This entry opens with a “Nize Baby” comic illustration by Milt Gross, since Milt’s book by the same title was advertised in the May 22 issue (featured later in this entry). I thought it better to begin with a bright comic than with a depressing image of NYC’s “The Tombs” prison, which was featured in the May 15 issue’s “Reporter at Large” piece written by Morris Markey.
May 15 cover by Ronald McRae.
The somber, colloquial name of the prison was actually derived from a previous prison that had occupied the area, designed in a fashion that resembled an “Egyptian mausoleum.” The original Tombs (pictured below) was built in 1838:
(daytoninmanhattan)
The first Tombs was notorious as a place of extreme cruelty—most of the prisoners were simply detainees awaiting their hearings and few had been convicted of actual crimes. Nevertheless some remained imprisoned for up to ten months in horrible conditions. The city’s answer to the problem was simply to demolish the prison in 1897 and replace it in 1902 with a Châteauesque-style structure. This was the prison to which Markey paid his visit:
The prison (left) that replaced The Tombs connected to the 1892 Manhattan Criminal Courts Building with a “Bridge of Sighs” crossing four stories above Franklin Street. (Wikipedia)
The prison may have been an improvement over the original Tombs, but Markey nevertheless found it a gloomy place:
Now on to something a bit cheerier. It is springtime in New York, after all:
May 22, 1926 cover by Julian de Miskey.
“The Talk of the Town” briefly commented on Sinclair Lewis’s refusal to accept the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Arrowsmith. Lewis said he did not agree with contests where one book or author was praised over another. In the “Profile” section, Waldo Frank looked at the life of philosopher and education reformer John Dewey…through a jaded lens:
The issue featured this advertisement for a new book by cartoonist Milt Gross. He was best known for his comic characters who spoke a Yiddish-inflected English dialogue.
Gross is perhaps one of the first comic artists to publish (in 1930) what today we call a graphic novel—his pantomime tale He Done Her Wrong: The Great American Novel and Not a Word in It — No Music, Too. At nearly 300 pages, it was composed entirely of pen-and-ink cartoons.
Cover for He Done Her Wrong (Wikipedia)
And The New Yorker took its usual blasé tone in reporting on the latest world news, namely Admiral Richard Byrd’s attempted flight over the North Pole.
Pathé cameraman filming the Josephine Ford as it was being prepared for flight to the North Pole. (The Ohio State University Archives)
New Yorker editors had some fun taking jabs at The New York Times for its sensational headlines regarding the event:
And to close, the first of what would be a series of ads for Grebe radios, including the weird testimonials by Confucius and “Doctor Wu”…
The cover of the May 8, 1926 issue featured this Bauhaus-style rendering of a baseball player by Victor Bobritsky in anticipation of the 1926 season:
May 8, 1926 cover by Victor Bobritsky.
After a terrible 1925 season (and Babe Ruth’s infamous stomach ache), in 1926 the New York Yankees would begin to form a batting lineup that would become known as “Murderers’ Row.” They won the AL pennant in 1926 (losing to the St. Louis Cardinals in a seven-game World Series) and in 1927 they would go 110-44 and sweep the Pittsburgh Pirates in the World Series. More on that when we actually get to 1927.
The May 8 issue offered more coverage of Spanish actress-singer Raquel Meller’s first-ever visit to America, which caused quite a sensation:
Raquel Meller
Meller arrived in New York via the SS Leviathan, on which she apparently attempted to book a deluxe suite for her five Pekingese. After New York she also visited Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, Baltimore and Los Angeles, where she attracted the attention of Charlie Chaplin. Although Chaplin was unsuccessful in landing Meller as a co-star, he did incorporate the melody of her most famous song, La Violetera, as a major theme in his 1931 film City Lights.
