Bill Makes Good Grub

I've had many a drink in the small, dark-wood bar of Bill's Gay Nineties restaurant (called the Silver Dollar Bar0, the unsung, old-school former speakeasy on E. 54th Street. But I've never eaten there. Few patrons know there's a second floor. I do, but every time I've peeked up there it's been desolate, the many tables and chairs unoccupied. I figured the food must not be such great shakes.

But, not trying is not knowing, so last night I sat down for dinner with a good friend among the countless framed playbills and posters of long-forgotten plays and attractions from the first years of Broadway. (The days before plays were meant to last.) A photograph of Maude Adams, the original Peter Pan, hung above my friend's head. Further up was a poster for a play called "Fine Feathers," ballyhooed as "the finest written play in our day." Never heard of it. Sarah Bernhardt, Ada Rehan, Edward Harrigan, Al Jolson, Mrs. Fiske and Tony Pastor looked down on us from other walls, all seeming to whisper "Sic transit gloria."

Our waiter was one of the oddest birds I've ever encountered. Slight, blonde, of indeterminate age and with an indeterminate accent, like those Hollywood contract players from the '30s who were perpetually playing "foreign." He could have been seated at the bar at Rick's in "Casablanca," waiting for a letter of transport.

The menu was short, with the usual assortment of meat and seafood favorites typical of chop houses of yesteryear. I had the Maryland Crab Cakes, my friend the Sesame Crusted Tuna. And both were quite fine! I had expected some circular hockey pucks made of crab, but my cakes were fresh and light and presented with care. The green beans were crisp and the side of remoulade sauce was a nice touch.

We had the hall all to ourselves from 6:30 to 7:30 PM. Bill's customers who choose to eat seem to prefer the cozy downstairs bar. But if you like privacy, while keeping company with the faded stars of the Rialto, head upstairs. There's also an upright piano. No idea if, or when, it's played.

After returning home, I turned up a little history about Bill's and discovered that in the 1930s, there was a notorious altercation between a Bill's doorman and famous journalist-screenwriter Adela Rogers St. John and her party, in which blood was spilled. Charges were eventually dropped on both sides, with the presided judge closing the trial with this self-penned verse:

There comes a night when we all get tight
And we drink queer drinks and we think queer thinks
And the world seems full of skating rinks.
Nobody cares if you fall downstairs
And nobody cares if the landlord swears.

Why Cemusa Sucks

All this time while the Spanish glass-and-metal boys Cemusa were zapping street corners with the new bus shelters and newsstands—part of a contract that Mike's City Hall accepted a shitload of money for—it never occurred to me to visit the company's website. But today I did, and now I know why Cemusa is bad for New York.

Why? Because they don't care about New York City, what it is, what it's made of, what the environment is like here. If they did, they wouldn't have given us the same damn shelters and newsstands they gave Spain?

The "street furniture" (awful term) was designed by the Dickensian-sounding Grimshaw Industrial Design. Check out the website and look under "Projects" and then "Full Project List," and click on the Spain street furniture images and then the New York street furniture images. They structures are almost identical. And since the Spain stuff was in place first, one gets the feeling that Cemusa and Grimshaw have just unloaded their stale Spanish leftovers on The Big Apple, which no consideration that our City might deserve its own particular, site-appropriate shelters and newsstands. No, we're just part of the lousy old Global Village, right? so we can take on the same things Madrid did.

Unspecial. Unoriginal. Anti-individualistic. Cemusa and Grimshaw's work is everything New York is not, and should not be.

A Good Sign: Solomon's Appliance Repair

Solomon's traffics in the obsolete notion that appliances don't have to be thrown away once they break; they can be repaired! I hear Solomon's can fix almost anything. The store is in Bensonhurst in 86st Street near 17th Avenue, and has been around for more than 55 years. The sign features those words you like to see: factory authorized. They're not kidding. Solomon's is a factory service center for about 100 companies, including Black & Decker, Braun, Dirt Devil, Kitchen Aid, Norelco and Waring.

A Trip to Murray's

Murray's Sturgeon Shop on the Upper West Side is the kind of city treasure that just bides its time quietly year after year, not garnering excess publicity, just standing firm, doing what it does. Murray Bernstein, the owner of the shop, and a man renowned for his standards and skill with a knife, sold the store in 1974 to restaurateur Artie Culter, who sold it to Ira Goller in 1990. Murray retired to Florida and died in 2000. Cutler, the guy who would go on to create the dining monsters Carmine's and Ollie's, died in 1997.

Craig Claiborne called the shop the City's best. The store retains its days-of-old feel (see the below photos). The neon sign can't be beat. And I can vouch for the quality of the whitefish in wine sauce that I bought. Morever, my wife, who has had much more whitefish in her time than I, praised it.

