Disappeared Manhattan
Last night Travel Channel aired a special called “Disappearing Manhattan”. It was a Bourdain show under the “No Reservations” banner which usually means a better-than-average travel program with a realistic, no B.S. perspective. As a guide to some aging institutions in New York it was a solid show but the title was fairly misleading in my estimation. Many if not all of the places they chose to feature are in no danger of going away any time soon despite their advanced age and in fact have been featured on many other programs. Hell, Russ and Daughters was even part of a challenge on “The Next Food Network Star”.
But this post isn’t going to be a television review. Rather, this will be a list of some places in my Manhattan that have gone away or irrevocably changed. I’ve written about my college hangout before so this will cover places that I have haunted over the span of my post-collegiate working life.
Back when I started my first job in this industry I was making no money. I mean just about literally no money. We’re talking 300 bucks a week before taxes and I was already married to a newly-minted teacher was going through grad school. So there weren’t many places I could afford to relax with a cheap lunch and a few beers. One place a man could go was the Central Park softball fields. You could brown bag a sandwich and the friendly homeless folks who called the park home in the warmer weather pushed shopping carts around filled with ice and $2 Bud tall boys. Of course, this is before Saint Rudy turned this town into a kindergarten, now if you want to watch the Broadway stagehands softball league games on your lunch hour you’d better have a Vitamin Water in that brown bag or you’re getting a desk appearance ticket for having the temerity to consume a legal beverage al fresco.
Of course I couldn’t afford the luxury of cheap beer every day back then but fortunately there were alternatives. The late-great Coliseum Books on 57th and Broadway was somewhere you could go and hide in a corner and read for a while and it would cost you absolutely nothing. Once I started to have a little more money I frequently purchased books there, often ones I had already read large chunks of for free. It’s a shame to me that future generations will never have the pleasure of navigating the warrens of independent bookstores where the air was filled with the smell of the ancient wooden shelves and the new books. It’s a sense memory right up there with the smell of a new LP right out of the plastic. You can’t get that from looking at an Amazon item. Well, not yet anyway.
In those recessionary times of the early 90s a body needed a cheap place to drink after work and bitch about the bosses. We had the perfect place right on the corner of 55th and 7th. The name escapes me right now but for a good reason: we hardly ever went in the front door on 7th avenue. We would go into a door leading to a dark wood-paneled backroom where they had the free happy hour food which typically was tuna salad sandwiches on white bread. Hey, they had a budget too and the tuna salad was just fine. There were nights where tuna salad sandwiches and pitchers of whatever was cheap made a fine dinner for our crowd. That bar is long gone now; it became part of the Ben Ash deli chain before the turn of the century.
As the early 90s became the mid 90s and we all had a few more bucks we could afford to lunch regularly at a solid working man’s joint called the Shandon Star. Going to the Shandon Star was often referred to as “going for gravy” because the Shandon had some of the finest sliced meat, mashed and gravy ever produced by man. You would enter the narrow, dark bar with the prehistoric linoleum crackling beneath your feet and line up on the right side at the steam table where turkey, roast beef and corn beef lay glistening alongside mashed potatoes and huge bins of gravy. You’d grab a tray that was probably World War II army mess hall surplus and give your order to whichever of the ancient men in white looked at you first. My favorite was the roast beef on an enormous round roll soaked in gravy, a real 20 napkin job. After you were handed your plate you would slide it down to your left please, pay at the register and stop at the condiment table to load up with pickles and hot peppers. Then someone would watch the plates while the other person or persons went to the bar to order a pitcher or two of McSorley’s and briefly take note of whatever horse racing they had on the vintage early 1970’s color TV behind the bar. Once you sat down you might be joined by one or more of several bar cats that were in residence. Over in the corner a full time day-drunk might be napping while a few tables over to the other side might be some early-shift construction types who had already knocked off for the day and were getting tanked up before heading home. It was a place I loved, it was a place with charm, and it was a place I spent a fine St. Patty’s Day evening one year as it also happened to be the day I was fired from my first job in my chosen field as a result of having given 2 weeks notice to go work for a company that was perceived as a competitor. Unfortunately the Shandon Star now exists only in memory. Not only did it close, the building that housed it was demolished. What wonderful benchmark of progress replaced this humble working class watering hole? Why a Wendy’s, of course.
