#223 The Algonquin Round Table

The Bowery Boys: New York City History

Tom Meyers

Society & Culture, History, Documentary, Places & Travel

4.8 • 3.6K Ratings

🗓️ 3 March 2017

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

EPISODE 223One June afternoon in the spring of 1919, a group of writers and theatrical folk got together at the Algonquin Hotel to roast the inimitable Alexander Woollcott, the trenchant theater critic for the New York Times who had just returned from World War I, brimming with dramatically overbaked stories. The affair was so rollicking, so engaging, that somebody suggested -- "Why don't we do this every day?" And so they did. The Algonquin Round Table is the stuff of legends, a regular lunch date for the cream of New York's cultural elite. In this show, we present you with some notable members of the guest list -- including the wonderful droll Dorothy Parker, the glibly observant Franklin Pierce Adams and the charming Robert Benchley, to name but a few. But you can't celebrate the Round Table from a recording studio so we head to the Algonquin to soak in the ambience and interview author Kevin C. Fitzpatrick about the Jazz Age's most famous networking circle. Are you ready for a good time? “The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue.” -- Dorothy Parker boweryboyshistory.com Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/boweryboys

Transcript

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0:00.0	Episode 223 of the Bowery Boys, the Algonquin Roundtable.
0:05.7	Hey, it's the Bowery Boys.
0:07.3	Hey.
0:08.5	Support for the Bowery Boys is provided by our listeners.
0:12.1	Join us for as little as a dollar month by visiting patreon.com slash Bowery Boys.
0:20.9	Hi there, welcome to the Bowery Boys. This is Greg Young. And this is Tom Myers. Today we
0:26.5	visit the New York of the Roaring 20s. It's a city of speak-easies, chorus girls, and gangsters,
0:33.8	where every night Greg was opening night on Broadway, except of course for Sunday night and
0:39.9	Monday Day. So it might seem rather odd to do what seems to be a modest show about a group of folk
0:47.8	who met for lunch, you know, most days of the week for almost 10 years at a midtown hotel. But this wasn't just any group,
0:57.3	of course, because this was a period dominated by the city's daily papers. They had both morning
1:04.0	and afternoon papers, and their reporters and columnists churned out pieces at a breakneck speed
1:10.5	that kept the city and the nation hooked.
1:14.1	These were some of the best-known personalities in the country.
1:17.9	And they were more than just newspaper writers and editors.
1:21.1	They were also novelists.
1:22.7	They were actors.
1:23.7	Sometimes those colonists and those novelists would be actors.
1:27.5	And they were also critics and playwrights and theatrical press agents.
1:33.2	You know, at work, these people were generating what New York and the nation was reading
1:38.7	and was seen performed on stage and later would hear over their radios or see on a movie screen.
1:45.7	Now, you may be familiar with perhaps the best known name of the roundtable. That would be
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