Personalities

Frances Barlow lives her life with an unbuttoned sense of joy, both in New York, where she runs the theatre she founded, Urban Stages, and in Telluride, where she lives part time with husband Ed Barlow. Telluride Inside...and Out always looks forward to spending time with Frances – and with Ed, whenever his feet touch the ground, which is almost never. The most recent invitation was during our recent trip to New York: lunch at The Coffee House at 20 West 44, where members dine at one long table, discussing anything but work. Here's the backstory based on a speech by Ben Hall at the club's Golden Anniversary Dinner in December, 1965.

Unrecorded in the annals of the Knickerbocker Club is an event which might be called the Great Coffee House Rebellion. One day in January, 1914, two mem­bers of the Knickerbocker—Frank Crowninshield and Rawlins L. Cottenet—met for lunch at a midtown hotel and agreed that they were fed up to the tops of their Arrow collars with the Knickerbocker and its brass-buttoned flunkies, silver duck-presses, and gold-plated table conversation. According to Crown­in­shield’s recollec­tions, they decided that “it would be agreeable and desirable to found a small dining club composed of such members of the Knickerbocker Club as had no sympathy with busi­ness or wealth or with such things that business and wealth produced or implied.”