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

said a plain-looking girl in bobby socks as the mail clerk passed a substantial pile of letters and hometown newspapers to another girl. Gael wandered off alone down Lexington Avenue, where it was starting to rain.

Gael Greene’s assignment for the New York Post was to “live among them,” the “young women alone,” who “bravely concealed” the telltale marks of their predicament. The result was a serialized patchwork of impressions. Gael invited her readers to stand beside her in the Barbizon’s hotel lobby and watch and listen: “A frozen smile of hopeful expectancy. / The foamy daiquiri glass on a tray outside her door. / An old biddy who scolds her for giggling during TV hours. / Cookies and banal conversation with her afternoon tea. / The glass of the phone booth as she presses her tear-streaked face against its soothing coolness. / A phone that does not ring. / Tears of homesickness. / Gentle smiles of recognition.” Here was “New York’s untold story,” as the New York Post promised, which Gael Greene reported in 1957.

On a Saturday night the Barbizon’s lucky ones (the Graces, so to speak) rode the elevator down to the lobby in velvets and furs, where their nervous dates were waiting for them. The petite female elevator operator shouted, “Up, up, up,” as she headed off to pick up yet another batch of the lucky ones. The other half, the less lucky ones, had gathered in the lounge and were listening to Perry Como sing “You’ll find that happiness lies, Right under your eyes, Back in your own backyard.” No one, wrote Gael, seemed to get the irony that Perry Como was probably right and they might well be better off back in their hometowns than here. One dark-haired girl tugged at the wool in her hands (she was knitting a sweater) while just across from her two attractive girls fiddled with a jigsaw puzzle. They were all sitting on the floor of a tiny lounge on the Barbizon’s topmost floor. It was only a matter of minutes before yet another girl jumped up with the battle cry: “I’m absolutely staaaaaaaaarved.” Just like the others before her, and those soon after her, she fingered the change in her hand while she waited for the elevator that would take her to the lobby drugstore and, Gael thought, “a sweet, creamy, rich something to feed the void mistaken for an appetite.”

The next day, however, there was a sense of excitement in the air: a wedding reception was planned for the wood-paneled recital room on the mezzanine, a place usually reserved for teas and girls in curlers watching The Late Late Show on the television set. It was a Barbizon resident who was getting married, in a church just down the street, after which she was returning “home” for the wedding reception. One of her Barbizon friends, Ellen, read this as a sign that there was hope for everyone. Her friend was twenty-eight (old!) and her husband-to-be was forty-five. “So now she’s got a job, a home, a car and a husband—and she did it all in one year.” (Later another Barbizon resident would wonder whether she did in fact win the coveted prize; it turned out the groom was shorter than the bride.) Ellen was a Katie Gibbs girl, living on one of the three floors reserved for them, where they were properly monitored by house mothers, early curfews, and a sign-out/sign-in book for after dark. She always wore the mandatory stockings, high-heeled shoes, and hat to class and, adding insult to injury, they weren’t even allowed to wear sweaters. It would show their curves too much. Ellen was averaging one date a month.

Sometimes an evening’s entertainment meant watching the people in the building across from the Barbizon: there was a woman in a red flannel nightgown and a man who walked around in his boxer shorts. Another ready form of entertainment was the television: there were two television sets in the whole of the hotel. Gael stopped by the television room on cowboy night. Girls were buried deep within the cushioned armchairs, their feet propped up on wooden benches. This was usually when rifts between the young women and the elderly longtime residents flared up—over program choices and manners. A sign at the entrance to the TV room said no smoking or eating, but everyone ignored it. Up on the eighteenth floor, in the only lounge where young ladies could bring their male guests after obtaining a pass from the front desk, there was silence. Gael walked through the empty room and onto the terrace, where she looked out onto the neon-lit city. Seeing both the Empire State and the Chrysler Buildings to the south, she was jolted by the reminder that she was smack in the middle of Manhattan.

Gael met Anna at one of the teas in the Barbizon recital/TV room. Unlike the other women, Anna took the initiative and introduced herself to Gael. She was the self-appointed “social director of this female fortress,” and immediately wanted to know which floor Gael’s room was on. She pulled out her notebook. Anna herself was on the fifth floor, where, she claimed, they had a “gay time.” It was, in other words, a lark on the fifth, but Gael was on the tenth. Anna flipped through the book, noting they had not seen “774” in a while, and then lighting up when she remembered “1090”—a fellow tenth floorer that Gael simply had to meet. “1090” was called Sylvia. Sylvia, with “a colorless, puffy face,” was not so pleased to see them, despite Anna’s insistence: she blocked the door, as if she didn’t want them coming in. Behind her Gael spied a half-unpacked suitcase, clothes in mounds, an empty wine bottle on its side, and on the dresser a Bloomingdale’s cosmetics counter’s worth of lotions and potions. Sylvia was from Philadelphia, a nurse: “Grace Kelly’s mother said it was the best place to stay.” Gael remembered a pair of