Alan Dunn – Page 9 – A New Yorker State of Mind

Lighter Than Air

Just a decade after German Zeppelins sowed terror across the skies of Europe and Great Britain, Germany’s new Graf Zeppelin was enthusiastically welcomed by a throng gathered at Lakehurst, New Jersey, the massive airship having completed its first intercontinental trip across the Atlantic.

It had been only ten years and two months since German Zeppelins dropped their last bombs on the British, which had dubbed the airships “baby killers” for the mostly civilian casualties they inflicted. Beginning in 1915, Zeppelin raids on London killed nearly 700 and seriously injured almost 2,000 over the course of more than 50 attacks. It must have been a terrifying sight, something straight out of science fiction — flying ships more than the length of two football fields, blotting out the stars as they loomed overhead. Their size, however, was also their downfall, as Britain soon developed air defenses (searchlights, antiaircraft guns, and fighter planes) that shot many of these hydrogen gasbags out of the sky (77 of Germany’s 115 airships were either shot down or disabled).

TERROR IN THE SKIES…Image from a German postcard celebrating the bombing of Warsaw by the Zeppelin *Schütte Lanz* in 1914. Here’s a weird fact: There was a shortage of sausages in Germany during WWI, since cow intestines normally used for casings were instead used to create special bags to hold the hydrogen gas that kept Zeppelins aloft. It took more than 250,000 cows to make one airship. (Wikipedia)

So when the 776-foot Graf Zeppelin loomed over the New York City skyline on Oct. 15, 1928, the reaction was one of awe rather than terror. The New York Times heralded its safe arrival on the front page…

The Graf Zeppelin at Lakehurst, N.J., 1929. (rarehistoricalphotos.com)

…and The New Yorker’s James Thurber (writing in “The Talk of the Town”) was on hand to assess the welcoming crowds gathered at Lakehurst, N.J….

…who in their enthusiasm could have easily destroyed the vessel, which had already sustained damage during a storm over Bermuda…

OLD GAS BAG…The *Graf Zeppelin* arriving at Mines Field (now Los Angeles International Airport) on August 26, 1929. Newspaper magnate **William Randolph Hearst** sent the Graf Zeppelin dirigible on a 20-day flight that circumnavigated the world in 1929. (martinturnbull.com)

Living quarters of the *Graf Zeppelin.* Cozy, if you could forget that your room was contained within an envelope of highly explosive hydrogen gas. (airships.net)

Dining aboard the *Graf Zeppelin.* (Top, airshipsonline.com, bottom, airships.net)

Reuben’s restaurant in New York seized the opportunity to cash in on the spectacle, boasting (in this hastily placed ad in the Oct. 27 issue) that the Graf Zeppelin’s passengers dined at their establishment on the very night of their arrival…

A final note: Considering the hazards of flying these ungainly, flammable machines (e.g. the Hindenburg in 1937) Graf Zeppelin flew more than one million miles in its career (the first aircraft in history to do so), making 590 flights (144 of them oceanic crossings, including one across the Pacific), and carrying more than 13,000 passengers — all without injury to passengers or crew.

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Rough Riders

Back on the ground, “The Talk of the Town” looked in on a somewhat less exotic form of long-distance travel — the recently inaugurated coast-to-coast bus service from New York to Los Angeles:

LONG HAUL…This Greyhound bus from 1929 was probably similar to those leaving the New York bus stations for points west in 1928. (flickr)

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From Our Advertisers

On the subject of rolling transportation, Buick trumpeted the introduction of “adjustable front seats” in its silver anniversary model. Curiously, this improvement was touted as a convenience solely for women drivers…

Our cartoon (a two-pager) for Oct. 27 comes from Gardner Rea, the latest among The New Yorker’s staff to mock the quality of sound motion pictures. The cartoon is labeled at the bottom: “The Firtht One Hundred Per Thent Thound Movie Breakth All Houth Recordth.” (click image to enlarge)

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If you wanted to get a glimpse of New York’s “royalty” in 1928, you could secure a seat at the Metropolitan Opera, especially one with a view of its famed “Diamond Horseshoe” seats.

November 3, 1928 cover by **Julian de Miskey**.

