More evidence that the East Side is a fine place to roost
As Flaco the owl is being memorialized at the New York State Historical Society, another bird visitor of note is making the rounds on the East Side. Unlike Flaco, whom some miscreant human helped escape from the Central Park Zoo, Astoria the turkey seems to have come to East Side out of her own volition. Her normal digs are Roosevelt Island. (She was named after Astoria, the neighborhood at the Queens end of the Queensboro Bridge.)
Needless to say, the image above is not of Astoria, but you’ll find video and stills in The New York Times.. The Times is on the case.
This is at least Astoria’s second visit to Manhattan. She was seen here last year, fashionably posing above the entrance of Saks Fifth Avenue. How she gets over the East River is not entirely known. Does she fly? Does she walk across the bridge? Does she take the Roosevelt Island Tramway, figuring she’d save some mileage on her wings ?
Anyhow, earlier this week she was seen on a balcony around 58th Street, between First Avenue and Sutton Place,
Astoria is not the first being to look across the river at the bright lights of Manhattan and think, “Looks more fun over there.”
Flaco had a good run. May Astoria’s last longer.
Can we call a 34-year-old woman a ‘matron’?
The New York Times published a news item on December 9, 1946, about a “Park Avenue matron” who died suddenly. She was 34. Back in those days, “matron” was often paired with “Park Avenue.”
It connotes white glove, the right clubs, that sort of thing. And Mrs. Evelyn Morgan would seem to qualify.
Mrs. Morgan and her husband had apparently spent the evening at the Stork Club. Club goers back then tended not to hold back the drink, and it’s possible that a full night ending at 1:30 a.m., followed by sleeping pills to be not a healthy combination.
Starting as a speakeasy during Prohibition, the Stork Club was the place for celebrities, soignée socialites and other connected New Yorkers to be seen and talked about in the next day’s papers. It was there that Count Basie and Guy Lombardo performed with their orchestras.
“It was a shrine of sophistication in the minds of thousands who had never seen it, the fabric and pattern of legend,” wrote Lucius Beebe, a top-hatted bon-vivant who chronicled “high society” in mid-century Manhattan.
The Stork Club became victim of the go-go 60s. Dress codes had collapsed, and refinement had crumbled in an implosion of hippie slobdom. The swaying ballroom dancing of yore had morphed into couples free-form rocking on the clubs’ dance floor.
The original Stork Club closed in 1965 and the building was leveled. The site is now a Midtown pocket park, Paley Park.
As for the Morgans’ apartment at 277 Park Avenue, the building between 47th and 48th Streets was raised and is now an office tower.