fed the Chesapeake Bay in and around Baltimore.
But the proponents of a “dry” Baltimore viewed the notorious park as trouble, and they weren’t wrong. John T. “Jack” Flood, whom the Baltimore Sun dubbed the “King of Anne Arundel County’s Fifth District,” had a different view and believed the park served as a place where working men, sailors, soldiers, and politicians could drink freely and blow off steam.
Flood opened his notorious warm-weather park in 1884 at Ferry Point, in what was then Anne Arundel County, Maryland, near the small town of Brooklyn. The park became famous, but it wasn’t entirely unique. Beer gardens and “pleasure resorts” were everywhere in Baltimore, and Baltimore and Anne Arundel Counties back then. There was practically one on every beach. But Flood’s Park stood out as the Gold Standard for Baltimore beer pavilions. Most beach parks offered beer and occasionally parlor games, but Flood’s venue was unlike most others. It had a hotel, theatre, dancing girls, prostitutes, vaudeville acts, and even public transportation to its very doorstep. And most importantly, it had lots of beer and other libations.
The appeal of the park was magnified even more by the flamboyantly charismatic nature of its proprietor, Jack Flood. An affable, well-connected business owner, Flood was also a surreptitious Democratic party leader who was loved by the local working class. He would unabashedly flout temperance laws and find protection behind powerful friends in the county, usually politicians and police. Despite this protective umbrella, he had no partners or bosses. He kept no books. His park was conducted on a cash basis. People paid for what they received, and he extended no credit. Flood believed in sparing his patrons the annoyance of owing him money. He had no shortage of star power in the park too. He brought all the latest vaudeville acts of the day to the park, including A-list stars like W.C. Fields, Mae West, and Jimmy Durante, who would all make appearances when they were in the Baltimore area.
Flood ran his business with fearless guile. He didn’t charge admission to the park, but no one was permitted to bring in any outside food or beverages. The water pumps inside the park would be locked so patrons were forced to buy their drinks. When the law prohibited the sale of alcohol on Sundays, he found a loophole where hotel guests or those buying meals were exempted, so he acquired a $250-per-year hotel license from Anne Arundel County and had every park attendee sign the resort’s registry when they walked through the gates. He asserted that “intoxicating liquor had never been sold in any shape or form to other than bona-fide guests.” Problem solved.
Flood was well-connected and he and his guests openly flouted drinking laws of the day. So pervasive was the practice that it became part of the show in his theater. One of Flood’s female vaudeville singers, in a parody of Rudyard Kipling’s Road to Mandalay, which was modified to become On the Road to Curtis Bay, would begin singing the tune— a crowd favorite — and the audience in the hall would join in the refrain:
For the soubrette belles are calling
And it’s there that I would be,
By old Jack Flood’s pagoda
Drinking Pilsner on the quay.
To the region’s temperance movement, Flood’s Park was a malignant cancer just south of Baltimore. But it wasn’t so evil to others. In those vaudeville-era days, the resort offered a place for adults to relax, enjoy shows and carouse. Flood believed he was offering a service to the community that was not being addressed anywhere else, and to some degree he was right. But keeping his park operating was sometimes a challenge. Flood had a long record of citations for serving alcohol on then-illegal Sundays and he suffered repeated losses of the park’s business licenses, according to William H. “Bubby” Mariner, who described his experiences as a Flood Park employee in a 1962 Baltimore Sun story. Anne Arundel County Commissioners revoked and restored Flood’s license often, much to the chagrin of Baltimore’s vocal “dry” community who felt aggravated and taunted by the constant weekend rush of its citizens across the Baltimore City-Anne Arundel County line.
But Flood’s Park’s reputation was mostly sullied, Mariner said, by the late-night trolley runs back into Baltimore. Ripe after a day of carousing, park patrons would be warned by trolley conductors that the 2:06 a.m. train, known as the “Owl,” was leaving with shouts of “Last car! Last car!”
Conductors like Theodore Bowinkelman worked the Orleans Street-Curtis Bay line of the United Railway trains, and he and his conductor brethren affectionately referred to the late night runs from the park as the “Dirty Shirt.” It was a well-deserved nickname. The remaining people in the park at that hour were almost always drunk and belligerent. In a November 26, 1950 article in the Baltimore Sun, Bowinkelman said the Owl sometimes didn’t leave until 2:30 a.m. or so, and every inch of the car was packed with riders.
“As fare, these people were likely to offer anything at all — tin tags, collar buttons, penknives, keys, anything but a nickel,” he said. “In those days there were different gangs, or factions, as they called them — the Gilligan Benders, the Hell Cats, the Sandy Bottomers, the Goose Hillers, and the Putty Hillers. All hailed from different parts of Baltimore. There was always a feud among them, and it seemed that they always ride this car on a Sunday night to settle their differences. The bloodshed in some of these melees would have made the streets of Paris during the French Revolution look like a small nosebleed. All sorts of weapons were brought into action like brass knuckles, dirk knives, razors and blackjacks.”
To make matters worse for the conductors, Bowinkelman said, there was no police protection because the Brooklyn and Curtis Bay policemen — then employees of Anne Arundel County — went off-duty at midnight. Flood was well aware that his park could be rough-and-tumble at that time of night, so he was there at the park gates on most nights and frequently tipped the conductors to ensure that his “special” guests — Baltimore’s financial elite and local politicians from all over — were not bothered on their way home. This extra attention occasionally paid off in helpful ways. Police and politicians frequently looked the other way when Flood was challenged and that helped keep his stature and business secured.
