AGE OF EXCESS The Casino was a favored destination in Central Park. Credit...New York City Parks Photo Archive

Dashing in gray spats and double-breasted suits, tall, handsome, fit as a dancer and with a perpetual smirk, he was loved by citizens for passing bills allowing Sunday ballgames and keeping subway rides a nickel. Mobsters liked his penchant for speakeasies. During his campaign, he had pledged city money to repair the park, and he kept his word, though most of it went to improving what he wanted to be the swankiest restaurant in town.

When city lawyers evicted the Casino’s proprietor, Walker appointed the hotel businessman Sidney Solomon, to whom the mayor owed a debt since Mr. Solomon had introduced Walker to his personal tailor. Mr. Solomon quickly assembled a board of powerful New Yorkers like William K. Vanderbilt, the banker Robert Lehman and the show business tycoons Adolph Zukor and Florenz Ziegfeld. Rumor had it that a financier was Arnold Rothstein, who fixed the 1919 World Series and was the model for the sentimental, coldhearted Meyer Wolfsheim in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

Mr. Solomon did little to the exterior but inside displayed “new standards of elegance and beauty.” The Metropolitan Opera’s theatrical designer Joseph Urban modernized the interior with a main dining hall accommodating 600 guests, where two large glass chandeliers sparkled off black mirrors with an inlaid tulip design covering the walls and ceiling.

“It’s not just a renovation,” Mr. Solomon told The New York Times. “It’s something which has never before existed so perfectly in the world.”
A dozen stars each a yard wide dangled above perfectly set tables with maroon cloths and crystal glasses, gleaming cutlery and white napkins. Clusters of green and maroon balloons swayed to Emil Coleman’s orchestra with Eddie Duchin on grand piano. René Black, “Master of 40 Sauces,” was the maître d’hôtel, and a special French menu was prepared by Louis Rothschild’s former chef. Twenty-four-hundred requests for reservations were submitted for opening night, June 4, 1929, and with Walker’s plump wife and their children on a long Florida vacation, holding his arm was his young, slender, dark-haired mistress from the Ziegfeld Follies, Betty Compton.

Celebrating the repeal of Prohibition at the Casino in Central Park in 1933.Credit...Bettmann/CORBIS

“The Casino will be our place,” Walker said to her, but that night, 500 of New York’s rich and powerful joined them at what was called “the high hat hut.”

The mayor spent more time at the Casino than at City Hall, and when his chauffeur-driven Duesenberg approached the Casino’s long canvas awning, the doorman notified the orchestra leader, who broke into “Will You Love Me in December?” as Walker swaggered in with his admiring entourage. Parties lasted well past midnight, and when the main restaurant closed at 3 a.m., chorus girls from the Ziegfeld Follies arrived with a police motorcycle escort to entertain select clients in private rooms upstairs, as dazzling light spilled from the windows and blazed upon the luxuriant exteriors of Fifth Avenue.

Running for re-election against the fiery Fiorello H. La Guardia in 1929, Walker won overwhelmingly. But his trajectory paralleled the age. Wall Street’s “black” days in October turned public sentiment against him, his flamboyant lifestyle blamed for the mess in which the city floundered. An investigation into his corrupt administration led to his resignation from office in September 1932; vowing to clear his name, he fled with Ms. Compton for Paris, where, Sinclair Lewis wrote in It Can’t Happen Here, we find “Jimmy Walker and a few ex-presidents from South America and Cuba.”

La Guardia was mayor now and had a special hatred for the Casino, its annual rent, $8,500, less than “that whoopee joint” made in one night. Robert Moses claimed the Casino had menu prices greater than the bill of fare of the Plaza Hotel and therefore did “not belong in a public park.” Despite a pledge from the Casino’s manager to lower the prices, Moses was determined to raze a symbol of the corrupt, decadent Walker administration, which he despised.

Everything was destroyed except stained-glass windows later installed in the park’s 86th Street transverse police station, though they disappeared years ago. Moses built the Rumsey Playground on the once-riotous site; it, too, lost in time to the SummerStage.

But there’s an enchanting belief that any sound ever emitted resonates for eternity, that everything is still here. And late some nights along the Mall, when the park empties, the sky takes on a haunting iridescence. The faintest cocktail music rises softly like the clear, thin notes from a music box, and as the mayor lifts his Champagne glass, Ms. Compton’s laughter, carrying upward through the park, forever fastens to the treetops like a loosed, snagged party balloon.