UNO-in-The Bronx

Though the Borough of The Bronx already boasted the Yankee Stadium and the world's biggest zoo, New Yorkers toiled like stage hands to fix it up with a world capital as well. The finished product was flossier, in a restrained, global way, than either El Morocco or Club "21," and could be reached by both the I.R.T. and Independent subways. But any resemblance to Versailles, The Hague or Geneva was purely coincidental.

Coldly considered, The Bronx's Hunter College, where UNO's delegates convened this week, was probably as good a place as any to bring a world problem. The echoing college gymnasium had been equipped with a false ceiling, a false floor, and paneled walls. Rose drapes and beige furniture had transformed the gym into a warmly decorated chamber with seats for 692 and perfect acoustics. Its council table held hidden microphones, its glassed-in balcony a gleaming mass of radio, motion picture and television equipment. It even had a specially built steel ballot box, equipped, against any eventuality, with a padlock.

Bilingual Ladies. By the time UNO's delegates arrived, the college cafeteria was ready to feed the men of all nations at a reasonable price (lunch: 50-c-). A Miss de Vienne Blanc had recruited a secretarial staff, and had enthusiastically announced that many of the girls were bilingual and all of good moral character. Said she, proudly: "We have no tramps here." A caterer named Lee Harding had spent four days & nights seeking a bartender capable of a high, international type of work, had found a man he hoarsely described as "one of the greatest bar characters in the city." The Marine Corps had sent 79 men in dress uniform to act as an honor guard, had immediately lined them up to form the letters UNO for pictures in the best Elks drill-team tradition.

But despite these comforts and conveniences, UNO-in-The Bronx lacked a certain cloistered air ordinarily associated with world conferences, whether held in field headquarters or marble halls. The 42-acre Hunter College campus was pleasant and green, but its turreted granite buildings were a little too obviously intended for educating young females. The UNO council chamber had been built in only 15 days and still looked, somehow, as though an irascible electrician might crawl out from beneath a desk. There were blackboards in the halls, a strong smell of paint in the air, and neat signs which still read "Corrective Room" and "Meditation Chapel." And, like most other newcomers to New York City, UNO had been engulfed as well as accepted.

Hotels had allotted 1% of their transient space (625 rooms) to delegates, but problems still arose. At the dignified Plaza, onetime haunt of the late F. Scott Fitzgerald, bullet-headed Soviet agents looked for a room for Ambassador Andrei Gromyko, turned down one with a balcony for fear a capitalist might rope his way up to the window with a roscoe. China's Victor Hoo knocked at the wrong room at the Waldorf-Astoria, was handed a bundle of laundry, had to exercise the utmost diplomacy to get the woman inside to take it back.

As the world-shaking meeting began, UNO seemed oddly like a setting hen with a nest in a threshing machine. It had a place out of the rain, a good food supply and a spot to brood on its clutch of world problems. But UNO seemed almost as preoccupied with keeping its beak out of the big city's machinery as in global meditation.

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