New York City Diners

There are some places that want to be perceived as diners and others that are intrinsically and naturally diners. The latter, which are usually family run, can be recognized by very large menus, a few traditional Greek dishes on those menus, a huge selection of Danish, muffins and elaborate cakes displayed on and behind the counter and never letting your coffee cup get less than half full. They serve breakfast twenty-four hours a day and fast service is provided by people who are professional waiters and waitresses. Their coffee-to-go is usually in a blue and white paper cup with, “It’s Our Pleasure to Serve You,” framed by two Ionic columns.

Lately, in New York City, mostly Manhattan, a new type of chain diner has been opening. They try for a 1950’s retro style featuring Doo Wop interior design with old signs and maybe some muscle car parts hanging on the walls. Their menus list items with cute names that they want us to believe mythical Eisenhower-era Americans lived on; burgers, shakes and sundaes. Was there ever a “Malt Shop” in New York City? Maybe there was in television land where the Nelson boys and Donna Reed’s kids hung out after school but no, not New York. No matter how hard I try, I can’t imagine Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks” sipping coffee in any of these Disneyfied places. There’s something contrived about the “new” diners that I would hate to see catch on.

I hope tourists don’t have a BLT at one of these theatre sets and think, “Wow, I’ve eaten in a New York City diner!” because they haven’t.

Some of the old favorites are gone now; the Market, Munson and Cheyenne, but there are enough of the originals left to easily give anyone who wants it, a genuine diner experience.

A handful of them still have waitresses with teased blond hair who will ask you, “What’cha havin’, hon?”

How could anyone give that up for a second-rate copy?

Play

Excerpts from my recently published personal essay, “The Pit,” in the Outrider Press PLAY anthology. 

. . . Carlo slipped about halfway across and fell off the beam. He landed face down on a pile of sand. The game stopped because we thought he was dead. As soon as he saw what happened, his brother, who was on the other team, ran to call their mother. A few of us kids climbed down and stayed with him. After what seemed like a long time to us but probably wasn’t, he sat up, spit out a mouthful of sand, and started cursing about something on the beam that he tripped on because it was too dark to see. He was a tough kid and embarrassed because he fell. He wasn’t hurt badly, just a broken arm. His mother arrived, took him by his good arm, and got into a cab to Saint Vincent’s Hospital emergency room. . .

. . . They tore out the playground equipment, trees, fences, and pavement. After removing everything else, I wondered why they left a long section of the handball wall where the courts used to be, the one closest to the Bowery. We kids didn’t play handball. The games we saw there were fast and played for money by tanned hard-looking men – Jews, Italians, and Puerto Ricans. They played with a small black rubber ball. You could hear the distinctive sound of it smacking into the wall over Bowery and Houston Street traffic noise. With Houston Street being widened, no one could ever play handball on that wall again. . .

A Keith Harring mural on the old hand ball wall. 

A New York Christmas Story

‘Twas the night before the night before Christmas, and I was feeling very content. Our shopping was finished, my wife and I just had coffee and homemade cookies with some neighbors, and we were planning to go to a big Christmas Eve family dinner the next day. I expected work to be light on the twenty-fourth, and we might even get to go home early. Yes, I was pretty content when I went to bed.

My department cell phone rang a little after three AM. It was Carol, the night shift Watch Commander at the Office of Emergency Management.

Always polite, she said, “Sorry to wake you, but we’ve got a bad one.”

As the person in charge of emergency operations, I got the call whenever the Department of Buildings was needed at an incident. I coordinated our response and managed our activity at the site, either by phone or going to the location.

“There was a gas explosion in a small multi-family house in Brooklyn, and there may be survivors in the rubble. FD is requesting structural advice on how to go through the wreckage.”

I got the rest of the details and immediately called the engineer-on-duty to give him this information. Since he lived in the Bronx, I was concerned about how long it would take him to get to the Brooklyn site. After hanging up, I called Debra, another Department engineer who lived a few blocks from me on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. I gave her the essential information and said I’d pick her up in twenty minutes. She didn’t usually go into the field and never in the middle of the night. Realizing lives could be at stake, she immediately agreed.

When I arrived at her building, Debra was waiting for me in work shoes, jeans, field jacket, and hard hat. She was ready to get to work. I drove an emergency response vehicle, so with lights and sirens at that time of night, we quickly got to Brooklyn.

