Algonquin Round Table History,News The Round Table Centennial Summer

The Round Table Centennial Summer

June 9, 2019June 9, 2019| Kevin FitzpatrickKevin Fitzpatrick| 0 Comment | 10:43 pm
Al Hirschfeld Illustration
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The Algonquin Hotel is not going to let the centennial of the first luncheon of the Algonquin Round Table pass without notice. The national literary landmark has planned an entire summer of events to celebrate the Vicious Circle, which began as a welcome home roast for critic Alexander Woollcott in June 1919.

To mark the occasion, the hotel is having a special $19.99 lunch menu every day until Labor Day, live music on Thursdays and Saturday nights, and a poet in residence in the lobby on Fridays. You can also attend, and participate in open mic poetry readings. The full hotel schedule is here. There will be weekly history walking tours at 3:00 p.m. on Wednesdays, meeting in the lobby, the schedule and advance ticket link is here.

The hotel is hosting five evening curated dinners on Wednesday nights at 6:00 p.m. in June and July. Each week a different New York expert will be featured that is in keeping in the spirit of the Algonquin Round Table and its members. Book your spot in advance on Open Table for cocktails and dinner, noting the night you wish to attend.

Wednesday Night Schedule for the Round Table Room Restaurant
6:00 p.m. cocktails at the Round Table
6:30 p.m. seat for dinner
7:30-8:00 p.m. dessert and Round Table talk.
Guests must have dinner reservations. Reserve your seat in the Round Table Room here (note the date & time at 6:00).

These experts are in the spirit of the Vicious Circle and will be talking about topics in the vein of the legendary members of New York’s most famous group of friends. Come for cocktails and dinner and enjoy a look at the worlds of current New York City through writing, music, comedy, and the most-beloved pastime of the group: high-stakes poker.

Laurie Gwen Shapiro

June 12
Laurie Gwen Shapiro – Writing

Laurie Gwen Shapiro is a native of New York City’s Lower East Side. She has most recently written articles for publications including The New Yorker, New York Magazine, The Daily Beast, Lapham’s Quarterly, Slate, Aeon, Los Angeles Review of Books, and has her own history column focusing on unsung heroes for The Forward. Laurie is also a documentary filmmaker who won an Independent Spirit Award for directing IFC’s Keep the River On Your Right: A Modern Cannibal Tale and an Emmy nomination for producing HBO’s Finishing Heaven. The Stowaway is her first non-fiction book. It’s the spectacular, true story of a scrappy teenager from the Lower East Side who stowed away on the Roaring Twenties’ most remarkable feat of science and daring: an expedition to Antarctica.

Book your spot in advance here.

Michael Cumella

June 19
Michael Cumella – Music

Creator of the “Gramophone DJ” concept, Phonograph DJ Michael Cumella brings two 1905 disc phonographs and plays 78’s circa 1900-1929 for an engaging musical experience. The music ranges from ragtime to dance bands, instrumentalists to songsters. Visually fascinating and very entertaining, the presentation creates a wonderful atmospheric ambiance. As host of WFMU Radio’s Antique Phonograph Music Program since 1995, he is a leading expert on this period of culture and music. Michael will bring to the hotel a vintage phonograph and play original music from 1919.

Book your spot in advance here.

Noah Diamond

June 26
Noah Diamond – comedy

The #1 source for comedy knowledge of the Algonquin Round Table era is Noah Diamond, a writer, performer, producer, and raconteur. He’s the award-winning creator of the off-Broadway Marx Brothers revival I’ll Say She Is and has written and lectured extensively about the Brothers and their work, including a multimedia comedy lecture. This fall his brand-new show 400 Years in Manhattan will debut at the United Solo Theatre Festival in Manhattan on Theatre Row.

Book your spot in advance here.

Kevin Fitzpatrick

July 10
Kevin C. Fitzpatrick – history

The author of 8 non-fiction books tied to NYC history, including The Algonquin Round Table New York: A Historical Guide and Under the Table: The Dorothy Parker Cocktail Guide, Kevin C. Fitzpatrick started the Dorothy Parker Society 20 years ago. He has been leading walking tours of the Vicious Circle haunts and hangouts since 1999. His talk will be about the women of the Round Table. So many know of Parker and Edna Ferber, but not many can recall Jane Grant, Margalo Gillmore, Ruth Hale, Neysa McMein, Beatrice Kaufman, or Peggy Wood.

Book your spot in advance here.

joanna holliday

July 17
Joanna Holliday – poker

The World Series of Poker is the biggest gambling event of the year in the United States. Joanna Holliday is a professional poker player and has competed numerous times in big stakes tournaments across the country. She’s also a wit, fast-talker, and podcaster. For 25 years she’s been slinging drinks at Doc Holliday’s in the East Village. Since the majority of the Round Table were addicted to cards, she’s going to be talking about how to play poker and win, as well as what it takes to maintain your balance and wellness in such a stressful competition.

Book your spot in advance here.

The Algonquin is also offering special room packages, so why not spent a few nights in the most famous hotel in the city? Click here for more information. The events go all summer, and there will be more events in the fall as well. If you have any questions, contact us.

