Читать книгу The Personality of American Cities - Edward Hungerford - Страница 10

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Thirty minutes before the big bell of Trinity spire booms out noon-tide New York's busiest grub-time begins. A few early-breakfasting clerks and office-boys begin to find their way toward the shrines of the coffee-urns and the heaped-up piles of sandwiches.

The view of New York from the lunch club in the skyscraper

Of course, in New York breakfast is an almost endless affair—generally a fearfully hurried one. But lunch is far more serious. Lunch is almost an institution. Fifteen minutes after it is fairly begun it is gaining rapid headway. Thin trails of stenographers and clerks are finding their ways, lunch-bound, through the canyon-like streets of lower Manhattan, streams that momentarily increase in volume. By the time that Trinity finally booms its twelve stout strokes down into Broadway there is congestion upon the sidewalks—the favorite stools at the counters, the better tables in the higher-priced places are being rapidly filled. At twelve-thirty it begins to be luck to get any sort of accommodations at the really popular places; before one o'clock the intensity of grubbing verges on panic and pandemonium. And at a little before three cashiers are totaling their receipts, cooks, donning their hats and coats to go uptown, and waiters and 'buses are upturning chairs and scrubbing floors with scant regard for belated lunchers who have to be content with the crumbs that are left after the ravishing and hungry army has been fed. Order after pandemonium—readiness for the two hours of gorge upon the morrow. The restaurants and lunch-rooms are as quiet as Trinity church-yard and something like three quarters of a million hungry souls have lunched in the business section of Manhattan south of Twenty-third street—at a total cost, according to the estimate of a shrewd restauranteur of a quarter of a million dollars.

*****

You may pay your money and take your choice. The shrewd little newsboys and office-boys who find their way to the short block of Ann street between Park Row and Nassau—the real Grub street of New York—are proving themselves financiers of tomorrow by dickering for sandwiches—"two cents apiece; three for a nickel." They always buy them in lots of three. That is business and business is not to be scorned for a single instant. Or you can pay as high prices in the swagger restaurants downtown as you do in the swagger restaurants uptown—and that is saying much. When lunch-time comes you can suit the inclinations of your taste—and your pocket-book. But the average New Yorker seems to run quite strongly to the peculiar form of lunch-room in which you help yourself to what you want, compute from the markers the cost of your midday meal, announce that total to the cashier, who is perfectly content to take your word for it, pay the amount and walk out. It seems absurd—to any one who does not understand New Yorkers. The lunch-room owners do understand them. New York business men and business boys are honest, as a general thing—particularly honest in little matters of this sort.

"It is all very simple," says the manager of one of these big lunch-rooms, who stands beside you for a moment at the entrance of one of his places—it boasts that it serves more than two thousand lunches each business day between eleven and three. "I've been through the whole mill. I've been check boy and oyster man, cashier—now I'm looking out for this particular beanery. Honor among New York business men? There's a lot of it."

"And you don't run many risks?" you venture.

"Not many here," he promptly replies. "But there was a man in here yesterday, who runs a cafeteria out in Chicago. I was telling him some of the rules of the game here—how when a customer comes in and throws his hat down in a chair before he goes over to the sandwich and coffee counters that chair is his, until he gets good and ready to go. My Chicago friend laughed at that. 'If we were to do that out in my neck-o'-the-woods,' says he, 'the customer would lose his hat.' And the uptown department stores don't take any chances, either. At one of the biggest of them they make the women decide what they will eat, but before they can start they must buy a check—pay in advance, you understand. They've tried the downtown way—and now they take no chances."

The floor manager laughs nervously.

"It's different with the girls downtown. We've started one quick buffet lunch on the honor plan, same dishes and prices and service as the men's places, but this one is for business girls. They said at first that we wouldn't make good with them—but we're ready to start another within the month. The business girls don't cheat—no matter what their uptown sisters may try to do."

*****

As a matter of fact downtown business girls in New York eat very sensibly. Sweets are popular but not invariable. They prefer candy, with fruit as a second choice, to be eaten some time during the afternoon. In big offices, where many girls are employed, "candy pools" are often made, each girl contributing five cents and getting her pro rata, one member of the staff being delegated to make the purchases. Eaten in this way the candy acts as a stimulant during the late afternoon hours, in much the same way as the invariable tea of the business man in London.

The business girl in New York takes her full hour for luncheon. It is seldom a minute more or a minute less. She is willing as a rule to stay overtime at night but she feels that she must have her sixty minutes in the middle of the day. A part of the lunch hour is always a stroll—unless there be a downpour. Certain downtown streets from twelve to one o'clock each day suggest the proximity of a nearby high school or seminary. There is much pairing off and quiet flirtation. This noon-day promenade of girls—for the most part astonishingly well-dressed girls and invariably in twos and threes—is one of the sights of downtown New York. Some of the girls gather in the old churchyards of Trinity and St. Paul's—in lower Broadway—on pleasant days. They sit down among the tombstones with their little packages of food and eat and chat and then stroll. No one molests them and the church authorities, although a little flustered when this first began, have seen that there is no harm in it and let the girls have their own way. There is always great decorousness and these big open-air spaces in the midst of the crowded street canyons are enjoyed by the women who appreciate the grass and winding paths after the hard pavements.