Tune in next time for Part 2 which will feature places that have gone away in the 21st century.
But this post isn’t going to be a television review. Rather, this will be a list of some places in my Manhattan that have gone away or irrevocably changed. I’ve written about my college hangout before so this will cover places that I have haunted over the span of my post-collegiate working life.
Back when I started my first job in this industry I was making no money. I mean just about literally no money. We’re talking 300 bucks a week before taxes and I was already married to a newly-minted teacher was going through grad school. So there weren’t many places I could afford to relax with a cheap lunch and a few beers. One place a man could go was the Central Park softball fields. You could brown bag a sandwich and the friendly homeless folks who called the park home in the warmer weather pushed shopping carts around filled with ice and $2 Bud tall boys. Of course, this is before Saint Rudy turned this town into a kindergarten, now if you want to watch the Broadway stagehands softball league games on your lunch hour you’d better have a Vitamin Water in that brown bag or you’re getting a desk appearance ticket for having the temerity to consume a legal beverage al fresco.
Of course I couldn’t afford the luxury of cheap beer every day back then but fortunately there were alternatives. The late-great Coliseum Books on 57th and Broadway was somewhere you could go and hide in a corner and read for a while and it would cost you absolutely nothing. Once I started to have a little more money I frequently purchased books there, often ones I had already read large chunks of for free. It’s a shame to me that future generations will never have the pleasure of navigating the warrens of independent bookstores where the air was filled with the smell of the ancient wooden shelves and the new books. It’s a sense memory right up there with the smell of a new LP right out of the plastic. You can’t get that from looking at an Amazon item. Well, not yet anyway.
In those recessionary times of the early 90s a body needed a cheap place to drink after work and bitch about the bosses. We had the perfect place right on the corner of 55th and 7th. The name escapes me right now but for a good reason: we hardly ever went in the front door on 7th avenue. We would go into a door leading to a dark wood-paneled backroom where they had the free happy hour food which typically was tuna salad sandwiches on white bread. Hey, they had a budget too and the tuna salad was just fine. There were nights where tuna salad sandwiches and pitchers of whatever was cheap made a fine dinner for our crowd. That bar is long gone now; it became part of the Ben Ash deli chain before the turn of the century.
As the early 90s became the mid 90s and we all had a few more bucks we could afford to lunch regularly at a solid working man’s joint called the Shandon Star. Going to the Shandon Star was often referred to as “going for gravy” because the Shandon had some of the finest sliced meat, mashed and gravy ever produced by man. You would enter the narrow, dark bar with the prehistoric linoleum crackling beneath your feet and line up on the right side at the steam table where turkey, roast beef and corn beef lay glistening alongside mashed potatoes and huge bins of gravy. You’d grab a tray that was probably World War II army mess hall surplus and give your order to whichever of the ancient men in white looked at you first. My favorite was the roast beef on an enormous round roll soaked in gravy, a real 20 napkin job. After you were handed your plate you would slide it down to your left please, pay at the register and stop at the condiment table to load up with pickles and hot peppers. Then someone would watch the plates while the other person or persons went to the bar to order a pitcher or two of McSorley’s and briefly take note of whatever horse racing they had on the vintage early 1970’s color TV behind the bar. Once you sat down you might be joined by one or more of several bar cats that were in residence. Over in the corner a full time day-drunk might be napping while a few tables over to the other side might be some early-shift construction types who had already knocked off for the day and were getting tanked up before heading home. It was a place I loved, it was a place with charm, and it was a place I spent a fine St. Patty’s Day evening one year as it also happened to be the day I was fired from my first job in my chosen field as a result of having given 2 weeks notice to go work for a company that was perceived as a competitor. Unfortunately the Shandon Star now exists only in memory. Not only did it close, the building that housed it was demolished. What wonderful benchmark of progress replaced this humble working class watering hole? Why a Wendy’s, of course.
Tune in next time for Part 2 which will feature places that have gone away in the 21st century.
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