Word: metropolitane
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Nightmare." Mumford had dared to criticize Moses' pride & joy, the enormous Stuyvesant Town development of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co., whose 24,000 tenants will form a community larger than all but 400 other U.S. cities. Mumford pronounced Stuyvesant Town "a caricature of urban rebuilding . . . considering all the benefits it might have derived from beginning at scratch, on a site as large as this." Snorted he: "As things go nowadays one has only a choice of nightmares. Shall it be the old, careless urban nightmare of post-Civil War New York ... or shall it be the new nightmare...
...Tripe. Roaring like a subway express, Commissioner Moses retorted: "This is just plain tripe . . ." He pointed out that the buildings will house more tenants than the "rookeries" they replaced and use but 23% of the land compared to the rookeries' 60-70%. As for their height, "neither the Metropolitan nor public-housing officials can build two-story cottages or garden apartments housing a hundred people an acre on $8 to $10 a foot slum land. Mr. Mumford's funny arithmetic is based on the assumption that some private Santa Claus was . . . aching to buy this enormously expensive property...
...that choked the Metropolitan Opera's 39th Street entrance came early, and wasn't disappointed. From glossy limousines stepped glossy fine ladies, dragging their tails behind them. The place was fuzzy with ermine, mink, diamonds and dignitaries. There was a shout, "Here comes Lily Pons!" followed by a buzzing ("Yeah? Didn't know she was a blonde"). The Widow Betty Henderson, showoff of cafe society, who got tapped for the front page of all the tabs last year by stretching her 71-year-old leg on a table in the bar, arrived with a raspberry-colored hairdo...
Margaret Truman, the lioness of the evening, showed up fresh and glowing in white satin and orchids. She and her hosts -the family of Thomas J. ("Think") Watson-arrived 20 minutes after the curtain belatedly rose. After all this, the Metropolitan Opera got down to what it tried hard to regard as the point of the proceedings, Verdi's Otello...
...first time in its 64 seasons, the Met faced a double audience on opening night: the 3,459 seat holders, and an estimated 2,000,000 who watched every move on television.* After a summer of uncertainty and criticism (TIME, Aug. 16 et seq.), the Metropolitan's management was anxious to please both...