MANHATTAN .45

The Settings of MANHATTAN .45 #2: El Morocco

El Morocco is long gone, as are most of the speakeasies that had their beginnings during Prohibition, like the Stork Club and the Cotton Club. The 21 Club survived until 2020, closing as a victim of COVID and never reopening.

But the speakeasy scene remains alive and well in New York City. An example is Apotheke, located at the elbow of a dark alley in Chinatown known as “the Bloody Angle,” whose claim to fame is that supposedly more murders have been committed there than at any other corner in America (see accompanying photograph—not a place one would willingly wander down late at night, although this author has managed cocktails there multiple times and survived; the hanging panel inscribed with the deceptive “Chemist” is the bar’s only signage). The Raines Law Room in Chelsea is another example: a dozen uninviting steps down from a dirty sidewalk leads to a plain black door with a bell push, but on the other side is a different world: dark, intimate, sophisticated, and the cocktails are well made. There are many others scattered across Manhattan, mostly below 42nd Street. The common theme is that they are small, tucked away in odd places, often beneath street level, either ambiguously signed or completely anonymous, and they don’t encourage drop-ins.

Outside the strictly speakeasy scene, Manhattan bars have evolved in odd ways not often encountered elsewhere. For example, they’re sometimes associated with performance. “Trust & Life,” immersive theater on an industrial scale, has a bar occupying their big former banking hall complete with historic WPA murals and brass teller windows still intact, behind which the bartenders take your order. The bar scene at “Masquerade”—formal wear required—is frankly a better spectacle than the show. These performances can get personal: at “The Clown Bar” this author had to comfort one of the clowns who began crying on his shoulder; at “Trust & Life” a more congenial task was to unzip an actress; and when leaving “Masquerade” the coat check lady laughed at all the lipstick from when one of the girls in the cast got carried away.

Then there are the hotel bars. The modern boutique hotel scene began in 1984 when native New Yorker Ian Schrager, freshly released from prison following the collapse of his Studio 54, and perhaps feeling the need for more upscale accommodation, opened the Morgans Hotel near the library of the same name. Now, forty years later, the world is awash in Morgans knockoffs, but NYC moved on long ago: Morgans Hotel closed in 2018.

The current trend in New York is not for modernism but singularity, and the fashionable establishments now either occupy or build quarters that will distinguish them architecturally, so there are superb bars like the Swan Room at Nine Orchard (in the 1912 Beaux-Arts Jarmulowsky Bank Building, illustrating the old) or like the under-the-see-through-swimming-pool lounge at Dream Downtown (an example of the new). The focus is not on comfort or convenience but pure style. A recent stay in the Empire suite at the Standard Highline, a top-floor corner set of rooms bigger than most Manhattan apartments, revealed a wall-length built-in bar in the main room, a secondary bar in the bedroom, presumably for mixing nightcaps without having to rejoin the party, multiple lounging areas with magnificent views through the floor-to-ceiling windows, and an excellent audio system—but there was nothing so everyday as a desk, nor even a coffee maker.

Then there are extravagant one-night-only black-tie affairs that often recall movie sets—a scene from The Thin Man, say, or Eyes Wide Shut. And, lastly, there is the ongoing round of cocktail receptions, exhibition openings, charitable galas, and the like. These are sometimes associated with the financial world, occasionally the musical, or directly with charities in which one is expected to not leave without writing a check, but the best are part of either the fashion or art worlds. When these two combine, the result can be a blast, as with the after-party following the global premiere of the movie “Simply Ralph,” held at the Met’s Temple of Dendur.

In summary, the old Prohibition-era speakeasies might be gone, but New York remains a pretty good drinker’s town.

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The Cars of MANHATTAN .45 #1: Auburn 851 SC Boattail Speedster

Lola Deshaines’s Auburn 851 SC (supercharged) Boattail Speedster represented a pinnacle of automotive achievement in 1936. To begin with, it had great presence, equal parts elegance and aggression (see accompanying photograph). It was also very fast. The threaded chrome exhaust pipes flowing down from the hood hint at the powerful engine, a hefty 4.6-liter straight-eight that was supercharged and produced about 150 bhp—a lot in those days for just a two-seater, and enough to break many a speed record at Bonneville (e.g., fastest flying start mile at 104.17 mph, and fastest over 1,000 miles at an average speed of 102.77 mph). Each individual 851 Speedster was driven at over 100 mph before leaving the factory and had a plaque mounted on the dash to certify it:



It was a superb sports car, but who could afford them in the Depression?—Auburn ceased production in 1937.

