Reading the Tea Leaves Without Their Roots

Julia Ng Xin Yu

In its heyday during the early to mid-twentieth century, the industry of fortune telling in New York City was dominated by tea rooms. The combination of the two disparate elements of tea rooms and the traditionally Romani practice of fortune telling was an unlikely one: the former initially was a marker of a modern and progressive upper-class society, whereas the latter had strong affiliations with traditional religious and gender roles. Their union therefore produced a brand of fortune telling which was torn from its cultural roots entirely, morphing into nothing more than a commodity for tea rooms. This paper examines the remaking of fortune telling in New York City by charting the temporal and spatial evolution of the gypsy tea room, in which divinatory services like tea leaf

readings were sold. A study of gypsy tea rooms is inseverable from the history of tea rooms in general. In their infancy during the turn of the 20th century, tea rooms were spaces which belonged to upper-class women. In light of evolving social norms and the proliferation of the automobile, women in that period were granted unprecedented levels of freedom. They became part of the economy in novel ways, beginning to take on the roles of “business owners, operators, managers, hostesses, cooks, and ... customers” in establishments like tea rooms, which were located in departmental stores.1 William Leach, in City Of Dreadful Delight by Judith Walkowitz, was quoted as saying the departmental store “refashioned the urban center as a place for female pleasure.”2 Unfortunately, not all women had equal access to this new luxury. Tea shops “brought out high society and advertised to the world that tea was a classy affair,” and were exclusively for the wealthy.3 Their departmental store location reflected this trait, with Walkwowitz claiming that it facilitated movements across urban space only for “respectable women.”4 As such, tea rooms were a space in the urban landscape reserved only for the subset of women who were well-off. Romani fortune telling was an affair that took place in entirely separate spheres. While tea rooms were a boundary-breaking endeavour for women, ofisas where Romani fortune telling was sold as a service were run exclusively by men. In Fortune Telling Practice Among American Gypsies, Marlene Sway asserts that “It is the males’ responsibility to provide protection for the ofisa, pay bribes to necessary officials, and conduct all business such as paying deposits and rent.”5 As such, the union of tea rooms and gypsy fortune telling is one that would not have occurred without radical changes in both. The unlikely integration of fortune telling into tea rooms began amidst the backdrop of the latter’s evolving spatial spread. Tea rooms were initially clustered around upscale shopping areas like Fifth Avenue, but around 1915, tea rooms began to reach Greenwich Village. In her book Tea at the Blue Lantern Inn: A Social History of the Tea Room Craze in America, Jan Whitaker claims that Villagers reinvented tea rooms by “making fun of pretentiousness and mocking uptown tea rooms with irreverent takeoffs,” incorporating playful names, artsy interiors, impromptu

entertainment, and costumed waitpersons. This new strategy redefined tea rooms as a place where one could “(seek) fun with meals,” and eventually led to the idea that “tea rooms were eating places uniquely characterised by ‘atmosphere’”.6 The increased diversity of location and thus perception surrounding tea rooms set the table for an increased demand surrounding unorthodox practices like divination. This phenomenon coincided with the influx of Romani gypsies, which provided the supply to sate the new desires of tea room patrons. The Rom arrived in the United States from Serbia, Russia and Austria-Hungary beginning in the 1880’s, part of the larger wave of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.7 Romani women were not only culturally obligated to practice divination, but also possessed a history of selling it as a commodity, making them the ideal match for consumer demand. In Locational Determinants and Valuation of Vlach Rom (Gypsy) Fortune-telling Territories in the United States, Michael Chohaney argues that “for generations, fortune-telling, the act of interpreting someone’s present and predicting their future, has remained the American Rom’s primary means of economic survival and crucial component of their ethnic identity,” and that “fortune-telling is considered a sacred obligation for Rom women.”8 This thus illustrates that fortune telling is a large part of Romani cultural identity, and is inseparable from their history. The reasons for their sale of this cultural practice is believed to be rooted in oppression. As a 1995 New York Times article claims, Romani settlers in Europe 750 years prior were forbidden to settle in one place, forcing them to develop livelihoods that were portable and offered some protection from would-be persecutors, causing fortune telling to emerge as a means of income.9 As such, a large supply of Romani fortune tellers was created by this immigration, bringing to the tea room table the mystical “atmosphere” patrons craved. The discipline of fortune telling, however, was warped heavily by its entrance into the tea rooms in the 1920s. Fortune telling, which had once been practised largely within the Romani community,10 had to cater to a wider audience, which by then included lower-class segments of society. Whitaker asserts that fortune telling (by way of tea leaf reading) was used particu-

