There was a time when, of all the cities of the world, London was most conspicuously a man's town. London was a place created and maintained for masculine satisfactions, and its pattern of life was a background for an ordered and intelligent masculine society. Its streets were populated with men, each properly attired and identified with his proper class of society and place in the world. Unescorted women in polite public places were an exception. There were scores of wonderful shops which stocked and sold only items of masculine use, interest, or adornment. Bars were for men only, and many restaurants such as Simpson's at noontime resembled in their clientele nothing so much as gentlemen's clubs in Pall Mall. It was a well-ordered, leisurely, and, paradoxically, very gentle and mellow city, a place of impeccable manners and serenity. Going to the theater in the evening was a casual and unhurried business. After dark, gentlemen were dressed according to the company they kept, short jackets for masculine companions, tailcoats if ladies were present. Times were good, things were easy, and a Corona Corona cigar, in those days a cigar of breeding and consequence, cost, if memory serves, about thirty-five cents, although they were sixty cents in the United States.
Now, if the burden of returning voyagers is to be credited, London and indeed England have disappeared as places of consequence and seats of civilization. Shabby people are in politics, and shabby politics are reflected in a shabby way of life. The assurance, tranquillity, and desirable pattern of things have vanished, and England, embarrassed for its own poverty which isn't even genteel, advertises that it cannot accommodate tourists, and that the restaurants, concert halls, galleries, shops, and arcades that were once the most urbane and civilized in the world simply aren't what they used to be and, if the shabby people in authority at the moment have their way, never will be again.
What is England's tragic loss is, however, and in a somewhat oblique manner, New York's gain, for what with better times and better politics, Manhattan is assuming the role of the luxury capital of the world and, to a certain degree, of the Big Rock Candy Mountain of masculinity that London once was. Not that the serenity of West Brook Street on a spring evening can ever be recreated in Babylon-on-the-Hudson or that the style of living which made Claridge's and the Savoy the most beautiful restaurants in the world outside of Paris is likely to be reflected in any civilization as urgent as that of the United States. But New York is rolling in good times; its shops are beginning once more actually to have goods in stock, and, while a good 1941 vintage Cabana Largas cigar costs ninety cents at the Plaza, at least they are available.
As a man's town, too, Manhattan is not without its compensations. Happily, there are a few bars for men only: at the Plaza until after the Market closes, at the Ritz, the Biltmore, the Waldorf, and the St. Regis, and it would be a good thing if there were more and they ran on that basis twenty-four hours a day. There are wonderful men's shops such as Sulka's and McCrory's livid shirt foundry where the best-dressed men in the world, with England out of the picture, can drape themselves in five-hundred-dollar topcoats and satin bathrobes, and the Cub Room at the Stork is probably the choosiest celebrity club on earth for men and their lady friends.
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