New-York tribune. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, 1916-10-15

New York is Paying the Ups.
II is a continuous performance in
which the entire city takes part. The stranger
in town is welcomed into the game with a
cheerfulness which it was worth coming miles
to see In fact, the stranger has confident
feeling that the game was devised for him, and
that New Workers are let in on it because they
are such lovers of clean sport.
You begin to play the fascinating game OF
Paying the Ups en- route to the city, You SIT
comfortably in your Pullman gazing at the
Jersey signboards, drinking in the beauties OF
matted milk. fly screens and Turkish tobacco
when the lure of the game first strikes you.
Rooms 81 and Up. Hotel Exquisite. Hot
and cold water, telephone. Everything that
Manhattan affords in the way of luxury"
Fine Just what you want! AS the train
goes vhizzing by you take out notebook and
make a memorandum of the Hotel Exquisite.
Another few miles, and another sign
''Rooms 81 Up. Hotel Perfecto, in the heart
Of the city. New York's exclusive hosiery"
Better still! You like the idea of being in
the city's heart. You have heard so much OF
the pulse of the great metropolis and you
want to hear it beat, so you decide on one of
those dollar-a-day rooms at the Perfecto.
AS the signboards skip by you begin to mar
vel at the wild stories that have reached out
of-towners about the high cost of living in the
metropolis.
Perfect nonsensep you comment scornfuly
"rhey are all yarns. What cheaper could you
hon doI1or Jou on Fifth Ave
nue?"
Thick and fast they skim along, the Dollar
Up signs, until you grow dizzy trying to re-
member if the Perfecto is at Fifth Avenue and
Fifty-ffth Street or Fifty-ffth Avenue and
Fifth Street, and if the Elizabethan was the
hotel that advertised showers, and breakfast
served in the rooms at dollar up.
You snatch few correct addresses from the
alluring signboards and light-heartedly trip to
a telephone booth on your arrival.
"Our rates for single room are SO and up
without bath, So and up with BATH Dollar
rooms, did you say There is long
pause, freighted with scorn. You imagine
you can smell the violet sec on the hand.~l-
chief of the bored hotel clerk as he lightly
iips it across his aching brow. "No, we have
no rooms at that price"-his voice comes back
in weary drawl what did you say? Our
advertisement? Oh, yes, we have few very
select, very choice rooms at dollar. But, Of
course, those are all TAKEN
SO much for the Exquisite. You try the
Perfecto and the Allrighto, the Justito and a
few others whose seductive signs filled you
with feeling that all is well in Manhattan,
since rooms may be had at dollar up.
You give up the vain pursuit, after an hour
of frantic telephoning. Your conversation
with hotel clerks has made you feel as if you
had been camping on the ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
doorstep, asking them to adopt you, and their
buffers had put you in communication with
the nearest police station or psychopathic
ward.
Consider your laundry list 1t is a YER
liable score card for the game of Up paying.
Run your eye down both sides of it, male and
female It's Up, Up, Up. Everything is up.
Waists, 20 cents up; handkerchiefs, 2 cents up;
collars, cents up; dresses, 80 cents up; pa
jamas - cents up. You wonder why and
how cuffs and collars and pajamas can differ
from each other, and why a standard price for
laundering them could not be enacted by the
Legislature, and how the laundryman can diff
ferentiate between such apparently simple and
similar articles.
You gather together the few articles Of ap-
parel that you dared TO wear during the week
and take them apologetically to one of the few
thousand French hand laundries around the
corner. You call for them again, so as not to
arouse the ire of the laundryman and not to
give him the excuse of delivery to add to the
ups.
Take the simple matter of half dozen col
lars at cents up. They added so cents to
your BILL You pay the ups for every other
article that was washed and you wonder, with
Father Williams son, as you put down the cash
TO settle the ups, how they manage TO do it.
Suits Cleaned and Pressed, % Cents Up"
the tailor's sign across the street reads. OF
course he can tell you that he is Gust out" of
2J-cent cleaning mixture, but he can and he
does tell you that your suit is so elaborate, SO
IN need Of extra careful pressing and atten-
ton, that he must charge at least 81, and
that if he does it for that price you are really
getting wholesale rates.
walk up one flight and save street level
prices" is the familiar admonition of Fifth
Avenue and Broadway shops "Now," you
think, "the luck has changed the only up will
be up one fight" But the real Ups have ar
rived ahead Of you and the game goes mer-
qffv IN