A generation has grown up among us whose philosophy of life is not that of twenty years ago. It calls itself sophisticated. Perhaps it has reason. This is a complex age. Civilization has become complex and often it seems our young people are suffering from some sort of complex, if it is only that of “superiority.”
But some of us like occasionally to dwell on the past, to recall simpler days when nothing was complex and there was no talk of “complexes”; days when drinking was often an honored social custom among gentlemen, and when the man who indulged enjoyed the full protection of government, and did not thus necessarily render himself, in effect, an enemy of law and order.
Those days are past. Some say that in this country they will never return. This is no prophecy or argument.
But twenty years ago, over almost every thirsty lip in all parts of the world where English was spoken, had passed the name of one place of refreshment which in many ways had no peer. So far, no attempt has been made to recreate in print just what that place was and what it meant. What follows is a study of the old Waldorf Bar and its happenings, as representative of a phase of American social life which was once important, yet which—so slight is resemblance between that Bar and any speakeasy—may be said to have disappeared as completely as the vast enterprise of which it was long one of the most popular and most remunerative departments.
The author does not assume to be an authority on the composition of drinks or their effects—except as an observer. But he first saw the old Waldorf Bar about one month after its opening in the autumn of 1897. He had occasion to enter it frequently during the first seventeen years of the century; it was one place where a newspaper reporter could be sure of finding a patron of the hotel whom he wished to interview and who happened to be in no other part of the building. For two years of that time his office was in the hotel and he visited the Bar daily in search of news. In gathering material for this book, he has had assistance from many veteran employes of the old Waldorf, some of whom date from the days of the “sit-down” café, that ran for more than four years before the brass-rail Bar opened, with which this book is mainly concerned. And among his other collaborators have been regular patrons of the Bar who knew its habitues and what went on there.
Selections from the book “Old Waldorf Bar Days. With the Cognomina and Composition of Four Hundred and Ninety-one Appealing Appetizers and Salutary Potations Long Known, Admired and Served at the Famous Big Brass Rail; … also … A Glossary for the Use of Antiquarians and Students of American Mores by Albert Stevens Crockett. New York, Aventine Press, 1931”
