Biltmore Cascades – A New Yorker State of Mind

Screen Shot 2015-10-15 at 9.54.27 AM — 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.”

tumblr_lsv5w1uJwH1qgfx0uo1_500 — LOIS AND 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.

Screen Shot 2015-10-22 at 12.40.41 PM — DINING WITH MOMMY DEAREST…Joan Crawford was a frequent patron of The Colony restaurant near 61st and Madison Avenue. Here she is seen at at the restaurant with (ex-) husband Franchot Tone. The photo is dated 1940, but the two were divorced in 1939. They remained close, however, for the rest of their lives. (lostpastremembered.blogspot.com)

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.

BiltmoreCascades — 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.”

491px-62646_253114161496208_2059581299_n_zpsf6a62b6c — 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.”

Bronze-Traffic-Statue-Mercury_New-York_Untapped-Cities — 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:

Screen Shot 2015-10-23 at 11.42.26 AM — 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:

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:

Next Time: The Magazine Marks One Year…

Screenshot 2015-05-21 15.40.37 — August 1, 1925 cover by Garrett Price.

For all of The New Yorker’s attention to the Scopes Monkey Trial, the August 1, 1925 issue had little to say about the trial’s outcome.

The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes was decided in the Criminal Court of Tennessee on July 21, 1925, with Scopes found guilty and fined $100 (equivalent to $1,345 in 2015), but the verdict was overturned on a technicality.

“The Talk of the Town” offered this brief observation under its weekly wrap-up column: “Mr. Scopes, found guilty, goes home to Paducah, Kentucky…”

And then this item toward the end of “Talk,” announcing the death of the Scopes Trial defense attorney (and one of the magazine’s favorite punching bags) William Jennings Bryan:

“The Graphic Section” offered this cynical twist on the trial’s outcome:

Screenshot 2015-05-22 13.09.12 — (New Yorker Digital Archive)

In a related item under “Of All Things,” Howard Brubaker wrote, “Representative Upshaw of Georgia will introduce an anti-evolution bill in Congress. Upshaw is never happy unless the Ship of State is making twenty thou-shalt-nots an hour.”

Clarence Darrow, a famous Chicago lawyer, and William Jennings Bryan, defender of Fundamentalism, have a friendly chat in a courtroom during the Scopes evolution trial. Darrow defended John T. Scopes, a biology teacher, who decided to test the new Tenessee law banning the teaching of evolution. Bryan took the stand for the prosecution as a bible expert. The trial in 1925 ended in conviction of Scopes. ca. 1925 Dayton, Tennessee, USA — Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan have a friendly chat during the Scopes Monkey Trial. Following the trial Bryan traveled hundreds of miles, delivering speeches in multiple towns. On July 26, 1925, he returned from Chattanooga, Tennessee to his home in Dayton. After attending church services he ate a large meal, then died during a nap that afternoon, five days after the trial’s conclusion. When someone remarked to Darrow that Bryan died from a “broken heart”, Darrow responded, “Broken heart, hell, he died of a busted belly!” (Wikipedia)

Brubaker also quipped, “Tennessee is not the only State where there is arrested mental development, but it is the only one so far where it has been fined.”

Back to “The Talk of the Town,” the design for a memorial to Teddy Roosevelt was approved, to be erected as part of the east façade of the Museum of Natural History. It was noted that the design featured Ionic columns that Roosevelt “would have detested in favor of a “native expression of the arts…”

USA-NYC-American_Museum_of_Natural_History — The Museum of Natural History façade designed by John Russell Pope. *(Wikimedia Commons)*

“Talk” continued: “One recalls that Colonel Roosevelt wrote the American Institute of Architects deprecating the use of the lions which doze at the entrance to the Public Library, and advocating the placing there of bisons instead…The memorial to the man who insisted thus on American art, rather than imitation of foreign models, is to be a severely classic as the facade of –let us say—the First National Bank of Dubuque, Iowa.”

New_York_Public_Library_060622 — Lion guards New York Public Library entrance. Teddy would have preferred the native bison. *(Wikimedia Commons)*

“Profiles” featured Walter L. Clark, a “genius who made art into business.” The movie reviews included Theodore Shane’s fumings on prudishness of American censors (Will Hays in particular) especially when compared to more liberal European productions by directors such as Ernst Lubitsch:

In books, the magazine continued its admiration for the jottings of A.A. Milne:

Screenshot 2015-05-22 15.47.46 — (New Yorker Digital Archive)

As for night life, The New Yorker lamented (“When Nights Are Bold) that the rooftop garden at the Biltmore “was the only bower worthy of the name left in town where quiet or startling simplicity reigns”: