Prices of Xmas past
HO ho etc., etc., Considering today’s bitching and moaning about costs, look at 1932 Christmastime prices.
Subway — a nickel. Ride to, from and including Statue of Liberty visit — 35 cents. Your own personal boat — $15 an hour. Uber, shmuber. RollsRoyce with liveried chauffeur — $3. Car for 30 days garage storage — $15.
Puppet show? Admission’s a quarter.
Oyster Bar dinner — 70 cents. Less highclass joints, doing steak with Bermuda onions — 50 cents. Expen sive Dinty Moore’s — $1.50. Famous Barbetta’s dinner for two — 2 bucks. Takeout Chinese for a party of 16 — $3.
Cheese enough for a month — 14 cents. Fulton Fish Market stuff so fresh it’s still wiggling — 40 cents. To keep out the riffraff, potato’s an additional nickel. Guava jelly’s 30 cents a box, but I didn’t learn how guava jelly comes in a box. Olive oil, 60 cents a quart.
Vial of perfume for your homosexual, heterosexual, metrosexual, transexual or asexual — $1. Haircut, 60 cents. Mme. Polly, whose clients included Lillian Russell, Marie Dressler, Mae Murray — shampoo and finger wave, 50 cents.
Smokers? Refresh, remake, reclean your old pipe —a quarter. Cigar box a nickel.
Pet crazy? A fancy bird’s 25 cents. Want a pair? You can haggle.
Custommade, handmade toorder weather vane? Five dollars. But look at it this way. It isn’t thrown out money. Not something of which the person’s going to get two.
Oneofakind doll plus clothes — $3. On Orchard Street, a brass urn was 75 cents. That junky urn’s still there but now, schlepping to Orchard Street from Midtown, is $60.