Citizens of the World: A Stoic Podcast for Curious Travelers - New York Guide: Advice for Women in the 1930s Versus Today

Episode Date: January 4, 2018

In the last episode, we talked about how the Great Depression had positives for many women.     Because of the financial crisis, people were putting off marriage and single women were going to work, and living and traveling independently for the first time. They needed advice, and 1930s author Marjorie Hillis became their celebrated guru to the single girl.    In this episode, I continue my conversation with Joanna Scutts, who just published a book on Marjorie’s life titled: “The Extra Woman: How Marjorie Hillis Led a Generation of Women to Live Alone and Like It.” Today, we’re sharing some New York travel advice — what women would have heard in the 1930s, and then some updates based on Joanna’s recommendations.   Enter to win a copy of Joanna’s book before January 10, 2018, by going to postcardacademy.co/extra-woman   If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe and forward this show to a friend. If you’re feeling especially kind, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts. This helps people discover the show. 🤗   For more insider travel tips, visit postcardacademy.co     Instagram, Twitter, Facebook  Do you ever go blank or start rambling when someone puts you on the spot? I created a free Conversation Cheat Sheet with simple formulas you can use so you can respond with clarity, whether you’re in a meeting or just talking with friends.Download it at sarahmikutel.com/blanknomore and start feeling more confident in your conversations today.

Welcome to the Postcard Academy. I'm your host, Sarah Micahetteau. In the last episode, we talked about how the Great Depression actually had some positives for a lot of women. Because of the financial crisis, people were putting off marriage and single women were going to work and living and traveling independently for the first time. They needed advice, and 1930s author Marjorie Hillis became their celebrated guru to the single girl. In this episode, I continue my conversation with Joanna Scutts, who just published a book on Marjorie's life titled The Extra Woman. how Marjorie Hillis led a generation of women to live alone and like it. Today, we're sharing some New York travel advice, what women would have heard in the 1930s,

and then some updates based on Joanna's recommendations. Let's jump back into the conversation. Marjorie Hillis offered advice to women traveling alone, and I would love if you could share some of her recommendations for a few New York things and then update them based on your own New York recommendations. Let's do it. Okay. So lunchtime. So Marjorie Hillis loved. There was a chain of restaurants called Shrafts, which was very popular and welcoming to women, which was unusual for restaurants in the 1930s. So they really tried to make themselves somewhere where women could get lunch and be happy. I think lunch is pretty easy in New York now because nowhere is going to make you feel like you shouldn't. be there if you're a woman on your own.

There's a lot of great restaurants in department stores if you want to do that. Let's see if you're in Soho shopping and you want something that feels a little old school and a little bit classic. Balthazar is still a wonderful option any time of the day. It's a great big, bustling French-style brasserie that you know that is just they do what they do really well. And your celebrity sighting chances are pretty high. So that's always a fun place to go. How about dinner? That is really difficult.

Dinner is really kind of up to you. I mean, one thing that I think that's very different about New York now and New York and Marjorie's Day is that neighborhoods outside of Manhattan have become so up to date. And so many of the best new restaurants are in are in Brooklyn now. and that's definitely not what it would have been like for Marjorie Hillis. So I would say, you know, explore some of those out-of-borrow areas, Cobble Hill in Brooklyn. There's, you know, or Williamsburg, Greenpoint has wonderful restaurants now. Astoria where I live is a great and growing kind of hub of restaurants. So for that one, I would say, you know, be a little adventurous and get out of Manhattan.

Give us a specific restaurant. So there's a wonderful restaurant. I did a reading at a great bookstore in Brooklyn that's called Books Are Magic, which is on Smith Street. And there's a restaurant called French Louis there, which is wonderful. I've been there for dinner and I've been there for brunch, and they do both excellently. That's a great one. Could you tell me a little bit about what the Barbizon was? The Barbizon is a great. It's the name for a, it was a single ladies hotel. Well, they called it a hotel. It had rooms for rent like a hotel, but it also was a long-term lodging option. So there were several of these around the city, and actually I think there's one or two of them that still survive. What they were essentially was affordable and safe housing for young women who moved to the city. So they had curfews.