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Castle of Pierrefonds

Sergeant Woollcott’s 1919 Postcard from FranceSergeant Woollcott’s 1919 Postcard from France

December 30, 2023December 30, 2023| Kevin FitzpatrickKevin Fitzpatrick| 0 Comment | 10:28 am

The legends of the Algonquin Round Table trace their roots not to Manhattan but to places such as the Chateau De Pierrefonds. Never heard of it? The Round Table was born in World War I. Half of the 30 members were in France in uniform, or else as civilians working as volunteers or journalists. A postcard that was included in the Franklin P. Adams Archive from 1919 is one part of this legacy.

It is widely known that Capt. Adams, Pvt. Harold Ross, and Sgt. Alexander Woollcott were all members of The Stars and Stripes, the Army newspaper written and edited by Doughboys, for the Doughboys, at the behest of Gen. John J. Pershing. The trio formed a long friendship that would continue after the war.

Castle of Pierrefonds

When the Armistice was declared on Nov. 11, 1918, Adams was already back in New York. He served 196 days overseas and then returned home, arriving in New York on September 8, 1918, and honorably discharged December 3. But Ross and Woollcott remained behind, running the last issues of the newspaper and enjoying their time overseas. When the U.S. military was shipping home hundreds of thousands of men and women in uniform from France to go home, Ross and Woollcott were not on the packed troopships, jammed in with hordes of men who needed a bath. After wrapping up their Army careers, they took their discharges in France and took a civilian ocean liner home after a nice Spring vacation with a cruise around the Mediterranean. They didn’t get back to New York Harbor for several weeks.

FPA ID

Meanwhile, F.P.A. was back at work at the New York Tribune on Park Row. He continued to receive cards and letters from his friends stationed in France. Woollcott sent him a Christmas card of a fat Santa Aleck trying to get down a chimney. In March, a postcard arrived. Woollcott was touring battlefields with Pvt. C. LeRoy Baldridge, the staff illustrator on Stars and Stripes, who would later go on to publish a book of his Army art with Woollcott’s help.

The pair were doing what so many other Doughboys were doing, seeing the battlefields and no doubt collecting souvenirs. The soldiers found themselves at Chateau De Pierrefonds, in the Oise department in the Hauts-de-France region of Northern France. This was where fierce fighting had just occurred mere months before. Woollcott was right where today is the stunning and beautiful Oise-Aisne American Cemetery and Memorial which contains the graves of 6,013 American soldiers who died in battle.

A cheeky Woollcott sent this to F.P.A. on March 2, 1919:

Woollcott Postcard

Baldridge and I are out cruising around the battlefields and having a whale of a time. Pvt. Ross, our boss, says we must be back Tuesday but to hell with him. This little shack was infected with Americans all Summer.
A. Woollcott
[Underneath the Passed as Censored stamp is the name Stephen T. Early, who was an officer who worked in the office with the men, and went on to work for FDR.]

Shortly after this postcard was mailed, the men all lined up to be discharged. “The day after Sgt. Woollcott was demobilized he met General Pershing. “He’s a civilian now,” said Lieutenant Early, who introduced Woollcott to the C. in C. “He looks like a soldier to me,” said the General. “In Sgt. Woollcott’s twenty-two months in the Army, it was the first time anybody had said anything of the kind to him.”

Three months later, on a warm day in June, the Algonquin Round Table met for the first time in the Pergola Room on the Hotel Algonquin. Woollcott later presented a soldier’s portrait of himself–drawn by Baldridge–to Adams and Ross.

For more stories about the Algonquin Round Table, pick up a copy of The Algonquin Round Table New York, A Historical Guide</em> (Lyons Press), available wherever you buy books.

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Divided By Three

The Flop of 1934, Divided By Three Fails to Find an AudienceThe Flop of 1934, Divided By Three Fails to Find an Audience

December 13, 2019December 13, 2019| Kevin FitzpatrickKevin Fitzpatrick| 0 Comment | 4:15 pm

Eighty-five years ago the Algonquin Round Table members Peggy Leech and Bea Kaufman were licking their wounds after their debut collaboration flopped on Broadway. The two friends worked for about a year on a drama that failed to succeed. Divided by Three was the first play to open the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. It had a popular cast, led by megastar Judith Anderson, with a young Jimmy Stewart in a supporting role.

Divided By Three has not been published and is not available. It ran for just 32 performances in October 1934. Among the tepid reviews were this one from Time, 10/15/1934:

Divided by Three (by Margaret Leech Pulitzer and Beatrice Kaufman; Guthrie McClintic, producer) was written to make room for the superb abilities of smoldering Judith Anderson. It borrows the plot of Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude and puts Miss Anderson back in the role she enormously enjoyed for a year. In Divided by Three again she is divided by: 1) her aggressive middle-aged lover (James Rennie); 2) her incredibly unsuspecting putterer of a husband; 3) her son (James Stewart). She finds it desirable and, until the second act curtain, possible to accept all three simultaneously.

