The Soaring '20S; from Wall Street to the Chrysler Building, from the Algonquin to the Savoy, New York Was Where That Singular Decade Happened David Von Drehle
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Document 1 of 1 The Soaring '20s; From Wall Street to the Chrysler Building, from the Algonquin to the Savoy, New York was where that singular decade happened David Von Drehle. The Washington Post [Washington, D.C] 26 Sep 1999: 25. Abstract I want to find the roots of it all, and so I have come to Wall Street. There is an East Side subway and a West Side subway and the platforms are three blocks apart. Three blocks turns out to be a very significant distanceon Wall Street, because this iconic address -- as potent as 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., as explosive as Los Alamos, N.M. -- is in reality a rather short and narrow street, a bit crooked. Nothing like the wide, straight power avenues of midtown and upper Manhattan. Wall Street does not seem very powerful at all. It is quaint. London-like. It is boxed in at each end, by lovely Trinity Church at the top of the street and by the East River at the bottom. You might say this is where the '20s began. On this corner, at noon on September 16, 1920. Survivors recalled the clock at Trinity Church was tolling the noon hour, and the street was filling with clerks and traders bound for lunch. Someone saw a horse-drawn wagon stop on Wall Street just below Nassau. Someone saw the driv-er jump down and run. The world became a thundering hurricane spiked with shrapnel and choked with dirt. Thirty-five people died in the blast, including a man killed by a falling pipe a full five blocks away, and 130 others were injured. New York is not an aspect of the '20s. It is not an element of the '20s. From Coney Island to Yankee Stadium, from Wall Street to Harlem, New York is the essence of the '20s. It is the poetry of Langston Hughes and Edna St. Vincent Millay. It is the painting of Aaron Douglas. It is the music of the Gershwin brothers, handsome George and clever Ira. It is Dutch Schultz smuggling rum in coffins, and the politics of Al Smith and Jimmy Walker. If you boiled the '20s down to a residue, what you'd have left is New York. Full Text It isn't the only place to hunt for the Roaring Decade. But it is the first one that leaps to mind, because I am a man of the 1990s, a man with a plan -- a 401(k) plan, to be exact. I am highly conscious of the Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange. I attend to dividends and appreciate the miracle of compounding. And so, while I have never skimped on baby food to buy more shares of Amalgamated Conglomerated or eStuff.com on margin, I feel a certain kinship with those stock maniacs of the 1920s who rode an amazing bull market up a mountain and off a cliff. They seem so familiar to me. They had a huge man hitting more home runs than anyone could imagine, just like we do. They had a genial, skirt-chasing president whose vice president was stiff and rectitudinous, same as us. They had rich people squandering money on ridiculous luxuries. And, like us, they thought it would go on forever. They are calling to me across the years, in the hot licks of Louis Armstrong and Bix Beiderbecke, from the pages of F. Scott Fitzgerald, out of the sporting dispatches of Grantland Rice and Ring Lardner. The '20s. Broadway! Jazz! Bathtub gin! Babe Ruth and flappers and Hemingway when he could still write. Men sitting for weeks on flagpoles and wearing straw boaters and flying across the Atlantic in cold and tiny aeroplanes. Women with bobbed hair in dresses with no hips playing golf smashingly and holding their liquor. I want to find the roots of it all, and so I have come to Wall Street. There is an East Side subway and a West Side subway and the platforms are three blocks apart. Three blocks turns out to be a very significant distanceon Wall Street, because this iconic address -- as potent as 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., as explosive as Los Alamos, N.M. -- is in reality a rather short and narrow street, a bit crooked. Nothing like the wide, straight power avenues of midtown and upper Manhattan. Wall Street does not seem very powerful at all. It is quaint. London-like. It is boxed in at each end, by lovely Trinity Church at the top of the street and by the East River at the bottom. At the corner of Wall Street and Nassau is a four-story neoclassical building. The address is 23 Wall St. It looks like a very large tomb, but in fact it is