As suburbs go, Haddon Heights, N.J., has a lot to recommend it. Kids can walk to school and play safely under leafy trees. It’s close to Philadelphia, but full of small-town charm. It has an almost century-old grocery store, good restaurants, plenty of longtime residents and small business owners who know one another by name.
The town is short on just one thing: booze.
For all of its 120-year history, Haddon Heights has been a dry town. But this month, its residents voted to change that. By a nearly two-to-one margin, voters passed a ballot initiative on Election Day to allow restaurants and bars to serve alcohol, joining the growing ranks of formerly dry counties and towns across the country that have abandoned such restrictions.
In Kansas, where prohibition was law until after World War II, only one dry county remains. Kentucky is down to two dry counties from more than 40 in 2011. In Texas, 22 counties and more than 200 towns scrapped anti-alcohol rules over a 10-year span, according to the National Alcohol Beverage Control Association.
And in New Jersey, a state with a Protestant past where municipalities can decide their own liquor rules, a once-long list of dry towns becomes shorter year after year.
Some of the holdouts are stricter than others, like Ocean City, where it is against the rules to drink in public, even in restaurants. Other towns are perhaps better considered damp, allowing B.Y.O.B. restaurants and even the sale of locally made alcohol. That’s how Haddon Heights got Tanner Brewing Company, a craft brewery that makes its beer on-site and opened off the main drag a couple of years ago.
So what can’t you get in Haddon Heights? There are no liquor stores, no wine shops and no bars, though some restaurants allow diners to bring their own drinks.
Mike Plonski, 47, who has lived in the town for seven years, said he voted for the measure. Though he doesn’t want a watering hole on every corner, or rowdy crowds gathering outside bars in the early hours of the morning, he thinks it would be nice to be able to order a drink once in awhile.
“It would be cool to go on a date with my wife and just sit at the bar, and have a cocktail, and not have to drive there,” Mr. Plonski said.
Before Haddon Heights officially moves from dry to wet, the town council and its mayor, Zachary Houck, will need to pass an ordinance to enact the ballot question’s result. Public opinion is on liquor’s side, and so is Mayor Houck, who proposed the referendum and said he intended to honor its results.
New Jersey law bases the number of liquor licenses each town can issue on the size of its population. Haddon Heights, with its population of about 7,500, would only be eligible to grant liquor licenses to two bars or restaurants if the ordinance passes.
Matt Konopka, who moved to Haddon Heights nearly 40 years ago, dismissed concerns held by some of his neighbors that the granting of a couple of liquor licenses would dramatically alter their close-knit community.
“Progress is a good thing, and you can’t stop it,” said Mr. Konopka, 68, who voted for the proposal. “You have to adapt, and it’s not going to kill anything. It’s not going to change the nature of the town.”
Still, the possibility of even two licenses is a bridge too far for some residents who voted against the measure. Many are less concerned with upholding the town’s prohibitionist tradition than they are with preserving its charm.
“I’m opposed to it,” said Bill Lange, 76, as he loaded groceries into his car on a recent afternoon. He added that he was “not a teetotaler by any stretch of the imagination.” But he worried the shift would have ripple effects.
“I think it’s going to bring a lot of changes,” Mr. Lange said. “It’s like the domino: One falls and then another and another.”
That is a concern shared by Annie Pyle, 28, a Haddon Heights resident who grew up in a dry town not far away and sees no reason to fix something that isn’t broken.
“I just don’t feel like anything needs to change,” Ms. Pyle, 28, said, as she pushed her baby in a stroller down the main drag, Station Avenue. “It’s tradition.”
On Station Avenue, small businesses in neat brick buildings line the street, where curbside parking is free and abundant. Walk past Anthony’s, a white-tablecloth Italian joint, and you just might bump into Anthony, blowing leaves off the sidewalk in a stained black apron.
To some local business owners, like Vic Turkot, a florist who has also sold Christmas trees in the town for decades, passing the measure was actually an opportunity to protect Haddon Heights’s small-town character.
Back in the early 2000s, he said, Station Avenue was bustling. But now, he said, foot traffic had slowed so much “you could take a nap on the sidewalk.”
He is happy the measure passed, and he thinks it will help revitalize the town.
“If we didn’t change, we’d still be living in caves,” said Mr. Turkot, 71.
Kunkel’s, a 140-seat steakhouse and seafood joint, is one of the oldest restaurants in Haddon Heights. John Kunkel, who owns it with his wife, thinks liquor licenses would be good for the town, though he is not sure if one would be good for him.
He hasn’t decided whether he will bid on one of the licenses, which in New Jersey can cost anywhere between $100,000 and $1 million.
But not serving alcohol is costly, too — Mr. Kunkel said his restaurant would make up to 20 percent more in profit if it did.
Seeking to plug the gap, Mr. Kunkel has flirted with serving drinks before. He even built a 10-seat bar when the restaurant first opened, roughly 20 years ago, as the town weighed the question of issuing licenses.
Then, years later, Kunkel’s experimented with serving locally made New Jersey wines, a not-so-lucrative loophole in the dry town policy through which the restaurant made around $1 for each bottle it sold.
“Then I got a couple of bad reviews on the place, and it was basically wine,” Mr. Kunkel said. “They didn’t like the wine.”
Who will get Haddon Heights’s two licenses is a question the town will deal with later, probably some time next year, Mayor Houck said. Once the ordinance goes into effect, the town will start accepting applications from interested business owners, set a minimum price for the licenses and open bidding.
Some residents have said they feel Kunkel’s and Anthony’s, the two oldest restaurants in town, are most deserving and should get the licenses, if they want them. Others fear that a chain restaurant, say an Applebee’s or an Outback, could swoop in and outbid the locals.
But still others said they were open to something new opening up.
“We would never want anything bad to happen to this town,” Mr. Plonski said. “But I think that if we had a bar, it would be OK.”
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