All the business girls downtown are not content with sitting after lunch among the tombstones of St. Paul's churchyard or of Trinity. He was indeed a canny lunch-man who took note of all the girls strolling in the narrow streets of downtown Manhattan, who remembered that all New York, rich or poor, loves to dance and who then fitted up an unrentable third floor loft over his eating place as a dancing hall. Two violins and a piano—a gray-bearded sandwich man to patrol the streets with "DANCING" placarded fore and aft upon his boards—the trick was done. Mamie told Sadie and Sadie told Elinor and Elinor told Flossie and the lunch-man began to grow famous. He made further study of the psychology of his patrons. There were the young fellows—shipping and file clerks and even ambitious young office-boys to be considered. There were the after-lunch smokes of these young captains of industry to come into the reckoning. The lunch-man placed a row of chairs along one edge of his dancing-hall and over them "Smoking Permitted at This End of the Room." After that Mamie and Sadie and Elinor and Flossie had partners and the lunch-man was on the highway to a six-cylinder motor car. He has his imitators. If you were in business in lower New York and your stenographer began to hum the "Blue Danube" along about half an hour before noon you would very well know she was gathering steam for the blissful twenty minutes of dancing that was going to help her digest her lunch.

*****

You, yourself, are going to lunch in still another sort of restaurant. It is characteristic of a type that has sprung up on the tip of Manhattan island within the past dozen years. You reach this grubbing-place by skirting the front doors of unspeakably dirty eating-houses in a mean street of the Syrian quarter. Finally you turn the corner of a dingy brick building, which was once the great house of one of the contemporaries of the first of the Vanderbilts and which has managed to escape destruction for three quarters of a century and face—the only skyscraper in congested New York which stands in a grass-platted yard—the whim of its wealthy owner. A fast elevator whisks you thirty stories to the top of the building and you step into the lobby of what looks, at first glance, to be the entrance hall of some fine restaurant in uptown's Fifth avenue. But this is a lunching-club—one of the newest in the town as well as one of the most elaborate.

Elaborate did we say? This is the elaboration of perfect taste—unobtrusive rugs, hangings, lighting fixtures and furniture—great, broad rooms and from their windows there comes to you another of the spectacular views that lay below the man-made peaks of Manhattan. To the south—the smooth, blue surface of the upper bay—in the foreground a nine hundred foot ship coming to the new land, her funnels lazily breathing smoke at the first lull in her four-day race across the Atlantic; to the east, a mighty river and its bridges, Brooklyn again and on very clear days, visions of Long island; to the north the most wonderful building construction that man has ever attempted, Babylonic in its immensity; to the west the brisk waterway of the North river and beyond it, Jersey City, sandwiched in between the smoky spread of railroad yards. This is the sort of thing that Mr. Downtown Luncher may have—if he is willing to pay the price. On torrid summer days he may ascend to the roof-garden, may glance lazily below him at the activities of the busiest city in the world and sip up the cool breezes from the sea, while folk down in the bottom of the Broadway chasm are sweltering from heat and humidity. And in winter he will find a complete gymnasium in operation on another floor of the club, with a competent instructor in charge. The "doctor," as they call him, will lay out a course of work. And that course of work, calling for a half-hour of exercise each day just before lunch will make dyspeptic and paunchy old money-grubbers alike, keen as farmhands coming into dinner.

And yet this club, typical of so many others in the downtown business heart of Manhattan, is but a cog in the mighty machine of the lunching of the workaday multitudes of downtown. Its doors are closed and lights are out at six o'clock in the evening, save on extraordinary occasions; while most of its hundred or more well-trained waiters go uptown to assist in the dinner and the late supper rushes of the fashionable restaurants in the theater and hotel district. Like most of its compeers, it is an outgrowth of the wonderfully comfortable old Lawyers' Club, which was completely destroyed in the great fire that burned the Equitable Building in January, 1912. From that organization, famed for its noon-day hospitality and for the quality of the folk you might meet between its walls, have sprung many other downtown lunch clubs—the Whitehall, the Hardware, the Manufacturers, the Downtown Association, the new Lawyers—many, many others; almost invariably occupying the upper floors of some skyscraper that has been planned especially for them. These clubs are not cheap. It costs from sixty to a hundred dollars to enter one of them and about as much more yearly in the form of dues. Their restaurant charges are far from low-priced. They are never very exclusive organizations and yet they give to the strain of the workaday New Yorker his last lingering trace of hospitality—the hospitality that has lingered around Bowling Green and Trinity and St. Paul's church-yards since colonial days and the coffee houses.

*****

Even the hospitality of the genial host seems to end—with the ending of the lunch-hour. As he takes his last sip of café noir he is tugging at his watch.

"Bless me," he says, "It is going on three o'clock. I've got that railroad crowd due in my office in fifteen minutes."

That is your dismissal. For ninety minutes he has given you his hospitality—his rare and unselfish self. He has put the perplexing details of his business out of his mind and given himself to whatever flow of talk might suit your fancy. Now the hour and a half of grace is over—and you are dismissed, courteously—but none the less dismissed. With your host you descend to the crowded noisome street. He sees you to the subway—gives you a fine warm grasp of his strong hand—and plunges back into the great and grinding machine of business.

Lunch in your Day of Days within the City of the Towers is over. Three o'clock. Before the last echoes of Trinity's bell go ringing down through Wall street to halt the busy Exchange—the multitude has been fed. Miss Stenographer has had her salad and éclair, two waltzes and perhaps a "turkey trot" into the bargain, and is back at the keys of her typewriter. Mr. President has entertained that Certain Party at the club and has made him promise to sign that mighty important contract. And the certain Party and Mr. President rode for half an hour on the mechanical horses in the gymnasium. What fun, too, for those old boys?

Three o'clock! The cashiers are totaling their receipts, the waiters and the 'buses are upturning chairs and tables to make way for the scrub-women, some are already beginning to don their overcoats to go uptown; but the three-quarters of a million of hungry mouths have been fed. New York has caught its breath in mid-day relaxation and once more is hard at work—putting in the last of its hours of the business day with renewed and feverish energy.