Page:The New Yorker 0019, 1925-06-27.pdf/4

proved the oil leases is passed over again for promotion and Mexico is called to order about lack of respect for American property.

Mr. William H. Anderson sees a plot against Protestantism in anti-Prohibition feeling and two bulldogs tear trousers' seat from a dry agent following his appointed rounds. The Soviet removes an editor for living in too great style and Mr. William Randolph Hearst and Mr. Arthur Brisbane negotiate $7,000,000 worth of buildings in these parts. Mr. William Fox admits that his personal insurance policies now amount to $6,500,000 and Lord Lee of Fareham denounces American movies as "trashy." Mayor Hylan picnics at Bear Mountain, on the Hudson, and citizens protest that garbage scows pollute city's ocean beaches.

Mr. Stewart Edward White is wounded stabbing a leopard and two men convicted of torturing a third are let off with a fine on the plea of their victim. The Salvation Army forms a corps to save bootleggers and Scotch retails locally at sixty-five a case.

Passing

The Belleclaire Bar at last has succumbed and is to become a brokerage office, although for many years after the advent of Volstead, Mr. Walter Guzzardi, proprietor of the Hotel Belleclaire, refused to turn the bar into a soft drink counter, maintaining it unused, with admirable sentiment, as a memorial of times gone.

Many notables have seen themselves in its shining mirrors, for in its day the Belleclaire was known as "the best bar north of the Astor." It was there that Admiral Peary, surrounded by cronies from the Arctic Club, lifted the "godspeed" glass upon his departure for that exploration which led him to the North Pole. Woodrow Wilson, when a professor at Princeton, occasionally dropped in, his preference having been for the mint julep of his native South. Theodore Roosevelt was seen there; his taste in refreshment ran to draught beer, since he eschewed what was then known as hard liquor. A pair of steins still stood therein, until its leasing, as a memento of the visit to the bar of Prince Louis of Battenburg, over whom New York once went as wild as it did later over the Prince of Wales. Sir Thomas Lipton there drank his toast to the victor after one of his America's Cup defeats.

And, not the least of its glories, the Belleclaire bar was credited by many with having been the birthplace of the Tom Collins.

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The passing of charm, above or below street level, is to be regretted. And one hears that Those Gorgeous Cellars, reached only after ordeal by kitchen odors, have not been themselves since their conflagration.

Once, of an afternoon, one saw top-hatted fragments of wedding parties lounging there, oblivious of the suspicious glances of pink-and-white-shirted "sales representatives" from more up-and-coming (and drier) cities.

After the medley that was dinner, chic shop girls and inconspicuous debutantes (of the still waters variety) ignored one another and the fact that their escorts were club-mates. Matrons came to look and stags to refresh themselves.

The long, low room had that character so rare nowadays, that it needed no jazz band, nor any whirling celebrities, to amuse its patrons.

The babble that cut its way through the smoke was music enough; there were sights more interesting than silk-clad dervishes. The Bernaisians were sufficient unto themselves.

Now, one is told, prices have gone up, undoubtedly in an effort to pay for the less comfortable furnishings of reconstruction, and the patronage of the Racquet has drifted elsewhere. One can't help but be sorry for the old captain who once piloted that precarious ship, The Three Kings.

New Yorkers, Transient and Less Transient,