Meller’s visit landed her on the cover of the April 26, 1926 Time magazine. (Wikipedia)
Theodore Shane reviewed the film Brown of Harvard and pondered the accuracy of this portrayal of Harvard student life:
(Wikipedia)
The issue also featured more unique mapmaking by John Held Jr:
And this W.P. Trent cartoon with a common theme of early New Yorker issues: the comic imbalance of rich old men and their young mistresses:
And finally, this advertisement in the May 8 issue caught my eye. Although cars crowded the streets of New York, they were still a recent enough invention to evoke the days of horse-drawn carriages. Even with all of the advances in automobiles in the late 20s, this landau-style Rolls Royce still exposed the driver to the weather, a design feature that signaled class, not practicality.
The Ringling Brothers Circus was in town, and The New Yorker marked the occasion with a profile of the surviving Ringlings, John and Charles. Writer Helena Huntington Smith noted that the brothers used a lowbrow profession to become multimillionaires, real estate kings (“They own “most of the west coast of Florida”) and even occasional patrons of the arts.
May 1, 1926 cover by Ottar Gaul.
Speaking of lowbrow, circus freaks remained a big attraction in 1920s New York. Here is an image of the Ringling Brothers “Congress of Freaks” lineup from two years earlier, in 1924:
Photograph by Edward Kelty, who took photos of the “Congress of Freaks” every year from 1924 to the mid 1930s. (artblart.com)
The 1926 show at Madison Square Garden also featured elephants “dancing” the Charleston. One wonders how much these poor beasts were abused:
(Vintage Everyday)
And from the “Remember it’s 1926 Department,” we have this New Yorker obituary for famed Ringling circus freak Zip the Pinhead. Note that Zip was “owned” by a Captain O.K. White:
Zip’s real name was William Henry Johnson. Thought to have been born with microcephaly (those with the condition were commonly called “pinheads), he might have merely possessed an oddly shaped head.
William Henry Johnson. (Wikipedia)
Audiences were often told that he was a wild man, or a missing link, and although it was assumed he was mentally deficient (the New Yorker article above suggested he had the mentality of a two-year-old child), Johnson’s sister said he could “converse like the average person, and with fair reasoning power.” She claimed his last words (he died at age 83) were, “Well, we fooled ’em for a long time, didn’t we?”
The New Yorker editors continued to marvel at the heights of new buildings, the latest being the Ritz Tower, which was to be the tallest residential building in the city:
Here’s a postcard image of the Ritz Tower from the late 1920s. Note the airplane at left, added to emphasize the building’s height:
(geographicguide.com)
At 41 stories and 541 feet, the Ritz was city’s tallest residential tower at the time. The tallest residential tower in NYC today is 432 Park Avenue. The 96-story tower is just shy of 1,400 feet:
(Forbes)
Even taller residential towers are in the works.
Now, to end on a lighter note, a Whoops Sisters cartoon by Peter Arno—this is the first in which their trademark “Whoops” is uttered.
and this “generation gap” observation by Helen Hokinson:
The “sad young man” in question was none other than F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was profiled by John Mosher (who would succeed Theodore Shane as film critic) in the April 17, 1926 issue of The New Yorker.
April 17, 1926 cover by Clayton Knight.
Mosher wrote that Scott believed he was “getting on in years,” even though he was only 29 years old and had recently published The Great Gatsby (which had received a brief, lukewarm review from The New Yorker in 1925). Mosher observed that the novelist and his wife, Zelda, famous on two continents and with money pouring in from the publication of This Side of Paradise, nevertheless complained of being broke:
It was noted however that the couple had little financial sense:
Mosher found Fitzgerald to be a grave, hardworking man, and seemed to sense the melancholy that would lead to madness (in Zelda’s case), alcoholism and an early grave (Fitzgerald would be dead in 14 years).
Illustration of Fitzgerald by Victor De Pauw for the April 17 “Profile.”
In this issue we were also introduced to Peter Arno’s “Whoops Sisters,” although they are not yet identified here by that title:
According to New Yorker cartoonist Michael Maslin, “in 1925, The New Yorker published nine Arno drawings. In 1926, it ran seventy-two. The enormous jump was due to the wild success of two cartoon sisters Arno created: Pansy Smiff and Mrs. Abagail Flusser, otherwise known as The Whoops Sisters. The Sisters were not sweet little old ladies — they were naughty boisterous grinning “wink wink, nudge nudge” sweet little old ladies, their language laced with double entendres.”