larly as a form of escapism for less affluent young workingwomen.11 Fortune telling was being sold by tea rooms as a respite from daily life, which required an air of mystique to be created so as to maintain the fantasy. This culminated in an intentional exotification of the space and the practice itself. The team rooms borrowed “the techniques of stage-set designers to dramatically enhance their interiors,” and fortune tellers altered their appearances to maintain the fantasy.12 Whitaker describes one fortune teller as “(enhancing) her gypsy identity for business purposes,” with another dressed in a colourful getup with lots of jewellery.13 In Gay New York, George Chauncey depicts a similar phenomenon in Greenwich Village, claiming that some Villagers had “begun to cater to the tourist trade, decking themselves out in the costumes visitors expected of bohemians, selling their verse and etchings to the unsophisticated, and offering tours of a fabricated ‘Bohemia’ to the gullible.”14 Whitaker suggests that not even the providers of the service themselves believed that they were genuinely foretelling the future — one named “Princess Karina” expressed that it was not tea leaves but faces, hands, manners, and mannerisms, as well as “many small details of dress and personality” that revealed a person’s situation and concerns.15 What tea room clients were being sold was not genuine spirituality but “mild amusement,”16 which took place in a deliberately-constructed environment. The divorce of fortune telling from its cultural roots manifested itself most evidently in the spatial patterns of tea rooms. The general trend was for them to cluster around high-traffic, upper-class shopping districts. To exemplify this point, in 1925, 29 tea rooms were present on one block alone on West 49th street, in close proximity to establishments like Saks Fifth Avenue.17 Tea rooms that offered fortune telling services were no exception. One prominent supplier of such services was Gypsy Tea Kettle Inc., which placed an advertisement in the 1946 Manhattan Telephone Book for its four locations, three of which were on Fifth Avenue. Its chain store structure was also a far cry from the conventional Romani mode of fortune telling, which emphasised the close bonds of family.18 The proliferation of fortune telling services in affluent areas served to reiterate the deviation of fortune telling from

tradition.The clustering near places such as Fifth Avenue stood in stark contrast to the spatial spread of Romani Gypsies within the city. Rena Gropper and Carol Miller observe in Exploring New Worlds in American Romani Studies: Social and Cultural Attitudes Among the American Mačvai that Roma people were not gathered in any specific areas, but rather forced to spread out by financial circumstance. For the remainder of Romani gypsies who sold their fortune telling skills independently of tea rooms in ofisurias, their living quarters were entirely dependent on the location of their business, using the curtained-off rear of the store as a living area. They were prevented from congregating in one place because even the largest stores available lacked sufficient space to house entire extended families; they were made to take whatever empty stores became available.19 The incongruity between the spaces occupied by independent practitioners and those used by gypsy tea rooms served to further elucidate the point that tea rooms had distanced the act from its original practitioners not only metaphorically but also literally. The gradual decline of gypsy tea rooms, much unlike its rise, was almost utterly assured by the financial inviability of gypsy tea rooms towards the middle of the century. Different factors impacted both the “gypsy” and “tea room” elements separately, with harsher enforcement of anti-fortune telling legislation plaguing the former, and dwindling profit margins—owing to the Great Depression and World War II, among others— affecting the latter. Gypsy tea rooms were targeted by police raids for the crime of “telling fortunes for compensation” in the 1930s and 1940s20,forcing them to abandon the practice and eventually the restaurants in general. In a New York Times article dated 21 April, 1934, a reporter detailed the two weeks of investigation which culminated in the arrest of employees in three gypsy tea rooms at 144, 146 and 156 West Thirty-fourth Street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, showing a concerted effort on the part of law enforcement officials to curb the practice.21 Without the allure of fortune telling, patrons found little reason to visit gypsy tea rooms, causing businesses to flounder and begin to shut down. In a 1941 New York Times article entitled “Fortune out as a Dessert,” Anna Meade, owner of a gypsy tea room in Queens,

said that she “lost (her) customers and had to start in again.” Following her second arrest, deciding her business was no longer viable without fortune telling, she claimed to be “giving up, and moving out.” The effect of harsher enforcement therefore played no small role in the disappearance of fortune telling establishments towards the middle of the century. The economic conditions of the 1930s and 40s did gypsy tea rooms no favours either. The Great Depression in the early 1930s which followed the economic boom of the 1920s saw the unemployment rate skyrocket from 5.2% to 18.26%, reducing household incomes across the United States.22 World War II was also suspected by Whitaker to be a probable cause of low demand.23 Tea rooms which provided food with entertainment such as divination for a higher fee were an unnecessary expenditure, causing revenue at gypsy tea shops to wane. The fortune telling industry suffered as a result of the poor demand for and subsequent closure of the tea rooms it was made to occupy. The survival of the gypsy tea room was also threatened by new stringent health codes and stiff insurance premiums because they sold food, causing some to abandon the concept altogether. Using the Gypsy Tea Kettle chain in 1946 as an example, a 1993 New York Times article noted that these conditions raised the cost above any possible price they could charge a patron. As the company’s owner Mrs. Haber lamented, “How much can (one) charge for a cup of tea?”24 By making fortune telling unprofitable, the Great Depression, along with World War II and cost conditions, forced most gypsy tea rooms to cease operations. The reasons for their closure further entrenched the role of fortune telling as a commodity, highlighting its close relationship to the profit and survival of tea shops through the latter’s evident inability to survive without putting fortune telling on the menu. The death of the fortune telling industry certainly did not go uncontested, with a 1936 attempt at unionisation having been reported on in Time Magazine. The National Association of Fortune Tellers voted to picket all tearooms employing other than Association tea-leaf readers and appeal to President Roosevelt to push repeal of state statutes outlawing fortune telling. Manhattan-based Keynoted Speaker “Gypsy Lee” was quoted as saying “fortune tell-

