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

AllertonHouse for Women was the obvious next step, tying in a growing taste for a certain kindof accommodation with the realities of post–World War I and women’s new claims for independence outside of the protection of a male-headedhousehold. Silk wanted to offer rooms to female “physicians,decorators, lecturers, politicians, writers, buyers, store executives.” (Thatthese residential hotel accommodations were marked as white and privileged never neededto be said out loud.) Silk envisioned a homelike environment, which would differentiateit from a standard hotel, with a sewing room, a ballroom, a “strictlyup-to-the-minute laundry,” and men-free lounging rooms. An Allerton guest was freeto “be her own mistress.” The hotel, built to accommodate five hundred womenresidents, was booked solid before it was even finished.

Such profit potential could hardly be ignored. Others followed, with theAmerican Women’s Association (AWA) hotel becoming the largest yet. Heralded by the New York Times as a “temple to the spirit ofemancipated womanhood,” Miss Smith, head of the AWA’s board, berated anyonewho dared to call it a hotel. It was to be no such thing, she said: it was a“movement.” She was right. These women’sclub-hotels were the “physical manifestation” of a woman’s right tolive without the protection of her father, brother, uncle; to socialize as she pleased;to shop as she pleased; to work as she could. In the case of the AWA, the hotel’sdrawn-out funding drive and construction also brought in the city’s wealthiestwomen to try their hands at a serious business venture. Led by Anne Morgan, of thefamous Morgans, along with other women belonging to the city’s social elite, theycreated a modern-day stock-selling campaign that they launched at the Plaza Hotel,handing out sales kits and calling cards to an army of stock sellers. They devised afull-scale advertising campaign based on a mascot they named “Miss RobinsonCrusoe,” the concept being that a single woman’s loneliness in New York wasakin to being stranded on a tropical island. “Miss Robinson Crusoe” had apamphlet, a song, and Fifth Avenue display windows. The idea was that she would ofcourse be saved by the AWA Clubhouse, where there would be others like her, of the samespirit and ambition; and where she would find community andluxury. The sales team regrouped two years later, now with $3.5 million collected withwhich to begin construction. Over champagne and canapés, AnneMorgan and her fellow socialites-turned-businesswomen handed out prizes of fur coats andsalamander pins to the top stock sellers.

The AWA hotel found its site on West Fifty-SeventhStreet, where professional women could be “as free as men.” Women’sindependence at the AWA was declared in no uncertain terms: a full twenty-eight stories,with furnishings overseen by Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt, another member of thecountry’s wealthiest clans, as well as a swimming pool with “nasturtiumcolored tiles” and a patio where “four fountains splash in melodiousarpeggios.” The “ultra-modern girl” could “order her coffee andcigarettes” in an array of themed rooms. The powder-blue tableware used in themuraled art deco dining room was the same as one would find in the wagon restaurants ofthe French trains because Mrs. Vanderbilt believed if it could withstand European railtracks, it could survive the women of New York. She ordered crateloads. While a place toeat, drink, and smoke, the AWA hotel also offered 1,250 rooms with baths, making it thefifth-largest residential hotel in all of New York.

But it was the Barbizon Hotel that truly captured America’simagination. It would become the go-to destination for young women from all over thecountry determined to give their New York dreams a shot. Whereas the Allerton and theAWA were built for professional career women, the Barbizon targeted a different kind ofguest. She was the debutante who couldn’t tell her parents she wanted to paint;she was the shopgirl from Oklahoma who dreamed of the Broadway stage; she was theeighteen-year-old who told her fiancé she would be right back, but first there wasa typing course she needed to take. The hotel would come to embody anentirely different persona from the others as a place of glamour, desire, and youngfemale ambition.

William H. Silk, with the Allerton already on its wayto completion, now aimed to combine femininity with this new independence, declaringthat just as the modern woman’s dress had shaken off the cumbersome frills of theVictorian age and embraced a “drastic” simplicity, so too her livingquarters at the Barbizon needed to “reflect the larger life opened to the femalesex,” while keeping in mind that women “have by no means lost their feminineattributes.” This is what Silk envisioned the Barbizon would be: twenty-threefloors, 720 rooms; on the outside, it would offer the masculine, he declared, embodiedin a building of the North Italian school, filled with everything that men demanded fortraining their intellect and their physique—swimming pool, gymnasium, roofgardens, lecture rooms, and library. But on the inside, in the Barbizon’sinteriors, the rooms hidden to men would be “highly feminine boudoirs,” thecolors “delicate and fresh,” furnished in a modern French style. Like itspredecessors, the Barbizon would be designed around a post-suffragette rethinking ofdomesticity along with the developers’ bottom-dollar desire to maximize livingspace. The result was lines of private rooms off of long narrow corridors, intermingledwith shared parlors, libraries, and laundry facilities.

Silk promised the Barbizon Club-Residence for Women, as it was firstcalled, would open “on or about October 15”—1927—and indeed,print advertisements began to appear in September, announcing that applications forresidence would begin on September 15. Among the features of the Barbizon was a radio ineach room—which would so delight Molly Brown when she arrived. Rates started at $10 a week. Designed by the hotel specialists Murgatroyd &Ogden, the Barbizon, completed a few months past schedule, in February 1928, wasimpressive from both near and far, with four massive turrets at the corners of thetowering building, like gradated steps moving up to its peak. The outsidebrickwork was chosen to convey color and light from salmon to light red, artisticallyarranged in diverse patterns, with a neutral limestone as the trim. A large solariumthat functioned as a lounge, furnished tastefully, was located on the west side of thenineteenth floor, above which rooms were reserved for various college clubs. On theeighteenth floor,