New York was indeed the “Supreme City” (November) in the 1920s. Items that Gerald Carson might have mentioned: Ed Wynn, the Perfect Fool, in Manhattan Mary , accompanied by a line of bare-legged girls that really gave pause to a high school boy recently arrived from Vermont; a ride through the Holland Tunnel on one of the first excursion buses to make that trip (all I remember is an endless vista of white ceramic tile); and Arthur Guiterman’s archetypical Manhattanite, Lady Jane, who read the ads “Of laces at Macy’s, of thimbles at Gimbel’s, or urns at Stern’s and churns at Hearn’s … fur mittens like Peary’s at Mr. McCreery’s, and silver salt-shakers at John Wanamaker’s.”

What a time, and what a city!