Upscale Village Eats

When the Sheratons felt flush they went to the fancier restaurants in the Village including the Charles on Sixth Avenue, the Brevoort on Eighth and Fifth or Le Jardin Paroquet in the Fifth Avenue Hotel which had a flower-trimmed sidewalk cafe. All of these restuarants served French food, or at least Frenchified food. They sometimes went to the Sunday brunch at the Amen Corner, also at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, and ate casual meals at the Helen Lane Tearoom, where Babbo's is now. Tea rooms, once plentiful, were already bit old-fashioned in 1946, their function as a place for ladies to lunch having been supplanted largely by Schrafft's, which served a somewhat similar menu.

The Brevoort Hotel, like the neighboring Lafayette, was a francophile's delight where the fashionable members of the artistic, intellectual and politically radical set had been joining expatriates for repasts since the previous century. The hotels were places to stay for cultivated visitors who did not want to go where American businessmen congregated. Both places had been snobbishly elegant in their early years but had become favorites of the Village radicals in the teens and twenties. Past their peak in 1946, they retained a shabby. nostalgic elegance and were patronized by the middle-aged members of the '20s Village smart set like the writer Dawn Powell. Less monied patrons met for drinks and light meals and they were a place to go when your publisher had sent you an advance or you had sold something to a magazine. The Brevoort, which closed in 1948, had hosted dinners during the Village radical days for birth control advocate Margaret Sanger and the anarchist Emma Goldman on the occasion of her deportation and for the IWW, It was where the American Labor Party , an electoral coalition of Socialists, Communists, unions, liberal Democrats, and LaGuardia Republicans of the '30s and '40s, was formed to allow voters who could not stomach pulling the Democratic or Republican party levers to vote for FDR and LaGuardia.