When, this month, New York's stateliest hotel, the Plaza (how many tarriers in its bars know that the two back-to-back P's of its monogram stand for the Park Plaza Corporation?), celebrates its fortieth anniversary, it will celebrate not only four decades of tangible survival in the world's most mutable community, but also forty years of triumph for tradition and good manners and the tranquil serenities of urban life as it once flourished universally in more gracious and happy times.
This, perhaps more than any other of its assets, sentimental and negotiable, is what has endeared the Plaza to so many people in whose lives the average hotel is simply a convenience. Its continuity with the enviable and almost irrevocably lost past is unbroken and secure. There has been no lapse in its legend, no suspension of its saga from that long ago evening in the autumn of 1907 when Fred Sterry threw open its doors with a dinner to the press whose menu of terrapin and woodcock, champagnes and noble Burgundies remains to this day a fragrant souvenir of how the reporters lived in the golden era of Richard Harding Davis.
Successive managements, culminating in the Plaza's present position as bright particular jewel of the chain of Hilton Hotels, have contrived to make the past an asset rather than a mortmain, and while its background and atmosphere derive from those happy Edwardian times, its plumbing and other tangible appointments certainly do not.
Whoever eventually undertakes to write a definitive chronicle of the Plaza and this department here and now nominates Gene Fowler for the office for what it may be worth, will be literally overwhelmed by the details of the available record. No hotel in history ever opened in such a blaze of felicitous publicity, and for many years, in an age when there was room in the public prints for a wealth of florid personal trivia, a play-by-play account of high life as lived in its august premises was as much a part of the daily papers as the weather or the market is today.
Aside from its splendors as a residence and citadel of formal society ranking those of any other hotel in Manhattan with the possible and reasonable exception of the St. Regis, a structure dating from the same era and partaking of a parallel time spirit but lacking the Plaza's proud location, the Plaza has been a secure and favored retreat of the gustatory muse. Its lapses from the grand manner have been few and those evoked by the urgencies—sometimes, if the truth be remarked, spurious—of war time. At the current moment its kitchen destinies are lovingly supervised by François Gouron, an executive chef of imagination and a lively interest in the individual tastes of the hotel's leading patrons, who can turn his hand to so delicate a confection as mousse de sole one minute and turn out a superb hunter's stew of bear meat the next. Next to its function as a stronghold of manners, the Plaza will be remembered as a bastion of good living in its every aspect.
Life may very well begin at forty, and in the graph of human progress a certain satisfying maturity may be said to derive from this date, but in the case of the Plaza, if its life is to begin in 1947, it may justifiably be remarked that it has had a notable head start.
Although this department monopolized somewhat more space last month than it is customary for the management to reserve to its use, and went through the motions of taking its annual oath of allegiance to San Francisco and the Palace Hotel in extenso, it still did not come to the end of its notes and memoranda on transcontinental North America as available to the cocktail-route reporter in the late summer of 1947.
This particular canto of our own special version of “America the Beautiful” had its inception as we rolled down Weber Canyon into the precincts of the Latter Day Saints aboard the “City of San Francisco,” and more particularly that section of the “City of San Francisco” whose dining-car steward is Wild Bill Kurthy, probably the greatest living salesman for five-pound T-bone steaks, chops not by the pair but by the dozen, stacks of little thin hot cakes more than a literal foot tall as the merest incidental to breakfast, and Niagaras of champagne on every occasion known to record and a few dreamed up special by Wild Bill Kurthy. People on the eastbound run of the “City of San Francisco” have been known to go right through Chicago and not stop until they were well in the hands of the specialists at Battle Creek, but they loved getting that way, and they made Wild Bill very happy.
Bill is the sort of dining-car steward who, if he really likes you, isn't happy if at Oakland Pier or the Northwestern Depot, as the case may be, you can get off the train without the aid of a section gang with block and tackle. Frail little old ladies of Whistler's Mother manners have been known to forego their breakfast habits of years which ran to a half glass of fruit juice and a slice of Melba toast and, rather than outrage Bill's sense of hospitality, put away his idea of an invalid's meal: six fried eggs, four outsized pork chops, four pots of coffee, a deckhand's fill of little thin hot cakes, and three kinds of fresh fruit served with chamber-of-commerce abundance.
The evening before this was commenced your reporter had dined off Bill's notion of a snack: canapés of caviar no bigger than a stove lid, Kansas City T-bones which, conservatively, would serve a family of five people of outdoor habits, roast pheasant, one to a customer, and fresh figs, champagne and cognac beyond recall or counting. An hour later, glazed, dazed, and happy in a distended sort of way, we were in our drawing room wondering how the Southern Pacific Railroad can afford to have Bill on the premises when there was a gentle tapping at the door and one of the diner stewards made an entry with a tray of assorted ham, cheese, and tongue sandwiches, enough for a brigade at a seven-eleven conflagration, and six quarts of milk, this for the two of us. It was in case we were hungry during the night.
“The Wild Man will be very unpleased if you don't eat everything,” he said softly as he withdrew. “We open for breakfast promptly at seven.”
