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HISTORICAL
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have gone. The great hall where they exercised elbows
and appeased arid appetites every day, some of them for
more than twenty years, ceased to function one dark day
in June,
1919.
While the light holds, let me try to
recreate it, and to limn the shapes of some of those who
went surging in and out, while, above the roar of con–
versation and the chatter of the ticker, the air was rent
with calls of "Same here!" and "tlere's how!"
On the walls are
a:
few paintings-expensive.looking.
Here and there is a piece of
m~ssive,
if not always orna–
mental, statuary. In one corner stands a great rectangular
counter, behind which a dozen men
in
white coats are busy
all afternoon and evening ministering to an endless array
of thirsts.
The crowd surges in. Everyone struggles to get a foot–
hold on a brass rail that runs around the bottom of the
bar. Sometimes the gang is ten deep, all pressing toward
that common goal. On every face is written strong re–
solve. Each man pushes forward until some drinker who
has been monopolizing a coveted spot falls or otherwise
gives way; and then, with something like a shout, the
late-comer, if he is a good squirmer or ducker, wiggles
into the place thus vacated, t0 claim the drink he yelled
for while still a Sheridan's ride away.
It should be stressed that the scene described was typi–
cal only of hours when the room was overcrowded, as it
frequently was toward six o'clock of an afternoon, when
men would come in who acted as if they had .only one aim
in
life, and that was to get outside of a drink, and with no
delay. Frequently, as intimated, their chances improved
when some "tank" at the barside had filled to overflowing
and had to
be
either carried or led away.