There is no need to go far afield.  There is the older New York, with its memories of Mine Host of oyster-bar and chop-house, of culinary joys and the ghosts of viands.  Yesterday the personality of the landlord was more in evidence and that of his staff happily less so.  Mine Host was an individual and not yet a corporation.  He oozed welcome.  He walked from table to table, bland, smiling, eager for commendation, keen-eared for criticism.  Although paid for, it was none the less his hospitality that was being dispensed, and he was acutely sensitive to appreciation.  His retainers were fewer in number and were retainers only.  Then, from the Spanish Main the last of the pirates disappeared, bequeathing to their descendants the tables and hat-stands of the hostelries of Fifth Avenue and the Great White Way.  There they are today, insolent-eyed and “walk-the-plank” mannered to all but the few whom they feel they can hold to high ransom.  To those of us who do not belong to that few of the race of Dives there is satisfaction in turning over the old bills-of-fare, and musing on the repasts that were once within the reach of the purses of the humble.

When Horace Greeley arrived in New York in 1831, he had ten dollars in his pocket and knew no one in the city.  He entered a tavern.  The bartender looked him over superciliously.  “We are too high for you.  We charge six a week.”  Horace agreed with him, and found shelter in a boarding-house where he paid two dollars and a half a week.  Occasionally, when the table there palled, he and the other boarders sought a change by repairing to a Sixpenny Dining Saloon in Beekman Street where a splendid feast was to be had for a shilling (twelve and a half cents).

Two years after Horace Greeley arrived in New York Holt’s Hotel opened its doors.  It was the wonder of the town, the largest and most magnificent inn erected up to that time.  Even by rich people its prices were thought exorbitant.  They were one dollar and a half a day.  That, of course, meant the American plan.  Even the panic years, from 1835 to 1837, when prices soared in a manner that brought consternation to the breasts of careful housekeepers, do not very much startle us who are living in the present Anno Domini 1918.  Philip Hone, in his “Diary,” wrote of living in New York in 1835 as exorbitantly dear, and went on to say:  “it falls pretty hard on persons like me who live upon their incomes, and harder still upon that large and respectable class whose support is derived from fixed salaries.”  The sweat of the brow of New York all ran into the pockets of the farmers.  Hone laid in a winter stock of butter at twenty-nine cents a pound.  “In the course of thirty-four years housekeeping I have never buttered my bread at so extravagant a rate.”  In March, 1836, he recorded:  “The market was higher this morning than I have ever known it.  Beef, twenty-five cents; mutton and veal, fifteen to eighteen; small turkeys, one dollar and a half.  Poor New York!”