The transcontinental hospitality of the railroads is, for the record, nothing new in the current generation, which believes in its naïve way that the first-rail travelers went west in zulu trains and would be astonished to know that the first streamlined, airflow train was operated by the Baltimore and Ohio back along 1900.
Through cars from coast to coast did not, for the record, come into being in 1946 at the fiat of the C & O's Robert Young, and the writer has before him at the moment the account of the first through train from Boston to San Francisco which was operated on a six-day schedule under the auspices of the Boston Board of Trade.
“This train,” so reads the chronicle, “was made up of eight of the most elegant cars ever drawn over an American railway. They were built by the Messrs. Pullman, and the first car is a baggage, the front end of which has five large ice closets and a refrigerator for the storing of fruits, meats, and vegetables. The balance of the car is for baggage except for a square in one corner where stands a new quarto-medium Gordon press upon which the train's daily newspaper is printed.
”Next comes a very handsome smoking car, which is divided into four rooms. The first is the printing office, which is supplied with black walnut cabinets filled with the latest styles of type for newspaper and job work. This department, we may say without egotism, has been thoroughly tested, and has already turned out some fine work as can be done by those of our brothers who have a local habitation. Adjoining this is a neatly fitted up lobby and wine room. Next comes a large smoking room, with euchre tables, etc. The rear end of the car has a beautifully furnished hair dressing and shaving saloon. Following this comes the two new hotel cars, the “Arlington” and the “Revere” both of which are completely and elegantly furnished and are thoroughly adapted to the uses for which they are destined. Two magnificent saloon cars, the “Palmyra” and “Marquette,” come next. The train is completed by the two elegant commissary cars, the “St. Charles” and “St. Cloud,” each of which is finished in all of its appointments as any of the other carriages noticed.
“The entire train is equipped with every desirable accessory that may tend in the least to promote the ease of the passengers, elaborate hangings, costly upholstery, artistic gilding, and beautifully finished woodwork marking every portion of their arrangements. Among the new features introduced into these cars are two well-stocked libraries, replete with choice works of fiction, history, poetry, etc. and two of the most modern type of Burdett organs. These instruments are complete in every detail of stops, pedals, double banks of keys, etc.”
Refrigerators, library cars, two diners, hairdressing salons, a daily newspaper, and pipe organs! The pioneers certainly had things tough getting across Utah and Nevada in the seventies.
One of this department's first ports of call in the vicinity of the Golden Gate was, of course, Trader Vic's in Oakland, an institutional deadfall specializing in rums of a nature which the French would characterize as formidable even in their straight forms, but which Trader Vic prefers to serve in compounds of multiple proofs, blends, flavors, and degrees of lethal capacity. To watch Vic officiating back of his own bar, playing on the ranks of bottled Barbados, Trinidad, Virgin Islands, Haitian, Demerara, Puerto Rico, New England, Saint-Pierre, Antigua, and Jamaica the way Charlie Schwab's private organist was accustomed to run amuck at the console, is to watch destruction approach in some of its most enchanting forms.
As a smoke to complement his most urgent hellbroth, Vic has had manufactured for him in Havana an all-Cuba cigar twisted three to a bundle and selling under the name of Trader Vic's Crooks. For smokers with a taste for exotic and unconventional smokes that have an Islands touch of barter trade about them, these Crooks are an exceptional item, and this department can never, when confronted with a twisted cigar, forget his first encounter with this old-time type of seegar.
The Grand Old Man of our undergraduate days at New Haven, now some time past, was the great Dr. Henry Augustin Beers, a venerable gaffer who had, in his younger days, been the companion of Matthew Arnold, and even in his retirement was a tall tower of erudition and a Connecticut Yankee eccentric of raffish habits and outspoken contempt for a degenerate generation, particularly as it was represented by the politics of prohibition.
“Young man,” he would bellow at enchanted undergraduates who had the honor of his acquaintance, “we are governed by the quintessence of corruption and poltroonery. Fetch me that decanter on the side table, as I am faint when I think of the evil days upon which we are come. Pour yourself a dollop to the damnation of demagogues, and give me a double.”
The old gentleman was far advanced in years and confined to a rolling chair, which made his consumption of neat tumblers of Lawrence's Medford rum a heroic gesture in our eyes.
“Don't let my dotter hear me,” he would continue in a voice which could be heard right across York Square and as far as Arthur Head's bookshop in Whalley Avenue, “but in the back of that closet you'll find some smokes fit for a man. She'll scalp me if she catches me, but if we open the windows she will never know.”
The fit smokes were a cask of Java rat-tail twists approximately ten inches long, with a tuft at the end for convenience of lighting what may have been based on tobacco and certainly had been in the house since Timothy Dwight was president of Yale down the street. They burned with a clear blue flame and a hissing noise like a blasting fuse, and the smoker had to be fairly adroit at dispensing of them once they were in combustion, or he could be painfully burned.
The delusion that the room would air in a few minutes was confined to Dr. Beers alone, God light a good man, as their odor must have impregnated the house for a month, but the picture of the scholarly ancient, waving aloft the afghan which should have been across his legs in an effort to clear the air of Java rattail, will linger forever.