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

much like a luxury hotel, with cream-colored wallpapered hallways, large white doors, and bright sleek sconces lighting the way on the softly carpeted corridors. Framed black-and-white stylized photographs of an old Manhattan that the Women still remember hang on the walls. There is also a large bricked terrace with wrought iron furniture, the kind of outdoor space that makes regular New Yorkers living in minuscule apartments green with envy. If you step outside onto the terrace, Tony instructs, turn to face the Barbizon, and throw back your head and look up as far as possible, you see dizzying, glorious art deco layer upon layer of rose bricks and staggered edges that seem to lead far up into the sky. No one but Tony ever goes out there.

The large outdoor terrace on the fourth floor of Barbizon/63, available to the Women, but which they seldom use.

Today there are only five of the Women left. They are not a tight group, as one would like to imagine, growing old together amid a daily diet of afternoon teas and reminiscences. They barely greet one another, if at all, and it is only Tony whom they recognize as worthy of their interaction. “They are all hoarders, not just of stuff but information, memories.” As required by law, they have a housekeeper who comes in every day, Monday through Friday. They pay monthly rates dating back to when they arrived; in the case of Alice Delman, it is the 1950s. Alice, the lead information hoarder, is writing her own memoir. Somewhere, one imagines, she has a box full of old brochures and newspaper clippings and jotted private notes of the scandals that got out from under the hotel management’s tight control, as well as those that did not.

In 2011, the Friends of the Upper East Side Historic Districts applied for landmark status for Barbizon/63, formerly the Barbizon Club-Residence for Women. The building stands outside of the boundaries of the Upper East Side historic district, even after those boundaries were further extended. But the organization argued that it was not about geography in the case of the Barbizon, it was about legacy: the building had to be landmarked because of its social importance. At the same time, Berwind, which had ripped out the insides but left the outside largely intact, understood how to monetize the Barbizon’s social importance. The condominiums sold remarkably well, despite many a New York real estate agent’s raised eyebrows and snide remarks about low ceilings and so-so location. Advertisements for the Barbizon/63 tapped into the building’s glorious past and the famous women who had passed through its doors. The walls of the building’s shared space on the third floor are decorated with black-and-white photographs of the glamorous movie stars and models who once lived there.

But there were also the thousands of others, unnamed, who passed through those doors: young, ambitious, full of anticipation, tasting their first freedoms. They might not have become famous, even as they had hoped, but they were all courageous—even Gael Greene’s Lone Women. Whether aspiring actresses, dancers, fashion models, nightclub singers, seamstresses, secretaries in training, nurses, or entrepreneurs, they all embodied both the possibilities and contradictions of what the twentieth century offered American women. In the 1920s, they had headed for work in Manhattan’s skyscrapers as New Women, unbound from nineteenth-century restrictions by World War I and the women’s vote. The youngest among them expressed their newfound liberties with painted lips, blunt cuts, flapper dresses, long pearls, and speakeasy martinis. The 1930s Great Depression cast censure on these workingwomen, but that did not stop them. Many now worked to make ends meet, and just as many to keep their families back home afloat. Typing and modeling, those uniquely “feminine” professions, which the Barbizon’s young women could not be accused of taking away from men, became their go-to jobs. But this decade also produced the first wave of power career women, like Mademoiselle’s editor-in-chief Betsy Talbot Blackwell, who created a program for young women much like herself, brimming with talent and ambition, even as they were increasingly being told, especially after World War II, that they should be mothers and wives to the exclusion of all else. For these guest editors, the month of June at the Barbizon was a time of both opportunity and reckoning that could either buoy you for the years ahead or slide you ever closer to depression. And even in the 1960s and 1970s, while some women felt they no longer needed the protection of the Barbizon’s salmon-colored walls, there were still others who understood that their escape from small-town USA necessitated a soft landing, especially if they were to find the courage within themselves to make their escape.

The Barbizon, through much of the twentieth century, had been a place where women felt safe, where they had a room of their own to plot and plan the rest of their lives. The hotel set them free. It freed up their ambition, tapping into desires deemed off-limits elsewhere, but imaginable, realizable, doable, in the City of Dreams.

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CKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book was hatched in November 2014 in the lobby bar of a Marriott conference hotel in San Antonio with my Oxford University Press editor, Susan Ferber. I have her to thank for starting me on this path, and also fellow historian Marci Shore for putting me in touch with Gillian MacKenzie, who became my extraordinary agent. A year into the research, I stumbled across Susan Camp, who had turned an interest in the models of her youth into a vocation and an archive. Always generous, Susan has been both cheerleader and vital source.

I interviewed countless women (and a few men) along the way, and I want to thank you all, even if you do not find your story here (apologies especially to the 1968 Mademoiselle guest editors!). I learned from each of you, was inspired by all of you. For those whose stories shaped this book, I thank you for your openness. Neva