running, and Amy resigned herself with a philosophical sigh, telling
herself that it was probably better for Peggy to go first anyway,
because she always finished quickly, as if that made a difference,
which, of course, it did not.
The timing, however, must have made sense in some mysterious way,
because both girls were ready at precisely the same moment. It was at
the exact instant that the grandfather clock began to chime softly that
Amy and Peggy both stepped from their rooms into the hall and said, in
chorus, “You look lovely! How do I look?”
Laughing at themselves, each girl whirled around and showed herself to
the other. Peggy’s turn made a wide sweep of her black taffeta dress
with its black satin cummerbund smartly making the most of her trim
figure. For this special occasion, her first real date in New York, she
had put her hair up and skillfully used a little eye make-up. Her long,
slender neck was accentuated by a single string of pearls, which were
echoed by her tiny pearl earrings.
Amy had chosen to set off her pale, blond beauty with a brocaded dress
of dark, lustrous green that seemed to add a green glint to her brown
eyes. She wore a delicate, flat gold necklace, small gold earrings and a
slim, antique gold bracelet set with semiprecious stones.
As Peggy fastened a hook and eye for Amy (it was located in that one
spot that just cannot be reached), the last notes of the clock sounded,
followed immediately by the sound of the doorbell.
“That’s Randy and Mal now!” Peggy said. “We’re all so prompt that it’s
hardly possible!” She ran down the stairs to answer the door, Amy at her
heels, and a few minutes later, the four were strolling down the street
arm in arm.
“You sure look beautiful tonight—both of you,” Randy said. “I’m glad
that I decided to wear a tie!”
“If you hadn’t, I’d have sent you right home to get one,” Peggy said
firmly. “And besides, you did say that we should dress up for dinner and
dancing. That is, if you’ll put up with me. I’ve never danced with a
professional dancer before.”
“Oh, I’m not a dancer, really,” Randy said. “I’m a hoofer. You know, tap
and soft-shoe and a couple of gestures and turns that make the customers
think I studied ballet. Mostly I dance just enough to carry off the
singing, so that the act will have a little movement. I hate singers who
just stand there and croon.”
“Where did you study singing?” Peggy asked.
“Oh, I’m not really a singer,” Randy said with a grin. “I just sing
enough so the customers won’t notice that I’m not dancing well!”
“I’d love to see you work and make up my own mind,” Peggy said. “When
can I get a chance?”
With an expression halfway between a smile and a frown, Randy answered,
“I hope that you never get a chance. I’m not working now, and with any
luck, I won’t have to do night-club work again. I’ve always wanted to
write for the theater, and I believe in the play we’re doing now, so
I’ve turned down all engagements until we get it produced. It may be the
break I need. I’ve been able to put away enough to live on for a while,
so I don’t need the night clubs. If the play flops, though, I can always
go back to them, much as I don’t want to.”
“In that case, I hope I never get a chance to see your act, too,” Peggy
said.
“A sensible wish!” Mal put in. “I’ve seen it, and I tell you, as a
singer and dancer, Red Brewster—as he bills himself—is a darn good
playwright. I won’t say it’s the worst night-club act in New York, but—”
“I know,” Randy interrupted cheerfully, “but it is.”
“But he makes a living at it,” Amy protested, taking the lighthearted
insults a little too seriously.
“Just proves an old contention of mine,” Mal answered airily, “that the
public has a lot more money than taste!”
By this time, they had reached Fourteenth Street, a wide, busy
thoroughfare bright with neon lights and gaudy store windows crammed
full of bargain merchandise. It hardly looked the sort of neighborhood
to come to dressed as they were, and for a moment Peggy had a feeling
that Randy hadn’t been joking about coming without a tie. “Where are we
going?” she asked cautiously, not wanting to offend the boys.
Randy laughed. “I wondered whether or not you knew about Fourteenth
Street. Since you’re so deep in the history of the theater, I thought
that we’d take you right into some. This run-down street was once the
heart of the fashionable theater district!” He waved a hand to indicate
the tawdry movie houses, the corner hot-dog stands, the poolrooms, the
pizza places.
“This?” Peggy said.
“This,” Randy answered solemnly. “And the funny thing is that this is
far from being a bad neighborhood. Especially when you compare it with
some of the places you’ll be visiting in the next few days!”
