Along the Boulevards

NOTES ON THE DE LUXE LIFE:

• The fragile and costly orchids which are part of the uniform of the pretty stewardesses who, in addition to the regular dinner-jacketed stewards, lend a decided chic to the atmosphere on dining-cars on the New Haven's celebrated Merchant's Limited on the Boston-New York five o'clock run.
• The fires maintained by horse-cab drivers on the Plaza cab rank to heat bricks for the feet of patrons in four-wheelers advertised as “heated cabs,” a scene right out of New York a century ago.
• The gentleman rookie cop on traffic duty at the corner of Madison and Fifty-seventh who wears, along with his shield and arm band, a Brooks-looking polo coat, snap-brim brown hat, expensive tan brogues, and pigskin gloves.
• The lineal successor to the universal American two-bit pocketknife: a solid gold-mounted, stainless steel penknife advertised in Fortune for $125, and sold in a plush-lined, wooden gift box. Whatever would Dan'l Boone have said to this?
• The red candle in a silver candle-stick used by the wine steward at Jack and Charlie's to hold behind a bottle of claret or Burgundy while decanting it to detect the sediment.
• The luxury editions of hunting books, ranging in price up to $50 and $75, a copy of which Abercrombie and Fitch uses as a window display incidental to the showing of $1,200 shotguns and Ritz-Carlton versions of pup tents.
• The smart idea of Podesta and Baldocchi, the classic San Francisco florists whose windows are a civic institution in Grant Avenue and the Fairmont, and who have started a weekly club delivery service for flowers beginning as low as $3.50 and serving distant points by air express.
• The amusing labels on a brand of tinned pheasant and other potted birds called “Henry VIII Brand,” showing the Merry Monarch tearing a grouse literally to shreds and tossing the bones under the table with fine Tudor abandon—Most amusing reading around the boulevards of New York these days is the luxury fur advertising featuring fur coats from $500 up which run regularly in the Evening Post and PM so that it only remains for the Daily Worker to start carrying the daily market reports.
• Successor to the late and charming O. O. McIntyre, first and greatest of all New York columnists, as collector and connoisseur of costly dressing robes, is Clifton Webb. Most of Webb's recent roles on stage and screen have called for multiple changes in lounging attire with the result that he is Sulka's best customer of the moment, and his collection is achieving proportions where it is a serious consideration in his rent scheme.
• A sign of the times in a Sixth Avenue drug-store window: “We have films; we have tissues; we have canned heat; we have almost everything.
• Even the stately minded old-timer who laments that druggists deal in everything but drugs and that there are no chemist's shops any more can't complain much about that!