The Pleiades club at the brevoort
One hundred years ago today … The Pleiades Club, a Greenwich Village group with artistic and bohemian inclinations, held a “Ladies night” for its weekly dinner at the Brevoort Hotel.
Courtesy the New York Public Library, “What’s on the Menu?”.
We have the entire menu, thanks to the New York Public Library’s menu collection.
The menu lists the night’s attendees. If it is to be believed, this was a luminous and eccentric gathering. It included Amelia Bingam, Broadway star; Effie Shannon, actress; Otakar Marak, Czech opera singer (and a man); Milan Lusk (also a man), a violin virtuoso.
The meal began with grapefruit (a common appetizer then) and included a specialty dish: Breast of Chicken Pleiades, of unknown preparation. The item that might surprise is the “potage okra creole,” likely a side dish that, if made in traditional southern/creole style, would have been spicy.
No menu is complete without an anonymous ode to springtime.
The Brevoort Hotel was built in 1824 on the corner of Eighth Street and Fifth Avenue.
Ca. 1925 the Valentine-Souvenir Co. Courtesy the Museum of the City of New York.
The Brevoort cafe/restaurant had been a hub for intellectual socializing since the hotel was bought by Raymond Orteig, a French restauranteur, in 1902. It was a favorite hang of Emma Goldman before her deportation in December 1919, and is mentioned by such writers as Eudora Welty and John Dos Passos.