April 24, 1926 cover by Ilonka Karasz.
In the April 24, 1926 issue, the dyspeptic film critic Theodore Shane took aim at Cecil B. DeMille’sThe Volga Boatman:
VOLGA HOKUM…Elinor Fair and Victor Varconi in The Volga Boatman. (Virtual History)
Also in this issue, Al Frueh’s interpretation of New York’s social strata via the city’s Madison Avenue train stops:
Near the theatre section, this illustration of famed Spanish singer and actress Raquel Meller, as rendered by Miguel Covarrubias:
And a photo of Meller from the 1920s that looks like it could have been taken yesterday:
(rameller.tripod.com)
An international star in the 1920s and 1930s, Meller appeared in several films and sang the original version of the well known song La Violetera.
In her latest dispatch from Paris, correspondent Janet Flanner offered New Yorker readers a glimpse into the French mind, its fear of “Americanization” and its perception of America’s Puritanical attitudes behind Prohibition.
April 3, 1926 cover by Rea Irvin.
All the more reason the French were bemused by reports that American and English citizens led the lists of reported drug raids in the City of Light…
or that somehow Prohibition was a question of theological differences:
The April 3, 1926 issue also offered up some curious advertisements. Aiming square at the grasping Anglophilia of New Yorker readers, here’s a pitch for a used Rolls Royce:
And with the money left over from your savings on the used Rolls, you could buy this 47-foot cruiser from the American Car and Foundry Company:
Moving along to the April 10, 1926 issue (cover designed by H.O. Hofman)…
April 10, 1926 cover by H.O. Hofman.
…I discovered this clever “map” by John Held Jr. For fans of “Boardwalk Empire” or other 1920s gangster-themed fare, Held’s map confirms it was no secret that Atlantic City was a major port for rum runners:
Also on the theme of Prohibition, cartoonist James Daugherty (Jimmy the Ink) had some fun with New Yorker colleague Lois Long (aka Lipstick) by pairing her with New York’s top Prohibition prosecutor Emory Buckner in this unlikely scenerio:
Note the lock on the fire hydrant. Padlocking restaurants and clubs suspected of selling alcohol was a favorite tactic of Buckner and his agents. Long famously took him task in her Oct. 31, 1925 “Tables for Two” column. You can read about it here in my previous post, “How Dry I Am.”
Although the trade name “Technicolor” conjures up images of mid-century Hollywood, the process was actually invented in 1916 and developed over subsequent decades.
Early Technicolor was a complicated process, using a prism beam-splitter behind the camera lens to simultaneously expose two consecutive frames of a single strip of black-and-white negative–one behind a red filter, the other behind a green filter. A projectionist had to be highly skilled to keep the film aligned during its showing. The Black Pirate, however, used a later technique that cemented the two prints together, making for a thick film that was prone to bulging and distortion.
When the New Yorker’sTheodore Shane reviewed Douglas Fairbanks’ latest swashbuckler film, The Black Pirate, in the March 13, 1926 issue, it appeared that after ten years of development the Technicolor process had a long way to go:
DEAR, YOU LOOK A BIT PEAKY…Billy Dove and Douglas Fairbanks rendered in early Technicolor in The Black Pirate. (MovieMail.com)
Art critic Murdock Pemberton wrote about the genius of the young artist Georgia O’Keeffe, whose work was on display at husband Alfred Stieglitz’s new exhibition space, the Intimate Gallery:
Georgia O’Keeffe’sBlack Iris, 1926. (Metropolitan Museum of Art)
On to the March 20 issue, boldly illustrated by S.W. Reynolds, who contributed a number of deco-themed covers for the magazine:
March 20, 1926 cover by S.W. Reynolds.
For all The New Yorker’s progressive wit and style, you are occasionally reminded that some of its sensibilities were still very much mired in those times. For example, this bit from the issue’s “The Talk of the Town” segment:
The March 27 issue offered a profile of actress Helen Westley, who was described by writer Waldo Frank (pen name “Search-light”) as “a goddess of our city” whose “true value and her art (was) her personal life.”