The “Diamond Horseshoe” described a ring of seats at the Metropolitan Opera House occupied by New York’s social elite. Not unlike today’s stadium skyboxes, the Met reserved these boxes for purchase by the wealthy. “The Talk of Town” for Nov. 3, 1928 noted how many of these were still held by the same families that had secured spots after the Met opened in 1883:

CULTURAL LANDMARK…The Metropolitan Opera House at Broadway and 39th Street circa 1905. (Wikipedia)

SEE AND BE SEEN…The Diamond Horseshoe at the Metropolitan Opera House, as seen from the rear of the stage for a concert by pianist **Josef Hofmann,** November 28, 1937. (newyorksocialdiary.com)

“Talk” also noted that some of the boxes in the Diamond Horseshoe were coming into new ownerships among the newly rich (E.F. Hutton) and even (gasp) immigrants such as Otto Kahn:

DUST TO DUST…Above, a view of the “Diamond Horseshoe” at the Metropolitan Opera’s gala farewell performance on April 16, 1966. Below, patrons say goodbye to the old house at Broadway at the farewell performance. The building was torn down in 1967 and replaced by a 40-story office tower. (Time/Life)

Also in the Nov. 3 issue was this cartoon by Peter Arno depicting one of the Met’s boxes stuffed with overfed toffs:

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Poet With a Green Thumb

The Nov. 3 “Talk” also featured a bit by James Thurber on American poet and playwright Edna St. Vincent Millay, a major figure in New York’s Greenwich Village literary scene as well as a feminist leader. A Pulitzer-Prize winner (1923), Millay was also an avid gardener who preferred the solitude of her farm, Steepletop, to the limelight usually accorded a literary star:

RARE PHOTOGRAPH…**Edna St. Vincent Millay** raised her own vegetables at Steepletop, a former blueberry farm located near Austerlitz, New York that she owned with her husband Eugen Jan Boissevain. Photo is circa 1928. (Library of Congress)

Thurber noted that even her publisher, Harper & Sons, had to use an old photo of the publicity-shy poet for a new book release:

On the topic of photography, “Profiles” (written by film historian Terry Ramsaye) looked in on the quiet life of photography pioneer George Eastman, who founded the Eastman Kodak Company and popularized the use of roll film.

A quintessential “mamma’s boy,” Eastman never married…

…and by all accounts died a celibate less than four years after this profile was written, taking his own life at age 77. Suffering from intense pain caused by a spinal disorder, Eastman shot himself in the heart on March 14, 1932, leaving a note which simply read, “To my friends: my work is done. Why wait?”

Odds and Ends

Other items of note from the Nov. 3 issue included a humorous piece by Rube Goldberg, “The Red Light District,” in which the president of the Blink Stop-Go Traffic Company summons a doctor to treat a strange malady. The doctor gets held up by traffic lights on the way to the “emergency,” and when he discovers the problem is only hives, he shoots the patient. The piece was headlined by this artwork, also by Goldberg (shades of George Herriman and R. Crumb, yes?)…

Goldberg is still known today thanks to his series of cartoons depicting deliberately complex contraptions invented to perform simple tasks, such as the “Self-Operating Napkin” below, from 1931:

Cartooning’s highest honor, The Reuben Award, was named after Goldberg, who was a longtime honorary president of the National Cartoonists Society.

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The Roaring 20s saw a rapid transformation of the New York skyline, with massive skyscrapers rising from the dust of old 18th and 19th century institutions. But few would signal the new age more than the Chrysler Building, an Art Deco landmark that would stand as the world’s tallest building for nearly a year (knocked from the top spot in May 1931 by the Empire State Building). Architecture critic George S. Chappell (“T-Square”) had this observation about the planned building:

EVOLUTION OF AN ICON…Stages in the design for the Chrysler building, from the July-December 1929 issue of *Progressive Architecture.*

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More from our advertisers…in the Nov. 3 issue Hawaii beckoned well-heeled New Yorkers who were contemplating the coming winter…

…and then there was this poorly executed ad for Kolster radios, the whole point seeming to be the drawing they commissioned from New Yorker cartoonist Peter Arno:

And finally, a cartoon by Alan Dunn, who looked in on an Ivy League football huddle:

Next Time: Diamond Lil…

A Familiar Ring

Ring Lardner is one of those 20th century American writers everyone has heard of but few have actually read. This is perhaps because he is often pigeonholed as a sportswriter rather than being remembered as a gifted satirist whose crisp writing style—often peppered with slang—influenced a generation of writers including Ernest Hemingway, who covered sports for his high school newspaper under the pseudonym “Ring Lardner.”

July 7, 1928 cover by **Julian de Miskey**.

Lardner would contribute nearly two dozen pieces to The New Yorker beginning with this ditty in the April 18, 1925 issue—

—and ending with “Odd’s Bodkins,” published posthumously in the Oct. 7, 1933 issue (Lardner died at age 48 of a heart ailment on Sept. 25, 1933). In his satirical “Profiles” piece for the July 7, 1928 issue, Lardner had some fun with editor and playwright Beatrice Kaufman, who like Lardner existed within the orbit of the famed Algonquin Round Table but was not a regular member (however Beatrice’s husband, playwright and director George S. Kaufman, was a charter member).

