Brooklyn Today for April 5
Good morning. Today is the 95th day of the year. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle of April 5, 1902, carried an article saying that Brooklyn would have “an exceedingly dry Sunday.” The Eagle writer was not talking about the weather, but about the fact that police, under the direction of a new administration in City Hall, had decided to enforce the Sunday prohibition on liquor sales, a law that was usually ignored. During the previous few weeks, the article continued, many “rum shops” and saloons, anticipating the pinch, had been selling liquor until the last moment of Saturday night, then closing at midnight.
The article continued by saying that even in wide-open Coney Island, cops had been asked to look out for Sunday sales of alcohol, a development that the Eagle predicted would cut down on robberies as well as public drinking.
Well-known people who were born today include former Secretary of Defense State Colin Powell, actor Mitch Pileggi (“The X Files”), filmmaker Roger Corman and actor Michael Moriarty (“Bang the Drum Slowly,” “Law & Order”).