The Barbizon by Paulina Bren (best novels to read for students .TXT) 📗

had to stand in line to get a window to jump out of.” But there were also less public ways to meet the same end. Ignatz Engel, a retired cigar maker in the Bronx, lay down on a blanket in his kitchen and opened all the jets of the gas range. A Brooklyn broker whistled and sang hymns, to the irritation of his neighbors, before he too turned on the gas, opting for his bed over the kitchen floor, dressed sharp in a blue serge suit, gray kid gloves, and pearl-colored spats.

There were those wealthy enough, however, that the crash at first meant only a financial stumble. For them, the fun continued still. The Stork Club, El Morocco, and countless other speakeasies remained filled with socialites, celebrities, and the ultrarich. The lavish Waldorf Astoria hotel opened in 1931—two years after the crash—where its in-house professional hostess, the celebrated Elsa Maxwell, organized costume parties, parlor games, soirees, and scavenger hunts for the rich who needed some cheering up. But with income tax revenues plummeting daily, the United States Treasury was starting to acknowledge that only alcohol taxes could make up for the ever-growing government deficit.

On Tuesday, December 5, 1933, in the late afternoon, a full four years after Black Thursday, the Merry-Go-Round Speakeasy on East Fifty-Sixth Street was packed as usual. The brass-buttoned doorman, looking like some misplaced admiral, was at the door, as always, waiting for new arrivals to utter the password. Downstairs, Omar Champion, the speakeasy’s host, was decorating the wrought iron banisters with autumn leaves he had purchased from the Park Avenue hothouses. Upstairs, the circular bar was turning—a full rotation every eleven minutes. Organ music was playing, and bartenders were pouring. Young women sipping sidecars, dressed in Parisian Mainbocher dresses with cinched waists that anticipated the Dior look by many years, perched on wooden merry-go-round horses attached to the rotating bar. Around and around they went. It was 5:30 p.m. when Omar went to answer the telephone. A few minutes later he returned, his face ashen, his voice shaking: “Ladies and gentlemen, Utah has ratified!” He reached out and pushed a button: the famous merry-go-round bar stopped mid-rotation. The bartenders quietly took off their aprons and put up a sign: NO DRINKS SERVED. Prohibition was officially over: the Twenty-First Amendment had passed, ringing the death knell for New York’s speakeasies. The Roaring Twenties had definitively come to a screeching halt, even for the wealthy.

By then, the economic collapse, and its wretched hopelessness, had spread well beyond Wall Street. Within a year of Black Thursday, a quarter of America’s workforce had become unemployed. At the worst point, one-third of New Yorkers were unemployed, and the once lush Central Park in Manhattan was turned into a muddy Hooverville, a town of makeshift shanties named after the president who many saw fit to blame. Hustlers and street hawkers were everywhere. Countless men peddled apples on street corners, a philanthropic gesture facilitated by US apple farmers’ 1929 bumper crop, which they were trying to unload while also helping out the urban unemployed. These images of men with their apple boxes hoisted high onto their shoulders became synonymous with the family man’s plight. But where were the women with their boxes of apples? Nowhere. It was only breadwinners—understood as male, and as white—who got the apples cheap to sell at profit. Women, after all, had men to take care of them. Or so everyone liked to say. But that was far from true—women, like men, suddenly had families to support, or else themselves, if only to ease the financial burden on their families.

The Great Depression was now everyone’s new reality. It was the Barbizon’s too. The Barbizon Hotel had not been cheap to build, costing $4 million in 1927 for its twenty-three floors. With the Great Depression fully under way, in 1931 the Barbizon Corporation, made up of individual shareholders presided over by William H. Silk, who had built the hotel, defaulted on its mortgage. Chase National Bank stepped in and took possession of the Barbizon. The following year, Chase protested the city’s assessment of $2,950,000 for the hotel, claiming its fair-market value was almost a third less. Then just a month later, the Barbizon sold at a foreclosure sale for the bargain-basement, Depression-priced sum of $460,000—a quarter of what Chase had just claimed was its real value. The interior fixtures and furnishings went for another $28,000. The lucky bidder for both was Realtor Lawrence B. Elliman, an original shareholder in the Martha Washington but also chairman of a new entity called the Barbizon Hotel bondholders’ committee. The hotel, in the most circuitous way, was now back again in the hands of those who had lost it. The skittish among the original shareholders, who did not want back in, were paid off with $400,000 borrowed by the new bondholders’ committee for that very purpose.

Throughout the foreclosure proceedings and the resale, the Barbizon carried on as before. Much like its clientele, it needed to survive in the inverted world the 1929 stock market crash had generated, in which many of the previously well-off were now poor, and the poor were destitute. By 1934, there would be seventy-five thousand homeless single women in New York. Just as men had apples to sell, they also had flophouses to go to, dormitory beds for twenty-five cents or less, while the women had nothing. Instead, they rode the subways and sat in train stations, the invisible victims of the Great Depression. With nothing to peddle, many were reduced to selling their own bodies, taking on sex work to balance the scale between life and death. Black women looking for domestic work gathered on street corners, waiting for employers to drive by and make an offer; the women called it their new “slave markets.” In the 1920s, some young black women had participated in flapper culture just like their white counterparts; that march forward stopped short. Now both white and black women were expected to hand over