The entire piece, including an illustration by Peter Arno, is below (click image to enlarge the text):

**Ring Lardner** in undated photo, possibly mid 1920s (Encyclopaedia Britannica)

KAUFMAN CHUMS…Comedian **Julius Tannen** (left) frolics with **Beatrice Kaufman** and **George S. Kaufman** in Atlantic City in the 1920s; writer/critic **Alexander Woollcott** (left), artist **Neysa McMein**, actor **Alfred Lunt, Beatrice Kaufman** and comedian **Harpo Marx** hanging out in the 1920s. (spartacus-educational.com)

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One New Yorker writer who does stand the test of time is E.B. White, known to earlier generations for his many humorous contributions to The New Yorker and to later generations for his co-authorship of the English language reference The Elements of Style, and for his beloved children’s books including Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web (Charlotte’s Web was often voted as the top children’s novel in a survey of School Library Journal readers, and most recently in 2012—the 60th anniversary of its publication). In the July 7, 1928 issue the nature-loving White offered these tongue-in-cheek plant care instructions, arranged atop a cartoon by Alan Dunn:

Another cartoon in the July 7 issue by Garrett Price offered another perspective on an advertising come-on:

No doubt Price was referencing ads such as this one below by the American Tobacco Company in which actress and dancer Gilda Gray—who in the 1920s popularized a dance called the “shimmy”—announced her preference for pipe smokers:

And we close with this cartoon by Al Frueh, who demonstrated how fashion had freed the woman of the Roaring Twenties:

Interested in the history of New Yorker cartoons and cartoonists? Then I recommend you check out cartoonist Michael Maslin’s Inkspill website for news on cartoonists and events. Another great site is Stephen Nadler’s Attempted Bloggery, which explores original art, auctions, obscurities and other angles of New Yorker cartoons and cartoonists.

A couple of my favorite Maslin cartoons (among many):

Next Time: 100 Percent Talker…

The Perfect Gift for 1927

We close out 1927 by looking at the final December issues, which grew fat with Christmas advertising catering to the tastes of New York’s smart set.

Before we jump to the ads, let’s look in on Lois Long, who in the Dec. 10 issue continued her lamentations regarding the quality of New York’s Prohibition-era night life and reminded readers that her job was far from a “soft snap”…

The problem, as diagnosed by Long, was that there were not enough talented entertainers to fill the needs of an overabundance of nightclubs…

vit-94-bobbe-arnst1 — LOIS THOUGHT **BOBBIE ARNST** WAS PRETTY SWELL when she appeared at **Helen Morgan’s** nightclub. A noted broadway singer and dancer, Arnst is pictured above in a publicity photo from the 1929 film *Rhythms in Blue*. (picking.com)

screen-shot-2017-02-07-at-12-33-26-pm — ON THE OTHER HAND…**Evelyn Nesbit’s** tearoom (and later speakeasy) couldn’t survive on notoriety alone. In the early 20th century Nesbit’s face was everywhere—from advertisements to calendars—but in 1906 her fame took a nasty turn when her jealous husband, **Harry Thaw,** shot and killed suspected lover and famed architect **Stanford White** at Madison Square Garden’s rooftop theatre. At left, Nesbit in 1900. At right, Nesbit in her tea room on West 52nd Street, near Broadway, circa 1922. (Library of Congress / restaurant-ingthroughhistory.com)

Long also railed against the white appropriation of Harlem entertainment, which she felt was draining the place of its soulfulness. In particular she called out writer and photographer Carl Van Vechten, who among white writers was the most prominent in intellectualizing the “Harlem Renaissance”…

What to Buy in ’27

The Dec. 10 and Dec. 17 issues grew fat with holiday advertising, averaging 120+ pages as opposed to the usual 60 or so pages. The advertisements mostly appealed to upscale readers, ranging from this almost Victorian-style ad from the staid Brooks Brothers…

…to this ad from Rex Cole promoting the latest in modern conveniences…

And I’ll toss in this cartoon from the Dec. 10 issue, in which Peter Arno allows us to listen in on an unlikely conversation between a couple of toffs…

Lois is Also Tired of the Holidays

On to the Dec. 17 issue, in which Lois Long also shared with readers her weariness of Christmas shopping in her column, “On and Off the Avenue.”

