"Twenty years ago and it had every promise of success. It looked as if Riverside Drive would surpass the Avenue as a street of fine residences. The side streets were preëminently nice. Then came the subway—and with it the apartment houses. After that the very nice folk began moving to the side streets in the upper Fifties, the Sixties and the Seventies between Park and Fifth avenues."
"Suppose that the apartment houses should begin to drift in there—in any numbers?" you demand.
"Lord knows," says Katherine, and with due reverence adds: "There is the last stand of the prosperous New Yorker with an old-fashioned notion that he and his would like to live in a detached house. The Park binds him in on the West, the tenement district and Lexington avenue on the East—to the North Harlem and the equally impossible Bronx. The old guard is standing together."
"There is Brooklyn?" you venture.
"No New Yorker," says Katherine, with withering scorn, "ever goes publicly to Brooklyn unless he is being buried in Greenwood cemetery."
*****
Tea for you is being served in a large mausoleum of a white hotel—excessively white from a profuse use of porcelain tiles which can be washed occasionally—of most extraordinary architecture. Some day some one is going to attempt an analysis of hotel architecture in New York and elsewhere in the U.S.A. but this is not the time and place. Suffice it to say here and now that you finally found a door entering the white porcelain mausoleum. What a feast awaited your eyes—as well as your stomach—within. Rooms of rose pink and rooms of silver gray, Persian rooms, Japanese rooms, French rooms in the several varieties of Louis, Greek rooms—Europe, the ancients and the Orient, have been ransacked for the furnishing of this tavern. And in the center of them all is a great glass-enclosed garden, filled with giant palms and tiny tables, tremendous waiters and infinitesimal chairs. A large bland-faced employé—who is a sort of sublimated edition of the narrow lean hat-boys who we shall find in the eating places of the Broadway theater districts—divests you of your outer wraps. You elbow past a band and arrive at the winter garden. A head waiter in an instant glance of steel-blue eyes decides that you are fit and finds the tiniest of the tiny tables for you. It is so far in the shade of the sheltering palm that you have to bend almost double to drink your tea—and the orchestra is rather uncomfortably near.
Washington Square and its lovely Arch—New York
Katherine might have taken you to other tea dispensaries—an unusual place in a converted stable in Thirty-fourth street, another stable loft in West Twenty-eighth—dozens of little shops, generally feminine to an intensified degree, which combine the serving of tea with the vending of their wares. But she preferred the big white hotel.