The Personality of American Cities Part 4

Katherine might have taken you to other tea dispensaries--an unusual place in a converted stable in Thirty-fourth street, another stable loft in West Twenty-eighth--dozens of little shops, generally feminine to an intensified degree, which combine the serving of tea with the vending of their wares. But she preferred the big white hotel.

"Tea at the Plaza is so satisfactory and so restful," she says, as you dodge to permit two ladies--one in gray silk and the other in a cut of blue cloth that gives her the contour of a magnified frog--to slip past you without knocking your tea out of your untrained fingers. "We might have gone to the Manhattan--but it's so filled with young girls and the chappies from the schools--the Ritz is proper but dull, so is Sherry's--all the rest more or less impossible."

She rattles on--the matter of restaurants is always dear to the New York heart. You ignore the details.

"But why?" you demand.

"Why what?" she returns.

"Why tea?"

You explain that afternoon tea in its real lair--London--in a sort of climatic necessity. The prevalence of fog, of raw damp days, makes a cup of hot tea a real bracer--a stimulant that carries the human through another two or three hours of hard existence until the late London dinner. The bracing atmosphere of New York--with more clear days than any other metropolitan city in the world--does not need tea. You say so frankly.

"I suppose you are right," Katherine concedes, "but we have ceased in this big city to rail at the English. We bow the knee to them. The most fashionable of our newest hotels and shops run--absurdly many times--to English ways. And afternoon tea has long since ceased to be a novelty in our lives. Why, they are beginning to serve it at the offices downtown--just as they do in dear old London."

You swallow hard--some one has recommended that to you as a method of suppressing emotion--for polite society is never emotional.

V

Dinner is New York's real function of the day. And dinner in New York means five million hungry stomachs demanding to be filled. The New York dinner is as cosmopolitan as the folk who dwell on the narrow island of Manhattan and the two other islands that press closely to it. The restaurant and hotel dinners are as cosmopolitan as the others. Of course, for the sake of brevity, if for no other reason, you must eliminate the home dinners--and read "home" as quickly into the cold and heavy great houses of the avenue as into the little cl.u.s.ters of rooms in crowded East Side tenements where poverty is never far away and next week's meals a real problem. And remember, that to dine even in a reasonably complete list of New York's famous eating places--a new one every night--would take you more than a year. At the best your vision of them must be desultory.

Six o'clock sees the New York business army well on its way toward home--the seething crowds at the Brooklyn bridge terminal in Park Row, the overloaded subway straining to move its fearful burden, the ferry and the railroad terminals focal points of great attractiveness. To make a single instance: take that division of the army that dwells in Brooklyn. It begins its march dinnerward a little after four o'clock, becomes a pushing, jostling mob a little later and shows no sign of abatement until long after six. Within that time the railroad folk at the Park Row terminal of the old bridge have received, cla.s.sified and despatched Brooklynward, more than one hundred and fifty thousand persons--the population of a city almost the size of Syracuse. And the famous old bridge is but one of four direct paths from Manhattan to Brooklyn.

Six o'clock sees restaurants and cafes alight and ready for the two or three hours of their really brisk traffic of the day. There are even dinner restaurants downtown, remarkably good places withal and making especial appeal to those overworked souls who are forced to stay at the office at night. There are bright lights in Chinatown where innumerable "Tuxedos" and "Port Arthurs" are beginning to prepare the chop-suey in immaculate Mongolian kitchens. But the real restaurant district for the diner-out hardly begins south of Madison square. There are still a very few old hotels in Broadway south of that point--a lessening company each year--one or two in close proximity to Washington square. Two of these last make a specialty of French cooking--their _table d'hotes_ are really famous--and perhaps you may fairly say when you are done at them that you have eaten at the best restaurants in all New York. From them Fifth avenue runs a straight course to the newer hotels far to the north--a silent brilliantly lighted street as night comes "with the double row of steel-blue electric lamps resembling torch-bearing monks"

one brilliant New York writer has put it. But before the newest of the new an intermediate era of hotels, the Holland, the nearby Imperial and the Waldorf-Astoria chief among these. The Waldorf has been from the day it first opened its doors--more than twenty years ago--New York's really representative hotel. Newer hostelries have tried to wrest that honor from it--but in vain. It has clung jealously to its reputation. The great dinners of the town are held in its wonderful banqueting halls, the well-known men of New York are constantly in its corridors. It is club and more than club--it is a clearing-house for all of the best clubs. It is the focal center for the hotel life of the town.

There is an important group of hotels in the rather spectacular neighborhood of Times square--the Astor, with its distinctly German flavor, and the Knickerbocker which whimsically likes to call itself "the country club on Forty-second street" distinctive among them. And ranging upon upper Fifth avenue, or close to it, are other important houses, the Belmont, the aristocratic Manhattan, the ultra-British Ritz-Carlton, the St. Regis, the Savoy, the Netherland, the Plaza, and the Gotham. In between these are those two impeccable restaurants--so distinctive of New York and so long wrapped up in its history--Sherry's and Delmonico's.

