Under ordinary conditions, no San Francisco dispatch can appear in the space occupied by this department's lexicon of superlatives but must have a report, however brief, on the Palace Hotel and the wonderments current in this spacious and opulent souvenir of the Old West. This is being typed in our old familiar and favorite apartment above the junction of Market and Montgomery Streets where the noise of the four trolley lanes eight floors below is deafening, and a hospitable carafe of forty-year Hennessy is at hand with the compliments of Edmond Rieder, the incomparable general manager of the Palace.
The big news of the Palace is various. The management is installing new electric elevators to supplant the hydraulic lifts which date from 1907, and there is opposition from everyone but the aged and faithful servitors charged with their maintenance and operation. The Palace barber-shop, too, is suffering from the mutations of time and financial expediency, and is being leased to a syndicate of modern and presumably “sanitary” wholesale tonsors. The ancients who, for decades, have shaved and singed the beards of the best San Franciscans, are removing a short distance up Montgomery Street to a shop all their own where, as the Chronicle's zany paragrapher, Herb Caen, remarks, they can continue to dispense deplorable haircuts in the most agreeable old-time atmosphere. They are likely to take a substantial patronage with them.
Elsewhere the Palace is as it should be: classic, decorous, and unbelievably part of the grand manner under the Rieder management, which by now is something of a San Francisco institution in itself. From the Palace's own greenhouses, erected for the first Palace in south San Francisco by Senator Sharon in the seventies, entire truckloads of shrubs and flowers come daily for the Palm Court and other public apartments, and the day we arrived those spacious premises were transformed into a bower of twelve-foot lemon and maple trees in alternating pots around its borders and at other vantage points. On the luncheon menu there now appears a superb crème Colony, a potage flavored with curry and apples whose great original in the New York Colony Restaurant is called crème Waterbury and whose formula was generously supplied by Gene Cavallero. Among the luncheon revelers were the venerable Dudley Field Malone, now a confirmed Californian, and the ubiquitous Dwight Fiske who, although the town's night life is in a state that can only be described in a burst of charity as “moribund,” is packing the customers in nightly by wartime hundreds in the House of Harris with new and hilarious ballads of quadruple entendre and, of course, the old standby, “Mrs. Pettibone.”
That the Palace's major-domo, Adolph Bach, is still in his fullest stride was convincingly demonstrated by a dinner served by Mr. Rieder and his Baroness in honor of the birthday of Chuck Clegg, this department's photographic accomplice. For the occasion, the Wells Fargo Bank was persuaded to surrender a proper complement of the Palace's legendary solid-gold plate and a table in the Palm Court was laid around a small pagoda or gazebo of orchids, nothing showy, just the tiny, very expensive brown and gold ones. Caviar arrived on the backs of three-foot-high, ice-carved dolphins; incredible roulades of California sand dabs vanished in a polite deluge of ice-cold Chablis; filets from Kansas City under thick blankets of Strasbourg foie gras strengthened the guests to cope with the various Niagaras of champagne which kept arriving, identified as Mumm's '29 in magnums, Louis Roederer '34 in magnums, and Bollinger sans année in magnums. Dessert was a pyromaniac's dream of brandied peaches in ices festooned with spun sugar, the cognac was from the Café de Paris of Monte Carlo, 1865, and the De Marcos, imported from the adjacent Rose Room where they were performing, danced during the coffee. Nobody felt that the cuisine of the Palace was slipping, and even Senator Sharon, himself a notable opener of foil-topped bottles, would, we felt, have been satisfied.
An eminently satisfactory aspect of this department's survey of the gilded traps of the countryside was the widespread revival of Victorian plush and ormolu as the decorative scheme for saloons, restaurants, and gaming houses throughout the Far West. The Happy Valley Bar at San Francisco's Palace has always been a model of this mannered style in which love seats, tiny divans, red velvets, and tasseled cords have been judiciously synthesized with oldtime playbills and cheerful items of Californiana, while up in Reno the Bonanza Club, the town's swellest roulette and bankruptcy parlors, is a wonderful midst of rococo Victorianism with tufted banquettes and velour drapes all the hell and gone, gold frame mirrors ten feet tall, and elaborately floriated electroliers on every hand.
Now Denver, which in modern times has been possessed of no more exotic premises than the eminently severe Ship's Bar in the Brown Palace Hotel, has flowered into spectacular Victorian effulgence with an Imperial Room at the Cosmopolitan Hotel which is a veritable explosion of looped and fringed curtains, brocaded bar stools, gold-backed mirrors, and elegant flourishes of every imaginable sort. The place is big enough to accommodate a thirsty regiment, and Denver is flocking to it in regiments. There is an oval bar of irregular outline surmounted by a cloud-shaped hung ceiling in pastel colors, and with a professor discoursing sweet music from a piano strategically located among the cash registers on a central platform. The whole shebang is a madhouse of 1850 ornamentation with lush, soft blues and pinks all over, and mahogany and cloisonné present in stupefying quantities, all of which must have cost, as the phrase goes, a pretty penny. If the cocktail-hour rush and later evening rioting for space there when this department passed through are any index of future grosses, the Imperial Room is Denver's ascendent institution of the moment and by long odds the gayest and handsomest bar in the Columbine Commonwealth.
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