Debtors’ Delight

Q. According to my late father, his father operated a Manhattan speakeasy during Prohibition named the Alimony Prison. It was in Greenwich Village. I have never been able to find anything else about it or the name. Can you help?

A. We can’t confirm the club’s existence or pinpoint its location. (Speakeasies generally did not advertise in the papers.) But there is little doubt a place called the Alimony Prison would have been named for the Ludlow Street Jail, at 70 Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side. Ironically, one of the same city fathers who had the jail built in 1862 — the infamous political boss William M. Tweed — ended up its most famous resident. He died there in 1878, after being convicted of corruption, escaping from the jail and being brought back.

But the jail got its nickname, the Alimony Club, around the turn of the 20th century, when it was largely reserved for people held in civil contempt or otherwise not convicted of crimes. It was something like a debtors’ prison, but most often those incarcerated there had failed to obey a court order to pay alimony and child support. Up to six months for nonpayment was a common sentence.

Although dingy and decrepit, the jail retained one feature from the Tweed days: a class system of accommodations. The civil inmates were allowed certain amenities for a price, like bigger rooms and the opportunity to pay for good meals. (Tweed, of course, had belonged to the paying class of boarders.) Rose Taylor, the jail cook for 33 years, became something of a legend, preparing breakfast eggs to order.