“You see that movie house?” Mal said, pointing to a place plastered with
signs for a double horror monster show. “That was once the most famous
musical theater in the city. And the Irving Theater over there was a
great dramatic showcase.”
“But why are we here tonight?” Amy asked in bewilderment.
“To show you that, in the ashes of the past, a good bit of the past
still flourishes with no sign of decay,” Mal intoned dramatically.
“He means,” Randy interpreted, “that we’re here to eat dinner at
Luchow’s, one of the best restaurants in the city. It’s German, not
Chinese, and you pronounce it with a German _ch_ that sounds like a
cough, if you can. If you can’t, you settle on ‘Loo-shau’s,’ which most
people do. It’s been here since the theater district was here, and it
hasn’t changed at all through all these years. Diamond Jim Brady and
Lillian Russell and Tony Pastor ate here, and tonight we’re going to do
the same!”
With a bow and a flourish, Mal and Randy opened the doors and led the
girls into, not just a restaurant, but another century and another
world.
XII
_Intermission_
Peggy had never seen anything like it! The tremendous, high-ceilinged
rooms paneled in darkly polished brown wood led in a seemingly endless
procession from one to the other, connected by arch after arch. In front
of them, across the first room, four steps mounted up to a kind of
gallery, itself an immense chamber that stretched back as far as one
could see. In the front of the gallery, near the steps, a small,
three-piece orchestra played Viennese waltz music. Peggy noted with
amusement that the three musicians looked as old as the restaurant,
almost as if they had been playing ever since opening night.
To the right, an oversized archway connected the room they were in with
what appeared to be the central room of the place, even higher and more
glittering than the others. Peggy’s eyes mounted up toward the ceiling,
which appeared to be three or more stories high, and she saw that it was
a kind of old-fashioned leaded glass skylight.
Another arch between the rooms contained the largest ship model that she
had ever seen. It was a full-rigged ship and stood easily six feet high.
Everything here was on such a large scale! Even the beer steins that
stood all around on shelves high on the paneled walls were immense. Some
would easily hold two quarts of beer.
Everywhere were waiters scurrying about between the crowded tables,
carrying trays loaded to improbable heights with dishes, glasses,
covered serving vessels, baskets of bread, rolls, and cheeses. The whole
place glittered with hundreds of lights, each caught and reflected in
the tall mirrors, the glassware and the polished wood.
And the noise! The many conversations, the clink of silver on dishes,
the rattle of glasses, the waltz tunes of the small orchestra, all
blended into one happy, congenial roar.
Peggy and Amy stood dazzled by the sights and sounds of Luchow’s, and
tried to get their bearings, while Randy and Mal checked their
reservations with the headwaiter. Soon they were assigned by this
impressive personage to a lesser headwaiter whom Peggy thought of as
their guide. This gentleman, beckoning them to follow, plunged into the
jungle of tables and, in a kind of safari fashion, they tracked him
through several rooms, up some steps to a gallery like the one on which
the band was playing, and to a large round table by the rail.
It was not until they were seated that Peggy realized that there was not
an endless number of rooms, but only about six. The illusion was caused
by giant mirrors on either wall, set in arched frames like the arches
that separated the rooms. Even so, it was the biggest and busiest
restaurant that either she or Amy had ever seen.
“Well, what do you think of it?” Randy asked. When Peggy replied with a
smile and a bewildered shake of her head, he continued, “I know. It
always affects me that way, too, but I still love to come here. This is
what New York was really like in the Gay Nineties, and they haven’t
changed a thing that they didn’t have to change. Even the lighting
fixtures,” he pointed out, “are the original gaslights, except that
they’ve had to wire them for electricity. But the best thing is—as it
should be—the food. That hasn’t changed either. Let’s order now, then we
can talk.”
The menu, Peggy thought, was of a size to match the restaurant, and it
was crammed with dishes she had never heard of, most with German names,
many with British names. At Randy’s suggestion, she let him order her
dinner, which was sauerbraten, the house specialty. Amy, less
adventurous about food, settled for roast beef. Randy ordered a lobster
for himself, and Mal asked for roast larded saddle of hare, which made
Amy shudder a little.
“I just don’t like the idea of eating rabbits,” she explained. “They’re
such cute little things!”