March 27 cover by Ilonka Karasz.
Wesley often played a stern, indomitable character who wore a hawk-like glare, and in her later years portrayed dour dowagers and no-nonsense matrons. Frank wrote that while Wesley was not a particularly good actress, she lived her life with a spirit for adventure and a need to plunge her fine-born, gracious manner into the “frowsy” world of Broadway.
A Miguel Covarrubias rendering of Helen Wesley for the “Profiles” piece.
And to close, Al Frueh’s take on a day in the life of a doorman:
Although they didn’t know it, thirsty New Yorkers still had more than six and half of years of Prohibition to endure, and business was brisk for the rum runners who plied the coastal waters.
The March 6, 1926 issue featured the article “Rum Runners Must Live,” in which writer Emile C. Schnurmacher described the heroic efforts of bootleggers and rum runners in keeping New York’s countless speakeasies (and many home liquor cabinets) well stocked. Some 30,000 speakeasies were opened in New York City alone during the Prohibition era.
Schnurmacher described the risky game of running “overboard stuff:”
He told of how one rum-running boat, the Sea Bird, made its way through Flushing Bay (to pick up bootleg Scotch) while evading the Coast Guard:
The boat later successfully delivered the “Scotch” near Yankee Stadium:
“The Talk of the Town” offered its regular update on bootleg prices. The local “synthetic” gin was reported to be of better quality than the imports, surprising given that synthetics poisoned a good number of folks back then:
The blog Speakeasy Science notes that during Prohibition, police department chemists, “analyzing the so-called gin in the Brooklyn bar and around the city, reported that much of it was industrial alcohol, re-distilled to try to remove the wood alcohol content. The re-distilling was not notably successful. The poisonous alcohol remained and there was more: the chemists had detected traces of kerosene and mercury, and disinfectants including Lysol and carbolic acid in the beverages.”
HE HAD THE GOOD STUFF…Not all bootleg was poison. Until he was busted in 1923 by government agents, one of the most famous purveyors to wealthy buyers was rum-runner William McCoy. (US Coast Guard)In order to destroy evidence, the crew of the rum-runner Linwood set fire to their vessel after being pursued by a patrol boat. (Photo circa 1923, U.S. Coast Guard)
In “Tables for Two,” Lois Long paid a visit to the Algonquin hotel and took some playful swipes at the denizens the famed Round Table:
IS THAT YOU DOUG? Silent screen star Douglas Fairbanks could relax unmolested in the quiet confines of the Algonquin. (Meredy.com)
At the movies, Theodore Shane took deadly aim at the silent film version of the opera La Bohème:
A “pop-eyed” John Gilbert and Lillian Gish in the 1926 silent film version of La Bohème. (IMDB)
And finally, Al Frueh’s sympathetic take on the wintertime toils of the rich:
The month of February 1926 must have been miserable in New York City. A massive blizzard made a mess of the streets, which were then topped by a soot-laden smog. The smog was the result of homes and businesses burning soft coal, which produced far more smoke than the hard variety (which was in short supply).
The photo above, from the Daily News archive, shows a chaotic scene on Orchard Street (Manhattan’s Lower East Side) after the storm.
As could be expected, The New Yorker editors tried their best to make light of the situation, although they couldn’t resist making a racist remark regarding the effects of soot on the population. It is also interesting to note that the word “smoggy” was considered by the editors to be a relatively new term:
Al Frueh showed us how the toffs dealt with the situation…
…and Fifth Avenue was not the best place for a fashionable stroll…
Shovelers were hired to clear the streets after 1926 blizzard (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)
No doubt the foul weather contributed to the mood of the writers and critics at The New Yorker, who reacted rather sourly to the much ballyhooed Feb. 17, 1926 debut of young Marion Talley at the Metropolitan Opera. At the tender age of 19, she was the youngest prima donna to sing at the Met at that time.