The Fire Department incident commander filled us in when we arrived. “It was a new three-family house, and only one family had moved in: two adults, one child. We haven’t had any signs of fatalities or survivors.” It wasn’t entirely negative news if we were still talking about survivors.

A verbal emergency declaration had been issued for a City contractor to come to the scene with heavy equipment. When the paperwork was done, it would say, “sift and remove debris.” “Sift” being a sensitive euphemism for “look for bodies.”

The equipment was on site with an expert operator waiting for instructions on how to proceed. The atmosphere was somber. We were standing beside a heap of rubble and felt we might be looking at a young family’s grave. Under the glare of floodlights, Debra and I climbed onto the pile around the almost completely collapsed building. She looked for structural clues for its safe removal. I watched her back since, although an excellent engineer, she wasn’t familiar with collapse sites. I’d been to incidents like this many times, but I was still a little rattled getting around the debris. We naturally expect walls to be vertical, so the whole world seems out of kilter when you’re walking on one as though it was a floor, and its windows are facing skyward. Debra and I might have been moving too quickly and looked unsteady to the Chief. He scolded us, “Watch where you step. I don’t want to have to carry anybody else out of this rubble.”

Debra made her assessment and gave instructions to the grappler operator. He was good at what he did, and we all had faith in him. A grappler is a powerful piece of mobile equipment designed to be used very delicately. With Debra near the grappler and watching from a different angle, she and the operator had a running conversation on how to go forward with the debris removal. He started gently removing debris from the top of the pile and then meticulously peeling away sections of walls and flooring. It was slow-going, but after a time, we saw progress. Then we noticed there was only structural debris and no personal belongings, no furniture, no food or utensils in the kitchen, and no clothing in the closets. We were all dreading the discovery of the first body but now began to have some hope that there were no occupants in the building when it exploded. At about this time, the police had finally made contact with the property owner who confirmed this. Although a family rented an apartment, they had postponed moving in until after Christmas. The building was vacant, and there would be no casualties.

The good news quickly got around, and the dreary pall lifted from the scene. The sun was starting to rise, and the mood turned festive. A Red Cross truck at the site was serving coffee and protein bars to the responders, and it began to seem like a Christmas party. I thought of the last scene of It’s a Wonderful Life. We all went home feeling as good as Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed.

Last Night at the Plaza

I’m a native Manhattanite and sorry that I’d only been to the old Oak Bar in the Plaza Hotel a handful of times. I’m pretty sure that I first heard of it in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. It begins with Cary Grant, mistaken for someone else, being kidnapped at the bar.I know I went there occasionally, but I worked Downtown, so it wasn’t a convenient after-work place-to-go. And when I was in the area of Fifth and Fifty-Ninth, I’d choose someplace else without really thinking of the Oar Bar. It seemed a bit stodgy to me and my contemporaries, not a place we frequented.

When I heard it was closing, I suddenly felt nostalgic about losing the Plaza. I made it a point to stop in for a drink. I went to the Oyster Bar first. The bartender and I were the only ones there. I ordered a Beck’s, and we chatted while my oysters were being shucked. Neither of us brought up the hotel’s closing.

When the oysters were ready, he served them professionally, setting out napkins and utensils but the silverware threw me. When all I really needed was an oyster fork, he’d also placed a fish knife on my napkin. I looked at it – it was pewter with the monogrammed Ps of the Plaza on the handle. I put it in my inside jacket pocket. When I finished the oysters, another customer was coming in as I paid my check. The bartender and I gave each other a friendly smile as I walked out. I left cash under my beer glass. That covered the check, the tip and what I thought a Plaza fish knife was worth. I like that fish knife and still have it so I guess I thought it was worth a lot. I never got his name, but we had a commercial interaction in addition to the beer and oysters. He knew I would understand his offer and might be interested. By looking me over and talking a bit, he surmised I was the kind of guy who’d appreciate a Plaza souvenir and give him a fair price. Everything would be auctioned off or thrown away within a few weeks, and I think we both felt that at least one fish knife now had a good home.

I left the Oyster Bar and crossed the lobby to have a last drink at the Oak Bar. I enjoyed looking at the famous nighttime murals around the room and wondered what would happen to them. After commiserating with another customer about its closing, I left feeling nostalgic for something that I never really knew but was a big part of my city. There were no souvenirs for sale and the only Cary Grant sightings were in the imaginations of the customers and staff.

