Bayrd Still Indeed, by the mid-twentieth century, Broadway was supplemented by "off-Broadway," which made even more pervasive the entertainment aspect of the city's personality. But this characteristic of the community, like its business-mindedness, has been apparent from early times. The lusty, transient society that inhabited commerce-focused New Amsterdam in the mid-seventeenth century led one newcomer to remark in 1654: ". . . they all drink here, from the moment they are able to lick a spoon. The women of the neighborhood entertain each other with a pipe and a brazier: young and old, they all smoke."2 A century later, when Dutch New Amsterdam had given way to British New York, English officials were remarking upon the "gayety and dissipation" with which its provincial society was "tinctured."26 And when still another hundred years had passed, William Dean Howells was of the opinion that, after its architectural shapelessness, in his day, nothing was more characteristic of the New York of 1895 than "the eating and drinking constantly going on in the restaurants and hotels, of every quality, and the innumerable saloons."" To a caustic commentator of the careless 1920s, New York was "the city of the Good Time" —and the Good Time was there "so sacred" that you could "be excused anything you do in searching for it."27 Even the wartime city of the mid-1940s exhibited a holiday spirit that offended visitors from the battlefronts, until, like Carlos Romulo, they became aware that its surface frivolity was a manifestation of its fighting spirit and that "those who were back out of the blood and mud of the lines were out hunting amusement, too, and finding new courage in such pleasures."28 To most observers, the essence of New York was detected more clearly in its entertainment facilities than in its achieve- ^Nicasius de Sille to Maximiliaen van Beeckerke, May 23, 1654, in New York State Historical Association, Quarterly Journal, I (1920), 102. 26 "Journal of Josiah Quincy, Junior, 1773," in Massachusetts Historical Society> Proceedings, XLLX (1915-1916), 480. 28 William Dean Howells, Impressions and Experiences (New York: 1896), 271. 27 Ford Madox Ford, New York Is Not America (New York: 1927), 49. 28 Carlos P. Romulo, My Brother Americans (Garden City, N.Y.: 1945), 146, 151. 411