Like many in New York this year, the residents at London Terrace are looking forward to the 1939 World’s Fair opening out in Flushing Meadows on Long Island. Some of the millions who visit this once-in-a-lifetime event will also visit neighborhoods in Manhattan, including Chelsea. This won’t be the first time Chelsea has been in the spotlight. Columbia University Professor Clement Clarke Moore wrote the poem, “The Night Before Christmas” while living in Chelsea. This was before West 23rd Street in Chelsea became the Times Square of its day in the 1880s.

With just several days to go before the World’s Fair opens, Margaret Pendleton is just entering the stylish lobby of her section of the London Terrace building. She’s back from buying some things at one of the local Chelsea shops. As she steps past the lobby mailboxes on the way to the elevator Margaret runs into a woman who lives down the hall from her on the seventh floor. 

Margaret’s thirty-five year-old neighbor is wearing a blazer, beret, high-heels, and A-line skirt extending several inches below the knees.

“Morning Margaret, how is Ed doing?” asks Jean, who is on her way out.

“His boss came by last night to see when Ed will be well enough to come back to work.”

“So how is the National Biscuit Company?” the neighbor continues.

Margaret, wearing a favorite gray house-dress and low-heeled black shoes, tries her hand at being clever:

“Making biscuits, making money, and making my Ed work hard as a department manager from eight in the morning to four in the afternoon, that is when he’s feeling well.”

Not to be outdone, Jean adds, “My uncle came from Chicago and worked six days a week for twenty years in Hell’s Kitchen at the New York Central Railroad’s West Thirtieth Street yards. He worked as a ‘cowboy’ riding a horse up and down Eleventh Avenue next to train tracks laid right on the street.”

“A cowboy on Eleventh Avenue?” queries Margaret.

“He’d ride a block ahead of a steam locomotive to warn pedestrians and wagons that a train was approaching on the rails set into the pavement. It was so bad they called Eleventh Avenue ‘Death Avenue.’”

The doorman steps over to where the women are talking and politely asks, “Will you be needing an errand boy this morning, Mrs. Pendleton?”

“I’ll call down later. I was just at the grocery, but I may need a boy to bring back some medicine from Addison’s Drugstore. Thank you Charlie.”

The neighbor starts toward the front door and says over her shoulder, “Bye-bye Margaret, I’m off to have tealeaves read at Madame Duvall’s.”

A minute later Margaret, with her sandy brown hair, brown eyes and thin waistline, is back in her apartment. She perks up hearing the kitchen radio play a song on the Hit Parade. Trumpeter, Bunny Berigan, sings:

I’ve been around the world in a plane

I’ve settled revolutions in Spain

The North Pole I have charted

But I can’t get started with you

Today’s fifteen-minute episode of the Guiding Light is just coming on and Margaret switches stations just in time to hear the Proctor and Gamble ads for the soap opera. She looks in on Ed who is snoring loudly in the master bedroom. As an afterthought, the still handsome woman scoops up her orange tomcat who is also sleeping on the bed and carries him out to the kitchen.

“Rollie, You’re not supposed to be in daddy’s bed. You’ll make him sneeze!”

Perhaps the hefty red tabby senses he can be bought off with a bowl of cream or maybe he’s in a snit about being woken up. In either case he looks up at his principal keeper and lets out a compelling “Murrow.”

Margaret won’t be having tealeaves read at Madame Duvall’s today. So as consolation, she’ll have a snack at the kitchen table after brewing English tea and adding lemon juice and honey. Rollie will have milk laced with a bit of cream.

Looking in Rollie’s general direction she complains, “My neighbor goes to have tealeaves read, my husband is sleeping in bed on a workday, and my cat’s drinking cream.”

As is his style, Rollie offers no comment and continues lapping up his snack from the peach colored bowl.

On impulse, Margaret calls the lobby and asks Charlie to send up an errand boy. She needs to refill the Terpin Hydrate and Codine cough medicine from Addison’s Drugstore on Ninth Avenue. The boy can also bring back lamb chops from Lynch the butcher. Later, Margaret will stop at Gus’s Grocery and get some things. And when her husband wakes up, she’ll send him to the building’s solarium to dry out his sinuses.

