A VANITY FAIR article covering the social and patriotic transformation of New York City just eight months after The U.S. entered the First World War:
"Already the greatest manufacturing center in the world, our coming into the War made New York the money center, the distributing center, the very hub of the universe as far as resources were concerned. London and Paris sank to the level of mere distributing points...."
An additional event took place in 1917: Congress granted full U.S. citizenship rights to the citizens of Puerto Rico - but they didn't move to New York until the Fifties. Click here to read about their integration.
Tickled by the New York laws that prohibited bars from serving spirits between the hours of 4:00 to 8:00 a.m., this correspondent for Stage Magazine, Stanley Walker, sallied forth into the pre-dawn darkness of a 1937 Manhattan wondering what kind of gin mills violate such dictates. He described well what those hours mean for most of humanity and then begins his catalog of establishments, both high and low, that cater to night crawlers.
"For something a shade rougher, more informal, smokier: Nick's Tavern, at 140 Seventh Avenue South [the building went the way of Penn Station long ago], dark and smoky, with good food and carrying on in the artistic traditions of the old speakeasies."
Click here to read about the arrest and conviction of New York's high society bootleggers. The New York café society of the Thirties was well documented by such swells as Cole Porter and Peter Arno - not so well-known, however, were the goings-on in the ladies' bathrooms at such swank watering holes as El Morocco, Twenty-One, Kit Kat, Crystal Garden and the famed Stork Club. That is why these columns are so vital to the march of history - written by a noble scribe who braved the icy waters of Lake Taboo to report on the conversations and the general appearance of each of these "dressing rooms". "The Rainbow Room, Waldorf, and Crystal Garden are modern and show a decorators hand, but the only really plush dressing room we know is at Twenty-One."
"Strangely enough, it doesn't matter whether it's the ladies' room of El Morocco, Roseland, or a tea room; the same things are said in all of them. First hair, then men, then clothes; those are the three favorite topics of conversation in the order of their importance." A whimsical article about the topography of New York's Greenwich Village and the migratory habits of all it's assorted bohemians, vagrants, spinsters and vegetarians during the Prohibition era.
Click here to read some high praise for Greenwich Village from a French film star.
"...On, on, on it went into the night and the next night as the biggest city in the world went its way toward picking up the biggest hangover in its history. It was a hangover few would ever regret."
Click here if you would like to read an article about the VE Day celebrations in Europe.
Click here if you would like to read about the VE Day celebrations in the United States. This cartoon was drawn by the New York artist Reginald Marsh (1898 - 1954), who had a swell time comparing and contrasting the bio-diversity along 1922 Fifth Avenue; from the free-verse poets on Eighth Avenue up to the narrow-nosed society swanks on Sixty-Eighth Street -and everyone else in between.
Click here to read a 1921 article about the growth of the Jewish population in New York.
Click here to read a magazine article about 1921 Harlem. | 