The “Parisite” Long referred to in this excerpt was actually Elizabeth Hawes, who occasionally contributed to Long’s column (with cables sent from Paris) regarding the latest in French fashions. More on Hawes another time…

As for ads in the Dec. 17 issue, we get this one from Dunhill, maker of fine English cigarettes and accessories: a woman’s compact that resembles a lighter…

…and the same issue offers this glimpse into the life a spoiled rich kid, home from college for the holidays. The cartoon is by Alan Dunn, one of the most published New Yorker cartoonists (1,906 cartoons from 1926 to 1974)…

With Christmas advertising over, the magazine’s page length dropped by half from the Dec. 17 to the Dec. 24 issue…

…in which we find this holiday-themed illustration by Al Frueh:

Why We Sing Auld Lang Syne

This advertisement in the Dec. 24 issue invited readers to celebrate the New Year at The Roosevelt Hotel…

roosevelt-hotel-1924 — The Roosevelt Hotel after its completion in 1924 (Museum of the City of New York)

1387211957-0 — AULD ACQUAINTANCE…If you want to know why we sing “Auld Lang Syne” on New Year’s Eve, you can thank **Guy Lombardo** and his Royal Canadian Band, which made the song a staple at his New Year’s performances beginning in 1929 at the Roosevelt Hotel. Their performance that night was broadcast on the radio before midnight Eastern time on CBS, then after midnight on NBC radio. (neatorama.com)

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Now Let’s Get Out of Here

With the holidays out of the way, New Yorkers still faced a good three months of winter. That is, unless you were well-heeled enough to head south to Palm Beach. Considering the abundance of ads promoting travel to southern climes in the Dec. 24 and 31 issues, apparently many of the magazine’s readers possessed the means to do just that…

And we close this entry, and the year of 1927, with this cover…

dec-31 — December 31, 1927 cover by **Rea Irvin**.

…and another tropical-themed advertisement, courtesy of Russeks…

…and this cartoon by Mary Petty depicting those who were left behind, still returning their Christmas gifts…

Next Time: Odious Odes…

Flapper Fitness

Lois Long stepped off her fashion beat to check out a new fitness salon on East 49th Street that used a combination of spa treatments, exercise and body shaming to get women into shape.

fd4accb02ed7d01ae3624ea180d47357 — September 24, 1927 cover by **Ilonka Karasz**.

Operated by a “Miss Marjorie Dork,” the salon offered a comprehensive and “rather sweeping program of making a new and perfect woman of you.” Long observed…

…and what gym would be complete without large placards shaming you for gaining weight or growing old?…

…or an array of newfangled electric gadgets one could use to melt away those extra pounds…

article-0-1a8ab29b000005dc-646_634x827 — ON THE BOARDWALK…Treadmill technology has advanced since these wooden numbers from the 1920s. It’s hard to believe anyone actually worked out in Mary Janes, but there it is. (*Daily Mail*)

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Another One Bites the Dust

The New Yorker bid farewell to yet another familiar landmark, the old Van Buren Place at No. 21 West 14th Street. Four stories high and five bays wide, the 1845 mansion was considered the height of early Victorian taste.

According to the blog Daytonian in Manhattan, in the 19th century the Van Buren estate had a large garden that extended through the block to 15th Street, and in the rear included a conservatory, a stable, arbors, dove cotes “and remnants of the farm life—chicken coops and a cow or two.”

van-buren-mansion-1906-oct-14 — REMNANT OF THE PAST…The old Van Buren Place (center) with its garden to the left. (Museum of the City of New York)

The August 7, 1927 issue of The New York Times reported that the mansion, erected “when all that section north of Washington Square was occupied principally by estates and truck farms, has finally succumbed to the march of improvements and will be demolished to make way for a theatre and office building.” The New Yorker managed to get one last look via “a hole in the fence”…

I don’t know if either a theatre or office building was ever erected on the site, but this is what stands there today:

daytoninmanhatten — THE GREAT WALL…The Van Buren estate site as it appears today. (daytoninmanhattan)

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Chill Out With Sanka

Sanka decaffeinated coffee was first marketed in the U.S. in 1923, but was only sold at two Sanka coffee houses in New York. The company made a big retail push in 1927, including sponsored broadcasts under various titles including the Sanka After-Dinner Hour on WEAF radio in New York. At least until the 1980s if you wanted a decaffeinated coffee you simply ordered a “Sanka.” According to a Wikipedia entry, the bright orange color of the Sanka can was so easily identifiable to consumers that even today a restaurant’s decaf coffee pot might sport a bright orange handle–the direct result of the public’s association of the color orange with Sanka, no matter which brand of coffee is actually served.

