Ladies of the night

Traveling to New York on a modest budget, never easy, may soon become impossible. The affordable hotels where I'd stayed in the last decade--the Empire, the Mayflower, and the Gramercy Park--have closed so they can be converted to more profitable uses. It reminds me of the Monthly's early offices. At the first one, 1150 Connecticut Avenue, we rented seven rooms with a fireplace and bay windows for just $475 a month, a deal that was clearly not going to last--and it did not. In five years, we had to move because the building was torn down and replaced by a glitzy edifice featuring wraparound windows and rents that were out of sight.

We moved to the LaSalle building at 1040 Connecticut, where the rent was the same but the rooms were smaller, tiny in fact, and there was no fireplace. The building had its own charms, however, with a mixture of offices and apartments that made life more interesting than it is in the usual office building.

Among the more colorful tenants were several ladies of the night. You would sometimes run into their customers in the lobby, waiting for the elevator and casting nervous glances over their shoulders, fearful that the next person through the door would be their mother-in-law.

I ran into John Mitchell, Nixon's attorney general, several times in the lobby. As to his destination, I cannot say with certainty, but it was definitely not the offices of The Washington Monthly. Of course, after five years, that building was torn down in order to make way for one more glamorous. By the way, the official New York hotel of the Monthly those days was the Royalton. In its pre-Ian Schrager era, a room could be had for $8.50. The "deluxe" room was $17.

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