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.