Sometimes my delight in stumbling upon an incredible resource is tempered by annoyance at having been ignorant of it until that point. Fortunately, you get to experience the pleasure without the irritation.
This week’s first discovery was a New York Times feature from Oct. 12, 1913, titled, “Drinks Chosen for Color, Not Taste, at Women’s Bar.” It’s the kind of piece you can go crazy quoting from, as the lede suggests:
There is a place in New York where there is a bar for women–just a regular bar like the one the male person drops into to get his morning morning. It is run exclusively for women, and no man can buy a drink there unless chaperoned by some member of the other sex.
This bar is patronized not by women of a doubtful class, but by women of social standing and assured position. It is the Café des Beaux Arts, at Fortieth Street and Sixth Avenue, of which Louis Bustanoby is the proprietor.
The Beaux Arts did most of its business in the afternoon, rather than the evening, because that’s when the potential clientele shopped and took in matinees. “When Milady has made her round of the department stores, or has come out of the theater, she feels the need of a little refresher and drops into the Café des Beaux Arts and rests her dainty foot on the bar rail while Francois and Gabriel, the two bartenders, ask her whether it shall be a cocktail or a highball.”
The author of the Times story–a gentleman, needless to say–gave it the full Martian treatment, expressing shock, horror that someone might order a drink and then “powder their nose” while waiting for it to be delivered. He quoted Mr. Bustanoby declaring that his female customers cared more about drinks’ hue than their flavor: “They want it to match the color of their costumes or the color of their eyes.” One woman asked a bartender for a drink that matched her aura: “She said she had a baby-blue soul and she nearly drove me to desperation trying to prove to her that it was impossible to make a blue cocktail,” claimed poor, frazzled Francois. And whereas men’s bars would name drinks after politicians, the Beaux Arts took inspiration from items of the moment, which the management found puzzling but good for business, because, “You can name a cocktail after the latest fashion in skirts or waists and there will be a heavy run on it.”
But was the Beaux Arts a lesbian bar? The Times piece gave no indication of that, except for one exchange that made me raise a quizzical eyebrow:
Do you have any cabaret dancing here by your women patrons?“ asked the reporter.
“No,” said Bustanoby. “If they want to dance, I let them go down [to the] cellar and do their dancing there”
Then, when reading a Master’s thesis about New York lesbian bars, I learned about Eve Adams’ tearoom, which sent me down a very deep rabbit hole. My ignorance of Eve Adams, née Chawa Zloczewer, was a failing on my part, since there’s been quite a bit written about her in the last two or three years–including a biography by Jonathan Ned Katz that I’ve now read. (JNK, a heroic pioneer of queer history, did amazing research, but the book is a bit of a mess, structurally speaking.)
Adams was a total Zelig–after emigrating from Poland to America in 1912, she moved in the same circles as Emma Goldman, and after she was targeted by the authorities, she was imprisoned at the Welfare Island workhouse at the same time as Mae West. Her life story was action-packed and tragic and too complicated to go into here (I recommend the typically great summary on the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project web site), but her many great adventures include running Prohibition-era “tearooms” in Chicago and Greenwich Village.
In Chicago, Eve co-managed a place called the Grey Cottage, which an ad in the Liberator described as “Chicago’s Greenwich Village Tea Room, Eve Adams and Ruth Norlander in Charge.” As Katz explains, in the Midwest of 1922, “Greenwich Village Tea Room” was code for bohemianism, leftism, and possibly gender nonconformity. Poet Kenneth Rexroth, who patronized the Grey Cottage, described Ruth Norlander as “a Cézannesque painter” and Eve as someone “who wore men’s clothes and for years traveled about the country selling Mother Earth, The Masses, and other radical literary magazines. Eve and Ruth didn’t serve meals. They started serving coffee and cake and pie and setups along about nine o’clock at night.“ (Setups were the ingredients required for a mixed drink; patrons brought their own booze, in spite of Prohibition.)
By 1925, back in New York, Eve had set up Eve’s Hangout, also known as Eve’s Tearoom or Eve & Ann’s, at 129 MacDougal St. in Greenwich Village. The place was listed in the Quill–a local publication whose editor, Robert Edwards, took against Eve with such passion that he was ultimately responsible for her imprisonment and eventual deportation–as a spot “where ladies prefer each other. Not very healthy for the she-adolescents nor comfortable for he-men.” Variety claimed that before opening her tea room, Eve “had affected masculine attire” and been “a regular at the various resorts catering to ‘temperamentals.’ " Variety also claimed that Eve had indicated “what kind of a joint it was through placarding the main entrance with a sign which read ‘MEN ARE ADMITTED BUT NOT WELCOME.’ ”
It was reading about that sign that got me interested in Eve and her tearoom, so it was a disappointment to learn that Katz doubts it actually existed, since no other outlet ever mentioned it.
RECOMMENDATIONS: I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from Louis Menand’s The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War, but it is an astonishing book, summarizing and contextualizing just about every big idea in art, music, criticism, and everything else from the mid-20th century.
LISTEN TO ME: On Working, Isaac Butler, Karen Han, and I did a couple of holiday episodes stuffed with advice and creative New Year resolutions, and the three of us kicked off Working Overtime, a new biweekly advice-themed show, with a discussion of whether avoiding the internet really helps creative work. I also joined the hosts of the Culture Gabfest to talk about HBO Max’s adaptation of Station Eleven.
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