In his “A Reporter at Large” column, Morris Markey scoffed at the hype and small-town boosterism that accompanied the young singer from rural Missouri:
Talley’s debut performance was as Gilda, the daughter of the title character in Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto. The Metropolitan Opera’s general manager, Giulio Gatti-Casazza, hoped Talley’s debut would be low-key and not overshadow the production. However, a delegation of two hundred leading citizens of Kansas City, including the mayor, arrived via a special train for the event.
Adding to the chaos, a noisy telegraph machine was set up backstage so Talley’s father could send dispatches to the Associated Press.
OVER EXPOSED: Marion Talley in 1926. (Library of Congress)
Talley’s swift rise to fame would be followed by a relatively quick return to obscurity. After appearing in seven productions at the Met, her contract was not renewed for the 1929 season.
Now that I have your attention (at least the dog lovers anyway; and yes, there is a dog-related item if you read on), it is worth mentioning that the Feb. 20, 1926 issue of The New Yorker marked the first anniversary of the magazine, and in what would become an annual tradition, the magazine reprinted the original Rea Irvin cover from its first issue.
The magazine nearly went belly up during the summer of 1925, but a new marketing campaign, along with noticeably better content, put the magazine firmly in the black as it looked to its second year.
In “The Talk of the Town,” the editors couldn’t help but boast about their prosperity, albeit in a winking manner:
Jimmy the Ink (James Daugherty) marked the anniversary with this drawing…
…and Corey Ford, who contributed more than twenty satirical house ads for the magazine under the title, “The Making of the Magazine,” returned to form in this issue with a recollection of the magazine’s imagined past (a device The Onion employs to great effect):
The magazine’s prosperity was evident not only in its talented stable of writers and illustrators, but also in its pages crammed with advertising. As I’ve noted before, much of the advertising is directed at the Anglo- and Franco-phile tastes of the magazine’s readers. For example, this ad from Studebaker suggesting a connection to British royalty:
Continuing on the theme of royalty, none other than Her Royal Highness, “La Princesse Genevieve” gave her nod to Produits Bertie skin cream (joining the ranks of other royal and society women who hawked moisturizers, cold creams and even cigarettes in those days…)
Royal endorsements were not limited to France and England, as none other than the Maharajah de Kapurthala put his seal of approval on Melachrino cigarettes in an ad featured on the inside back cover…
The issue was filled with car ads, appearing in the wake of January’s 26th Annual National Automobile Show at the Grand Central Palace. But the latest spectacle was the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show at the new Madison Square Garden, with the Terrier Group once again taking the top prize. The “Talk” editors offered this observation on Westminster:
BEST IN SHOW 1926…Signal Circuit of Halleston was a Wire Fox Terrier and winner of the the 50th Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show in 1926. The fourth Fox Terrier to win best in show, Signal Circuit was one of 200 Fox Terriers present at the 1926 Westminster show. He was handled by Percy Roberts, who had imported the dog from England and had just stepped off the boat before the show. The dog was described as having “phenominal length of head and sound movement.” (WKC)The New Yorker’sHelen Hokinson offered this illustration to mark the event.
An advertisement from Bonwit Teller even got into the spirit of the thing…
From my How Times Have Changed department, this ad from Guaranty Trust:
And finally, a detail from a center-page illustration by Rea Irvin depicting the result of a blizzard that blanketed the city in February 1926:
Feb. 13, 1926 cover by Ilonka Karasz. Image at the top of this entry is by Russell Patterson, circa 1930.
In reading all of these past issues of The New Yorker (a year’s worth, as of this post) one writer in particular jumps from the pages: Lois Long.
Perhaps it was her irreverent, high-spirited style and her fearless forays into any topic. She was the most modern of the New Yorker writers, developing a style that communicated directly to the reader as a confidant.
Her output was also impressive, writing about nightlife in “Tables for Two” under the pseudonym “Lipstick” and also about fashion in “One and Off the Avenue.” In his autobiography, Point of Departure, colleague Ralph Ingersoll wrote that Long “did a wheel-horse job of pulling The New Yorker through its first years,” with an “almost infinite capacity for being childishly delighted” while also possessing a “native shrewdness, an ability to keep her head.”
