Sank Roo Doo Noo.
Now that is an easy address in Paris to memorize, and that phonetic spelling for 5 Rue Daunou (a few blocks from the Opera stop on the Paris Metro and the main Galeries Lafayette) has long replaced the official address. Anything associated with Ernest Hemingway and the other American expatriates in Paris is on my check list, and this trip I found Harry’s New York Bar.
Now I need to ask an important question to others who may have been there before me. The interior décor is dominated by the banners of American colleges and universities, hundreds of them. But as hard as I looked, I could not find banners for either the College of William and Mary or the University of Virginia.
Virginia Tech, George Mason, Virginia Military Institute, Washington and Lee – they were all there, and other Virginia schools. Some I actually saw on the walls, and then I saw them again when the waiter gave me a plastic-coated listing with agate type so small it comes with a magnifying glass. Again, I didn’t see them on the list, not W&M or UVA.
If I just missed them and others can confirm their presence or know where they are, please advise. It is a surprisingly small place, just a couple of rooms, for all the history it has (they claim George Gershwin wrote American in Paris there.) It is not the bar that Hemingway famously “liberated” in August 1944. That one was at the Paris Ritz, a favored Nazi haunt during the occupation.
But this is a famous American hangout and I want to be sure those schools are represented. If nobody can testify their colors are there, that is reason enough to mount another expedition to the Second Arrondissement. (Not that we can’t find another excuse go back yet again in a couple of years.)
— SDH
