1940s Archive

Along the Boulevards

continued (page 2 of 4)

  • I must dine more regularly on Sundays in the Plaza's Terrace Room, still New York's most beautiful restaurant and the last place where the grand manner still survives in public.
  • I must look out for the habit of wearing brown or tan shoes in the city and with dark clothes, a nasty and unjustifiable lapse having its origin in the general letdown of standards during the wars.
  • I must lunch more regularly at the Colony at an inside table rather than out in the bar, an undistinguished habit likewise acquired during war years.
  • I must remember to read the Times regularly again now that Brooks Atkinson is back as drama reporter, and be somewhat less religious about the New Yorker, which thinks with the world-savers and other crackpots that a dogfight in Europe is worth more editorial notice than a war at home.
  • I must get to Jack Bleeck's more frequently, as that is the only place I ever encounter Dick Maney and, anyway, it's the last place around Longacre Square that serves an honest Hennessy and soda for a dollar. Most of the Times Square dumps, and some of them you wouldn't believe it of, are chiseling as though the wars were on by putting a single ounce of brandy in a drink and charging a whole fish for it.
  • I must come to terms with MacDonald-Heath in the matter of a new evening tailcoat and have a care of the sleazy-easy habit of wearing a dinner jacket in public places.
  • I must give up wearing my hair crewcut and have it trimmed more like Harry B. Walthal or William Jennings Bryan, as it's beginning to show through in the back.
  • I must remember to get season seats for Philharmonic and abandon the shiftless habit of listening to it on the wireless on Sunday afternoons.
  • I must get back into the habit of driving up to Charles and Connie Stearns's Bird and Bottle Inn at Garrison, the best suburban chow shack around New York.
  • I must more frequently drop by the Men's Bar at the Waldorf for lunch, both because Uncle Crosby Gaige lunches there daily and because it regularly has on the menu the most splendid deviled beef bones with hot mustard sauce in town.
  • I must remember to resist any attempts to make me call Sixth Avenue by any other name, and that goes for Longacre Square, too.
  • I must remember that the most sensationally insolent barkeep to be encountered anywhere is on night duty at the Savoy-Plaza, or was as this is being written, and advise nice people to stay away as long as he is employed there.
  • I must remember that the best way to get a taxi at Grand Central is not to go puttering around those underground caverns, since there is almost always a rank of them outside the Biltmore in Forty-third Street.
  • I must remember that the Plaza cigar stand has one of the few available stocks of dated and vintage London market cigars and be guided accordingly.
  • I must keep my fingers crossed that the enlargement of Reuben's, which has taken over the adjacent premises where Le Mirliton used to be, doesn't make Fifty-eighth Street any noisier at night than it already is.
  • I must not forget the sardines provençale at the Baroque, or the fact that the best $2.50 dinner in town with the freshest shrimp is at Cerutti's, or the broiled squab at the Stork served by the incomparable Spooner.
  • I must walk down Madison Avenue at noontime when everybody is going to lunch and window-shop in the hot-ice jewelry shops, never for a minute forgetting that because their merchandise is not being sold in Fifth Avenue, but in a small, unpretentious shop a block removed from it, it sets you back just twice as much.

    • Keywords
    lucius beebe,
    along the boulevards,
    new york

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