.

RUDY GIULIANI wanted to clean up Times Square. Some thought this was because it needed cleaning, others because Disney said,

“If you clean it, we will come.”

” . . . During a break in one of the first hearings, a city attorney called me and firmly said, “No more buttocks.” Asked, under cross-examination, precisely what his reported observation of “exposed buttocks” referred to, one of our inspectors had come up short. He couldn’t describe what he saw as having a precise beginning and end, which made his testimony useless. Since a buttock wasn’t clearly delineated, unlike other body parts specified in the regulations, the attorney said we should steer clear of them in future reports. . . “

Specified Anatomical Areas 

The Ham Sandwich

Rushing home to get on my computer for a one pm meeting, I still had time to stop at the deli and get something to go. I’d mute my mic while I ate and no one would ever know the difference. Glad there was no line when I arrived, I was upset to see Ali the Master Sandwich Maker wasn’t behind the counter. He took pride in his work, as any craftsman should. But he wasn’t there. Instead, a pretty young woman new to the deli stood in his place. Pretty or not, could she fill Ali’s shoes and live up to his excellent sandwich making skills?

“Hi, where’s Ali?”

She smiled but didn’t answer. Maybe she didn’t hear me.

I let it go and said, “Ham and Swiss cheese on a roll with mustard and lettuce, please.”

She held up two rolls, one on each side of her cheerful face, sesame on the left and poppy on the right. Now that was something Ali never did. He’d just pick up any old roll and that’s what I got. I pointed to the poppy and started to think that maybe his replacement wasn’t going to be too bad after all.

I got home and to my desk just in time, about two minutes to one. The meeting started and I muted so they couldn’t hear the crinkling of wax paper as I unwrapped my ham and Swiss. It was a good thing they couldn’t hear me because I said something unprintable when I saw orange American cheese instead of the Swiss I had asked for – very disappointing. As I explained some figures on a spread sheet to my associates, I quietly began to peel off the offending American cheese when I almost cursed again – mayo instead of mustard.

That was two strikes against the new sandwich maker. As quickly as I could, I ran to the fridge and grabbed the Gulden’s, reached in a drawer for a knife to spread it and got back to my meeting before anyone missed me. Most of the mayo was on the lettuce so I removed it and scrapped the rest of it off the bread. My desk began to look like a compost heap.

I thought I was finally ready to eat but no, I couldn’t. She might have been pretty, but she didn’t understand the underlying structure of a well-made sandwich. One has to be built, with each item carefully placed to evenly cover the bread to the right thickness, as Ali did. She cut a few slices of ham, folded them over and just laid them there leaving one side higher than the other. And she left bare spots, where a bite would result in a mouthful of bread and nothing else. I had to relocate each slice and by the time I corrected her amateurish mistakes, my keyboard was smeared with mayo and mustard.

Could she have sabotaged my sandwich on purpose? She seemed so sweet I couldn’t accept that. The only other explanation was that she didn’t understand English, and not just that, she must have come from a culture that didn’t understand sandwiches. When I made my order, she got “ham” and “cheese” but all the rest seemed to have been guess work on her part.

I half-heartedly ate my sandwich and continued with the meeting but I was distracted. I thought about the time Judge Sol Wachtler was in the news a few years back. Dissatisfied with the way the New York grand jury system worked, he felt it should be done away with. He said prosecutors had so much influence they could always get an indictment. They could even get the jury to “indict a ham sandwich.” If ever a ham sandwich deserved to be indicted, it was the one I had just eaten.

Autumn on the Lower East Side

My essay, Autumn on the Lower East Side, published in Artascent.

There are many street trees on the Lower East Side of Manhattan today, but when I was growing up there in the 1960s, the only ones we had were the Norway Maples in our church’s graveyard. I passed them every day going to and from school. They were how I gauged the seasons. I loved seeing the buds on the branches overhanging the graveyard wall in spring. They announced the school year nearing an end and summer vacation not being far away. But then, watching the leaves turn brown and fall to the sidewalk in autumn meant I had a dreary school year ahead of me. I loved spring and summer and didn’t mind winter but dreaded the coming of autumn when it got dark earlier every night.