Our cartoon from the Sept. 24 issue comes from Alan Dunn, who explored the topic of the birds and bees among the posh set…

Next Time: Wits of the Round Table…

Those Restless Natives

The evolution of filmmaking in the 1920s included the development of “docudramas.” Nanook of the North (1922), which captured the struggles of an Inuit hunter and his family, was received with great acclaim. A few years later Grass (1925), directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, followed a tribe in Iran as they guided herds to greener pastures. So when Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness opened at the Rivoli, The New Yorker was there (May 7, 1927) to share in the adventure.

43b9e74a7197a3d27d520d251a303549 — May 7, 1927 cover by **Ilonka Karasz**.

Chang, also directed by Cooper and Schoedsack, told the story of a poor farmer and his family (native, nonprofessional actors) in Issan—now northeastern Thailand—and their constant struggle for survival in the jungle. Cooper and Schoedsack attempted to depict real life but often re-staged events. The danger, however, was real to all involved, as was the slaughter of animals in the film.

According to Ray Young, writing for Viennale, the website for the Vienna International Film Festival (which is screening a retrospective of Chang this fall) Cooper and Schoedsack “open with scenes of domestic bliss and, offsetting title card warnings of the dangers of the jungle, a bucolic Eden ripe for development. But the tone soon shifts as tigers and leopards attack, and the picture evolves into a succession of episodes concerning their survival.”

The perils in Chang often feel rigged, notes Young, “most conspicuously in places where animals appear to have been killed simply for the beneﬁt of the camera. By most accounts, Schoedsack did most of the ﬁlming while Cooper covered him with a riﬂe.”

chang-criticsroundup — I’D BE WARY OF THOSE GUYS TOO…Image from the filming of *Chang.* (criticsroundup.com)

elephant-stampede-from-chang-1927 — JUST PASSING THROUGH…Elephants stampede a village in the film’s finale. (image capture from film)

Chang was nominated for the Academy Award for Unique and Artistic Production at the first Academy Awards in 1929. It was the only year when that award was presented (It lost to F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans).

However appalled as we are today by the film’s exploitation of humans and animals alike, those were different times, even for the usually discerning eye of The New Yorker:

In 1927 most people had a very limited view of the non-Western world, which was perceived as both savage and exotic, populated by child-like “natives” who in this case “lent their facial expressions and habits to the affair most successfully…”

And so in 1927 we also encounter cartoons like this one by Alan Dunn that at once dismisses out-of-town conventioneers (here: an Elks Lodge) as a bunch of ignorant racists, yet the early New Yorker’s own depictions of Blacks were usually minstrel-era stereotypes.

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The massive Graybar Building made its debut at 420 Lexington Avenue, the multi-tiered edifice impressing the “Talk of the Town” editors with the latest technology, including push-button elevators:

The Graybar Building (history.graybar.com)

graybar-building-2 — PERMANENT INFESTATION…The Graybar’s rain canopy cables include anti-rat devices (cones) decorated with rats. If you look carefully, the rosettes anchoring the cables are also decorated with rat heads. (deadprogrammer.com)

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The following advertisement needs some explanation: The 1867 Tenement House Act imposed constraints on height and lot coverage that large apartment buildings routinely violated.

According to an article in the Observer by Stephen Jacob Smith (April 30, 2013), “Some developers got out of these requirements by building co-operative buildings, without rental units, but others wanted to retain the revenue and control that came with rentals, while at the same time building larger structures than the tenement laws allowed. And thus was born the ‘apartment hotel.'”

The New York Times’s columnist Christopher Gray wrote (Oct. 4, 1992) that Apartment Hotels were a “widespread fiction of the period,” and “tenants in fact usually set up full kitchens in the serving pantries.” Smith adds that “one of the reasons apartment hotels were allowed to be built more densely than their fully residential counterparts was that there would be no cooking—a fire hazard in those days—in the units.” An so the ad:

Smith writes that by calling their buildings ‘apartment-hotels,’ builders could claim that as hotels they were outside of the rules of tenement legislation. He notes that “some of Manhattan’s most illustrious buildings were constructed using this legal sleight of hand,” including the Sherry-Netherland on Park Avenue.

The famous scaffolding fire at the Sherry-Netherland, which I featured in my last post, no doubt prompted developers to run the following ad in hopes that people would soon forget about the giant roman candle that burned bright near Central Park on the evening of April 12, 1927.

If you are ever in New York, check out the Sherry Netherland. It is a beautiful building.

And finally, this ad from the makers of Wildroot hair care products. I love the flapper artwork by John Held Jr., and even better the words “CRUDE-OIL SHAMPOO” displayed prominently as a selling point.

Next Time: Mode de Vie…