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DUSTY_MYSTERY

                                             January 15, 2009

About the "Samovar" a Greenwich Village tea
shop from the 1910s.  It was run by a
Nanni Bailey, on 4th Street near 6th Avenue.

Anna Alice Chapin, writing in 1917, describes
it as an invisible establishment with a             "Greenwich Village" (1917)
"shabby little wooden sign" and a "dim and          by Anna Alice Chapin,
gloomy doorway" that looked like an entrance        Chapter VII, Section II
to a warehouse. Just inside the door was a          [ref]
space like a desolate cellar, full of old
barrels and boxes and "dusty mystery" which
looked like a Dickensian burglars' den.

You walked through this area to climb a
staircase (so narrow and steep she often
calls it a ladder) up to a loft:

  "But such a loft! Such a quaint, delicious,
  simple, picturesque apotheosis of a loft! A
  loft with the rough bricks whitewashed and
  the heavy rafters painted red; a loft with
  big, plain tables and a bare floor and an
  only slightly partitioned-off kitchenette
  where the hungry could descry piles of
  sandwiches and many coffee cups. And there
  in the middle of the loft was the Samovar
  itself, a really splendid affair, and one
  actually not for decorative purposes only,
  but for use."

She describes the people there:

  "Under the smoke-dimmed lights were
  curious, eager, interesting faces: a
  pale little person with red hair I        This is a great detail: in
  recognised instantly as an actress        1917 she felt the need to
  whom I had just seen at the               explain who the Provincetown
  Provincetown Players--a Village           Players were.  Eugene
  Theatrical Company--in a tense and        O'Neill was just beginning
  terribly tragic role. Beyond her was      to put them on the map (his
  a white-haired man with keen eyes--a      first Broadway production
  distinguished writer and                  wasn't until 1920).
  socialist. A shabby poet announced
  to the sympathetic that he had sold          And the actress she's
  something after two years of                 describing might very
  work. Immediately they set about             well be Edna
  making a real fiesta of the unusual          St. Vincent Millay.
  occasion. Miss Bailey, a small,
  round, efficient person with nice            "The Improper Bohemians" (1959)
  eyes and good manners, moved about           by Allen Churchill, p.209:
  among her guests, all of whom she
  seemed to know. The best cheese              "It was during the first
  sandwiches in New York went round. A         reading of Floyd Dell's
  girl in a vampire costume of                 'Angel Inside' that a girl
  grey--hooded and with long trailing          newly arrived in the Village
  sleeves--got up from her solitary            appeared to ask for a role.
  place in the corner. She seemed to           Tiny, quietly red-headed, and
  be wearing, beneath the theatrical           lovely, she looked exactly
  garment, a kimono and bedroom                right for the part of the
  slippers. Obviously she had simply           frivolous Annabelle in the
  drifted in for sandwiches before             play. She read the lines in a
  going to bed. She vanished down the          voice remarkably deep and
  ladder."                                     resonant for such a small
                                               person ...  For the next two
                                               years at least she was best
                                               known to the Village as 'that
                                               beautiful young actress from
                                               the Provincetown'."

       HAZE

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