The Barbizon Paulina Bren (read along books txt) 📖

right below, was a loggia with expansive views. Once finished,Architectural Forum noted that while the Barbizon was for the most partGothic in detail, it was a “Romanesque sort of Gothic.” The large archedwindows gave it a sense of the romantic and the sacred, and avoided the“mechanistic effect” in some of the new skyscrapers. Up in the clouds,roaming the roof gardens, peeking through its arcades, residents spied one dome windowafter another, built up on different angles, with setbacks and terra-cotta balconies.One could easily imagine a Gothic castle, arrows slung through the arched openings.

While simplicity, even a playful simplicity, was reserved for the outside,the lobby and mezzanine could be described as intricate and Italianate. Entering the Barbizon, a guest encountered an interior atrium designed in aluxurious modern style inspired by the Italian Renaissance and grand Italian countryhouses. Decorated in elaborate colors, textures, and patterns, the space offered a fullyimmersive experience with its painted ceilings and patterned floors, ornamentedbalustrades and stair railings, and upholstered classically styled furniture. Pottedplants, a chandelier, and subtle lighting throughout the two-story-high space added tothe ambience of arriving into the open-air courtyard of a grand Italian villa. Whether amezzanine, located above the lobby, was intentionally chosen so the Barbizon’syoung ladies could peer down, looking out for their dates or, just as likely, checkingout one another’s dates and furtively rating them or desiring them, is hard tosay. But the mezzanine was like an outsize Romeo and Juliet balcony that was wrapped uparound the top of the lobby like a picture frame, with heavy stonework and an elaborate railing. From the northwest corner of the mezzanine, two steps leddown into an oak-paneled library, while the dining room opened from the main floor ofthe lobby and was furnished in neoclassical “Adam style” to suggest intimacyrather than grandeur. Architectural Forum declared:“The Barbizon seems to give evidence of a new understanding of civilization,wholly convincing.” Form and mission were now one.

From its inception the Barbizon was imagined as the rooming choice for theartistically inclined. The very name was intended to underscore this: the hotel wasnamed after a nineteenth-century French art movement, the Barbizon School, centeredaround the village of Barbizon, southeast of Paris, surrounded by the FontainebleauForest. The inns along its narrow main street, the Grande Rue, were a haven for starvingartists. Accommodating owners offered painters a full dinner, adormitory bed, and a packed lunch to take into the woods, all for a minuscule sum. At New York’s Barbizon Hotel, art students would livetogether in the Four Arts Wing, where one hundred rooms were reserved for them, as werethe studios—the very ones in which Molly Brown found sanctuary—located inthe tower, rising up from the eighteenth floor. The largest wasfifty by seventeen feet, with soaring two-level ceilings to let the light pour in, whilesmaller studios for musicians were carefully soundproofed. But not everyone needed to bean artist; an eagerness to embrace all that New York could offer was enough.

If the Barbizon had found its niche as the place for young aspiringartists, actresses, musicians, and fashion models, then the interior provided all thenecessary spaces in which these young women could express themselves—both asproducers and consumers of art. In the first-floor lounge, with astage and pipe organ, three hundred could comfortably enjoy a performance. The newpost-suffrage femininity required that both the mind and the body be fed, and theBarbizon’s library, lecture rooms, gym, and full-size swimming pool were up to the task. The early 1900s Gibson girl, freed up by her skirt and shirtseparates, had enjoyed a good morning stretch or a bicycle ride, but the 1920s flapperwas beginning to take on more rigorous exercise, and the basement of the Barbizon was amaze of workout options. With a strangely erotic choice of words,the New York Times exclaimed that “at all hours of the day the laughter ofgirls can be heard intermingling with the rhythmic thud of the balls in the squashcourts and the splashing of water in the pool. Modern amazons in the making are learningto fence; swimmers of the future are being taught the crawl in the nether regions of theBarbizon.”

Titanic survivor Molly Brown had had her skirmishes with theflappers who surrounded her now in New York. As a progressive-era suffragette, a NewWoman in the least frivolous sense of the word, Molly Brown, like many of hergeneration, found the flappers insufferable. She saw herself as a true pioneer ofwomen’s rights whereas the flappers were merely putting on the finishing touches,gaudy ones no less. Before New York, when Molly Brown had escaped to Paris to studyacting, she had been loud and clear about what she thought of this new breed of youngwomen. When asked by a reporter, she said: “The American girlcan’t hold her liquor; she shows it right away and grows mushy or wants tofight… today, society girls drink industrial alcohol to warm up on before theyarrive at a party.”

But one society girl back home was having none of it and fired back, witha clear dig at the Molly Brown myth: “I think Mrs. Brown has enough to do topaddle her own canoe without trying to paddle for the younger set” because“as far as a woman’s appearance goes, none looks her best after a fewdrinks. But there is no comparison between a younger woman and an older one. The youngerone still looks fresh and pretty and seems to control herself better. But older women are disgusting.” It’s hard to imagine Molly did anything morethan shrug; she had heard worse.

She might have had little patience for the flappers’ shenanigans,but whether she liked it or not, they were everywhere, and not just in the rooms of theBarbizon. The flapper was on Main Street, USA, as much as she was on Broadway, New York.Harold Ross, the founder of a brand-new magazine called the New Yorker, wasdesperate to capitalize on her. With the magazine barely up and running but alreadyteetering on bankruptcy, Harold Ross had to do something drastic to capture a steadyaudience. He had heard about a recent Vassar College graduate named Lois Long, who couldbe counted on to stir