1931 Old Waldorf Bar Days by Albert Stevens Crockett

What and Wherefore of Drinking ceased to exist. In this connection I give no impure considera tion to the dispensations of Mr. Grover Whalen's estimated thirty thousand under-cover oases in New York. Of the only speakeasy I ever visited, I have lost the address. I have to go to Europe or Havana for mine, or trust, upon an occasional visit to Miami, that something has come ashore. The greatest exponent of the American School of Drinking is now in the same class with the ruins of ancient Athens and Rome; and now that voracious steam shovels have done their dirty work, searchers for the material remnants of its main audience hall, if not its administration building, must dig among city dumps or swamp fills, the latter, after the present water dries out, probably t? be reliquidated into real estate developments to supply homes for the more or less homeless who have begun to crowd the thirty-fifth floors and penthouses of Manhattan Island. Or, one has a choice of hiring a steam dredge and plumbing that part of the Atlantic where, so press releases say, is n~w the graveyard of at least part of what was once the most famous establishment of its kind, bar none. You have guessed. Knowing me or not, you suspect I am going to dig up the now defunct and vanished Wal– dorf. For, whether you had learned to drink .as far back as twenty, or even thirty years ago, if you knew your Fifth Avenue and your caviar, or where to get a free lunch that would otherwise cost you two dollars-and by the expenditure of a mere quarter for a drink-you would know that when I speak of the greatest and most famous exponent of the American School of Drinking, I can mean no other place than, the old Waldorf Bar. [9]