527. Polly Adler, Queen of Tarts

                Polly Adler, Queen of Tarts

“Going to Polly’s?” was a question often asked among the city’s night-reveling elite in the Roaring Twenties, that fabled decade when Prohibition and the Charleston reigned.  But more often one heard “See you at Polly’s,” for the presence there of one’s partying friends could be safely assumed.  “Polly’s” was obviously a very “in” place at which to be seen.  But what was it, and who was Polly?

Polly’s: 215 West 75th Street, on the West Side of Manhattan.  Persian carpets, Louis XV and Louis XVI furniture, gilded mirrors, oil paintings of delicious female nudes, a Gobelin tapestry showing Vulcan and Venus wantonly engaged, and walls lined with books that added atmosphere but seemed rarely to be read.  Whoever she was, Polly was in the chips.

And in the evening the place was jammed with people: 

• Mayor Jimmy Walker and his chorus girl playmate;
• world heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey;
• gangsters Lucky Luciano and Dutch Schultz;
• politicians, actors, judges;
• and Algonquin Round Table members Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley.

There were late-evening dinner parties amid the buzz of gossip, while some guests played mah-jongg in a Chinese room, and business deals were struck over a Scotch and soda at the bar.

Presiding over all was Polly, short and dark-haired with a winning smile, no rare beauty but a friend to all.  She had come a long way from her humble Jewish origins to become the city’s most notorious and successful madam.  

Yes, Polly’s was a brothel, well stocked with young women available at the going rate of twenty dollars a tumble.  Some guests came for sex, some for cards and drinks, and some for an atmosphere mixing the elegant and the tacky.  But they all came for Polly Adler, Queen of Tarts.

* * * * *

For more about Polly, see chapter 14 of my newly released paperback, Fascinating New Yorkers: Power Freaks, Mobsters, Liberated Women, Creators, Queers and Crazies.  Polly was certainly liberated.  You will learn

• How a nice Jewish girl became a procuress;
• How, one after another, her houses were raided and shut down, and she went to court in a mink;
• How charges against her were mysteriously dropped, allowing her to open another even more luxurious establishment;
• How Polly finally quit the trade, realized a childhood dream by finishing high school, and published a memoir that became a bestseller: A House Is Not a Home.

Though attracted to men, she never married.  Marriage had little appeal, compared to being Queen of Tarts.

Polly is just one of many New Yorkers, some remembered and 

some forgotten, some sinister, some admirable, and some notorious, who appear in Fascinating New Yorkers.  Knowing them, you may 

be shocked or puzzled or angered, but you will not bored.  The paperback is available from Amazon.  

©  2021  Clifford Browder