Mal grinned. “If you once start to think like that,” he said, “you’d
have a hard time eating at all. Think about all those cute lambs, and
those nice, sweet-tempered cows. And think about—”
“I do my best not to think about them,” Amy interrupted, “and if you
don’t stop, I’m going to order a vegetable dinner and have an awful
time!”
Still, when the food came, she and Peggy consented to try the hare, and
were forced to agree that it was one of the most delicious things they
had ever tasted. Amy also liked Peggy’s sauerbraten, which was a kind of
sweet-and-sour pot roast of beef, done in a rich brown gravy and served
with potato dumplings and red cabbage.
“You know, it’s an odd thing the way Americans eat,” Mal said between
bites of the saddle of hare. “I’ll wager that there are millions of
people in this country who have never eaten anything but beef and pork
and perhaps a bit of fish. And I don’t mean poor people, either. I found
out on my first tours here that there are many parts of the country
where you can’t even get lamb or veal, and mutton is almost unheard of.”
“Is it very different in England?” Peggy asked.
Randy answered before Mal had a chance to reply. “In England they eat
things that would make the average American turn pale with fright.” He
laughed. “They eat suet puddings and kidney pies and chopped toad....”
“Chopped toad!” Amy almost shrieked.
“It’s not at all what it sounds,” Mal explained in his most British
tones. “It’s actually a sort of a hamburger thing, and it’s not made of
toads or anything like toads. And, personally, I can’t stand it.”
“Is the food the reason why you left England?” Amy asked teasingly.
“Partly,” Mal said with a smile. “But not because I didn’t like it. I
liked it well enough when I could get it. The reason I left was that I
wasn’t able to earn enough money to eat with any degree of regularity.
When I got a part with an American movie company that was filming a
picture in England, I was asked to come back with them, and I jumped at
the chance. I made a few films in Hollywood, and then I decided to come
to New York.”
“Why did you leave pictures?” Peggy asked. “I mean, if you were working,
and if you were starting to be an established actor, why did you come to
the Academy to study?”
“I didn’t like the roles I was being given,” Mal answered. “It’s because
of my face, you know. I look like a young thug, so I was given nothing
but young thug parts. But, when you come to think of it, how many roles
are there for young thugs with English accents? Besides, I didn’t want
to spend the whole of my life in cops-and-robbers films. I decided that
I should try the stage, where I might have a chance to play a variety of
roles. Also, I thought I might like to direct. The trouble was that I
had no experience with stage technique, so I applied to the Academy for
a year of basic training. It was there that I met Randy, who has given
me my first chance to direct, and now that I’ve had a taste of it, I
know that’s what I really want to do.”
“It’s nice of you to say that I’ve given you a chance to direct,” Randy
put in, “but unless Peggy and Amy can produce a theater, I’m afraid that
the chance will be a strictly imaginary one. Which reminds me, how are
you girls doing with the search?”
Peggy told him about the troubles they had encountered in making up a
list, and he nodded sympathetically. “We’re finished with that part of
it now,” she said in tones of relief, “and we only have to finish
checking against the phone book before we go out to look.”
“And when will you start?” Randy asked.
“Tomorrow afternoon, I think,” she said. “We ought to be done with the
telephone book by noon, if we don’t sleep the whole morning away as a
result of this heavy dinner. Then we can look in the afternoon.”
“Sounds good,” Randy said. “It looks as if the best help we can give you
is to see to it that you work off this dinner so that you don’t waste
the morning in sleep! What do you suggest, Mal?”
“Dancing,” Mal said firmly. “Best way to get rid of the full feeling.
But, unfortunately, I can’t dance on an empty stomach, so we’d best
order a sweet, right?”
The girls and Randy protested with groans, but somehow managed to eat
every scrap of the thin pancakes with lingonberries that Mal ordered for
them. A final cup of coffee, and then it was time to go.
“I feel as if my dress is going to split any minute!” Peggy whispered to
Amy. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to walk to the door, much less
dance!”
Stepping out of Luchow’s, leaving its noise, gaiety, and glitter behind,
was once more like making a transition between worlds. Fourteenth
Street, now almost deserted, looked even sadder and more run-down than
before. The night lights in the windows of the closed shops cast baleful
gleams on the pavement; the thin sound of a cheap dance band far off
lent its sad jazz beat to the relatively quiet night. Peggy shivered a
little in the first chill of autumn.
