One season two new roof gardens have opened. The one at the top of Grand
Central Palace is large enough for a regimental drill room. The band is
imprisoned still higher in a turreted affair, and a person who prefers
gentle and unobtrusive amusement can gain deep pleasure and satisfaction
from watching the leader of this band gesticulating upon the heavens.
His figure is silhouetted beautifully against the sky, and every gesture
in which he wrings noise from his band is interestingly accentuated.
The other new roof garden was Oscar Hammerstein's Olympia, which blazes
on Broadway.
Oscar originally made a great reputation for getting out injunctions.
All court judges in New York worked overtime when Oscar was in this
business. He enjoined everybody in sight. He had a special machine
made--"Drop a nickel in the judge and get an injunction." Then he sent a
man to Washington for twenty-two thousand dollars' worth of nickels. In
Harlem, where he then lived, it rained orders of the court every day at
twelve o'clock. The street-cleaning commission was obliged to enlist a
special force to deal with Oscar's injunctions. Citizens meeting on the
street never said: "Good morning, how do you feel to-day?" They always
said: "Good morning, have you been enjoined yet to-day?" When a man
perhaps wished to enter a little game of draw, the universal form was
changed when he sent a note to his wife: "Dear Louise, I have received
an order of the court restraining me from coming home to dinner
to-night. Yours, George."
But Oscar changed. He smashed his machine, girded himself, and resolved
to provide the public with amusement. And now we see this great mind
applying itself to a roof garden with the same unflagging industry and
boundless energy which had previously expressed itself in injunctions.
The Olympia, his new roof garden, is a feat. It has an exuberance which
reminds one of the Union Depot train-shed of some western city. The
steel arches of the roof make a wide and splendid sweep, and over in the
corner there are real swans swimming in real water. The whole structure
glares like a conflagration with the countless electric lights. Oscar
has caused the execution of decorative paintings upon the walls. If he
had caused the execution of the decorative painters he would have done
better; but a man who has devoted the greater part of his life to the
propagation of injunctions is not supposed to understand that wall
decoration which appears to have been done with a nozzle is worse than
none. But if carpers say that Oscar failed in his landscapes, none can
say that he failed in his measurements of the popular mind. The people
come in swarms to the Olympia. Two elevators are busy at conveying them
to where the cool and steady night-wind insults the straw hat; and the
scene here during the popular part of the evening is perhaps more gaudy
and dazzling than any other in New York.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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