Ed’s chronic ailments began when as a twenty year-old clerk at a brokerage house on Wall Street he was one of the victims of a bomb blast in front of the old Sub-Treasury Building across the street from the New York Stock Exchange. A wagon filled with dynamite had exploded at noon in September 1920. At least thirty people on the street were dead and more than 100 left wounded, Ed being one of them. He’s never quite regained his health after the attack. No one was ever convicted of anything. Some believed the explosions were the work of radicals. Others believed it an accident involving a drunken wagon driver delivering dynamite who vanished either just before the explosion or in it along with the two horses.

Margaret has one other errand to run today. The Victrola needs to be fixed at the radio store. Margaret’s sister Eileen and brother-in-law Joe will be coming over and they like hearing the latest records. You play records on a record player, but everyone calls them Victrolas.

Madame Duvall’s tealeaves-reading room is in a small nook on the second floor of an aging wood-framed building alongside the Third Avenue El on the Bowery near Broome Street. The building is across the street from Bowery Savings Bank. It’s also just up from the five-story Grand Hotel, a flophouse at No. 143. Through her windows, you can hear the familiar whir of electric motors that power an approaching Third Avenue El train as it rattles by on the rails, vibrating the trestle’s steel girders. Then you hear the squeal of brakes and a soft thump as the train stops at the shaky elevated wood plank station that from a center position serves the uptown and downtown tracks.

Madame Duvall uses tarot cards for telling fortunes. But her first customers here on the Bowery were the waiters from a nearby Chinese restaurant who had asked her to read tealeaves. Perhaps they liked getting a cup of tea for their money.

Margaret’s neighbor, Jean, has just sat down at a small round table for two in a windowless ten-feet square room with dark maroon curtains covering the walls. Jean has short brown hair, grayish eyes and a nice figure. Like her uncle, the New York Central Railroad worker on Death Avenue, Jean grew up in Chicago.

Today Jean wants to know whether a man will ask to marry her. Madame Duvall, who is not French but Gypsy, is cautious. After reading the tealeaves left in the cup Madame Duvall says someone romantic will enter Jean’s life in the coming year, if Jean ‘will follow the signs that show in unpredictable places.

Somewhat disappointed with Duvall’s lack of detail Jean leaves and walks several doorways up the Bowery to Shanghai House. She climbs the twenty creaky wooden steps up the narrow dark staircase and catches the eye of the restaurant’s owner-manager, Martin Yang. He motions her to a cozy wood-backed booth with snug seat cushions. Yang brings her some tea in a small brown ceramic teapot with a matching cover. Jean barely looks at the familiar menu and eventually orders Moo goo gai pan.

Martin Yang’s family moved from Formosa to America when the Japanese took over the island in 1895. Yang then came to New York by way of San Francisco, where he worked in several Chinese restaurants before  pursuing his American dream, here on the Bowery.

Outside perhaps ten feet away form the restaurant’s second floor windows, another Third Avenue El-train with just three cars squeals to a stop and a thump. No matter, the restaurant offers an exotic atmosphere enhanced by the el trains, the second-floor location, the white tablecloths, the food aromas, the ceramic teapots, the red shaded lamps, and the Chinese music playing softly. Yang’s male waiters are all polite, thin, and speak with heavy Chinese accents. They wear red and black abbreviated jackets, black pants, black-laced shoes, and white button-down shirts with black bow-ties.

The soft conversations at the other tables blend into soothing murmurs. While she waits for some crackers and soup to arrive Jean reads over the latest issue of Life Magazine she purchased from a sidewalk newsstand on the way from Madame Duvall’s. After the meal, Jean will either take in a movie or go back home.

