Word: genteel
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52nd Street (Walter Wanger). Time was when Manhattan's 52nd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenue, was just as stuffy as the picture that bears its name. But in the last decade or so Bacchus and Momus have taken over the genteel brownstone houses whence Rhinelanders, Iselins, Fahnestocks, Vanderbilts once set forth in broughams to leave their cards. Today nightclubs jammed with swing bands and floor shows have chased away all but a last handful of old settlers. 52nd Street misses most of the swing, wastes too much time on the old settlers...
...eyes of the polite world, Ernest Hemingway has much to answer for. Armed with the hardest-hitting prose of the century, he has used his skill and power to smash rose-colored spectacles right & left, to knock many a genteel pretence into a sprawling grotesque. Detractors have called him a bullying bravo, have pointed out that smashing spectacles and pushing over a pushover are not brave things to do. As the "lost generation" he named* have grown greyer and more garrulous, so his own invariably disillusioned but Spartan books have begun to seem a little dated; until it began...
...Parsons pulled the biggest coup of her career. Bidding against four Baltimore and Philadelphia investment banking houses for a $30,000 issue of by-pass bonds offered by Salisbury. Miss Parsons submitted the lowest bid ($30,010 at interest of 2½%), walked off with the bonds to the genteel embarrassment of her competitors...
...maiden' departure, as he pointed out. The elegant old gentleman was found in his suite at the Plaza, his portmanteau packed, his mourning doves wrapped in clotted swiss, his head in a sitz bath for a last shampoo. Everywhere, scattered about the place, were grim reminders of his genteel background: a cold bottle of Tavel on the lowboy, a spray of pinks in a cut-glass bowl, an album held with a silver clasp, and his social-security card copied in needlepoint and framed on the wall. We begged the privilege of an interview. . . . Mr. Tilley let the comb...
...then set up his own shop in a basement on Manhattan's Centre Street. Thence he moved to Brooklyn and started manufacturing A. B. See elevators. By 1909 Mr. See had a $1,000,000 business, still largely consisting of carriage lifts (for storing carriages in stables) and genteel elevators for four-and six-story brownstone houses. About that time Alonzo See began one of the most distinguished careers among U. S. writers of letters-to-the-editor...