Always a favorite with New Yorkers for whom the rigorous conventions of “the big season” of the town hold few attractions, “the little season” of May and June this year gives promise of being more amply characterized by blue days and fair along the boulevards than any springtime in many years. The “big season,” with its implications of social glamour and overtones of super elegance, is the period, in happy times, of the Opera, the Horse Show, the big-time theater openings, public dinners, balls, debutante parties, and all the white-tie and imperial-sable routs and sarabands to which the town is given in its most opulent moments.
Reversing the London tradition, in which the most formal court functions, the most stylish horse races, cricket games, and public school ceremonials are mounted in early summer and in which champagne and asparagus for lunch at Claridge's are the hallmarks of polite well-being, New York has a “little season” at this time of year when the city's charm is most perceptible, even to outlanders who find it nice only to visit but wouldn't etc., in the accustomed manner of suburban snobisme.
April in Paris, certainly; but May in New York, unequivocally yes!
This is the time of year when Sunday lunch at the Plaza is absolute ritual and when the red rope is up from one in the afternoon on, both at the traditional Back Room where Jules, the maître d'hôtel, is absolute overlord, and in the wonderful Terrace Restaurant, New York's most beautiful dining premises, reopened this season for Sunday only after many, many years. Now the horsecabs on the Fifty-ninth Street cabrank, missing Pat Rafferty of the old days but spry enough just the same, have new coats of paint on their wheels and glitter in cream, crimson, and yellow splendor as they tool through the finest of all parks. Sunday, relieved of the chill austerity which winter brings to Fifth Avenue, is a pleasant thing again. The top hats dip and glisten in the Plaza section after church; the footmen of the Rollses and Lincolns are in their smartest liveries. Pulitzer Memorial crawls with out-of-towners, sailors, and polite moppets being photographed at the one spot which is indisputably the heart of New York's heart.
And there are all the other traditional indexes and portents, the messengers and signs of spring: the letters to the editor of the Herald Tribune proclaiming the first robin from Peapack, New Jersey; the overflowing window boxes on the Park Avenue façade of the Waldorf; the last of the early shad, “brown and bright to the heart's delight, the broiled and beautiful shad,” on all the menus from Jack and Charlie's to the Madison; the newest and most amazing Valentina gowns on Gloria Swanson at lunch at the Colony and the latest and most preposterous Daché bonnets being recorded for the public prints by Thyra Samter Winslow at the Drake; the intelligence in the mail that cabanas at the Atlantic Beach Club are selling like nylons and that you had better hurry if you want to hold onto your old one; the new taxis and the promise and rumor of new cars of all sorts to be.
There are, too, losses and abatements in New York this spring. No bock beer, although that had, in recent years, so rushed the season as to become virtually a mid-January institution. And this is probably the last year that surface trolley cars will be a commonplace on Manhattan Island. Gone with the vanished, clattering Madison Avenue cars and the seasonal open trolleys on Lexington, will soon be all the broomstick cars of Gotham, and the good bock succumbed, temporarily, to economics. But the flyspecks on the civic show window of Manhattan are few, and the show itself was never better!
Pausing fascinated, as birds are reported to do in the gaze of lethal reptiles, before the display window in Forty-sixth Street of Walter McCrory, the maddest shirt carpenter of them all, we beheld the other morning Walter, the head shirt-cutter, wrapping up a parcel of chemises that would have given pause to Tom Mix and made even the late, shirt-maddened O. O. McIntyre think twice about the propriety of their public wearing. The other Walter, Mad McCrory as he is known to the profession, was standing by assisting the packing job with little pats of affection and loving adjustments of the bundle, obviously giving his adoring all to a consignment of what could only have been a costume order for an actor engaged in portraying the life of the late Evander Berry Wall. Aha, this department remarked to itself: Roy Howard has been running amok among the shirt samples again, and we went in to investigate.
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