Stork Club [antikvár]

PROLOGUEA fiat rectangle of water slides down the rocky wall of a sud-den oasis in the skyscraper canyons of Manhattan's East Fifties. The cascade erases the blaring traffic horns and soothes brown baggers, fugitive smokers fleeing their offices, and urban vagabonds with their bundles of soda cans and cardboard shelter. Spindly young trees shade the white wire chairs and round all-weather tables wobbling on the rickety cobblestones. Sandwiched between the Bank of the Philippine Islands and a gallery for children's art studies, this little tableau of peace is a perversely inappropriate monument marking a site where thrills, not tranquillity or sanity, once ruled the New York night. By the entrance, a bronze plaque dedicates this pocket park to the memory of Samuel Paley (1875-1963), the father of broadcasting pioneer William Paley. At seven-thirty each night, a guard shuts off the waterfall; at eight he locks a tall iron gate and washes down the sidewalk with a hose. It's closing time at what remains of the Stork Club.The green canopy over the sidewalk is long gone. So is the blue-uniformed doorman, his whistle bleating. Gone too the hastily parked automobiles, whitewalls planted insolently on the sidewalk; the crowds of craning gawkers and autograph hunters; the trudging union pickets; the traffic backed up in the beams of streetlamps; lines of taxis and limousines disgorging men in black tie and silk hats, servicemen in uniform, and veiled ladies in capes and furs and seamed stockings, black stiletto heels going tap-tay-tay over the glistening pavement and through the heavy bronze door. . . .Gone the solid-gold chain and the din of conviviality at the crowded bar, the rattling of ice in cocktail shakers, the pop of champagne corks and the sudden blare of rhumba music when a distant door slid open, the flare of flicked lighters and air violet with pleasurably exhaled smoke, the clik . . . clik . . . cliiik from whirled dials of squat black telephones at the café tables and the definitive clunk! when the heavy receiver dropped back1