Bohemia Historical Society
Prohibition Comes to Bohemia
How a Czech village met the Volstead Act — politely, with a full glass kept out of sight
At one minute past midnight on January 17, 1920, the Eighteenth Amendment took effect and America officially went dry. In most of the country, the news was met with either celebration or grumbling. In Bohemia, a small hamlet in the Town of Islip founded in 1855 by Czech immigrants, it must have landed as something closer to an insult.
This was, after all, a community whose founders came from the land that perfected pilsner. Beer in Bohemia was not a vice to be legislated away; it was woven into the fabric of everyday life, poured at Sokol gymnastics meets, masquerade balls, Czech-language theater nights, weddings, and Sunday dinners. When the federal government declared all of that illegal, the village faced a choice familiar to immigrant communities across the country: comply, or quietly carry on. Bohemia, by most accounts, chose to carry on.
The 1920s
A Village of Cigars, Buttons, and Beer Halls
The Bohemia of the 1920s was a working village of hand-rollers and craftsmen. Its cigar factories, a trade the Czechs had carried from Manhattan tenements to the Long Island pine barrens, still hummed, though the 1926 strike at the General Cigar Company signaled the beginning of the end for the hand-rolled era. In 1923, George Math and Joseph Hrouda opened their pearl button factory on Karshick Street, its towering white piles of oyster and clam shells becoming a local landmark.
Social life ran through the halls and hotels. The Czechoslovak Society of America built its second hall on Smithtown Avenue in 1920, complete with a downstairs taproom, an upstairs meeting room, and a ballroom that held 250 people for polkas, plays, and weddings. The Central Hotel, purchased by the Stejskal family in 1928, drew busloads of Czech-Americans out from Manhattan for family-style Sunday dinners of roast duck, dumplings, and sauerkraut. The Bohemia Historical Society puts it with admirable diplomacy: during Prohibition, the town’s hotels and social halls were “widely rumored to be… less than strictly dry,” with hard apple cider flowing freely.
Rum Row
An Island Made for Smuggling
Bohemia’s quiet defiance played out against one of the great smuggling theaters in American history. With more than 1,600 miles of shoreline, Long Island became a rum-runner’s paradise. In 1921, Captain Bill McCoy anchored a schooner full of liquor just outside U.S. waters, inspiring the floating marketplace known as Rum Row. Local baymen who knew every creek and inlet became indispensable to the trade, and South Shore farmers and fishermen could earn as much as $150, serious money at the time, simply for letting smugglers stash cases in their barns. By some estimates, Long Island supplied nearly a third of Manhattan’s illicit alcohol.
Bohemia sat inland, away from the landing beaches, but that was precisely its value. The hamlet’s isolation among the scrub oak and pine barrens, along the quiet roads between Montauk and Manhattan, made it a discreet waypoint. And no place put that geography to better use than the castle rising at the corner of Smithtown and Lakeland Avenues.
1928–1932
The Baron’s Castle
In 1928, local builder Winnie Benedict, a great-grandson of village founder Jan Vavra, completed his masterpiece: the Chateau La Boheme, a turreted, half-timbered French Provincial fantasy built for Anton Boris Divis and his wife Lillian. Divis, known around town simply as “The Baron,” wore a monocle, practiced hand-kissing manners, and claimed descent from a Bohemian count executed in 1618 during the Thirty Years’ War. His dining room featured a massive carved fireplace reputed to be 500 years old, guarded by two life-sized wooden knights said to represent Generals Liska and Veliky of the old Bohemian armies.
Officially, the Baron sold art and antiques. Unofficially, the Chateau became one of Suffolk County’s most storied speakeasies. According to the Bohemia Historical Society, rum runners moving liquor in from Montauk used the building’s labyrinthine cellars as a storage and distribution point, while upstairs the establishment cultivated an air of high glamour. Silent film idol Rudolph Valentino is recorded to have spent at least one night at the inn, and the Prague-born Broadway composer Rudolf Friml was an occasional guest.
The neighbors were not amused. A Ronkonkoma “vigilante committee,” fed up with what it called the “menace of the intolerable speakeasy conditions,” tipped off the authorities. Federal agents raided the Chateau in 1931, a story that made the front page of the Suffolk County News that January, and again the following year. The Baron and several others were taken into custody on both occasions, though the establishment carried on, and the raids only burnished its legend.
👻 The Legend of Maria: One darker piece of lore survives from those years — the story of Maria, a young woman allegedly strangled in an upstairs back bedroom during the building’s speakeasy days. For decades afterward, employees and guests of the building, later renamed the Normandie Inn, reported knocking on doors, footsteps in empty hallways, and lights descending the staircase, making it one of Long Island’s most famous hauntings.
December 5, 1933
Last Call, and What Came After
Prohibition ended on December 5, 1933, and Bohemia’s taprooms could finally operate in the open. But the dry years cast a long shadow. The same decade killed the hand-rolled cigar industry that had built the village; by 1930, all eight factories had closed. The Central Hotel burned in 1936 and was rebuilt by the Stejskals, continuing its famous Sunday dinners into the 1950s. The Chateau La Boheme became the Normandie Inn, a beloved restaurant that stood, increasingly weathered and reputedly haunted, until it was finally demolished in 2022. In a fitting coda, a replica of the Baron’s castle was built on the site in 2024, so the silhouette of Bohemia’s most notorious speakeasy still stands over Smithtown Avenue, now serving sandwiches instead of smuggled rye.
The Prohibition era in Bohemia was never about crime empires or tommy guns. It was about a community that regarded the Volstead Act roughly the way it regarded other attempts to tell it how to live: politely, and with a full glass kept somewhere out of sight.