The steady stream of boorish patrons making their way out of Anne Arundel County and back across the Baltimore City line kept Baltimore City police annoyed and busy, and drew the ire of organizations like the Just Government League of Anne Arundel County, United Women of Maryland, and many local churches. Flood didn’t care, and the golden drafts continued to flow.
So incensed were these organizations that in August 1917 they demanded that Anne Arundel County’s Commissioners cancel Flood’s business license. They had visited Flood’s Park on a Sunday and witnessed people, including young women, drinking amber beverages and revelling. It was proof positive, they asserted, that liquor was being sold there illegally. Police Chief Thomas W. Irwin was there that day too. They petitioned him to appear before the commissioners and certify their claims, but Chief Irwin chose, instead, to go to Ocean City, Maryland that day and provided a letter that said that “no beer or whiskey was sold” in Flood’s Park that day. The commissioners, led by President James S. Smith, said that while they believed violations had been committed, the board was powerless to act unless proof of intoxicants being sold was laid before them. Of course that never happened and the elusive Jack Flood kept his taps open.
Not everything about Flood’s Park was negative. Dick Steuart, writing under his pen name, Carroll Dulaney, recounted a story in his Dec. 6, 1945 “Day by Day” column in the Baltimore News-American.
“The best story I ever heard about Flood’s concerns the Rev. Frederick P. Reese, rector of St. Marks Episcopal Church, who was elected Bishop of Georgia. Dr. Reese was fond of fishing and his cousin, Albert D. Dorney of Baltimore, decided to take him on a final fishing trip before he left Baltimore to be made Bishop,” Dulaney (nee Steuart) wrote.
“So the Bishop-elect and three other men went to Flood’s and hired a fishing boat. While on their way to board the boat one of the girls accosted the quartet and asked the men to buy her a drink. The three other men hung back, but the reverend gentleman said he would, and he did. Later some of the men asked Dr. Reese why he had talked to the woman, and he said she was ‘one of God’s children.’ Someone also explained to her that she had spoken with a bishop, and she said: ‘Well, he was no Holy Joe; he was a gentleman.’”
Flood’s Park’s status as a resort was unmatched in the area, but it was notable that Flood didn’t actually own the property where his park operated. The property’s owner, the South Baltimore Harbor and Improvement Company (formerly the Patapsco Land Company), was as demure as Flood was brazen. The contrasting styles began to show as the company had grown weary from years of relentless Flood-induced pressure from Baltimore and Anne Arundel temperance organizations and clergy.
The emergence of new prohibition-era Blue Laws were the final straw for the company, and it refused to extend Flood’s lease. Alcohol flowed freely in Flood’s Park from 1884 to 1916, but, ironically, it was replaced at the mouth of Curtis Creek by a business offering another form of spirits: the United States Industrial Alcohol Company. Shortly after denying Flood’s lease, the company sold the property. By that time industrial companies and ship builders had grown fond of the deep channels in the Patapsco River, which were perfect for industrial uses of the day. While Flood had been in a perfect location to take advantage of Baltimore’s desire for alcohol and recreation, industry saw other far more profitable uses for the land.
When Flood received the fateful news that his lease would not be renewed, the park was already reeling from the constant surveillance of the temperance movement. Police Chief Irwin, who earlier in his career had looked the other way when his friend Flood flouted Sunday drinking laws, was now raiding saloons under pressure from Anne Arundel County’s Commissioners, the clergy and the Baltimore Sun. Fewer and fewer patrons were coming to the park, and Flood upbraided what he saw as the shortsightedness of new laws from “officials who could not realize that the working man needs recreation.”
Even as his famed park was nearing its well-publicized end the temperance movement still chased him into court. Weeks before the park’s final day he appeared in court in Annapolis after a grand jury charged him with “running a disorderly house and a public nuisance.” In his defense he pointed out that the park’s liquor license wasn’t actually held by him, but rather by his bartender.
Reflecting on the park’s demise, and to some degree, his own vices, Flood said that “no damn fool can sell whiskey and drink it too,” and closed up shop. He settled into his Baltimore mansion at Annapolis and Charles Streets, but the wild nights at Flood’s Park were over forever.
It was almost a year between the time that the South Baltimore Harbor and Improvement Company refused to renew Flood’s lease and it finally selling the property to the U.S. Industrial Alcohol Company. During that period Flood, like his father and sister, Lizzie, had at Ferry Bar, started a nominally successful ferry business at the site of his former park. Though his lease was up he wasn’t asked to leave right away. His reputation earned him the right to stay. His launches ferried people to Hawkins Point, Dundalk and Canton. By 1918 his theater, saloons and shops had been razed and only piles of aging timber remained. Only the faded, arched sign at the entrance hailing “Flood’s Park” remained as a reminder of its past glory.
In 1919 Baltimore annexed Brooklyn, Fairfield and Curtis Bay, looking to absorb the Baltimore’s fastest-growing region and the industries that were beginning to dominate the Patapsco’s southern shoreline. His land on which his former park rested was finally sold as the Industrial Alcohol company expanded its reach, and Flood had to vacate the site. His launches were sold to the highest bidder. A few years later he moved from Baltimore to Brooklyn and built a $10,000 house and opened a pub, the Log Inn, though it never attained the notoriety of his famed former park. He died peacefully at 83 in 1939. His legacy is largely forgotten today, but 30 years on from the roaring 1890s Jack Flood’s resort was a recreational playground like no other.
