Grant Willard and Dorothy Houghton spent all of May 18, 1917, being tourists in the streets of Manhattan. They rode a "rubber neck" carriage up Riverside Drive to Grant's Tomb.
They dined at the fabulous Marine Grill in the Hotel McAlpin at 34th Street and Broadway. Though the building still stands, the hotel disappeared in the 1970s. Luckily, you can still see some of the amazing terra cotta murals that adorned the walls of the Marine Grill at the Fulton Street Station of the NYC Subway!
And then, like all good tourists do, they went to a Broadway show. The Man Who Came Back, a melodrama by Jules Eckert Goodman, ran at the Playhouse Theatre from September 1916 to October 1917.
The New York Times called the play, starring Henry Hull (the future "Wolfman of London") and Mary Nash, a "little lurid." A play of "regeneration," it had to do with the debauched son of a wealthy man who drifts around the world until "he and a girl he has picked up on the way drink the dregs together in the lowest opium den in China. There and then--apparently because they have reached the bottom of things--they take hold of hands and wearily start the return to decency." Grant said the play "hit the spot" with him.
Their date ended when Grant dropped Dorothy off at the Martha Washington Hotel, and he made his way to his room at the Biltmore.
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