JUAREZ JAZZES PACE OF HOURS
Nine O'clock Deadline Makes Afternoon Evening
Tuxedos Walk Unabashed in Full Light of Sun
BY NORMAN WALKER
[EXCLUSIVE DISPATCH]
JUAREZ (Mex.) June 29.— Jazz and dinner jackets in the daytime are Mexico's newest contribution to the current pleasure of two republics. Since a benevolent Uncle Sam closes the international bridges each night at 9 o'clock, the Palacios de Jazz are not so jazzy and the bright glow along the street of a thousand red lights is somewhat dimmed and has lost its intriguing glamour.
No one on the border thinks of eating dinner before 7 o'clock in the evening—oh, dear, no—and two hours to drink one's dinner and get through the long queue of automobiles and across the bridge before the hog-tight gate is closed promptly at 9 bells is a problem which the pleasure-seeking ones have often failed to solve, to their sorrow.
DAYLIGHT SAVING PLAN
Now rather than take a chance on spending the night in Juarez with its one hotel approaching the first-class and with all the explanations incident to getting home the morning after, the boys and girls who like to come to Juarez for a good time make it an afternoon date and spend the afternoon and early evening under the imitation palm trees and the alleged fig trees in the various gardens, villas and maisons along Avenida Juarez.
This change in the plans of the pleasure seekers has caused a change in the geographical location of the wet zone in Juarez. In the past the cafes and brass rail bars have been concentrated within the one block along Calle Comercio. Outside of this zone the saloons were mostly for the natives and for the tenderfeet who love to tell the story of their slumming experience along the crookedest street in the world.
Now the bars and cafes along Comercio street are moving down toward the international bridge. Several popular places downtown have opened No. 2 places near the bridge and several brand new joints have sprung up along the river bank. This makes it possible for the folks who patronize them to park their automobiles on the American side of the river, walk across the bridge, thereby saving the price of a big McGinty beer, and park for the afternoon in one of these new jazz joints.
NIGHT BIRDS BY DAY
Enter the saxophone midnight sons with their dinner jackets in the middle of the day. El Paso and Juarez have become accustomed to seeing the braid bound Tux, running loose on the streets and in the ham-and-egg eating places, where the musicians eat, as early as 5 o'clock in the afternoon. For work starts promptly at 6 o'clock in the Juarez cafes and the syncopation lads do not crave paying cafe prices for their fodder on the Mexican side.
But to see the boys with their hair enameled like one of Henry Ford's chariots, running at liberty as early as 2 o'clock in the afternoon, is something new, even for blase Juarez, and the fact that the cowboys are working in the pictures1 is all that saves them from sudden death.
It's a gay life along the new Juarez Rialto which the 9 o'clock closing created. Old adobe residences have been converted into maisons and villas and have had beer garden attachments grafted on to their ancient and peaceful patios. Board front buildings have sprung up like a new mining or oil camp and the adobe maker is busy drying enough brick to supply the new joints which are building.
PLAYING TO EVE
One place advertises a grove of fig trees as a special attraction and invites "the ladies to climb the trees and help themselves." Another urges the customers to send a copy of the menu, with all kinds of wet goods listed, back to the folks at home, while a third calls the public's attention to the fact that is on the south bank of "the silvery Rio Grande." All of which proves that the proprietors got their inspiration on the same south bank of the "Silvery Rio Grande."
Saturday afternoon and Sunday are the two bright and shining days in the life of the Juarez cafe proprietors. Crowds flock over the bridge early on these weekend holidays and stay until they barely have time to hot-foot it back across the bridge ahead of the gate. Beating the gate has become an exact science with the cafe patrons, and they can estimate the time to the split second. It's a gay life if they don't wait a minute too long.