SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2020MBNEW YORK CITY
2 SUNDAY ROUTINE
Muesli, Orson Welles and
work on landscape designs.
6 STILL COOKING
Kitchen sharing to help
chefs who’ve lost their jobs.
3 BIG CITYGinia Bellafante on campaign
donations and meager results.
5 IN THE DIARY‘My finger is swelling! Can
you see it? It has a pulse!’
The bar in Showman’s Jazz Club, a Harlem
destination for visitors from just down the
block to Japan and back, stretched from the
front door to the stage. The owner, Al How-
ard, liked to sit at the curve near the en-
trance.
John Miller, a regular at the club and a
deputy commissioner in the New York Po-
lice Department, knew the habit well. “Typi-
cal detective thing,” he recalled. “So he
could see everyone going in and going out.”
The club’s owner had in fact been a police
detective, and the two men became friends.
And so, decades later, Mr. Miller was sur-
prised to hear one particular story about
Mr. Howard’s years on the force. He won-
dered if it indeed could be true and, if so,
found it shocking that it was not more
widely known. So, a couple of years ago,
very late one Saturday night — actually, al-
ready Sunday morning — after the crowd
had thinned and the band had packed up,
Mr. Miller took a bar stool beside the club
owner and just came out and asked.
“I heard this story that you saved Martin
Luther King,” Mr. Miller said.
What happened on Sept. 20, 1958, in aHarlem department store is briefly re-
counted in history books and old newspaper
clippings that dutifully tell the who, what,
when and where of a tragedy averted. But
lesser known, because it was not in the na-
ture of the men involved to broadcast it, are
the snap decisions of a young officer and his
partner, dropped into a scene of bedlam and
confusion, that would change the course of
American history.
That night in the bar, Mr. Howard, then 91,
drew closer, and told his story.
It was a warm and cloudless Saturday af-
ternoon. Officer Howard, 31 years old and
on the job three years, was driving a patrol
car with a rookie he had just met that day,
Officer Philip Romano. A call came over the
radio: There was a disturbance at Blum-
stein’s department store in Harlem.
They arrived to find chaos on the second
floor. At its center, in a dark suit and tie and
sitting still as stone in a chair, was the Rev.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., then 29. There
was a letter opener jutting out of his chest.
He had been signing copies of his book
“Stride Toward Freedom,” about the Mont-
gomery bus boycott, when a young woman
approached and stabbed him.
An advertising executive for The Amster-dam News, a prominent Black newspaper,
grabbed the woman and restrained her un-
til a security officer took over. Stunned local
leaders and politicians looked on as another
woman, fearing for Dr. King’s life, reached
to pull the blade out. “She was hysterical,”
Officer Romano said later. The officers,
knowing that the blade might have been
saving Dr. King from bleeding to death,
stopped her in time.
They needed help.
“In those days we didn’t have walkie-talk-
ies,” Officer Howard said years later in anBy MICHAEL WILSONVERNOLL COLEMAN/NEW YORK DAILY NEWS, VIA GETTY IMAGESThe Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. after being stabbed at a 1958 book-signing at Blumstein’s department store in Harlem. The letter opener nearly struck his aorta. Al Howard,
below, a nightclub owner and former detective with the New York Police Department who died of Covid-19 last month, played a crucial role in getting Dr. King to the hospital.CONTINUED ON PAGE 7VICTOR J. BLUE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESAl Howard found a second career running a Harlem
jazz club. But he rarely spoke about the day in 1958
when, as a young police officer, he shaped history.
Saving Dr. King’s Life
About 30 miles north of Poughkeepsie, in
the small town of Pine Plains, is Ryan Road.
Quiet and flanked by farmland, it has a dis-
creet turnoff onto a long, gravelly driveway.
At the end of that is a large, new-looking
barn, with revelers sitting outside at picnic
tables, sipping cocktails and eating pizza
and s’mores. Inside the barn is a state-of-
the-art distillery, bar, and tasting room.
But take away the picnic tables, food
trucks and day drinkers, and the distillery
looks like any other farm in Dutchess
County, just the way it did during Prohibi-
tion, when it was one of the largest
producers of moonshine in New York State.
All that came to an end in October 1932,
when federal agents raided it. According to
a local paper of the time, the distillery at
Ryan Farm “was one of the most extensive
and elaborate layouts ever found in this
part of the country.”
This fall, the curious site, revamped for
modern day trippers, reopened as Dutch’s
Spirits. It is part of a growing trend of distil-
leries that have cropped up across the state
since Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo introduced
the Craft New York Act in 2014, easing regu-
lations on farm distillers. These days, with
well over 100 craft distillers across the state,
New York trails only California, according
to a 2018 report by the Craft Spirits Associa-
tion.
Many farm distilleries have met the mo-
ment with pandemic-friendly and rustic-
chic outdoor seating. One has an art gallery
and an adjoining farm-to-table restaurant;
another was built in and around an old fire-
house from 1929. But Dutch’s claim to fame
is the very thing that caused its demise 88
years ago: It used to be illegal. To that end,
its house spirit is moonshine, and its owner
hopes to cash in on the farm’s gangster lore.
Bunkers and a tunnel system — for stor-
age and escape routes — are still on the
property, said Brendan McAlpine, the
owner of Dutch’s Spirits. He plans to open
them up for tours. According to newspaper
accounts from the 1930s, only two Polish im-
migrants were arrested in the raid; it is be-
lieved the rest of the workers escaped
through the tunnel system.
Dutch’s Spirits is named after the New
York gangster and bootlegger Dutch
Schultz, who is believed to have been the
mastermind behind the expansive under-
ground moonshine distillery, although
some local historians stop short of giving
him credit. (The property that was used as a
front — a turkey farm — was owned by a
retired policeman, Patrick Ryan, who was
not arrested during the raid and was ru-
mored to be in cahoots with Mr. Schultz.)
Stacey Demar, who moved to Dutchess
County from New York City two years ago,
discovered the distillery on Instagram, and
recently visited with her girlfriend and
puppy. But when she heard about the
place’s possible connection to a famous
gangster, she thought her mother might be
interested.
“My mom is an old Jew from the Lower
By DEVORAH LEV-TOVLAUREN LANCASTER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESA portrait of the bootlegger Dutch Schultz at
Dutch’s Spirits, a distillery in Pine Plains, N.Y.
CONTINUED ON PAGE 4
Among the trendy distilleries
in New York State is one that
has a link to Prohibition.
Moonshine
Made Here,
And Now
It’s Legal