They had you had a bedroom, usually a very small bedroom, and there were very strict rules about who you could have. in, you know, you couldn't have guests, overnight guests in your bedroom, but there were parlors downstairs where you could entertain visiting men. There were, you know, there was, there were usually cafeterias and places to eat in the building. But the Barbizon was the most high end of all of these. It was very chic. It was, you had to be vetted by the, you know, by the management. You had to come from a good family. You usually had to have like a letter of recommendation. It was tough to get in and very, very snobbish. But if you made it in, you would meet other women just like you. Lots of them would be aspiring, might be aspiring actresses.

Many, many famous actresses passed through the Barbizon and lived there. And really, its heyday ran until the, at least into the 1960s. When I lived in New York, I used Craigslist for everything. Do people still use that to find apartments? Definitely. I think one thing, I think that a Craigslist is still there. You have to be really smart about it and know that there's scams. And if something sounds too good to be true, it definitely is. Moving on to best places to go out at night.

So where did Marjorie go out when she was a single girl? So there were a couple of great places that the late 30s after the repeal. of Prohibition, nightlife became a much more of a glamorous thing and a very kind of, you would have a lot of these big, glamorous sort of ballrooms that became sort of nightlife centers. The Stalk Club was a very famous, it was a famous club that sort of evening club is a weird word, let's see, what would it have been most like. It's a kind of a cabaret. There would have been music, performances, but also dinner and drinks. And a lot of, there was the Rockefeller Center, which was a new development at the time.

The Rainbow Room in the Rockefeller Center was also a place to go and see and be seen. A lot of big hotels in Midtown Manhattan had ballrooms where they put a cabaret. And then also a lot of the glamorous clubs up in Harlem were still, you know, very, very, very swanky and sort of welcoming to white audiences, but playing big band music and jazz. So there were a lot of these wonderful places to go out, but a lot of them were very hard to access for a single woman. You usually had to have a date.

Can you tell us about the Rentagent Service? Yes, this is one of my favorite little details that I followed from Marjorie Hillis's. So her book, her guide to New York, which was from 1939, talks about a service whereby if you wanted to get into the Stork Club or one of these glamorous hotels, you could hire a man to be your date for the evening. And I was like, what? Was this a real thing? What does this mean? She says you could hire a, you know, if you wanted a Hungarian count, he could be provided. it. And this service actually existed. It was a guy who moved from the Midwest, who was a young man, young ambitious guy who

arrived in the city and realized that the depression meant that there were a lot of under-employed young men, and there were lots of women visiting the city with money, and he saw a way to kind of put this together. And he got hotel managers to recommend his service to their kids. guests and he supplied men who he always claimed were the, you know, the cream of the crop. They were all, they'd all gone to Ivy League colleges. They were all smart and presentable and, you know, impeccable morals. And they would just take you out of the evening and that was all there was to it.

But New York City did not think that this was, they didn't necessarily believe him. So he was able to operate for a couple of years. years and then the city's kind of vice squad essentially took him to court and said this isn't we can't have this and they shut him down but for from marjorie's point of view this was a very practical solution to a problem for single women and yeah once he was shut down uh nothing nothing quite like that arose in his place what are your favorite places to go out at night there are some great cocktail bars in the city now it's always good to go on a weekday if you can can. The popular cocktail bars get a little too crazy at the weekends, but certainly there are some

wonderful ones. The Pegu Club, which is a wonderful cocktail mixologist called Audrey Saunders. So it's a woman-owned, woman-operated place on Houston Street in Soho. I love the Pegu Club. Closer to home in Long Island City, there's a wonderful cocktail bar called Dutch Kills. That's a great one. And there are new ones. The city is still kind of continuing to reinvent cocktails. And the whole speakeasy thing was big for a while. And now these places have become a lot more, sort of a lot more mainstream. And every good bar has a great cocktail menu now.

So it's really improved, if you like, classic drinks or sort of modern versions of them. Moving on to shopping, where did girls shop back? in the 1930s. How did it differ from today? It's a lot of department stores. Marjorie suggested that they call up Vogue and get advice if they're visiting the city, which is fun to imagine what kind of reception you would get now if somebody if you called Vogue and asked them where to shop. But she said, study the fashion magazines and look for where they are. I think there's a lot of new places that are opening up now, places, especially around Soho and Nolita and those neighborhoods, where there's a couple of wonderful stores that are started out as online retailers and now have opened brick and mortar stores.