Over in the theatrical brilliancy of Broadway up and down from Times square are other restaurants--Shanley's, Churchill's, Murray's--the list is constantly changing. A fashionable restaurant in New York is either tremendously successful--or else, as we shall later see, they are telephoning for the sheriff. And the last outcome is apt more to follow than the first. For it is a tremendous undertaking to launch a restaurant in these days. The decorations of the great dining-rooms must rival those of a Versailles palace while the so-called minor appointments--silver, linen, china and the rest must be as faultless as in any great house upon Fifth avenue. The first cost is staggering, the upkeep a steady drain. There is but one opportunity for the proprietor--and that opportunity is in his charges. And when you come to dine in one of these showy uptown places you will find that he has not missed his opportunity.

All New York that dines out does not make for these great places or their fellows. There are little restaurants that cast a glamour over their poor food by thrusting out hints of a magic folk named Bohemians who dine night after night at their dirty tables. There are others who with a Persian name seek to allure the ill-informed, some stout German places giving the substantial cheer of the Fatherland, beyond them restaurants phrasing themselves in the national dishes and the cooking of every land in the world, save our own. For a real American restaurant is hard to find in New York--real American dishes treats of increasing rarity. A great hotel recently banished steaks from its bills-of-fare, another has placed the ban on pie; and as for strawberry short-cake--just ask for strawberry short-cake. The concoction that the waiter will set before you will leave you hesitating between tears and laughter--ridicule for the pitiful attempts of a French cook and tears for your thoughts of the tragedy that has overwhelmed an American inst.i.tution. Some day some one is going to build a hotel with the American idea standing back of it right in the heart of New York. He is going to have the bravery or the patriotism to call it the American House or the United States Hotel or Congress Hall or some other t.i.tle that means something quite removed from the aristocratic nomenclature that our modern generation of tavern-keepers have borrowed from Europe without the slightest sense of fitness; and to that man shall be given more than mere riches--the satisfaction that will come to him from having accomplished a real work.

The truth of the matter is that we have borrowed more than nomenclature from Europe. We have taken the so-called "European plan" with all of its disadvantages and none of its advantages. We have done away with the stuffy over-eating "American plan" and have made a rule of "pay-as-you-go" that is quite all right--and is not. For to the simple "European plan" has recently been added many complications. In other days the generosity of the portions in a New York hotel was famous. A single portion of any important dish was ample for two. Your smiling old-fashioned waiter told you that. The waiter in a New York restaurant today does not smile. He merely tells you that the food is served "per portion" which generally means that an unnecessary amount of food is prepared in the kitchen and sent from the table, uneaten, as waste. And a smart New York _restauranteur_ recently made a "cover charge" of twenty-five cents for bread and b.u.t.ter and ice-water. Others followed.

It will not be long before a smarter _restauranteur_ will make the "cover charge" fifty cents, and then folk will begin streaming into his place. They don't complain. That's not the New York way.

They do not even complain of the hat-boys--bloodthirsty little brigands who s.n.a.t.c.h your hat and other wraps before you enter a restaurant. The brigands are skillfully chosen--lean, hungry little boys every time, never fat, sleek, well-fed looking little boys. They are employed by a trust, which rents the "hat-checking privilege" from the proprietor of the hotel or restaurant. The owner of the trust pays well for these privileges and the little boys must work hard to bring him back his rental fees and a fair profit beside.

Leave that to them. Emerge from a restaurant, well-fed and at peace with the world and deny that lean-looking, swarthy-faced, black-eyed boy a quarter if you can--or dare. A dime is out of the question. He might insult you, probably would. But a quarter buys your self-respect and the head of the trust a share in his new motor car. The lean-looking boy buys no motor cars. He works on a salary and there are no pockets in his uniform. There is a stern-visaged cicerone in the background and to the cicerone roll all the quarters, but the New Yorker does not complain--save when he reaches Los Angeles or Atlanta or some other fairly distant place and finds the same sort of highway brigandage in effect there.

VI

After the dinner and the hat-boy--the theater. You suggest the theater to Katherine. She is enthusiastic. You pick the theater. It is close at hand and you quickly find your way to it. A gentleman, whose politeness is of a variety, somewhat _frappe_, awaits you in the box-office. A line of hopeful mortals is shuffling toward him, to disperse with hope left behind. But this antic.i.p.ates.

You inquire of the man in the box-office for two seats--two particularly good seats. You remember going to the theater in Indianapolis once upon a time, a stranger, and having been seated behind the fattest theater pillar that you could have ever possibly imagined. But you need not worry about the pillars in this New York playhouse. The box-office gentleman, whose thoughts seem to be a thousand miles away, blandly replies that the house is sold out.

"So good?" you brashly venture. You had not fancied this production so successful. He does not even a.s.sume to hear your comment. You decide that you will see this particular play at a later time. You suggest as much to the indifferent creature behind the wicket. He replies by telling you that he can only give you tickets for a Monday or Tuesday three weeks hence--and then nothing ahead of the seventeenth row. Can he not do better than that? He cannot. He is positive that he cannot. And his positiveness is Gibraltarian in its immobility. A faint sign of irritation covers his bland face. He wants you to see that you are taking too much of his time.