ing is not going to escape modernization,” and insisted that the practice would “undergo a streamlining process.”25 Their attempts were, however, in vain, as neither of their strategies had any notable impacts. The decline that had been set in motion by legislation and financial conditions had sealed the fate of fortune telling in the city. Even in its last stand against market forces and law enforcement, the tea room fortune telling of the late 1930s revealed itself to be radically different from its predecessor. Romani Gypsies with no affiliation to tea rooms operated under a wildly different, informal legal structure. Chohaney observed that Kumpania (local economic alliance) members paid regular taxes to the Rom Baro (important Rom), whose role it was to maintain amiable relationships with non-Rom authorities by exchanging insider reports on non-affiliated Rom in the area for favors.26 The juxtaposition of traditional informal economic alliances with phrases like “modernization” and “streamlining process” serves to highlight the new ties forged between fortune telling and the formal capitalistic economy. The use of fortune telling as a source of income for tea rooms ironically cheapened the practice, rendering it as nothing more than an intentionally exotified form of casual entertainment in the eyes of New York’s tea shop patrons. The transfiguration of this art was evident through all periods in the lifespan of the gypsy tea room, from its conception in the 1920s to its complete eradication by the 1950s. One must, however, note that this transformation was symptomatic of the forces that shaped urban landscapes across the globe during that era. Several trends had an unmistakable bearing on this change, including the establishment of female-centric spaces, as well as the creation of subcultural spaces like Greenwich Village, and the proliferation of urban immigration. As such, the co-opting of gypsy cultural practices into the formal economy via the tea room, in light of the social and economic conditions that supported it, certainly seems to have been fated.

1 Jan Whitaker. Tea at the Blue Lantern Inn: A Social History of the Tea Room Craze in America. (St. Martin’s Press, 2002) Location 98. 2 Judith R. Walkowitz. City of Dreadful Delight Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London. (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2011) 48. 3 Whitaker, Location 239. 4 Walkowitz 46. 5 Marlene B. Sway. “Fortune Telling Practice Among American Gypsies.” Free Inquiry in Creative Sociology, vol. 15, no. 1, May 1987, pp. 3. 6 Whitaker, Location 1807. 7 “Gypsies” in the United States. Smithsonian Institution, www. smithsonianeducation.org/migrations/gyp/gypstart.html. 8 Michael L. Chohaney. “Locational Determinants and Valuation of Vlach Rom (Gypsy) Fortune-Telling Territories in the United States: An Integrated Application of Economic and Cultural Logics and Methods.” Applied Geography, vol. 53, Sept. 2014, pp. 33. 9 Erin St. John Kelly. “The Storefront Psychic: A Peek Inside.” New York Times, 14 May 1995. 10 Chohaney 37. 11 Whitaker, Location 220. 12 Whitaker, Location 221. 13 Whitaker, Location 1961. 14 George Chauncey. Gay New York: The Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940. (Flamingo, 1995) 233. 15 Whitaker, Location 1964. 16 Whitaker, Location 1967. 17 Whitaker, Location 203. 18 Chohaney 33. 19 Rena Gropper and Carol Miller. “Exploring New Worlds in American Romani Studies: Social and Cultural Attitudes among the American Mačvaia.” Romani Studies, vol. 11, no. 2, Dec. 2001, pp. 92. 20 “Latest Legislative Bills.; Fortune-Telling Prohibited and Advance ‘Phone Payments Barred.” New York Times, 17 Feb. 1911. 21 “Tea-shop Raids Net 13.; 11 Freed, One Fined for Fortune-Telling, An other Held.” New York Times, 21 Apr. 1934. 22 “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” National Archives, National Archives and Records Administration, www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2012/spring/1940. html. 23 Whitaker, Location 181. 24 Adam Green. “From Tea Leaves to Tarot Cards.” New York Times, 1 Jan. 1993. 25 “Seers.” Time, 12 Oct. 1936. 26 Chohaney 35.