A recent report in Crain's noted that owner Ira Goller has a "nice landlord" and is in the middle of a "long-term lease." May it stay that way. The chain-ridden Upper West Side's soul currently hangs on the continued existence of a few shops, among them Zabar's, Fairway, Citarella, H&H Bagels, Barney Greengrass, Gryphon Book Store and Murray's. It can't afford to lose one more landmark.

CSI: Williamsburgh Bank Building

The Williamsburgh Bank Building's main hall was one of the things open during Open House New York last weekend. Hours were long, there were no lines, and virtually no one was supervising visitors (I witnessed one Russian family sneak in a back elevator and head north to parts unknown), so anyone who paid a call was in for a treat.

The details of the Byzantine, basilica-like banking hall, there to be lingered over, were tantalizing. Everywhere you turned there was some stone carving, piece of ironwork or tilework that symbolized thrift, industry or other noble human endeavor. Who knows when the owners of "One Hanson Place" will next allow regular folk to gaze upon these wonders, so I took a few shots to share.

East Side, West Side

The past weekend was Open House New York, possibly my favorite two days of the New York City calendar. As in the past four years of the annual event, hundreds of City edifices and monuments that are typically closed to visitors threw open their doors.

I devoted Sunday to OHNY and managed to hit five sites before I tuckered out. The first two were the High Bridge Water Tower at 174th and Amsterdam, once part of the Croton Aqueduct system (no line there), and the Little Red Lighthouse underneath the George Washington Bridge (huge line). The above view is from the top of the first, the below view from the top of the second.

Holy Mackerel, A Phone Booth

I thought these icons of yesteryear had totally disappeared from New York streets years ago. But seeing is believing. This holdout stands at 90th Street and West End Avenue. And it works, good citizens. Did Verizon get some sort of kickback from the New York Historical Society for keeping it in use?

Rue de Lexington

Sometimes a single landowner can improve life in NYC through a eccentric act of pique.

Take the worthy who owns the three-story, strangely shaped, white-brick building at the northeast corner of 71st Street and Lexington. The property is home to a string of small businesses—classic New York small businesses, in fact: a news agent, a locksmith, a shoe repair shop, etc. Aside from their narrow acreage, they have only one thing in common: the same, unusual, red-and-white striped awning.

There can be no other reason for all these candy-striped awnings than that they are imposed upon the merchants through the leases written up by the landlord. It's a pretty little stipulation. The effect of so many attractive awnings on so many tiny storefronts is of walking down a Parisian side street.

I stopped in one of these inviting stores, Empire Shoe Repair, which, for some reason, is advertised in the from window as The Empire Shoe Repair. (Which empire?, one might ask.) It's been there for 45 years, and is run by one Chaim Yigal Dzhurayev, which may be one of the best names I've ever heard.

Cemusa Mushrooms

Those Cemusa bus shelter/newsstand people strike like lightning.

Last Thursday night I was waiting for the (loathsome) B61 bus at around 7 PM. There was no bus shelter there, just a pole with a MTA sign on top as usual. The next night at the same time, I arrived at the bus stop and the above structure was in place. Just like a mushroom, it grew overnight, only needing a bench and the netting to be cleared away for it to be complete. Wham!

Does Cemusa put these things in so quickly because they pride themselves on efficiency? Or do they want to deflect criticism by driving the stakes in so fast no one has time to cry "stop!"? (A Robert Moses stratagem.)

I was OK with these bus shelters at first. They were sleek and quasi-European. And they gave you a place to sit down. But now that there are three or four of them on Atlantic, it's starting to dawn on me what the City will look like when Cemusa has taken over. "Bladerunner," anyone?

You Can't Tear HoJo Down That Easily

The death of the Times Square Howard Johnson's was one of the catastrophes that inspired this blog. So it's been an irritant that the poor restaurant has been sitting there, a crumbled heap of bricks, with an ugly blue fence around it, and no structure rising to replace it. If they wanted to kill it so fast, then what's the hold-up?

Well, Curbed sheds a little light. As the construction workers were bashing away, they ran up against this protuberance which seemed to belong to the building next door. That building? The Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, home until recently of "Beauty and the Beast," delight of tasteless parents and kids everywhere. The secret brick room within the HoJo was actually the downstairs refreshment bar at the theatre, a bar that the Lunt owners were still using every night to sell overpriced cokes to tourists. Those owners are the Nederlanders, and the Nederlanders don't let go of anything they own easily. Screech! Work came to a halt.

So, WTF? Even for New York, this is weird. Why did part of the Lunt-Fontanne poke out into HoJo land? Well, the Times, which is good as this fusty real estate history stuff, explained: "The bar is a vestige of the old Globe Theater, whose main entrance ran through a brownstone building on Broadway. When the Globe, which opened in 1910, was renovated and renamed the Lunt-Fontanne in 1958, the Broadway entrance was closed. Its owners later sold the Broadway building but, through a property easement, held on to the small section that now contains the bar."

How deep in the City records was that document?

Anyway, the two parties finally came to a deal. The bar will be demolished and then rebuilt. Whew! Now, we can finally get that Niketown built!