The Enormous Milk Bar

This enormous milk bar was located, in the late 1930s, at 24 East 42nd Street. I love the cart parked outside complete with donkey, and the sign which is both simple and (because of its outrageous size) really rather tacky, too. Lewis Mumford (1895-1990) the historian and cultural critic, simply hated it. He wrote in 1939-40 that:

...the east part of Forty-second Street, in particular the strip between two important buildings, the New York Public Library and grand Central Terminal, already shows alarming symptoms of mistaking itself for the bawdy stretch between Seventh and Eighth Avenues; and the new Sheffield Farms Milk Bar doesn't help matters.

I have nothing against milk. It is a fine drink. Children cry for it, pigs fatten on it, Anna Held* used to bathe in it, some of my best friends drink it. I even have a sentimental feeling for Sheffield's, since I can remember, as a boy, the cold, buttery smell of its dairies in the days when they were merely a part of Sheffield, Slawson, Decker, a name to linger over, like Bailey, Banks and Biddle. But this new milk bar is a monstrosity. On the outside, it announces its presence with a huge vertical sign and a gfreat white enamelled signboard with green and red neon lights and a twiwinkling bottle of milk. It would take a lot  of ingenuity to create anything more massively vulgar and out of place than this particular front...

...As milk bars go, the interior is fairly good: the brilliant red panels at the back of the room soften the cold white glare of the walls, and the use of red on the subsidiary fixtures, like the mechanical milk-shakers, was a happy inspiration. Even the horizontal tubular lights are not so glaring to stand under as one might think from the outside. But the more playful attempts at decoration, in the form of cutout patterns and especially in a Walt Disney sort of painting, are feeble, and anyway they can hardly be seen by the milk-and-doughnut addicts without a lot of neck-stretching.

This sound rather fun, doesn't it? I would love to have visited this place. I especially want to take a look at that ersatz Disney painting and the red mechanical milk-shakers.

Image of exterior from NYPL Digital Gallery. The picture of the interior of the Sheffield is from Gotham Construction.

More on Lewis Mumford here. The Sheffield Milk Bar rant is from a collection called Sidewalk Critic: Lewis Mumford's Writings on New York (2000).

And for more on Sheffield Farms here is more at Forgotten New York and the Museum of the City of New York.

*Anna Held (1873-1918) was a famous Ziegfeld showgirl (and later common-law wife of Florenz Ziegfeld) among whose most famous beauty rituals was the milk bath. She is at the left posing with some enormous teddy bears.