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

barred from anywhere but the lobby andthe eighteenth-floor parlor, to which a gentleman caller could receive a pass ifaccompanied by his date.

The front entrance of the club-hotel was onSixty-Third Street, while the ground-floor shops, eight in all, were on the LexingtonAvenue side of the corner building, and included a dry cleaner, hairdresser, pharmacy,hosiery store, millinery shop, and a Doubleday bookshop—everything a certain classof woman might need. All the stores had entrances from inside the hotel, off a smallcorridor, so Molly Brown did not have to venture out onto the street if she was not upto it. The Barbizon had opened only three years earlier, when New York was in the midstof a transformation. A building boom had been in full swing, a purposeful out with theold and in with the new. Public opinion declared that over the years Manhattan hadexpanded haphazardly, senselessly, illogically, but all that could stillbe brought to heel. The buildings that belonged to past centuries would be razed to theground in favor of a new, ambitious, mechanized twentieth century; tenements andlow-lying buildings were to give way to well-planned towers that sprang up into the skyin art deco silhouettes.

The architecture of the early twentieth century was as new as the NewWoman who had broken free of old constraints. Critics ofnineteenth-century New York condemned the “brown mantle spread out” acrossManhattan, creating a sea of “monotonous brownstones” in its wake.Today’s prized brownstones, quaint and historical, were then seen as a blight onthe city. City planners pointed out that while they could no longer bring back thecheeriness and color blasts of the “old Dutch days of New Amsterdam” withits “red tile roofs, rug-patterned brick facades and gayly paintedwoodwork,” they could conjure up a new century and its signature look: theskyscraper.

In the midst of this building boom, in 1926 TempleRodeph Sholom sold its space on Sixty-Third Street and Lexington Avenue in Manhattan for$800,000. One of the oldest Jewish congregations in the United States, soon to bereplaced by the premier women-only residential hotel, was moving to the Upper West Side.Temple Sholom had stood at this spot for fifty-five years, following its Jewishimmigrant congregation uptown as they moved out of their Lower East Side tenements intonew homes in Midtown Manhattan and the Upper East Side. Now again it was following itscongregants out of this area that was rapidly building up, especially with the 1918extension of the Lexington Avenue Line subway from Grand Central at 42nd Street up to125th Street. The temple ended its half-century-long residency onNew York’s Upper East Side with its eldest worshippers onstage to commemorate thismoment of change. Mrs. Nathan Bookman, ninety-seven, and Isador Foos, ninety-one, hadbeen members since their confirmations at age thirteen; enthroned onstage, looking downat the congregation of upstanding New Yorkers, their parents andgrandparents once Lower East Side German Jewish immigrants, they said goodbye to thenineteenth century. The Barbizon was about to say hello to the twentieth.

Just as Temple Sholom had been built on Sixty-Third and Lexington toaccommodate a growing need, so now its planned replacement was responding to an entirelynew one. World War I had liberated women, set them on the path to politicalenfranchisement in 1920 with the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment, and, just asimportant, made workingwomen visible and more acceptable. A record number of women werenow applying to college, and while marriage continued to be the end goal, clerical workcombined the glamour of flapper life—with its urban, consumerist excesses(Shopping at Bloomingdale’s! Dinner at Delmonico’s!)—with anacceptable form of training for married life. Clerical work had been a careerstepping-stone for young men, but now, as thousands of women headed for the officesinside the sparkling new skyscrapers going up each year across Manhattan, the job ofsecretary ceased to be a career path with the promise of promotion: it was insteadrecast as a chance for young women to exercise the skills of “office wife”while also earning a salary and living a brief independent life before marriage. The new secretaries of this new world were to be for their bosses“as much like the vanished wife of his father’s generation as could bearranged,” declared Fortune magazine. They would type their boss’sletters, balance his checkbook, take his daughter to the dentist, and offer himego-boosting pep talks when necessary.

But the New Woman received something in exchange: the publicly sanctionedright to live independently, to express herself sexually (up to a point), to indulge asa consumer, to experience all the thrills of urban life, and to enter public space onher own terms. And to do that, she needed a place to live. Theold-fashioned women’s boarding houses—an earlier option for a single womanliving and working in New York—were of a past era, now lookeddown on with scorn, associated, as the New York Times declared, with“horsehair sofas” and the “recurrent smell of beef stew.” Theywere also associated with the working class, whereas the new breed of upper- andmiddle-class workingwomen wanted something better. Neither did they want house rules orpatronizing philanthropy (the well-intentioned but demeaning engine behind so manyold-fashioned boarding houses for widows, workers, and female outcasts) to be part oftheir living experience. And the address mattered—a lot.

But even if they had been able to look past the substandard rooms, theitchy horsehair, and the chewy beef, there were nowhere near enough of these boardinghouses to accommodate the great numbers of young women pouring into the city.Residential hotels built high into the sky would have to be the answer instead.

Hotel residential living—for families and for bachelors—hadbeen in vogue since the late 1800s. “In town it is no longerquite in taste to build marble palaces, however much money one may have,” wroteone social commentator at the time. “Instead, one lives in a hotel.”Residential hotel accommodations ranged from palatial suites for the perversely wealthyof the Gilded Age to practical rooms for the single and striving. Much fuss andattention were paid to the coziness of these hotel homes. The more modest residentialhotels featured custom-made furniture that was intentionally smaller than the standard,making it easier to fit into small spaces and making the hotel rooms appear larger. Thetwin bed lost its footboard, and the