The Braycott Arms was a stain on the character of the city of Portland, a blight on its inhabitants, and a repository for criminality, both aggressively active and relatively passive, the latter frequently due only to the temporary requirements of a parole board. It had always been thus, even beyond recall. The Braycott was one of a number of railroad hotels that had sprung up in the vicinity of Union Station, now departed these sixty years, of which only the Inn at St John and the Braycott survived.

But while the former was comfortable, hospitable, and carefully maintained, the Braycott catered to those who were less than particular about their surroundings, and valued the company of rough men and rougher women over clean sheets and a peaceful night’s sleep. There was something almost admirable in the Braycott’s commitment to anarchy and disrepute, a commitment that seemed to have been passed down from owner to owner along with the deeds and keys. The hotel first opened its doors on July 25, 1888, just one month after Union Station itself. By then Maine’s embrace of Prohibition, which had commenced nearly seventy years before the passage of the Volstead Act, was tightening.

The sale of alcohol was illegal in the state, which drove the business underground – literally, in the case of the Braycott Arms, whose principal developer, Normand Braycott, had the foresight to devise a bar in the basement, albeit one omitted from the official plans. Bribes rendered it largely immune from raids, except for cosmetic purposes, although a two-hundred-foot tunnel behind the keg storage bay was kept clear in case of real emergencies, with a point of egress in a Braycott-owned property on the other side of Park Avenue. Decades later, when the rest of the United States followed Maine’s lead in attempting to dry out its population by
force, the Braycott’s tunnel and bar became a staging point for the rumrunners bringing liquor into Portland Harbor, where the bottles would be concealed in boxes of Moxie soda, later to become the state’s official soft drink, possibly in part for services rendered to its populace during Prohibition…

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