It is her son who learns of her adultery, through the kindly offices of his priggish fiancée. As priggish as she, he calls his mother a whore and withdraws his love from both mother and fiancée. The last act allows everyone (still except the husband) to become readjusted to the situation. The son still feels that adultery is wrong; his mother is still determined to have what she wants. But just as she decides to come clean and divorce her husband, he comes home with the news that he has been wiped out in the stock market. Like the noble character she is, she drops the divorce plans. Her lover, after a minute’s anguish, decides after all to stay for dinner.

Only Judith Anderson makes this implausible story a moving and challenging affair. She bats her heavy-lidded eyes, settles her welterweight shoulders and makes her audience feel that something important is happening. Noteworthy are Donald Oenslager’s handsome settings.

Divided By Three

Judith Anderson rehearsing with director Guthrie McClintic for “Divided by Three” in his garden. ©The New York Public Library.


More newsworthy than their first play are Divided by Three’s authors.

Margaret Leech Pulitzer is the second wife of that studious, shy Ralph Pulitzer whom newspapermen have never forgiven for letting his late great father’s New York World be sold, and whom they howled out of accepting the post of administrator of the NRA newspaper code.

Beatrice Bakrow Kaufman is the wife of playwright George S. Kaufman (Of Thee I Sing, Once in a Lifetime, Dinner at Eight, Merrily We Roll Along), who lives on meat and chocolate peppermints, talks to himself on the street and is on the administration committee of the NRA theatre code.

Both Mrs. Pulitzer and Mrs. Kaufman are ringleaders of Manhattan’s first-nighting, croquet-playing, waggish literary-theatrical-social set. Mrs. Pulitzer has a two-year-old daughter; Mrs. Kaufman has a nine-year-old daughter. Mrs. Pulitzer graduated from Vassar, has written three competent novels, hates bridge, likes travel. Mrs. Kaufman quit Wellesley after a year; quit the University of Rochester to marry Mr. Kaufman. She is convinced she is No. 1 woman croquet player of the U. S.

Last week Manhattan critics tried to like their friends’ first play but only half of them succeeded.

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Walk in the Footsteps of the Algonquin Round Table in New Guide Book to Jazz Age Writers & WitsWalk in the Footsteps of the Algonquin Round Table in New Guide Book to Jazz Age Writers & Wits

November 20, 2014November 20, 2014| Kevin FitzpatrickKevin Fitzpatrick| 0 Comment | 9:00 am

Algonquin Round Table New York: A Historical Guide (Lyons Press)

Algonquin Round Table New York: A Historical Guide (Lyons Press)

New York—Retrace the steps of the legendary wits that convened at the Algonquin Hotel in 1919 who called themselves the Vicious Circle. THE ALGONQUIN ROUND TABLE NEW YORK: A HISTORICAL GUIDE is the first book to fully explore the whole group and their world. It’s packed with photos and maps.

“That is the thing about New York,” wrote Dorothy Parker in 1928. “It is always a little more than you had hoped for. Each day, there, is so definitely a new day.”

Now you can journey back there, in time, to a grand city teeming with hidden speakeasies, luxurious Broadway playhouses, and dazzling skyscrapers. In these places, Parker and her cohorts in the Vicious Circle sharpened their wit, polished their writing, and captured the energy and elegance of the time. Robert Benchley, Parker’s best friend, became the first managing editor of Vanity Fair before Irving Berlin spotted him onstage in a Vicious Circle revue and helped launch his acting career. Edna Ferber, creator of bestselling melodramas, wrote the Pulitzer-winning So Big as well as Show Boat and Giant. Jane Grant pressed her first husband, Harold Ross, into starting The New Yorker. Herman Mankiewicz was a Times wage slave who soaked up the atmosphere, later pouring it into his screenplay for Citizen Kane. Parker wrote for Vanity Fair and Vogue before ascending the throne as queen of the Round Table, earning everlasting fame (but rather less fortune) for her award-winning short stories and unforgettable poems. These are a few of the thirty figures from backstage Broadway to newspaper city rooms in the book.

Explore their favorite salons and saloons, their homes and offices (most still standing), while learning about their colorful careers and private lives. Packed with archival photos, drawings, and other images—including never-before-published material—this illustrated historical guide includes current information on all locations. Use it to retrace the footsteps of the Algonquin Round Table, and you’ll discover that the golden age of Gotham still surrounds us.

About the Author
Kevin C. Fitzpatrick (author), president of the Dorothy Parker Society, is the author of Under the Table: A Dorothy Parker Cocktail Guide (Lyons Press). He has been leading walking tours from the Algonquin Hotel for 15 years. Visit him at fitzpatrickauthor.com.

Anthony Melchiorri (foreword) is the creator and host of Hotel Impossible on the Travel Channel. A former general manager of the Algonquin Hotel, he has twenty years experience at the top hotels in the industry.

To Pre-Order: The Algonquin Round Table New York: A Historical Guide, by Kevin C. Fitzpatrick, (Lyons Press January 2014; ISBN: 978-1-4930-0757-8)

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