The Barbizon by Paulina Bren (ebook reader browser TXT) 📕

hotels were a perfect location forwomen’s college clubs, re-creating the same-sex solidarity ethos that buoyed thesuffragette movement and had helped establish these colleges in the first place. Even as the Barbizon was still under construction, the WellesleyClub ordered up a suite of rooms on the eighteenth floor, and signed on for theexclusive use of its southern and western roof gardens. The plan was for a large lounge,a dining room connected with the restaurant down on the first floor by a small elevatorfor bringing up the food, and a smaller lounge to be used as a writingroom or library. Twenty bedrooms were also being set aside for exclusive use by clubmembers. Other women’s college clubs quickly followed.

The hotel was quick to capitalize on these associations, placing anadvertisement in the New Yorker: “The Barbizon hasbecome the latest accepted rendezvous for the art and music-loving young set. In thecenter of New York’s social life… no more fitting background could have beenchosen by the following organizations for the establishment of their club rooms: BarnardCollege… Cornell’s Women’s College… Wellesley College… Mt.Holyoke College… League of Seven Women’s Colleges.” In the January 1928 Junior League Magazine, the Arts Council of the City ofNew York further announced it would have its executive offices on the mezzanine floor ofthe Barbizon, and the services of its director would be available to the residents ofthe Arts Wing, who would be kept abreast of all the latest art exhibitions and musicaland dramatic presentations. In other words, as the Barbizon was being built, brick bysalmon-colored brick, so too was its image. It would be the place for theartistic but rarefied young lady, for the respectable but modern woman.

In February 1928, the Barbizon Club-Residence for Women officiallyopened on Sixty-Third Street and Lexington Avenue. The Unsinkable Molly Brown, back fromParis and no longer with a vast fortune to her name, settled in at the Barbizon in 1931,delighted to find herself with a room of her own—exactly what Virginia Woolffamously proclaimed was vital for a woman’s independence and creativity. TheBarbizon was the perfect place for the thoroughly modern Molly. Art exhibitions,concerts, and dramatic performances were constantly on the hotel’s social roster,many showcasing the Barbizon’s own aspiring actors, musicians, and artists. Andone never knew whom one might bump into on the elevator. According to the 1930 United States Census, Molly Brown’s fellow hotelresidents included Helen Ressler, a model from Ohio; Helen Bourns, a singer fromMaryland; Rose Barr, an interior decorator from Iowa; Margaret Gallagher, a trainednurse from Pennsylvania; and Florence Du Bois, a statistician from Kansas. Molly reveledin having an airy soundproofed studio for her voice lessons, and corridors filled withmodern women like herself, even if she might not have approved of them all, especiallythe flappers.

But on October 26, 1932, Molly Brown was found dead in her room at theBarbizon. Her death certificate listed her occupation as“housewife,” when she had been anything but a housewife. She had been aplucky nineteenth-century woman who had propelled herself into the twentieth century byembracing the mantle of independence and female drive. The press reported apoplexy asthe cause of her death: sudden death by aria. They evoked the image of a crazed richlady who could not sing, eccentrically dressed, belting it out in the Barbizon’spractice rooms and collapsing dead from the exertion of it. But Molly could sing, verywell in fact, and the real reason for her death was a brain tumor that had been growingsince she first arrived at the Barbizon, and from which she would flee to her room,lying there with her eyes closed for days, until the “migraine” went away,and she emerged again for tea.

Molly Brown had managed to outlive the flappers. Three years before herdeath, Junior League Magazine was already noting their steady decline: “Seriously, have you seen a Flapper this past year among youryounger sister’s friends—or looking in the mirror, has a Flapper reflectionsmiled back at you? I do not think so.” The flapper, the Junior League suggested,had been a crude reflection of the times, “who in her prime, claimed the limelightof the world, and excited pulpits, rostrums, and family hearths, with her sex conscious,self conscious bid for publicity.” But she had lost everyone’s interest.Women now were becoming more subtle, shed of “the shabby gestures ofFlapperdom, imitating the demi-monde.” A younger member of the Junior Leaguesummed it up: “The first so-called flapper was the immediate postwar creation. Shewas a shocking contrast—literally speaking—to all the nice girls of1913.… her skirts ended about her knees, she sneaked her brother’scigarettes, she swore like a soldier. Her dancing—but who of us could ever forgetthe inimitable camel walk and shimmy? Her make-up was as crude as a clown’s. Shewas like a puppy learning to bark in her new-found independence.” With theflapper, so too went the very idea of the New Woman. All women of the twentieth centurywere now new.

As the flapper disappeared from sight, so did the residential hotel. Hotel owners stormed city hall and demanded of New York mayor JimmyWalker that he do something about these “residential clubs,” these imposterhotels that were cutting into their profits. In 1929, the Multiple Dwelling Law wentinto effect, pulling back on the legal loophole that had made both residential hotelsand New York tenements possible. It was the end of the residential hotel boom. But theBarbizon Club-Residence for Women was here to stay. It was both a product of itstime—born of 1920s New York, an era filled with illicit booze, speakeasies ofmirrored opulence, and a new breed of women who felt uncaged in both their dress andtheir lives—as well as a harbinger of things to come. The Barbizon Club-Residencewas, as the Unsinkable Molly Brown could attest, a place where women went to reimaginethemselves: and in the twentieth century, that was not about to go out of style.

CHAPTER TWO

S

URVIVING THE

D

EPRESSION

Gibbs Girls and Powers Models

Katharine Gibbs’s secretarial school, the gold standard for women seeking credentials that would get them out of the home and into the workplace, housed its students at the Barbizon. The Katie