Prohibition Hall

Andrew went into fine detail in his post about the cluster that was New Year’s Eve at this place.
I will just add that I have never ever in my life been treated worse by a bartender. I waited for TWENTY SEVEN minutes to get two beers (my friends back at our table were apparently keeping track). Two bartenders were there, but then one went to the bathroom for five minutes. She comes back and the other goes to smoke a cigarette. After about 15 minutes of waiting I tried to politely let the bartender know that I had been there for a long time (as did others at the bar who had witnessed my wait). She ignores me and then blatantly starts serving others, giving me a dirty look each time she moves on to a new person. The other bartender finally returns from her cigarette, at which point I am livid, and she pours me a couple beers.
Between the horrible service, the abysmal opening band, and sound system fiasco… this place should die a swift death. Happy 2016!

Have you ever asked the question — what if Alice Cooper and Billy Baldwin had a child together, but instead of a child it was a bar?
I hadn’t either, but a few nights ago I learned that the answer is Prohibition Hall.
It’s a gawky approximation of greatness that has the genes of things people may have found compelling at some point, but the execution is dreadful.
And what better night to experience it than New Year’s Eve?
Prohibition Hall is a great name, one that evokes the heights of the Pendergast Machine in Roaring 20’s Kansas City. But once past the sign, we experienced more of a vaguely goth-​adjacent vibe that’s sort of like a novelty Over The Hill 40^th birthday party in honor of the Mad Hatter coupled with some mid-70’s decorative misogyny. Or maybe like the funeral for an unpopular leprechaun.
It was a weird night. The management of this place is an absolute mess.
For just $ 45 per person, patrons enjoyed:
–Woefully inattentive bartenders. Maybe they were overwhelmed, but what kind of management sticks only two people behind the bar on New Year’s Eve?
— Horrible stage management that had the headliners play their set 90 minutes after they were supposed to start, a half hour past midnight.
— Impressively watered-​down beer. If you ever go here, opt for sealed bottles.
— A blaring mess of a sound system — massively loud, but none of the band members were mixed properly, the crowd couldn’t hear the singers and the singers couldn’t hear themselves. It took 30 – 45 minutes to set up between acts.
— A champagne toast with some sort of concoction that was maybe seltzer water, Hi-​C, vodka, and maybe a splash of cranberry? We saw them mix these up behind the bar because apparently they were out of champagne with a place that was at half capacity.
— The legitimacy that comes from a cash-​only enterprise. The credit card machine was «getting fixed.»
— Seinfeld reruns adjacent to mod-​inspired «erotic» art. Or something.
— A stench of smoke that pervaded every part of your clothing, your car on the way home, your dreams as you slept that night.
It was a kaleidoscopic mess of shadiness that sounds like a Stefon sketch without the payoff.
We walked in, eager to see Hearts of Darkness, a 16-​piece Afro-​Cuban dance explosion that was headlining. But onstage was a band that was kind of like the B-​52s as reimagined by Tim Burton and David Lynch.
A 60 year old man in a black leather jacket, red velvet cowboy hat, and sunglasses pounded out murderous blues ponderously from the stage. 4 people were dancing out of a crowd of more than 200.
At the bar, some younger tweaker kids who are leaving at intervals to smoke weed or do a bump or whatever. There were questions of whether or not the venue owner was joining in.
Hearts of Darkness was supposed to have started playing around 11, capping off with a midnight countdown and playing a bit longer to close the night out.
But time wore on. The red-​hatted velvet cowboy and his cadre were not done. Kids in black flitted around in their black Mad Hatter New Years hats. A man in a pig costume wearing a business suit danced ominously in the corner. At 11:35, they announced «3 more songs.»
The people waited. They tried to go to the bar. And they waited more.
Finally, at 11:57, the band everyone came to see arrived on stage to set up. They worked the crowd valiantly, trying to keep energy up and running the countdown. But they were hamstrung by apparently having only having one working mic, with the sound person scrambling back and forth from stage to soundboard making invisible adjustments.
Clearly, management’s heart isn’t in this. They appear to be barely going through the motions while maybe some of the staff is trying to do what they can. Their website does not work and has placeholder text up from May 2015, and their last Facebook post mentioned a supposed soft opening for Halloween.
By going with good people, we were able to have fun with an absolute mess of a night. We made jokes. We wondered if this was all an extraordinarily convoluted attempt at a money laundering scheme. We predicted when in the evening we were going to be asked to put a price on a human life.
Unless something changes drastically, do not expect this place to last. After all, I’m the one adding it to Unilocal