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What and Wherefore
of Drinking ceased to exist.
In
this connection I give no
impure considera tion to the dispensations of Mr. Grover
Whalen's estimated thirty thousand under-cover oases in
New York. Of the only speakeasy I ever visited, I have
lost the address. I have to go to Europe or Havana for
mine, or trust, upon an occasional visit to Miami, that
something has come ashore. The greatest exponent of
the American School of Drinking is now in the same class
with the ruins of ancient Athens and Rome; and now
that voracious steam shovels have done their dirty work,
searchers for the material remnants of its main audience
hall, if not its administration building, must dig among
city dumps or swamp fills, the latter, after the present
water dries out, probably
t?
be reliquidated into real
estate developments to supply homes for the more or
less homeless who have begun to crowd the thirty-fifth
floors and penthouses of Manhattan Island. Or, one has
a choice of hiring a steam dredge and plumbing that part
of the Atlantic where, so press releases say, is
n~w
the
graveyard of at least part of what was once the most
famous establishment of its kind, bar none.
You have guessed. Knowing me or not, you suspect I
am going to dig up the now defunct and vanished Wal–
dorf. For, whether you had learned to drink .as far back
as twenty, or even thirty years ago, if you knew your
Fifth Avenue and your caviar, or where to get a free
lunch that would otherwise cost you two dollars-and by
the expenditure of a mere quarter for a drink-you would
know that when I speak of the greatest and most famous
exponent of the American School of Drinking, I can
mean no other place than, the old Waldorf Bar.
[9]