Police classified coffeehouses as cabarets to justify closing them

Evidence

The fire department closed the Gaslight for the first time less than a month after the Wallace interview. The police had determined that, liquor or no, coffeehouses were cabarets. Some blamed the striptease joints on West Third Street for the escalating anti-coffeehouse campaign. Others suspected that Carmine DeSapio, the recently defeated Democratic Party boss, long suspected of Mob connections, was attempting to shore up his neighborhood base. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 263

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s governing argument about illegality as a condition for avant-garde density; the cabaret-classification trick echoes other zoning/ordinance crackdowns on cultural venues.