Jimmy Walker Ran the City

SERVING AS THE city’s chief executive in the Roaring ’20s, Jimmy Walker was a twinkly, showy character, a onetime Tin Pan Alley songwriter turned Tammany politician. He was known for devoting maybe three hours a day to the job, traveling the city in a flashy Duesenberg automobile that cost more than most houses and swanning around town each night with his showgirl mistress, Betty Compton. (His wife stayed home.) In 1929, he arranged for a dowdy 65-year-old Central Park restaurant known as the Casino (not a gambling spot, despite its name) to become a swanky nightclub. Specifically, the mayor broke the previous restaurant operator’s contract and handed it to his friend and supporter Sidney Solomon, who got the license for $8,500 per year, which would turn out to be the amount the Casino took in every night. Joseph Urban—the architect behind Mar-a-lago’s interiors, no less—redid the place in Art Deco shimmer with black glass ceilings. It seated 600. The food prices, it was disapprovingly remarked, were even higher than at the Plaza or the Ritz. One regular Sunday-night customer in the insurance business sometimes spent $300 on caviar alone—equivalent to about $5,500 today— along with the rest of his food and drink. He tipped the orchestra $1,000 at a time and sometimes ran a $7,000 monthly tab. Prohibition and city ownership be damned, the bar poured plenty of wine, liquor, and Champagne, most of it BYOB, held on ice in the customers’ cars by their drivers. They paid $6 as a corkage fee; club soda was $3 a bottle, comparable to charging $50 now. Never mind the frequent Prohibition raids hauling out illegal liquor. One night in June 1930, the Feds arrested 40 people there, including Solomon. Mrs. Vincent Astor, also present that night, was not picked up. You could find Walker there multiple nights a week, turning the Casino into the Zero Bond of its day. The band struck up his most famous song, “Will You Love Me in December (As You Did in May)?,” whenever he arrived. He was around so much he kept an office there with its own phone line and a soundproof door, behind which a fair share of city contracts got worked out. The rebuilt Casino had reopened in June 1929. In October, the stock market crashed, the economy fell apart, and Walker’s cuddly crookedness began to look a lot less entertaining. (The caviar-and-$1,000-tips fellow lost all his money and killed himself.) Within a couple of years, investigations into Walker had begun, and in 1932 he admitted on the stand to taking about $1 million in “beneficences,” a fun word for payoffs. Before he could be bounced out of office, he resigned—abruptly, without alerting his aides—and hopped on a ship to resettle in the south of France for a few years and wait out the statute of limitations. As soon as Walker was out of power, newish Parks commissioner Robert Moses set his sights on the Casino, and in 1936, he tore the building down. Rumsey Playfield, and thus Summerstage, eventually replaced it.