“It’s like two different cities, in there and out here,” she said. “It’s
a shame, isn’t it, that the real one is out here?”
Catching her mood, Randy put a reassuring arm about her shoulders. “It’s
two hundred different cities,” he said, “and the real one is wherever
you happen to be at the moment. So let’s leave this one, to make it
unreal, and go uptown. By the time we turn our backs on this, it will
disappear.”
And it did disappear, or nearly, in the sophisticated decor and subdued
harmonies of the St. Regis Roof. Randy was, as Peggy had suspected, a
fine dancer. His lightness and his certainty helped her, and she knew
that she had never danced so well before. But even as they floated about
the gleaming floor, the sounds of the elegant music could not quite
drown out the tinny jazz sound of Fourteenth Street that echoed in her
mind.
No, she thought, Randy had not been altogether right. This beautiful
room, these handsome, well-dressed people were not nearly so real as the
world outside. And it was that world, in which she would start her
search tomorrow, that stayed uppermost in her thoughts through the rest
of the dreamlike night with its dancing, its carriage ride around the
park and (or was this too a dream?) Randy’s gentle good-night kiss on
the steps of the Gramercy Arms.
XIII
_The Hidden City_
When the list was completed, Peggy had found over forty theaters built
since 1890 and not currently listed as theaters in the classified phone
book. Now there was nothing to do except visit each one to see if it was
still there at all, and if there, to see what it was being used for.
Checking the addresses against her city map and street-number guide,
Peggy listed those that she would visit first.
“I’ve started out with a group I think we can cover in one afternoon,”
she explained to Amy. “And the district I’ve picked is not too far away
from most of the off-Broadway theaters in Greenwich Village. I’d like it
best if we could find a theater near where people are used to going, or
at least in districts that are easy to get to by bus or subway.”
“Don’t worry too much about that,” Greta commented from the depths of an
easy chair. “If you can just find a place to put on the play, and if the
play is good, people will come. Even if they have to walk, or pay
tremendous cab fares. That’s one wonderful thing about New York. People
love the theater, and they’re willing to go through all kinds of
hardships to see a good play.”
“The proof of that is the prices people pay to see a Broadway show,” Amy
agreed. “Six and eight dollars a seat for some of them!”
“And that’s at box-office prices,” Irene commented. “They pay
twenty-five dollars to a ticket broker sometimes to see a really popular
show. I think that the thing to be in this business is a broker, not an
actress. That’s where the big money is!”
“We’ll remember that when we get our theater,” Peggy said, laughing.
“I’ll put aside a whole lot of seats in my name, and if the show’s a hit
I’ll make a fortune on them!”
“No theater, no tickets,” Amy said dryly. “And no show either. We’d
better get going now.”
The area that Peggy had decided to cover first was a section south of
Fourteenth Street, and somewhat farther east than where they had been.
This was an old part of town, in which the theater had once been
centered even before it had moved “uptown” to Fourteenth Street.
(Fourteenth Street itself is now very much downtown from the present
theater district in the west Forties and Fifties.)
This old district had seen wave after wave of immigrants come from
various lands. Each nation had left its mark. There were Russian stores,
Rumanian restaurants, Irish bars, Jewish delicatessens, Italian grocery
stores, and Spanish shops of all sorts.
“It’s like looking at a cross section of certain kinds of rocks,” Peggy
said. “You know, the kinds that give you a million-year history of the
earth and the kinds of life that have come and gone. Finding all these
traces of different languages and peoples is sort of like geology.”
“Yes,” Amy agreed, “and you can tell pretty well which groups came to
the neighborhood first and which ones followed, and which are the
latest. I’d say the Irish were first, and then the Rumanians and the
Russians, a lot of whom were Jewish, and finally the Puerto Ricans. Look
at that store!”
She pointed to an old building with store windows lettered
“_Carnecería_,” which is Spanish for “butcher shop.” Over the windows
was a faded old signboard which the present tenants had neglected to
remove. Its gilt letters, nearly illegible, read, “A. Y. Ravotsky,
Inc.,” and on either side of the lettering, carved into the wood, was an
Irish shamrock and harp.
“It’s like a one-stop history of New York!” Peggy said. “I’ll bet if you
dug underneath it you’d find Dutch shoes and Indian arrowheads!”
