For 65 years the Occidental Restaurant attracted the rich, the famous, and, most of all, the powerful. Everybody who was anybody ate there, and its walls were lined with the proof: signed and framed photographs of its best-known patrons. By the 1950s more than 2,500 of them covered the walls.
In an era of prosperity and peace, of sporty cars and speakeasies, of Calvin Coolidge and Al Capone, he led a fashion-conscious city through the Roaring Twenties. His name was Julius Garfinckel, and in his time he reigned as the merchant prince of the nation’s capital.