The Lafayette Hotel

When she moved to 35 East Ninth Street in 1942, Dawn Powell reputedly told a friend that she was close enough to the Hotel Lafayette to "look out the window and watch her own checks bouncing there." Powell immortalized the Café Lafayette, one of her favorite hangouts, as the Café Julien in The Wicked Pavilion. In this novel she claimed that "Julien waiters were forthright self-respecting individuals who felt their first duty was to protect the café from customers, their second to keep customers and employers in their proper places."

Photo copyright Museum of the City of New York.