The American Pool Hall’s Life and Death

Pool—and the often-vilified pool hall—has had a tumultuous past in both pop culture and real life. Sarah Baird examines how America’s bad boy of bars is aging in the twenty-first century.
Pool has always struck me as the most romantic of all the barroom games—from darts to video poker—even in the most run-down of settings. This is a strategy game. Pool halls have long been associated with societal problems, acting as much-maligned dens of iniquity where game and alcohol collide.
Pool’s previous, far more respectable incarnations as a game beloved by Renaissance-era monarchs and Civil War soldiers have become so commonplace over the course of the twentieth century that it’s difficult to imagine its previous, far more respectable, incarnations as a game beloved by Renaissance-era monarchs and Civil War soldiers (who even collected trading cards of their favorite billiard players).
The game’s havens are once again undergoing the kind of identity crisis that comes with age in the twenty-first century. Pool halls aren’t as wild as they used to be, like the former bad boy who succumbs to a bad back and trades in his motorcycle for a Subaru.
All indicators pointed me to the famed People’s Billiard Club when I went looking for a holdout in Memphis last October. People’s Pool Hall, which opened in 1904, is the city’s and possibly the country’s oldest continuously functioning pool hall. People’s scripted neon fizzed softly in the night sky, just a stroll away from wandering herds of tourists humming Joe Jackson’s “Walking in Memphis” and the Technicolor blight of Hard Rock Café.
The pub, which is now over a century old, was a symbol of rip-roaring, pool shark culture and a haven for beer-swilling men during the “golden age” of pool in the early twentieth century, where roughnecks and Tennessee gentlemen participated in friendly rivalry over a shot and a beer. Even throughout my visit, it looked as if I had wandered into a secret, chalk-dust baptized fraternity gathering by accident. Pool halls, like so much of bar culture, have long been controlled by men, with the game’s competitive intensity adding a healthy dose of testosterone to the mix.
While the game’s actual beginnings are unknown, we do know that it was played in European royal courts in the 15th century and is mentioned in French aristocrats’ memoirs as well as Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. Pool attracted friends in high places, from wealthy businessmen to Abraham Lincoln, who dubbed the game “health-inspiring” despite the church’s constant condemnation.
By the 1920s, the pool hall had fallen out of favor, becoming a symbol of liquor-laced immorality and a haven for men seeking to escape the confines of home and family. There was a perception among church-pew whisperers—who loathed gambling almost as much as hard booze—that the game itself could lead their innocent youngsters down a path of immoral inebriation.
This dread is embodied in a scene from The Music Man, a 1962 classic musical about the penetration of pool hall culture into a pristine Iowa town (c. 1912). The hallmark song of con man Harold Hill in the film extols how playing pool is the “gateway drug” that turns boys into carousing ne’er-do-wells:
“Oh, you’re in a lot of trouble!” Here in River City, to be exact! “It starts with a capital ‘T,’ rhymes with ‘P,’ and stands for ‘pool!'”
“I say, first, medicinal wine from a teaspoon, then beer from a bottle!” “[Pool is] the first great step on the road, to the depths of —I say, first, medicinal wine from a teaspoon, then beer from a bottle!”
The Music Man was released at the perfect time for pool’s second coming on screen, reflecting the opulent excess of the Robber Baron era. This money aided the creation of billiard halls for gambling gentlemen who also loved a drink and a scuffle every now and then. Pool halls, on the other hand, became a sleazy pop culture phenomenon in the 1950s.
The Hustler, a 1959 film starring gorgeous Paul Newman as pool shark “Fast” Eddie Felson, portraying the world of pool halls as seething with inebriated, working-class wrath, was a major catalyst for this mid-century movement. When Felson meets Sarah Packard, his love interest, she explains how a prim appearing girl like herself ended up on the pool hall side of the tracks:
Pool halls’ physical arrangement is generally defined by rigorous, rank-and-file organization, despite their traditional association with booze-fueled pandemonium. Rows and columns of emerald-topped rectangles formed a grid over the pool hall floor behind the biker mates at the People’s bar, as if someone attempted to LARP an Excel spreadsheet, with each pool table working as its own, uniform cell. Of course, when a pool hall is mostly empty and the clink of a few wayward ice cubes in a watered down glass echoes louder than cue against ball, this Spartan aesthetic choice is most visible.
Pool halls are frequently found in this manner nowadays, albeit as slow-burning activity with periodic seismic spikes, rather than as hotbeds of pearl clutching, hard-drinking depravity. A continual in-and-out trickle of regulars, billiard league semi-pros, and emboldened first-date visitors make local venues throb on any given night in the New Orleans area.
“You play pool?” a particularly gruff bartender inquired as I sat down on a stool at People’s last year. Taking his gaze away from the Duck Dynasty reruns on the bar’s television, he reveals that he could easily pass for an extra on the show. Except for a couple of bikers in patch-covered, fringe-lined leather vests breaking open Miller, the hall was deserted.