kaylasmom and I were going through our music collection the other day, when we came across her boxed set of LPs, Unforgettable Nat “King” Cole, that she had obtained as a young girl from the Longines Symphonette Society. The address on the box is given as Symphonette Square, Larchmont, NY.
Yahoo! maps reveals nothing of the existence of such a street (or square, or plaza, or however it was configured thirty-five years ago). Are there any old-timey Dopers living in the vicinity of Larchmont, New York, who might have knowledge of the actual physical whereabouts of the erstwhile Symphonette Society? Idle curiosity is at work here, rather than any burning desire to discuss the work of Mr. Cole, so I think this is the right forum for the question.
My bet is that it didn’t exist at all and was merely a mailing address for large mail order companies. Longines Symphonette and The Wittnauer Precious Metals Guild both used the address Symphonette Square, Larchmont, NY. Wittnauer who were like an early Franklin Mint with coins and medals apparently gave the ZIP code as 10532 which is not Larchmont but Hawthorne NY.
(from here - but I’m not quite sure whose offices they are talking about)
My money would also be on a disguised “mail drop” address. These are a favoured approach of certain businesses that wish to appear to have a prestigious address when in fact they are backroom operations (not that I am suggesting this is necessarily the case here). There are lots of companies that rent mailboxes so that people can have prestigious addresses such as “Suite 123, 10 Regent Street, London W1” or whatever (fictitious example).
I wasn’t suggesting a mail drop. It can be better for the post office to allocate a ZIP or post code for mail sorting purposes, if lots of mail goes there. For instance Reader’s Digest get so much return mail that at some Aussie mail exchanges their mail is sorted into a separate bin.
Service addresses such as “Suite 123, 10 Regent Street, London W1” are generally no shonkier than anyone else. It’s just a way to have a good address without the overheads. Very smart if you are never in the office.
I agree that they’re shouldn’t necessarily cause suspicion, but there have been a number of cases recently highlighted on consumer-affairs shows in the UK where firms running dubious “prize draws” or even outright scams have used such mailboxes. It makes it that much harder to get any comeback if the only address you have for the firm leads to a room full of anonymous mailboxes.
Of course, there are also plenty of legitimate reasons to have a mailing address, and I don’t mean to blacken the name of the Longines Symphonette Society. All I’m saying is that it’s very doubtful that the address physically exists as the offices of the organisation.
Another possibility is that it could’ve been a legitimate business, but "Symphonette Square was simply the name of their building. For instance, the L.A. Times used to call their building “Times Mirror Square”, even though there is no square there; just a building with a regular street address. Now that they’ve been bought by the Tribune people, I don’t know if they still use that name. As another confusing example, there’s a “One Wilshire” office building at the beginning of Wilshire Boulevard, but the real address is 624 South Grand, and there are no single digit addresses in L.A.*
*except for in Venice, which is, of course, a world unto itself.
In 1965, the Longines Symphonette Recording Society moved into 200 Myrtle Boulevard, Larchmont, NY, as this article notes. Don’t know where it was before that, but the article seems to hint that it wasn’t in Larchmont.
Just in case you’re interested in visiting, 200 Myrtle Boulevard is smack up against I-95, the New England Throughway (which obviously wasn’t there in 1965). There is, however, a deli down the street.
