Legal harassment of unlicensed coffeehouses continued for years

Evidence

As coffeehouses proliferated, those unwilling to deal with the local Mob or navigate the bureaucratic labyrinth necessary to obtain a liquor license became de facto cabarets and, before long, the New York police began issuing summons. Such harassment would continue for the next several years on what the Voice called “the main drag of the poetry set.” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 50

Categorization

• XREF: Mob control and liquor-license bureaucracy as structural gatekeepers — another material condition in the reader’s inventory of why invention was dense here.