a very large bank. Beginning in 1913, this was the headquarters of J.P. Morgan, the most powerful financier in the world, perhaps the most powerful man, period. Though his most Olympian days were behind him (in 1901, for example, Morgan personally brokered the creation of U.S. Steel, the world's first billion-dollar corporation, and in 1907 he single-handedly ended a stock market panic), Morgan remained in 1920 the epitome of money and influence. He was Buffett and Greenspan rolled into one. You might say this is where the '20s began. On this corner, at noon on September 16, 1920. Survivors recalled the clock at Trinity Church was tolling the noon hour, and the street was filling with clerks and traders bound for lunch. Someone saw a horse-drawn wagon stop on Wall Street just below Nassau. Someone saw the driv- er jump down and run. The world became a thundering hurricane spiked with shrapnel and choked with dirt. Thirty-five people died in the blast, including a man killed by a falling pipe a full five blocks away, and 130 others were injured. The disaster was never fully explained. It could have been an accident; dynamite traveled in wagons in those days, and Wall Street was very bumpy. But everyone blamed the anarchists. The anarchists were very big at the start of the '20s. They mailed pipe bombs. They held rallies. They published manifestoes. Blend our wild-eyed militias with our Unabomber, add a dose of Save Mumia! claptrap, and you'd have an approximate parallel. Of course, dissent was more serious back then. When the anarchist heroes Sacco and Vanzetti were executed in 1927, thousands of their supporters gathered in Union Square, at 14th and Broadway, under the menacing snouts of police machine guns on the roof of a nearby building. The House of Morgan, 23 Wall St., looks on the bustling, money- grubbing street with a blank and superior stare, perfect -- except that on the Wall Street side, where the wagon paused as the clock was tolling, you can still see pockmarks in the smooth stone. The Morgan empire survived. There are other blemishes in the facade of this building, and they have been neatly patched. These wounds, however, are preserved as a point of pride. New York is not an aspect of the '20s. It is not an element of the '20s. From Coney Island to Yankee Stadium, from Wall Street to Harlem, New York is the essence of the '20s. It is the poetry of Langston Hughes and Edna St. Vincent Millay. It is the painting of Aaron Douglas. It is the music of the Gershwin brothers, handsome George and clever Ira. It is Dutch Schultz smuggling rum in coffins, and the politics of Al Smith and Jimmy Walker. If you boiled the '20s down to a residue, what you'd have left is New York. You'd have, for example, the Algonquin Hotel. You remember the Algonquin, that dowager in the club district, just west of Fifth Avenue on 44th Street. There, in the early 1920s, the in-crowd from Vanity Fair drank their lunches. They loved the place because the owner, Frank Case, liked the cut of their jibs and gave them free celery and popovers and a big round table. Smart guy, that Frank Case. His round table became the Round Table -- the most famous literary gathering in America since Thoreau did odd jobs in Concord for Emerson while Louisa May Alcott gamboled across the lawn. The Algonquin lobby is still a lovely place to sip a martini or a Manhattan -- not that anyone drinks Manhattans anymore, alas. It would also be a very nice place for Miss Havisham to sit at tea with J.D. Salinger, because the room is as dark as a closet, even at high noon on a throbbingly bright day. There are tiny puddles of light on small tables in quiet corners. There are dark oak bookshelves bearing first editions by James Thurber and Alexander Woollcott and Robert Benchley and E.B. White and A.J. Liebling and Stephen Leacock and S.J. Perelman and Dorothy Parker. Parker, who said of a group of debutantes: "If all these sweet young things were laid end to end, I wouldn't be the slightest bit surprised." She is a quintessential '20s figure: suave, drunk, hilarious, bitter. Her likeness appears lower left in the oil painting that hangs in the center of the Algonquin lobby. She is clutching a poem that she wrote: Drink and dance and laugh and lie Love the reeling midnight through For tomorrow we shall die (but, alas, we never do.) Harold Ross, the genius cuss from Colorado, dined here in the Algonquin and, between courses, wheedled the money from his dinner guests to start a new magazine. He called it the New Yorker.