The builder of the new apartment
building-turned-hotel in Manhattan wanted to call it the Puritan, but Frank
Case knew that wouldn’t do. Case decided to name it after the people who
preceded the Puritans instead.
“Installed as the manager of the
new Algonquin Hotel, Case brought much of his own personality into the
residence and dining rooms on 44th Street. Case couldn’t stand
politicians. He had no use for athletes. He ignored businessmen. He turned up
his nose at socialites. What Frank Case admired most in this world were men and
women of talent.
“’Gifted people should not only be
tolerated,’ he said, ‘but they should be encouraged in their strange and
temperamental antics.’
“’People of unique ability are
unique creatures, and it is only when they try to act like the rest of us that
are artificial and out of character.’”
Case got what he was after, and
then some, attracting newspaper people, authors, playwrights and actors — the
sharpest wits of their day and nation, who spent the 1920s there drawing their
rhetorical swords to skewer the hypocrites, the sentimentalists, the dullards
and the dishonest.
Source: “Smart Aleck: The Wit, World and Life of Alexander Woollcott” by
Howard Teichmann
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