I had heard of Vinegar Hill about a year ago but knew nothing about the neighborhood. Coming from living 25 years in eastern Long Island, I know making a life in the Brooklyn/Queens areas, I’d take whatever opportunities I could about the histories of what I now call home. The Whiskey Wars article immediately made me think of the backwards actions of todays government with surge taxing on the necessities that we as people require most, or products with the most demand. Tax breaks on the richest, but spiked taxing on the lower and middle class and only making them higher. “Mom and pop” shops and small businesses being overshadowed and turned out of business because they cannot afford it. To me, the Whiskey Wars and the attacks on Brooklyn distilleries in the 1860s, with liquor being dumped out and wasted when all of that product could have been huge profit for the distillers.