Strange to say, 851 Boattail Speedsters are still manufactured: several companies offer modern replicas, mainly for the SoCal market.

Photo credit: HymanLtd.com

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The Cocktails of MANHATTAN .45 #1: Plutoniums or Plutonia?

When used to reference the element with atomic number 94, plutonium is an uncountable noun and therefore has no plural form. In MANHATTAN .45, where Dorothy gives the term a second meaning as a type of cocktail, it is now reasonable to ask, as did she, what the plural should be. Invoking the grammatical principle of declension—meaning different noun forms, depending on context—and taking as a template the homoeoteleutonic (same ending) word stadium—which according to both Merriam-Webster and the OED is pluralized as stadiums in everyday usage, or stadia in strict academic or formal usage—both forms would be correct. So, “I prefer Plutoniums,” when, say, casually comparing cocktails, but “Two Plutonia, please,” when ordering them at the Plaza Hotel’s Palm Court.

The Plutonium cocktail was invented by the author. Here is the recipe:


☢ 4 oz. Physic Gin (distilled in Oxford using botanicals foraged from the plot across from Magdalen College, originally the “Physicke Garden”—hence the gin’s name—but now known as the Oxford Botanical Garden). If Physic Gin can’t be obtained, The Botanist, widely available, is a good substitute.
☢ 1 oz. L.N. Mattei’s Cap Corse blanc (don’t substitute another aperitif; the quinine in Cap Corse is what makes the cocktail radioactive)
☢ A dash of Lavender Bitters (the Original Lavender Bitters from scappysbitters.com, a Seattle maker, is a good choice)
☢ Shake well with plenty of ice and serve straight up with a generous twist. Serves two



An historical oddity: according to the OED, the term plutonium was first used in 1816 by the scientist Michael Faraday. How could this be, over a century before plutonium was discovered in 1941 (or, more accurately, when Glenn Seaborg first synthesized plutonium in a Berkeley cyclotron, since it doesn’t exist in nature)? Seaborg, following the example of uranium, named the new element in honor of the then recently discovered planet, Pluto.

In 1816, Faraday referred to “plutonium” in a letter to Edward Daniel Clark, but apparently he meant the element lately discovered by Humphry Davy, barium.1

1. “Faraday0067a,” in Ɛpsilon: The Michael Faraday Collection accessed on 10 June 2026, 
https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/faraday/letters/Faraday0067a 

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The Settings of MANHATTAN .45 #1: Empire State Building

The Empire State Building, despite recent vandalism inflicted on Manhattan’s skyline by poorly conceived new construction, remains the dominant Yang (assertive element) in the Yin and Yang of New York’s skyscrapers (the Yin, or cool element, being the Chrysler Building). See the accompanying photograph, contrasting the Empire State’s calm, confident dignity with its twenty-first-century neighbors. The strange jumble of off-kilter prisms to the left, seeking attention like some vacant online influencer, is One Vanderbilt; the uninspired pile to the left of that, which would have been more at home in a provincial Chinese city, is the new Chase headquarters. The building in the foreground with the flag is the former Port Authority building, a facility occupying an entire block in Chelsea, and which is now owned by Google—thus the big a/c units visible on the roof, cooling the many servers inside.

The shot was taken from the Standard Highline’s aptly named Empire suite.

MANHATTAN .45’s cover photograph of the Empire State Building during a spectacularly threatening sunset was captured from a corner office on the top floor of the nearby Socony-Mobil Building at 150 East 42nd Street, itself an architectural landmark.

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On the MANHATTAN .45 image

The black-and-white photograph on the website’s main page, reproduced here, is an AI-generated image that took as its text input descriptive phrases from Chapter One of MANHATTAN .45.

Apparently, the AI generator could not understand “pillbox hat,” nor any variation such as “brimless hat” or “Jackie-Kennedy-style hat.” Moreover, it seemed determined that if the dame was to be seen smoking, then so too must the detective, although, somewhat surprisingly, it understood “Zippo lighter” just fine. Despite these limitations, it has to be admitted that the image captures the overall mood of the first chapter well.

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