And so that's an interesting kind of shift. So there's the online retailer, Evelyn, which makes very practical basics. And they just opened a store. And there's a wonderful online retailer, French retailer called Cizanne. And they just opened a store in New York. So those are two that are on my personal wish list. right now. Where do you go for some culture and what did Marjorie like to do? That's one place where you can kind of still do similar things. She loved going to the theater

and those, you know, you can still get to a lot of those same places that she would have gone in the theater district. And I'm not really, I'm not a huge theater person, mostly because it tends to be out of my price range, but to see the big Broadway shows. But there are certain, certainly are wonderful shows, the public theater, which is downtown in a fantastic institution. And off-Broadway, you can still find a lot of great places to go. The movies were incredibly popular in Marjorie's period. Hollywood really thrived during the Depression. So there's a lot of wonderful theaters in New York, movie theaters in New York that now show,

first run movies but also classics and kind of obscurities. In Queens where I live, the Museum of the Moving Image has a great theater, a movie theater, and they show all kinds of curiosities. They have a wonderful series where they show old movies on the big screen, kind of the understanding that these great epics like Gone with the Wind, you know, you just can't, you can't get the same experience on Netflix. So they have a series where you can see it big and see it on a big screen, and that's a really fun opportunity. I went there for the first time not that long ago and saw the Jim Henson exhibit there with all the Muppets, and it was amazing.

Yeah, it's great. And they made that a permanent exhibit now. It was a temporary one for a while, but now they got the archive, and so they have all the Jim Henson stuff, and it's connected with the studios where they shot the TV show. So there's kind of a lot of movie and TV history right where I live in Queens. And in Marjorie's writings in New York, did she ever mention where to take out-of-town guests? She was right. Well, she didn't.

She was writing more for women going there by themselves. She basically said, you figure out ahead of time what you like to do and don't try to do too much. She wasn't very into sightseeing. She sort of says, you know, if you want to go up to see. grounds tomb or you want to go to the Statue of Liberty, that's fine, but don't try to, don't try to check all the sites off a list. She was much more interested in the shopping and the eating and the nightlife, I think. And she, and she kind of says, only see the things that you really care about seeing. The museums are wonderful, but don't try to do four or five museums

in a day. Otherwise, you'll exhaust yourself. And so, you know, she was, she was really, you said to make sure you you pace yourself so you can actually enjoy it. Where do you take out of town guests? I love the New York Historical Society. It is where I'm currently working. So this is a little bit of a plug, but we just opened a Center for Women's History. And that is a wonderful place to take out-of-town guests who are interested in,

in women and their role in building New York and national history. But the exhibitions are fabulous, and it is one of the things that, It has one of the qualities I love most in the museum in that it's small. And it's, well, relatively small. It's not tiny, but it's certainly smaller than the big hitters like the Met. And we have a wonderful, wonderful restaurant in that museum as well. So that's a good, we're right by the Natural History Museum, but are smaller and we're the oldest museum in the city.

So that's a fun place to go. What do you want us to remember about Marjorie Hillis and the ideas that she championed? I think the most important thing is knowing yourself, knowing what you really want, and it can take a lifetime to do this, but to know what makes you happy and to not be afraid to organize your life, to have as much of that in it as possible. I think it's very easy, especially for women, to put everyone else's happiness ahead of their own, especially if you have a family. So happiness is something that you deserve, no matter what your romantic situation is, and, you know, you have to figure out what it is that makes you happy and just try to get as much of it into your life as possible. Well, thank you so much for sharing Marjorie's story with us. Where can people find out more about you? So you can go to my website, which is Joanna Scouts.com, easily enough.

I'm on Twitter and Instagram, and my book is in stores. Well, thank you very much. Thank you. Bye, Joanna. Bye, Sarah. Rentagentz, that has to be my favorite story in this episode. And this is the second time we've heard mention of the shop Cézanne. Remember Lindsay told us about that in the Paris episode?

So I will definitely be checking out that store. Okay, if you're hearing this episode before January 10th, 2018, I'm raffling off a copy of Joanna's book, The Extra Woman. You can enter by visiting postcardacademy.com slash extrawoman. If you'd like today's episode, please share it with a friend and leave a review on Apple Podcasts. If you'd like to get in touch, you can email me at Sarah at postcardacademy.com or find me on Instagram at Postcard Academy. That's all for now. Thanks for listening and have a beautiful week wherever you are. Do you ever go blank or start rambling when someone puts you on the spot?

I created a free conversation sheet sheet with simple formulas that you can use so you can respond with clarity, whether you're in a meeting or just talking with friends. Download it at sarah micotel.com slash blank no more.