The next day Ed is out of bed on a short walk. Although it’s not particularly cold out he has put on a full-length brown overcoat along with a wide-brimmed brown fedora hat. The tall thin man with grayish brown hair and bloodshot blue eyes strolls along West 23rd Street in the direction of the Chelsea Hotel near Seventh Avenue. The ten-story structure has been a landmark since 1888. Writers like Mark Twain and O. Henry lived at the world-famous Chelsea Hotel on West 23rd Street. Maybe they found inspiration in the hotel’s inimitable wrought-iron balconies.

Ed will have lunch at Guffanti’s Restaurant on Seventh Avenue and then take in a movie at the RKO Theatre on the northwest corner of Eighth Avenue. He didn’t check what was playing but asked Margaret to go. She said she had too many things to do. Ed went because Rollie was making a fuss while Margaret was getting the bathroom ready for his weekly tub wash. Ed tells Margaret that cats are good at cleaning themselves. Nonetheless she believes that something in Rollie’s fur is causing Ed to sneeze.

Ed enters Guffanti’s, a neighborhood landmark since the 1880s. He gets a table near the window looking on Seventh Avenue and orders spaghetti and meatballs, a glass of Chianti, and some extra butter for the Italian bread that comes with the order. The waiter straightens the creased white tablecloth and then holds the chair as the infirm man sits. Ed likes looking at the goings on at the intersection of Seventh Avenue and West 23rd Street. Just now, a horse and open wagon with fruits and vegetables rattles by.

Ed says to a nearby waiter, “You don’t see horse and wagon deliveries much anymore.”

Perhaps understandably, Ed doesn’t think back to the horse and wagon that blew up at Wall and Broad Streets on the day he ran an errand as a twenty year-old clerk at the Merrill Lynch brokerage firm. Thoughts about the attack often haunted him in the months after the ground-shaking, horrible explosion that damaged Ed’s hearing and required months of physical therapy.

Instead, Ed notices a bus wending its way down to Greenwich Village and pictures in his mind the Seventh Avenue trolley cars that stopped running a couple of years back. He read in the paper recently that all the remaining trolley cars in New York will probably be gone in ten years and replaced by the buses.

The spaghetti at Guffanti’s is excellent and so is the red wine. So, Ed walks over to Eighth Avenue to see what the recently opened RKO 23rd Street Theatre’s marquee says. It’s a re-run of last year’s screwball comedy directed by Howard Hawks called Bringing Up Baby starring Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant. The second feature is Mexicali Rose, where cowboy Gene Autry goes up against a crooked oil company.

With his cold still not gone Ed plans to sit in the no-smoking section and watch the two movies, several cartoons, the news of the week, and the coming attractions. Maybe he’ll get some popcorn and a Coke. Like most people, he doesn’t worry about when the movies start. Moviegoers just show up, find seats, and about three hours later get up to leave saying to whomever they’re with, “This is where we came in.”

Back at the apartment, Margaret’s son Eddie is home from a break at college. Ed Jr. is talking with his mother at the kitchen table. He looks a great deal like his father. Recently, he’s started wearing fedora hats and sports jackets but no tie.

“Mom, the 1920 explosion down on Wall Street came up in my American history class. I didn’t mention that dad was injured in it. The professor seemed certain the bombing was a political act.”

“I’ve always believed the wagon driver had been drinking whiskey,” his mother says.

“But what if it was an attack on the Stock Exchange?”

Just then, Rollie leaps up onto one of the kitchen table chairs. Margaret reflexively goes to the Frigidaire to pour a blend of milk and cream into Rollie’s peach colored drinking bowl, knowing this will pacify her rambunctious orange tomcat.

Eddie now with the wisdom from one year of college says, “That cat has you well trained mom.”

“Hah!” his mother answers with a humorous tone.

“I may write my American history assignment on the old explosion at the Stock Market. Should I mention this to dad?”

“No,” she adds, “it will only bring back unhappy memories.”

“OK mom. By the way are you and dad planning to go out to the World’s Fair?”

“Yes! I thought the three of us would go this weekend, either Saturday or Sunday.”

He then asks, “I was talking on the phone with Lillie about the Fair. Would you mind if I invited her to come along?”

“Of course not. Lillie may be family one of these days.