When the ancestors of those old familiar claw machine games first started appearing in druggist’s shops in the 1930s, Rochester reacted poorly.  Customarily a town that cracked down hard on gambling and vice, the City of Rochester was concerned these nickel-hungry devices were gambling at best, outright theft at worst.

This dude, Chief of Police Henry T. Copenhagen, led the police crusades against the machines.  Installed as Chief of Police in 1934, Copenhagen hated claw machines, digger machines, pin games and dice games of all shapes and sizes.  He was a pinball bigot.

(Here is a link to a video of a vintage Iron Claw machine in operation: [https://youtu.be/GzDgtB9dD2E])

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Claws for Concern

Copenhagen was far from alone in his views. Numerous cities across the United States were banning the devices, especially later on during World War II when the metals and the idleness could scarce be afforded by the war effort. In the 1930’s the City of Rochester was fighting an early iteration of this moral battle, which would eventually result in drawing a legal line between the verboten “games of chance” and the more acceptable “games of skill”.

It hardly helped their reputation that many of the machines originated from Chicago, a city popularly viewed as a mob-bedeviled hive of iniquity and licentiousness.

In 1932, City Judge Arthur Wilder had returned a ruling deeming claw machines and several other games of its type as being gambling devices, and thus unlawful for installation in public businesses.  In 1933, Charles Gargano–a druggist with a store at 669 North Clinton Avenue–appealed the ruling, kicking off a period the papers would refer to as “The Claw War”.

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A Payout in Bricks

Gargano’s trial suffered some delays due to his lawyer falling ill; however, he eventually had his day in court and the ruling against the machines was overturned.  Iron Claw and pin games began to flow into the city unfettered. And along with the machines, apparently, came violence:

Within weeks the troubles began.  Bricks and rocks were used to destroy claw machines and the windows of shops that offered them.

Police theorized these are attacks undertaken by the claw machine distributors themselves, either as an attack on competitors or as part of a protection racket.  Though the clues don’t really line up–such as the lack of threats or cajoling by the attackers–it was an attractive hypothesis to that Javert of claw machines, Chief Copenhagen.

The claims were, of course, denied by machine distributors.

It’s odd that these folks were putting up to a dozen nickels into these machines before they smashed them.  Maybe they really were just angry at the game.

You would think they’d just go ahead and smash them if they were there to smash them.  If they wanted the prize, they wouldn’t feed it nickels, they’d just reach through the broken glass.  Or, take the whole machine, apparently that was viable:

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Crane Game Shots Exchanged

A licensing ordinance is floated, but is shortly to be overshadowed in the news cycle:

At this point folks were just cruising around shooting up claw machines with shotguns.

Also I’m fairly certain Clifford and Norton don’t intersect; Frederick A. Fisher’s restaurant was actually on the corner of Clinton and Norton, 1456 Clinton Avenue North.

This David Bowie-looking guy “Spike” shows off the smashed and pillaged claw machine at his place of employment, The Wheel-In Tavern at 1160 Jay Street.

John Fury, or Fuery, was rounded up on a vagrancy charge and questioned about the Iron Claw War. Fury was known as part of a counterfeiter’s ring headquartered in Batavia, which police had broken up in 1927. Fury also had several recent burglaries and larcenies under his belt. I guess it makes sense that he’d have some involvement in these events, although it doesn’t seem they were able to pin anything on him.

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Legal Struggles

This article “strikes” me as a particularly 1930’s problem to have: you want to ban those sinful arcade games but the dang unionists are striking again! Swell, that puts the kibosh on that!

The tiny town of Geneva, despite having just three of the offending machines, takes a gander at what’s going down in Rochester and is like, “no thanks.”

Another rash of raids and threats on shops and restaurants for operating claw machines draws an injunction from the State Supreme Court on behalf of Robert C. Allen of the Automatic Merchandising Association.  The police have to cease taking action against the machines for the foreseeable future, so long as the courts have proclaimed such devices legal.

Already, public interest was waning due to crummy prizes and poor returns on investment.  The old Iron Claw was no longer an item of novelty enough to draw crowds. This, of course, was not good enough for Copenhagen: he wanted the machines gone entirely.

Apparently some of the same violent claw machine rackets that had waged war in Rochester had taken off for the greener pastures of Syracuse, where smashing Iron Claws with hammers flourished once again.

I could not, unfortunately, find any corroborating journalism from Syracuse on this trio of “muscle men” wielding hammers against game cabinets.

Robert C. Allen of the Automatic Merchandising Association raised a lawsuit against the police for raiding game machines.  Allen’s suit was followed up with one by John Goodbody, a coin-operated game distributor. The City and police scrambled for a plan to reverse the injunctions against police action.

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A Dangerous Prize

One odd story that happened alongside all this was the case of Robert Lamb and Dewey Plotts.  Plotts, it is claimed, won a foot-long hunting knife from a claw machine at Malley’s Tavern on Monroe Avenue [familiar to some modern readers as the location of the former Sports Page Bar & Grill]. Plotts then promptly–and allegedly, accidentally–skewered Lamb with it.  Sheesh!

Regardless of whether it’s gambling or not, sharp foot-long blades seem like a poorly-thought-out claw machine prize.  How about a one-shot pistol?  A lit firework?

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End Game

The injunction disallowing police action against certain games was lifted, mostly those hinging entirely on chance for their payout.  Copenhagen was ready and willing to get back in there and crack some claw-heads, but unfortunately for him there was still some question as to the legality of Iron Claw style games which might be proven to have a component of skill.

Rollo games, mentioned above, are a key example. Basically mechanical Bagatelle, there’s an element of skill which elevates it from a game of chance. I could not, unfortunately, find a photograph of a full-size Rollo table or cabinet, nor indeed the “Jumbo” variant mentioned above.

In April of 1936, the decision was made.  The death warrant for Iron Claws was handed down from the high courts of the State of New York.

Copenhagen still held off, biding his time.

Finally, Copenhagen made his move. He and his men swept the city, confiscating the claw machines and their mechanical cousins from any corner drugstore or restaurant they could be found in. The city was rid of the devilish devices for the time being.

For all intents and purposes, the Iron Claw War had officially ended. Even as the proscribed pinball machines crept back into businesses, the violence and property damage which marked the war did not return.

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