In autumn, I’d go up to the roof of our apartment building to feed my uncle’s pigeons before we had dinner because it would be too dark afterward. I’d let them have one last flight before locking them in for the night. My uncle had a separate section of the coop, where he kept twenty white tiplers. He loved to watch them circle the roof altogether in a flurry of white. Tiplers like to fly in a tight group and often go to great heights. When dusk’s shadow covered the city, they would be far enough aloft to be still glittering in the sunlight. I was sometimes afraid that they were so high and the city below so dark, they wouldn’t find their way back to our roof, but they always did. They were white, but when they were at that height, the sunset’s last rays colored them in hues of orange and yellow.

My mother made autumn seem to come earlier than it should when she’d take me shopping for clothes for the new school year in August. I still had a few weeks of summer left, but those shopping trips reminding me of the start of school put a damper on the end of my vacation. We’d go to the Orchard Street shopping district on the Lower East Side. Like a lot of other mothers and sons, we’d make our way past the “puller in” standing in front of the clothing stores asking, “Nice suit for the boy?” My mother was loyal to Jay & Ess, a men and boys shop run by two brothers that she had developed a shopping relationship with over the years. They were nice guys, and both had those blue tattooed numbers on their forearms, so common in Jewish neighborhoods then. As a reward for my shopping patience, we’d go to Julie’s Toy Store afterward. He carried a large stock of model trains and accessories, and I’d get something to add to my set. Depending on which end of Orchard Street we were on when we finished shopping, we’d either go to Katz’s Deli on Houston Street for frankfurters and a Doctor Brown’s Cream Soda or Stolsberg’s Dairy Restaurant on Grand Street for a mushroom omelet and an egg cream.

The one thing about autumn that I did look forward to were the feasts. They were held on the streets of Little Italy and celebrated various saints – Gondolfo, Cirro, Rocco, and others. They started as autumn harvest festivals in towns and villages in Southern Italy and were carried over to America by religious societies. Local people set up stands selling traditional zeppoles or grilled sausage and peppers. There was always at least one stand that had nuts, dried figs, and various confections. Torrone is a type of candy that’s so hard it has to be cut with a heavy knife hit with a hammer. Us kids stood by to catch the chips that tasted like honey and went flying with every hammer stroke. Non-locals who worked the carnival and state fair circuit showed up at the Italian feasts with games of chance where you could win a goldfish or a parakeet. The fish never lasted long, but I once won a parakeet I named Tweety that we had for years. Each feast usually lasted about a week, ending on the saint’s feast day. There were bands and processions but what I liked most were the fireworks on the last night. The fouchi dártficio were ground displays with pinwheels and fountains spouting smoke and flames in every color imaginable. It ended late, and the kids who stayed up to watch it were sleepy in school the next day.

Long after the pigeon coop was gone, I still went up to the roof. From the parapet at the corner of the building, I could look east for almost the entire length of Houston Street to the edge of Manhattan island. To the west, I could see the sun setting over the Puck Building, a large old factory that was once the home of Puck Magazine. With my roof already in its shadow, instead of flying the white tiplers like I used to, I flew a kite. There were no open fields on the Lower East Side, so if a kid wanted to fly a kite, a roof was the only place. The kite would climb above the autumn twilight and be brightly lit by the sun’s final glimmer. It was still summer up there where the kite flew.

Autumn on the Lower East Side

The Neighborhood

My personal essay The Neighborhood was recently published in BEING HOME, an anthology of essays about the “spirt of place.”

” . . .  As I walked to my car, I passed a store selling elegant Italian shoes in the same location where my aunt and uncle once had an Italian restaurant. They called it Maria’s. There was no one in the family with that name. They just liked the sound of it. I thought of my uncle, who instead of preparing squid in the kitchen one sunny afternoon, opened the fire hydrant in front of the restaurant, set up a chair and started cleaning them there in a large pot. He was the color of an old penny, never missing an opportunity to sit in the sun and work on his tan. Distracted talking to a friend, he let the pot overflow, sending the squid floating away down the gutter. My friends and I were playing nearby, and he called us over to run down the block and get them. We made a game of it and managed to catch every squid. I’m sure anyone who witnessed this didn’t order the calamari specials on the menu that night. . .”

From the editor – “. . . and by all means brag that your story won the 1st prize for the collection.”

The Neighborhood