THE GANG…(l to r) Silent film star Charlie Chaplin,Vanity Fair editor Frank Crowninshield, sculptor Helen Sardeau, Lois Long and screenwriter Harry D’Arrast pose in a Coney Island photo booth, 1925. Photo scanned from the book Flapper by Joshua Zeitz.
Long was in rare form in the Feb. 13, 1926 issue, offering a comprehensive list of evening entertainments for everyone from a flapper to an aristocrat. Here’s the entire column:
According to Long, if you were an aristocrat, or a “rapacious visitor” wishing to rubberneck at the rich and famous, The Colony restaurant was a good choice for the dinner hour.
The Colony, which began as a speakeasy in the early 1920s, was one of the places to be seen in New York for many decades. According to the blog Lost Past Remembered, “there was a Colony ‘crowd’ that included Hollywood royalty Errol Flynn, Gary Cooper, and Joan Crawford as well as the real deal ––The Duke and Duchess of Windsor were great fans (as were assorted bankers, brokers, wheeler dealers and gangsters and socialites).”
In those days you could display your status by where you were seated at The Colony. In later years the place was frequented by the likes of Jackie O and her sister Lee Radziwill. Writer Truman Capote, who enjoyed a special back table under a TV set, reportedly wept when the restaurant closed in 1971.
FLAPPER FARE…Long suggested that the Biltmore might be a suitable dining destination for the “Village Flapper.” Pictured here is the Biltmore’s Cascades ballroom and dining area, circa 1915. (Museum of the City of New York)
On to a less glamorous subject, “The Talk of the Town” made note of the extension of traffic lights in the city:
In 1926 traffic lights were still something of a novelty in New York, which didn’t install its first traffic light until 1920.
According to the New York Times (May 16, 2014), the first permanent traffic lights in New York went up in 1920, a gift from millionaire physician Dr. John A. Harriss who was fascinated by street conditions. His design “was a homely wooden shed on a latticework of steel, from which a police officer changed signals, allowing one to two minutes for each direction. Although the meanings we attach to red and green now seem like the natural order of things, in 1920 green meant Fifth Avenue traffic was to stop so crosstown traffic could proceed; white meant go. Most crosstown streets and Fifth Avenue were still two-way.”
The signals were so popular that in 1922 “the Fifth Avenue Association gave the city, at a cost of $126,000, a new set of signals, seven ornate bronze 23-foot-high towers (designed by Joseph H. Freedlander) placed at intersections along Fifth from 14th to 57th Streets.”
Bronze traffic signal tower designed by Joseph H. Freedlander at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, 1922. (New York Times)
Within a few years it was determined that the towers were blocking the roadway, so in 1929 Freedlander was “called back to design a new two-light traffic signal, also bronze, to be placed on the corners. These were topped by statues of Mercury and lasted until 1964. A few of the Mercury statues have survived, but Freedlander’s 1922 towers have completely vanished.”
Freedlander’s bronze corner traffic signal, topped by a statute of Mercury. (Untapped Cities)
Skipping ahead a few issues, this Hulett advertisement from the March 20, 1926 issue features a drawing of the Freelander signal:
* * *
Although F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby received a brief, dismissive review from the magazine in 1925, a stage adaptation of the novel was received favorably by theatre critic Gilbert W. Gabriel:
A Page From Playbill...The Great Gatsby, February 22, 1926 at Ambassador Theatre (Playbill Vault)
In the movies, critic Theodore Shane gushed over a new film by Robert Flaherty, famed director of Nanook of the North. This time around Flaherty turned his lens on a Polynesian paradise in Moana:
Still image from Moana (Indiewire)
And to wrap things up, a drawing by Einer Nerman of German soprano Frieda Hempel…
And this advertisement exhorting readers to stay at the Hotel Majestic. The hotel, built in 1894, would fall to a wrecking ball in 1929, just three years after this ad appeared:
A New Yorker State of Mind 