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

temple ended its half-century-long residency: “Prepares to Quit Temple,” New York Times, September 26, 1926.

The new secretaries of this new world: Sara M. Evans, Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America (New York: Free Press, 1997), 183.

The old-fashioned women’s boarding houses: “New Club for Women Rivals Any for Men,” New York Times, February 24, 1929.

“In town it is no longer quite”: Laura Pedersen, “Home Sweet Hotel,” New York Times, August 6, 2000.

For some suites, Mrs. Sabis: Walter Rendell Storey, “Making the Hotel Room More Homelike,” New York Times, December 14, 1930.

In 1903, New York hotelier Simeon Ford: Paul Groth, Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States (Berkeley: University of California, 1999), 20.

The situation could be so embarrassing: Nikki Mandell, “A Hotel of Her Own: Building by and for the New Woman, 1900–1930,” Journal of Urban History 45, no. 3 (March 19, 2018): 521, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0096144218762631.

Those better off and creative in spirit: Mandell, “A Hotel of Her Own,” 519.

At her wedding she refused: “New Club for Women,” New York Times.

“Observation automobiles” full of gawkers: “New Club for Women,” New York Times.

The New York Herald jeered: Christopher Gray, “For Career Women, a Hassle-Free Haven,” New York Times, July 1, 2012.

An early brochure for the Martha Washington: Virginia Kurshan, “Martha Washington Hotel,” Landmarks Preservation Commission, Designation List 456a LP-2428, amended June 19, 2012, 4, http://s-media.nyc.gov/agencies/lpc/lp/2428.pdf.

The kind of women who came to stay: Kurshan, “Martha Washington Hotel,” 4.

In 1914, New York saw a second residential hotel: Mandell, “A Hotel of Her Own,” 526.

He and his partner, James S. Cushman: Mandell, “A Hotel of Her Own,” 531.

Silk wanted to offer rooms: Christopher Gray, “It Looks as if It’s One Building but It’s Really Two,” New York Times, December 8, 2002.

Heralded by the New York Times: “New Club for Women,” New York Times.

These women’s club-hotels: Mandell, “A Hotel of Her Own,” 526.

Over champagne and canapés: Mandell, “A Hotel of Her Own,” 532.

The AWA hotel found: “New Club for Women,” New York Times.

William H. Silk, with the: “Reflects Modern Woman,” New York Times, September 25, 1927. No original documents from the Barbizon exist today and therefore the number of rooms I cite are always based on articles written at various points in the hotel’s history. In this case here, the architect planned on 720 rooms. Later, it seems the number of rooms dipped under 700, presumably because some rooms were reconfigured.

Rates started at $10: Advertisement, New York Times, September 11, 1927.

Entering the Barbizon, a guest encountered: Many thanks to architectural historians Diane Al Shihabi and Kimberly Elman Zarecor for their input and expertise.

Architectural Forum declared: Matlack Price, “The Barbizon,” Architectural Forum 48 (May 1928), http://s-media.nyc.gov/agencies/lpc/lp/2495.pdf.

Accommodating owners offered painters: “Fontainebleau Forest,” Los Angeles Times, May 31, 2009, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2009-may-31-tr-barbizon31-story.html.

At New York’s Barbizon Hotel: “City’s First Club Home for Women to Open in Fall,” Daily Star (Queens Borough), June 25, 1927.

The largest was fifty by seventeen feet: Harris, “Barbizon Hotel for Women,” 4.

In the first-floor lounge: Harris, “Barbizon Hotel for Women,” 3.

With a strangely erotic choice of words: “New Club for Women,” New York Times.

When asked by a reporter: Iversen, Molly Brown, 237.

jazz came from the black ghetto: Evans, Born for Liberty, 176.

One bootlegger, barely thirty: Louis Sobol, “Speakeasy” (Part 3), Hearst’s International—Cosmopolitan, May 1934.

“Fine,” she said, and proposed: “Belle Livingstone, ‘Salon’ Hostess of Prohibition Era, Is Dead Here,” New York Times, February 8, 1957.

One of her speakeasies: Louis Sobol, “Speakeasy” (Part 2), Hearst’s International—Cosmopolitan, April 1934.

Then there was Janet: Sobol, “Speakeasy” (Part 3).

A muraled sign: Sobol, “Speakeasy” (Part 3).

The swankiest speakeasy: Sobol, “Speakeasy” (Part 2).

Roger Wolfe Kahn: Sobol, “Speakeasy” (Part 2).

New York’s Broadway: Louis Sobol, “Speakeasy” (Part 1), Hearst’s International—Cosmopolitan, March 1934.

At King’s Terrace: Eric Garber, “A Spectacle in Color: The Lesbian and Gay Subculture of Jazz Age Harlem,” http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ug97/blues/garber.html. I would like to thank my Vassar College colleagues Professors Hiram Perez and Quincy Mills for their input here.

She’d been “discovered”: Sobol, “Speakeasy” (Part 2).

The baby lamb: Sobol, “Speakeasy” (Part 1).

Before World War I, a single woman at a bar: Joshua Zeitz, Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern (New York: Broadway Books, 2006), 6.

It is what sixteen-year-old Lillian Clark Red: “Plays Cinderella with a Check Book,” New York Times, January 18, 1926.

A Monsieur Cestre: “Frenchman Calls Our Girls ‘a Bit Fast,’ ” New York Times, January 11, 1926.

Of the women born before 1900: Zeitz, Flapper, 21.

New York’s Rabbi Krass: “Criticizes Modern Woman,” New York Times, April 19, 1926.

With much greater originality: “Warns of Chewing Gum,” New York Times, July 31, 1926.

When dress manufacturers: “Sizes Askew on Women’s Clothing,” New York Times, January 17, 1926.

Between 1920 and 1926: “Woman’s Dainty Footprint Has Grown Larger,” New York Times, February 21, 1926.

“You’ll get the shock of your life”: “Lady Astor Here; Lauds Modern Girl, Chides Mothers,” New York Times, August 3, 1926.

A month later into her trip back home: “Lady Astor Flashes Wit in Speech Here,” New York Times, September 10, 1926.

The room, featured in Vogue: Helen Appleton Read, “Features: Opposite Aspects of Twentieth-Century Decoration,” Vogue 72, no. 13 (December 22, 1928).

Even as the Barbizon: “Wellesley Club Rooms: New York Members Take Floor in the Barbizon,” New York Times, August 7, 1927.

“The Barbizon has become”: Advertisement, New Yorker, October 4, 1930.

In the January 1928: Junior League Magazine, January 1928: 9.

According to the 1930: Qianye Yu, “A Room of Her Own. Housing for New York’s Working Women, 1875–1930” (M.A. thesis, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University, May 2019), 77, https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/doi/10.7916/d8-c1qq-em47.

Her death certificate: Evans, Born for Liberty, 176.

“Seriously, have you seen a Flapper”: “Has the Flapper Disappeared?” Junior League Magazine, January 1928: 16–17.

Hotel owners stormed city hall: Laura Pedersen, “Home Sweet Hotel,” New York Times, August 6, 2000.

CHAPTER TWO

In 1909, already forty-six years old: Rose A. Doherty, Katharine Gibbs: Beyond White Gloves (self-pub., CreateSpace, 2014), 24.

Borrowing money from friends at Brown University: Doherty, Katharine Gibbs, 34–35.

Her advertising suggested: Doherty, Katharine Gibbs, 26.

The school’s 1920 tagline: Doherty, Katharine Gibbs, 36.

In fact, these provocative words: Doherty, Katharine Gibbs,