A few blocks’ walk brought them to their first address. There was no
sign of a theater at all. In its place was a large, squat hospital; on
its cornerstone appeared the date it was built—1912.
“Well, that takes care of Hewett’s Theater,” Peggy said sadly, crossing
off the name on her list. “Now let’s try the Emperor. It’s only two
blocks away.”
The Emperor Theater was now effectively disguised as a Greek Orthodox
church, complete with a turnip-shaped steeple and a Russian signboard
outside. The next theater on the list was a large and gaudy caterer’s
hall, used for weddings, parties, lodge meetings, and dances, according
to its poster. The next two on the list had also totally disappeared,
giving way to a garage and an apartment house.
“This is hardly encouraging,” Amy said. “I somehow feel already that
we’re on a wild-goose chase.”
“Amy, this is no time to get discouraged!” Peggy said. “Why, we’ve only
gone to five places, and we’ve got nearly forty more on the list! And,
after all, it’s not as if we were looking for a dozen theaters. All we
want is one, so I don’t care if all but one prove to be shut or
converted. And we have to see them all, just in case it’s the last one
that turns out to be for us!”
“That makes sense,” Amy agreed, “and I certainly don’t want to quit.
It’s just that I wish we had hit it right the first time!”
“You’re a lazy girl,” Peggy reproached her. “Do you know the way I feel
about it? Even if we had found a good theater on our first call, I’d
still want to see everything else on the list, just to make sure that we
had the best one!”
After some more walking, in which they found two more missing theaters
and one that had been converted to a funeral parlor, they decided to
stop for lunch in a delicatessen where sausages of every shape and size
hung like decorations from the ceiling. They sat at a small table near
open barrels of pickles, pickled tomatoes, and sauerkraut and stuffed
themselves with corned-beef sandwiches on fresh, fragrant rye bread
dotted with caraway seeds, homemade potato salad, cole slaw, and
pickles. Afterward, they felt much better, and more heartened for the
rest of the day’s search.
As they worked their way downtown, the neighborhood began to change once
more, and the girls were unable to guess what might be the nationality
of the dark, strong-faced people they now saw about them. The signs on
the windows didn’t help either, being in a language they could not
identify.
It might have remained a mystery, had they not been stopped by a
policeman who said, “What are a couple of nice-looking girls like you
doing in the Gypsy section? This is no place to sight-see, you know. I’d
advise you to take a guided tour.”
“We’re not sight-seeing,” Peggy said. “We’re looking for an
address—actually for an old theater. Maybe you can help us. We want to
find the Burke Theater, if it still exists.”
The policeman was puzzled until Peggy showed him the address, and then
he smiled broadly. “Well, you might just as well forget it,” he said.
“It might have been a theater once, but not any longer. The Settlement
House has it now, and it’s the local boys’ club, complete with a
gymnasium equipped for every sport. It’s done a lot of good in this
neighborhood, I can tell you.”
Peggy and Amy thanked him, and then asked him about the Gypsies. They
hadn’t realized there were any in the city—or at least not enough to
make up a whole district.
“It’s not a large district,” he said. “No more than a thousand or so, at
the most. At least that’s what they say, but it’s not easy getting them
to hold still to be counted. They’re good people, once you get to know
them. Only they speak a language nobody can understand, and their ways
are different. If I were you, I wouldn’t hang around here much.”
Thanking him, the girls left, not without casting a few glances back
over their shoulders until they were sure they were clear of the area.
The remaining theaters on their first day’s list were to the west of the
Gypsy district, and these too proved to offer nothing. The district they
now found themselves in was on the outskirts of Chinatown, and was half
Chinese and half mixed-New-York. Of the theaters on the list for this
part of town, one had been at one time a Chinese movie house, and was
now a Rescue Mission. Signboards in rusty black with large white
lettering warned sinners to repent, and offered soup and bread to anyone
who attended the services. From inside, the girls heard some wheezy
voices and an even wheezier organ sounding the plaintive notes of a
hymn.
Peggy realized with a start that this was the Bowery, the sinister,
pathetic district inhabited by the poorest examples of humanity—those
who had almost resigned from the human race. Looking about her, she saw
tattered men in doorways, sleeping figures huddled under stairs, groups
of tough-looking tramps standing idly on street corners. She was
suddenly aware that she and Amy were the only women in sight.