Katherine saves the situation. She whispers to you that she noticed a little shop nearby with a sign "Tickets for all Theaters" displayed upon it.

"You know they abolished the speculators two years ago," she explains.

You move on to the little shop with the inviting sign. The gentleman behind its counters has manners at least. He greets you with the smile of the professional shopkeeper.

"Have you tickets for 'The Giddiest Girl'?" you inquire.

He smiles ingratiatingly. Of course he has, for any night and anywhere you wish them.

"What is the price of them?"

You are not coldly commercial but, despite that smile, merely apprehensive. And you are beginning to understand New York.

"Four dollars."

Not so bad at that--just the box-office price. You bring out four greasy one-dollar bills. His eyes fixed upon them, he places a ticket down upon the counter.

"There--there are two of us," you stammer.

He does not stammer.

"Do you think that they are four dollars a dozen?" he sallies.

You give him a ten dollar bill this time. You do not kick. Even though the show is perfectly rotten and the usherette charges you ten cents for a poorly printed program and scowls because you take the change from her itching palm, do not complain. You would not complain even if you knew that the man in the chair next to you paid only the regular prices, because he happened to belong to the same lodge as the cousin of the treasurer of the theater, while the man in the chair next to Katherine paid nothing at all for his seat--having a relative who advertises in the theater programs. You do not kick. Complaint has long since been eliminated from the New York code and you have begun to realize that.

After the theater, another restaurant--this time for supper--more hat-boys, more brigandage but it is the thing to do and you must do it.

And you must do it well. Splendor costs and you pay--your full proportion. If up in your home town you know a nice little place where you can drop in after the show at the local playhouse and have a gla.s.s of beer and a rarebit--dismiss that as a prevailing idea in the neighborhood of Long Acre square. The White Light district of Broadway can buy no motor cars on the beer and rarebit trade. Louey's trade in his modest little place up home is sufficient to keep him in moderate living year in and year out, but Louey does not have to pay Broadway ground rent, or Broadway prices for food-stuffs or Broadway salaries--to say nothing of having a thirst for a bigger and faster automobile than his neighbor. And as we have said, the opportunity for bankruptcy in the so-called "lobster palaces" of Broadway runs high. As this is being written, one of the most famous of them has collapsed.

Its proprietor--he was a smart caterer come east from Chicago where he had made his place fashionable and himself fairly rich--for a dozen years ran a prosperous restaurant within a stone-throw of the tall white shaft of the _Times_ building. And even if the heels were the highest, the gowns the lowest, the food was impeccable and if you knew New York at all you knew who went there. It was gay and beautiful and high-priced. It was immensely popular. Then the proprietor listened to sirens. They commanded him to tear down the simple structure of his restaurant and there build a towering hotel. He obeyed orders. With the magic of New York builders the new building was ready within the twelvemonth. It represented all that might be desired--or that upper Broadway at least might desire--in modern hotel construction.

But it could not succeed. A salacious play which made a considerable commercial success took its t.i.tle from the new hotel and called itself "The Girl from R----'s." That was the last straw. It might have been good fun for the man from Baraboo or the man from Jefferson City to come to New York and dine quietly and elegantly at R----'s, but to stop at R----'s hotel, to have his mail sent there, to have the local paper report that he was registered at that really splendid hostelry--ah, that was a different matter, indeed. Your Baraboo citizen had some fairly conservative connections--church and business--and he took no risks. The new hotel went bankrupt.[A]

[A] Another hotel man has just taken the property. His first step has been to change its name and, if possible, its reputation. E. H.

Beer and rarebits, indeed. Sam Blythe tells of the little group of four who went into a hotel grillroom not far from Forty-second street and Broadway, who mildly asked for beer and rabbits.

"We have fine partridges," said the head-waiter, insinuatingly.

"We asked for beer and rabbits," insisted the host of the little group.

He really did not know his New York.

"We have fine partridges," reiterated the head-waiter, then yawned slightly behind his hand. That yawn settled it. The head of the party was bellicose. He lost his temper completely. In a few minutes an ambulance and a patrol wagon came racing up Broadway. But the hotel had won. It always does.

One thing more--the _cabaret_. We think that if you are really fond of Katherine, and Katherine's reputation, you will avoid the restaurants that make a specialty of the so-called _cabarets_. Really good restaurants manage to get along without them. And the very best that can be said of them is that they are invariably indifferently poor--a _melange_ contributed by broken-down actors or actresses, or boys or girls stolen from the possibilities of a really decent way of earning a living. As for the worst, it is enough to say that the familiarity that begins by breeding contempt follows in the wake of the _cabaret_. It may be very jolly for you, of a lonely summer evening in New York and forgetting all the real pleasures of a lonely summer night in the big town--wonderful orchestral concerts in Central Park, dining on open-air terraces and cool quiet roofs, motoring off to wonderful sh.o.r.e dinners in queer old taverns--to hunt out these great gay places in the heart of the town. Easy _camaraderie_ is part and parcel of them. But you will not want such comrades to meet any of the Katherines of your family. And therein lies a more than subtle distinction.