By the time this appears, it is entirely probable that a large portion of the dust and fury aroused by Stanley Walker's renunciation of New York in the form of a Saturday Evening Post article will have abated. As city editor of the Herald Tribune and the most distinguished practicing newspaperman of an entire generation, Mr. Walker knew New York from the Battery to the Bronx and from TwentyOne to the Tombs as probably no one else did in his time or professional office. He collected about him a legendary and fabulous staff of newswriters which included such top-drawer byliners as Alva Johnston, Beverly Smith, Ishbel Ross, Edward Dean Sullivan, Denis Tilden Lynch, the late Ben Robertson, Joe Alsop, Joseph Mitchell, and Edward Angly, and staff members in allied departments of the Tribune and Bleeck's Saloon, Henry Cabot Lodge, Walter Millis, Don Skene, William O. McGeehan, and Percy Hammond were influenced by his stylisms and conditioned to his views on editing and reporting.
When, therefore, he gave New York a chilly brush-off and did a double scurry for his native Lampasas, Texas, folk generally adjusted their ear trumpets and gave heed. New York, said Mr. Walker, was brash, rude, crowded, unmannerly, and in a hurry. The food was in decline; the company in its bars and restaurants was lamentable; its wit was bankrupted, and its graciousness a myth; and he, Walker, was going home to Lampasas. Only people who have ever been to Lampasas can estimate just how much of Mr. Walker's tongue was in his cheek. But this department has been to Lampasas and knows. Boy!
Nobody is more open to persuasion on the subject of Manhattan's deficits and demerits than this department. But then, no city anywhere, unless possibly it is the incomparable town of San Francisco, achieves complete perfection, and there are a good many qualities about Baghdad-on-the-Make which still serve to recommend it above most comparable American communities. Let us list just a few of them.
In no other city in America, again with the exception of San Francisco, is it impossible to observe in the principal boulevards and public places so few women in trousers and so few hatless men, both of them manifestations of obscenity which in any right-minded community would be banned by legal fiat. In Hollywood, the outhouse civilization of the universe, not one man in fifty owns a hat, and the number of wretched female rumps wallowing along the sidewalks in men's garments is beyond all counting.
Not even in the least pretentious of the town's restaurants in New York is all the food without exception nauseatingly fried in deep pools of rancid valve oil or hair grease as is the universal custom in all but the most enlightened and expensive restaurants anywhere south of Princeton, New Jersey, nor is a revolting sort of crank-case lubricant served with the breakfast hot cakes on the strength of the completely spurious complaint that maple syrup is too expensive.
There are scores and scores of places in New York where it is possible for a reasonable charge, the times being considered, to obtain the two-ounce cocktail that is ordained by God and civilized usage—the Plaza, the St. Regis, Bleeck's Artists and Writers, Whyte's, and Billy the Oysterman's, to name a few. Elsewhere in the land cocktails are commonly and unblushingly served in glasses which were intended to hold a half portion of liqueur, and it is frequently necessary to command eight or ten of the nasty things to be poured together in a water tumbler before a perceptible quantity can be accumulated for swallowing purposes.
There are more waiters per public diner in New York than anywhere else in the United States and fewer waitresses, and while, heaven knows, there are some very wonderful waitresses in the world, as can be attested by any regular patron of Durgin Park's Market Restaurant in Boston or Thompson's Spa, formal and proper service of food requires a waiter who is as much of a professional expert as a surgeon, a copy reader, or a locomotive engineer, and nobody else can take his place.
It is an absolute impossibility to discover in New York a police officer who smokes on duty, wears his cap on the back of his head, or appears improperly attired in uniform. The average smalltown cop throughout the land is often personally and sartorially indistinguish able from the village bum or truckdriver.
Only in the provincial outlands of the United States is it common currency to attempt to disguise saloons under the revolting euphemism of “cocktail lounges.” In Manhattan at least a saloon is a saloon, and there are a number of bars restricted to masculine patronage alone, without juke boxes, without loudspeaker public address systems, and without women.
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