Evening Republican, Volume 17, Number 299, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 December 1913 — Talse of GOTHAM and other CITIES [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Talse of GOTHAM and other CITIES

Gotham’s New Mayor Lives in Apartment House NEW YORK.- -From time immeorlal the mayor of New York has had the honor of two large lamps erected at the eity expense to light his front door. The “Mayor's Lamps’* are an institution as inviolable as the famous

laws of the Medes and the Persians. But it looks as if this ancient tradition must go by the board —for John Purroy Mitchel hasn’t any real front door! - r . Mr. Mitchel has the distinction of bejng the first mayor here to live in ah apartment house. The now borough president, Marcus M. Marks, will be sorely puzzled when he tries to have his men put up those lamps. A visit to the big Peter Stuyvesant apartment house in Riverside drive convinced the writer after he had been whisked up seven floors in the elevator that even the ample corridor from which Mr. Mitchel’s foyer door leads would be cramped by the antediluvian street lamps of monstrous size which custom decrees. Then again this isn’t really Mr. Mitchel’s front door.

The imposing entrance to the Peter Stuyvesant is already well provided, thank you, with electric braziers, which give plenty of illumination and harmonize with the architecture, and the homely word “front door’’ dies on the tongue here, too. So the owners of the apartment house and the many other tenants, not realizing the honor they should feel in their identification with the mayor, might object. Altogether it is a perplexing problem.. Mayor Gaynor, who, like all his predecessors, lived in hdl own mansion, is said to have remarked in his caustic fashion that it was a “useless custom” when he saw the workmen without consulting him putting up their twin lighthouses before his Brooklyn home. , Then the Thespians are having their troubles these days', too. In the first place, the police have dared to apply the “low tragedy” word “loitering” to their custom of discussing the green room in animated groups along the Rialto. One actor has written tot Police Captain Walsh, threatening to lead a movement to desert Broadway.