ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, January 7, 1997 TAG: 9701070043
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: TRIP GABRIEL N.Y. TIMES NEWS SERVICE
Where are they now, the ashtrays of yesteryear?
Glass or porcelain, copper or melamine, $1.49 from Woolworth's or $410 from Hermes, their fading images linger in the memories of hosts and hostesses.
Once, they adorned linen-topped dining tables and gleaming mahogany board rooms. There were the heavy squares of amber glass with sluiceways cut deeply into the four corners. Or the tin receptacles set cunningly into bean-bag bases. Or the oblongs and moons of crystal, as much a part of a bride's registry as the silver porringer nut dish.
Gone now, all gone - banished in an increasingly smoke-free society.
Ashtrays, once commonplace, have entered a kind of twilight realm where they seem on the verge of becoming artifacts, as obsolete as 19th-century snuff bottles or champagne whisks.
That is not to say that smoking itself is on the verge of extinction. Despite a gradual decrease in the number of Americans who smoke - from 40 percent of the adult population in the early 1960s to about 25 percent today - 45 million people still puff away.
But smoking has become increasingly furtive, no longer welcome or acceptable in public, and the ashtray has all but disappeared as a visible accessory of modern life. Smoking is banned from most offices, restaurants and stores. In private homes, the smoker is often asked to step outside, where he or she huddles in driving sleet, then miserably grinds out the butt in the garden. No ashtray needed. The same scene is repeated in front of office buildings, where butts are flicked onto sidewalks.
In homes, ashtrays, if they are kept at all, are hidden away in drawers and kitchen cabinets. Detroit dropped them as standard equipment in some car models two years ago, the first time since the Model T.
In these twilight days of the ashtray, as it becomes ever more of an artifact, all sorts of odd perturbations in contemporary life have resulted.
``It really has forced decorators to rethink what makes a good coffee table,'' said Jeffrey Bilhuber, a New York interior decorator. ``Standard operating procedure was a stack of books and two beautiful ashtrays. Now, you've got to be really creative. If you tell most decorators they can't put any ashtrays on the table, they are absolutely perplexed.''
Bilhuber has been replacing ashtrays with small decorative sculptures.
As it has become less an accessory of everyday life, the ashtray has emerged in some quarters as a collectible - valued as a pure design object or an icon of American culture. Cooper-Hewitt has acquired a number of ashtrays representative of the smoking culture of the American Century.
One is a plastic souvenir commemorating the invention of nylon. A pair of chrome floor ashtrays from the 1950s once adorned a couple's living room, totemic figures that stood alongside his-and-her reading chairs.
Murray Moss, the owner of an industrial design store in Manhattan's Soho named Moss, said: ``I don't smoke, but I love ashtrays. It's a functional object which is so loosely defined, in which the function is so minimal, that people who do them well address other issues.''
Many industrial designers from the Bauhaus on have had a fling with the ashtray. But some of the most collectible ones, like salt and pepper shakers, appeal because of their kitsch value or for sentimental reasons.
``I stole a really nice one from a hotel in Venice,'' admitted Gaston Marticorena, a product designer and nonsmoker who has paid as much as $80 for a Baccarat ashtray to add to his collection of about 30. ``I just like the designs. They are going to be disappearing.''
Before taps is sounded for the ashtray, however, one ought to note its partial return thanks to the current cigar craze. Soon after young fogies discover expensive cigars, they seem to discover the expensive accessories that go with them, including $500 humidors, $325 cigar cutters and $60 black marble ashtrays with extra-long grooves to keep cigars from tipping into the bowl.
Hotel gift shops and the men's sections of department stores are abloom with cigar accessories, including many ashtrays also suitable as door stops.
Marvin Shanken, the editor and publisher of Cigar Aficionado magazine, said that when he tried to buy a cigar ashtray a few years ago, there were none to be found, but that today they are coming out of the woodwork.
``It's like when you go fishing, you take your fishing box and your pole,'' Shanken said. ``When you go smoking, you need your cigar accessories.''
At least, until the current mini-trend for flaunting one's bad habits cools off, and the ashtray resumes its march to oblivion.
LENGTH: Medium: 82 linesby CNB