January 2011

The motion picture palaces, as they are not very exaggeratedly termed by their publicity representatives, are greatly favoured by transient visitors because of the varied and continuous nature of their offerings. Music, dancing, a popular comedian, all add their piquant sauces to the main dish of the motion picture. So popular, indeed, has this kind of entertainment become that the number of straight vaudeville houses in New York has dwindled to one or two.…Roxy, genial showman of the radio, knows how to put together a good programme, and his theatre is in exceptional good taste, for all its crimson and gilt. Even its monstrous organ, which takes three musicians to operate, seems to fit naturally into the large-scale personality of the theatre. The Capitol, the Strand, the Rialto, the Rivoli, to mention only a few of the cinema houses whose electric signs help make the Great White Way the scintillating thoroughfare it is, are also favourites. Luxurious lounges, collegebred ushers, ice-cooled air
in summer, account partly for the popularity of these places.…

In 1921 Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake brought an all-black revue called Shuffle Along to Broadway. Not only was it successful enough to spawn eight imitators in the next four years, but it also spurred a nightly white migration to Harlem that lasted throughout the decade. Long after Times Square went dark, Lenox and Seventh avenues were busy with noisy crowds of visitors, some slumming, some merely curious, some actually drawn to the music played by musicians of the caliber of Fletcher Henderson and Duke Ellington.

Connie’s, on Seventh Avenue at 132nd Street, is the first white outpost on the uptown colored frontier, the first stop on the route of the downtown night clubbers. A wide red canopy stretches from the doorway to the curbstone, and once he has strolled on this tented way, the host to a party of four should be prepared to kiss a fifty-dollar bill a conclusive good-by. While at Small’s Paradise the average check is only about $4 a person, at Connie’s it is more likely $12 and possibly $15.

The following notices from The New York Times of the middle and late 1920s will be especially poignant to the modern Manhattanite. The prices that at first seem familiar to today’s tenant are in fact the yearly rental; the low figures are monthly.

Unfurnished — West Side

9TH ST, 17 WEST — Entire parlor floor, exceptionally large rooms; rent $2,500.

9TH, 66 WEST — High-class elevator house, 2–3 rooms; $45 – $75.

28TH, 344 WEST — Excellent apartments, rooms, bath; suitable artists’ studios; high grade, restricted, residential block; $60 – $65.

In spite of rubber-neck wagons and personally con- ducted tours, the best way of seeing Fifth Avenue remains the cheapest —the upper deck of a stage. And the least observant tourist, viewing the street from this dizzy platform, must notice the sudden transformation at Thirtyfourth Street…

From ten o’clock to six, it is as though twenty matinees were letting out at once —in winter a dark, rich mosaic of fur coats; in May, a rippling flower-bed.

It was the best time and place to be alive in since the world began, and everybody knew it. “I remember,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, “riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky; I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again.”

Fitzgerald’s Arcadia was New York in the 1920s, a city so raucous and dazzling and spiky with new buildings that one awed British visitor described it simply as “supreme.”

The decade began and ended a little early for the city: it started with the victorious soldiers marching up Fifth Avenue all through the spring and summer of 1919, and it died spectacularly in October 1929. In between, New York was the world’s stockbroker, and a powerful manufacturing center. Half a million of its six million residents actually produced things, to the tune of six billion dollars a year.

Then, as now, everyone came to New York sooner or later. One 1929 guide explained that “the equivalent in numbers of the entire population of the United States visits the City in less than three years. ” Guidebooks, magazines, and newspapers helped the throngs sort it all out. On the next dozen pages the editors have assembled a good deal of raw information from these guides, and marshaled it to let you move easily through Manhattan in its most glamorous era. Even though you can’t go there, we hope that this anthology may succeed in imparting something of the shimmering, elusive essence of the place.

BASIC INFORMATION

REWARDS FOR SERVICE

COMING INTO TOWN

Stop in at the U.S. Assay office…and exchange your gold in any form valued at not less than $100, for money.

In 1929 the Merchants’Association of New York published a little almanac that cataloged the city’s prodigiousness:
To begin at the beginning, a baby is born in New York every 4 minutes and 6 seconds —a total of 126,332 in 1928.

Using a twelve-hour day as a basis of computation, couples are getting married in New York at the rate of 14 every hour — a total of 62,424 getting married in 1928. Everybody can’t get married, however, and stay within the law, because in the population of 6,065,000 it is estimated there are 15,000 more females than males.

Food Consumption

These 6,065,000 people are consuming food at the rate of approximately 3,500,000 tons a year, an average of more than 1,000 pounds of food being consumed or wasted by every man, woman and child.

These people use 2,659,632 quarts of milk a day, almost a pint a piece.

The Health Department estimates that they use 7,000,000 eggs a day.

Stop in at the U.S. Assay office…and exchange your gold in any form valued at not less than $100, for money.

There is no safer city in the world than New York. Newspaper headlines to the contrary are largely sensationalism, playing up crimes and accidents of the day generally out of all proportion to their number or real importance. Women alone, or accompanied by young children, may be assured of safety and comfort in New York.…

In small towns like “Gopher Prairie,” the visitor is spotted at once, either by speech or dress or manner, or by mere “newness,” as he steps from the train, as he treads the quiet streets.…In New York the most unfamiliar type is the New Yorker —that almost unknown, practically nonexistent specimen, the native born Manhattanite. It is he, rather than the visitor, who is curious; yet he, poor dear, claims no special distinction, moves in no separate aura, nor ventures criticism of the hordes of aliens which possess his city — looks askance at none, accepts all.