Mitch Broder - Discovering Vintage New York

Contents

For Patty

For King and Mindie

About the Author

M itch Broder covered New York City as a feature writer and columnist for Gannett Newspapers, the countrys largest newspaper chain. He has also written about the city for papers including the New York Times, the Daily News, and the Washington Post. He has won some of the top prizes in New York City journalism, including the Mike Berger Award of Columbia University. Read his blog at mbvintagenewyork.blogspot.com.

Acknowledgments

T he people who most directly made this book possible are the ones who own, manage, and otherwise tend to the places featured in it. Thanks to everyone who invited me in, showed me around, told me stories, and kept the places going long enough for me to show up.

The person who most literally made this book possible is Kevin Sirois, my editor at the Globe Pequot Press. He liked my idea immediately, guided the project skillfully, and fielded my questions respectfully. For an editor, thats the Triple Crown.

The person who made Kevin possible is my agent, Anne Marie OFarrell of the Marcil-OFarrell literary agency. She found the right publisher quickly and has stayed at my side ever since. She is the one who actually got me to write.

Thanks to the authors who offered advice, to the bloggers who offered support, to the research professionals who offered assistance. Thanks in particular to the staffs of the Museum of the City of New York, the New-York Historical Society, and the New York Public Library.

Thanks to my sister, Jamie Broder, who provided free legal services along with free encouragement. And thanks to my parents, King and Mindie Broder, whose wisdom and support make every journey more promising and more worthwhile.

Special thanks to Rick Allen, my MacBook consultant, who is always there when I need him, which is recurrently. Thanks to friends who have helped in other ways, including Jim Downey, Gary Greenhill, Jeff Mangum, Ryan Ostrosky, Jen Poulsen, Hank Shaw, and Mary Shustack.

And devoted thanks to Patricia Greenhill, who along the way has contributed everything from blogging tutorials to a really comfortable chair. If not for her, you would now be reading some other book. And if not for her, I would know far less about patience, faith, and love.

Introduction

I was looking forward to sharing the story of the coffee shop with the airplane seats, especially since I had already gone to the trouble of writing it.

But you wont find it here. The coffee shop has been grounded, stranding thousands of passengers, along with my thousand-word write-up. The coffee shop was The Primeburger. It was almost fifty years old. It was also one of the places that inspired this book. Its prime features were its box seats with swiveling fake-walnut tray tables, which called to mind airline decor, if not oversize high chairs. With those seats, along with its space-age lights and white-jacketed waiters, The Primeburger did a matchless impression of 1965. And its history reached back to the forties, when it began as Hamburg Heaven, which, as irony would have it, is where it ended up.

When businesses are around for a long time, you never know how much longer theyve got. Rents go up. Owners step down. Buildings get sold (ask The Primeburger). Haunts that you think of as permanent can vaporize in a flash. Thats the punishment for writing a book about them. Also the reason.

I first thought of this project years ago, and it got steadily more manageable: Place after place that I would have written about shut down. I decided that Id better start writing before the title Vintage New York was forced to refer to spots that had been around for more than a week.

So I visited the classic restaurants, shops, and nightspots of Manhattan, and I put several dozen of those places in one place. Of those, I spotlighted fifty. I wrote what each is like now and how it got that way. I did a really swell job on The Primeburger.

The places are old, but this isnt a book about old places. The places are historic, but this isnt a book about historic places. Its a book about old and historic places that take you back in timeplaces that can make you feel like youre back where they started. They range from a newsstand that serves egg creams to a cabaret that serves caviar; from a deli that gives you a ticket to a restaurant that gives you no menu. They include the home of the power lunch and the home of the hot-dog-and-papaya lunch. Its hard to imagine that there isnt something in here for everyone.

The spots range in age from just under 50 to over 150, but not every spot in Manhattan within that age range is here. There were rules. Foremost among them was that the place had to look the part. If it didnt take you to a specific era, it had to at least get you out of this one. It wasnt enough to be established 1892, if the place making that claim looked more like it was established Thursday. It wasnt enough to bear the name of a famous New York destination, if the name was about the only remaining link to that destination.

I focused on places that you visit for fun, aware that fun is subjective. You can have fun at a hardware store; still, I did not include one. On the same principle, I omitted the likes of drug stores and butcher shops. Except for the exceptions. Choosing was not an exact science. But I chose comfortably sized spots, since there were enough to go around. There are no hotels, museums, theaters, department stores, skyscrapers, or monuments here. Those kinds of places all have plenty of books of their own. This one is for spots where a big crowd is always a small one.

In short, I chose places that some of us see as the heart of New Yorkthe ones that created the city thats squeezing the likes of them out. When places like these close, people who always meant to visit them start grieving. I wrote this book to save you some grief. I didnt write it to proclaim my preference for a bygone city, though I just did. I wrote it to encourage people to enjoy whats left of that city. I also wrote it because theres more to enjoy at a place whose story you know, and all the places Ive chosen have stories that are well worth knowing.