GAY WHITE WAY

Greymouth Evening Star, 21 September 1923, Page 8

GAY WHITE WAY

— BROADWAY’S DEATH KNELL. Prohibition lias spread a blanket over New York’s gaiety. Mournful word-pictures of the change are being published in all the great newspapers. Men and women who fought against the Volstead Act say that the consumption of alcohol has not diminished. Instead of public drinking, in brilliantly lighted cafes, the thirsty one patronise basement bars and homes where grog can be bought. But it’s good-bye for ever to New York’s Gay White Way. Broadway, which never knew when morning came, has been unable to survive the pall which national prohibition has cost it. Its laughter is being choked, its radiance clouded, its (lancing feet paralysed. On the memorable night before the Volstead Act went, into effect an elderly man stood in a cafe of the Hotel Knickerbocker, facing Maxfield Parrish’s glowing canvas of Old King Cole that stretched the whole length of the rich mahogany bar and formed one of the Gay White Way’s most admired wonders. As lie lifted his cocktail glass to his lips he turned to a young friend who was joining him in a drink and said: “Keep your eyes and ears open tonight. You will never know Broadway again as it is now.” It was the height of the cocktail hour, and the cafe was filled with a well-dressed cheerful throng. Behind the bar deft white-aproned men worked as if they faced an eternity of concocting delectable drinks. From the grillroom, where youth and beauty were already beginning to gather for their nightly revels, came the strains of a gipsy orchestra’s dreamy waltz music. And in the street outside the tide of light-hearted humanity was swelling towards the flood

it would not reach until long after the clocks had tolled midnight. But the young man who stood at the Knickerbocker bar that evening has lived to see how true his elderly friend’s prophesy was. At the cocktail hour the next afternoon the Knickerbocker Cafe was a strangely forlorn place—silent and deserted save for a little group of workmen busy taking down the Parrish masterpiece to carry away to the country estate of the hotel’s owner. The scores of other hotels which crowd Broadway and the adjoining streets had the same story to tell. In the cafe of the Waldorf-Astoria, over whose massive bar has probably flowed enough alcohol to float the U.S. 'Navy, carpenters were busy with preparations for the installation of the soda fountain and lunch counters which prohibition demanded. Only in the cabarets and the lobster palaces and the homes of jazz did life make any pretence of going on as before. The proprietors of these places made a brave show of trying to make themselves believe prohibition could never transform Broadway. They even spent many thousands of dollars on new furnishings and decorations and more extensive troupes of professional dancers. But it was no use. It seems there is no surviving the suffocating influence prohibition has thrown over the life of the one Gay White Way. The famous Rector’s, Churchill’s, and the Hotel Cambridge, all landmarks of the ’Pimes Square district, were the first to give up the losing struggle. Then came the closing of Reisenweber’s Paradise Cafe, under an injunction secured bj r the prohibition enforcement, officials. Shanley’s was among the next to go—one of the oldest of the lobster palaces, and one that for years had been filled to capacity every night from twilight to dawn. And now comes the announcement from the prohibition enforcement oflicials that they are preparing to close by injunction many more of the still remaining cabarets and jazz palaces on Broadway. Perhaps it would be a fitting finale to the tragedy of New York’s Broadway to have all the sparking electric signs that once made it a real fairyland suddenly cease to shine and leave the street to darkness and the regretful memories of those who can recall what the Gay White Way was like when it sparkled with wine bubbles, diamonds, and merry eyes, and rang with music, laughter and dancing feet. Earnest supporters of prohibition point to.the transformation of Broadway as evidence that New York is being dried up—that the law is being enforced in the city where it was expected to encounter the greatest difficulties.