1931 Old Waldorf Bar Days by Albert Stevens Crockett

Old Waldorf Bar Day s Well, it's gone. As a matter of fact, it went out of the back door of the hotel when prohibition came in the front . And despite the booze subsequently lugged in sui teases into the hotel by gouty but valorous Old Guards– men, by visiting Chicago aldermen, on one of their periodical sprees, by the Sons of Something or Other, and by the thousand or so banqueteering organizations that made steady customers for its grand ball room and smaller rooms up to the last, and which annually would have stocked a freight train with empties, that quantity was no measure for what was annually consumed on the premises during the quarter-century before the lid went on, or the cork went in, or the bottle was smashed, ac– cording to the way you did your little Volstead Act. And in those days, the ambulance cases that were driven to Bellevue Hospital, head-first, from the side door in the Astor Court, were not taken to the ward for the poisoned. Well, the bar, as such, disappeared more than ten years ago, as noted. The famous bar counter, on which empty "schooners" often grounded, if one may revert to a once much-favored form of bon mot, was soon afterward cast out, and the nearest approach to evidence I can ob– tain as to its survival to this day is the information that it still serves a mission in some speakeasy in Hester Street. But the cock-eyed individual who handed me the tip as a price for mr silence, did not have the grace to l?lip me its number. And now for a dash of history to make oblivion of re– gret. Dashes sometimes had' that effect, if numerous and of one potent liquid hereinafter to be discussed. [10]