This site has been retired, but you can tune in for more people and events at the intersection of celebrity and obscurity in 1920s New York at my author site: www.JoHaraf.com.
I look forward to meeting you there.
Jo Haraf
My 1926 Irish immigrant character, Doreen O’Neill, can read, write, and do sums, unlike her husband and most of her neighbors. I imagine her trading her nosey and noisy neighbors for the quiet of her local (Carnegie?) library to study and read to other women. Not satisfied with my imagination, I found the New York Public Library’s growing online photos. Jackpot!
Only a few blocks from Doreen’s Orchard Street tenement flat, the Seward Park Library opened its doors on November 11, 1909. Ah, Armistice Day, I thought, and then realized that Armistice Day honors the end of World War I, nine years into the future. 
Still, the library did exist and ladies who could read entertained and educated each other. Excellent historical evidence for my story.
What caught my attention as I perused the NYPL’s digital collection is the Library’s fourth floor plan.
There’s a bright and airy reading loft on the fourth floor, but there is also a large apartment: three bedrooms, a bathroom, kitchen, and living room. Poor Doreen lived in 325 square feet with a shared bathroom down the hall.
During my college days I may have thought I lived at the library but someone actually did live at the Seward Park library. A 1915 picture of the floor directory suggests the janitor had an apartment next to the open air reading room.
That, ladies and gents, is one heck of a job perk!
By the mid-twenties, the makeup worn by daring flappers had moved mainstream. An advertisement in the 1927 Redbook Magazine rolled its printed eyes at how “just a few short years back” rouge was equated with “skittishness” and bobbed hair covered a “freakish brain.”
But once put on each morning, the color in those bright cheeks and sultry eyes had to come off that night. Women reached for their Pond’s cold cream and their handy cold cream towel to wipe on, wipe off and repeat for the dewy complexion assured by the cold cream manufacturers.
Safe in the germ paranoid twenty-first century, the idea of using the same towel each night to remove my makeup and cold cream leaves me, well, cold. “Yuck” is the most printable word I can share in this family friendly blog.
But wait – there’s an unlikely corporate knight coming to the rescue of our 1920s damsel.
Do you remember the Weekly Reader? Depending on your age, and I’m not asking, starting in 1928 your teacher may have handed you the Weekly Reader in newspaper or magazine format. Alas, the Weekly Reader is no more. Scholastic is folding the Reader into their own weekly publication.
I spent my summers swimming, fishing and sometimes riding my girlfriend’s pony down the lanes and through the fields of Lake Bruce, Indiana. I was lucky, my parents bought me the summer edition of Weekly Reader.
Every Friday, I stayed close to my grandmother’s cottage waiting for the mailman to deposit my precious magazine in the rural route mailbox under our neighbor’s pear tree across the tar and gravel street. Since the statute of limitations has expired (by decades) on my misdeed, I will admit that I often celebrated the Reader‘s arrival with a pear pilfered from that same tree.
I hid behind the shed or in my green canvas pup tent planted near the garden to read – heck, memorize – every word of the world outside our small town.
Thanks, Weekly Reader. I’ll miss you.
In 1925, Willis Carrier installed his new air conditioning machines in the Rivoli Theatre in New York’s Times Square. Movie fans and the merely over-heated swarmed the theatre regardless of what was showing to escape the oppressive New York summer.
Between 1925 and 1930, Carrier installed air conditioning in three hundred movie theaters across the county. The era of “chillin’ at the cinema” was born!
By 1926, the Mark Strand Theatre on 47th and Broadway was one of the growing number of movie houses offering man-made weather to revive wilting audiences and expand their owners’ revenues. Thank goodness the The Strand was chilled for the premiere of Rudolph Valentino‘s Son of the Sheik. Rudy’s infamous love scenes were enough to get anyone hot and bothered.
Ah, tabloid, a word that implies sensational and probably shoddy journalism, complete with explicit pictures to back up salacious stories. But when tabloid newspapers first reached New York in the 1920s, the term didn’t describe the newspaper’s content but rather its compact size – roughly 11” x 17” – easy to read on the bus, trolley or subway.
The earliest newspapers were printed on a single, wide sheet of paper. Many had text only on one side and were sometimes folded into fourths. These were the original broadsheets, ancestors to the 11” x 23” format of the four newspapers delivered to my house every day.
Today serious newspapers, especially in England, are printed in the eco-friendly, smaller tabloid format.
Just goes to show, you can’t judge a paper by its size.
In the 1920s, two events changed the look of the average American’s daily menu. First, women working outside the home had less time to cook from scratch and high maintenance iceboxes began to give way to electric refrigerators.
Manufacturers, eager for their share of the dinner plate, invented products still found in today’s walk-in pantries and side-by-side stainless steel refrigerators. Continue reading
Writing about New York City in the 1920s sends me to a location 3,000 miles and nearly 100 years from my desk. I’m not complaining. My research challenges are trivial compared to the tasks facing authors writing pre-historic fiction. Still, when Jean M. Auel wrote Clan of the Cave Bear, it’s unlikely that anyone emailed her indignant that Ayla’s cave was on the wrong block or her haircut the wrong style. Continue reading
In 1926’s suffocating summer, Rudolph Valentino steamed from more than the weather. A recent Chicago Tribute editorial insulted his manhood and he turned to his friend and boxing coach, Heavyweight Champion Jack Dempsey, to stage an honor-saving bout.
On July 18, 1926, an anonymous Chicago Tribune writer, furious about a facial powder dispenser in a men’s public bathroom, penned an editorial entitled “Pink Powder Puffs” in which he blamed Rudolph Valentino for the apparent decline in mid-west manliness. Continue reading
Ordinary People - Extraordinary Times 