Wooden Phone Booth Sighting: O'Connor's

I was recently alerted (by its author) of a brand new blog called Here is Park Slope, set on covered all things concerning, yes, Park Slope. I checked in and it looks like Dan Myers is already up to some good work there. But that's not why I'm posting this. I'm posting this because the resourceful Myers has found a wooden phone booth that I did not know about. It's in the old dive, O’Connor’s, on Fifth and Bergen. I've been wanting to check out that place for some time. The pictures entice me even more.

The Dumbest Thing I've Ever Heard

Passing by the depressing dust-gatherer that the Gage & Tollner building has become since losing its most recent tenant (TGI Friday's—shudder!) two years ago, I got to wondering what was up with the poor brownstone and its landmarked (and, I'm sure, unattended-to) interior. There are stop work orders all over the front and the inside looks to be in disarray.

This lead me to a comment made last August by Joseph Chirico, the last man to own an operate the Gage & Tollner space as Gage & Tollner. He told the New York Post that he had retained the "naming rights" to the famed eatery and hope to reopen "at a new location within two years."

If further proof were needed that Chirico—who also owns the Marco Polo restarant in Carroll Gardens—never knew what he had in Gage & Tollner, or how to run it, this is it.

Open at a new location? The very heart of the restaurant, which existed for 125 years, was its location. Gage & Tollner was upholding no grand culinary traditions when it closed. What it had in its favor was a perfectly preserved 19th-century interior. The 36 gas lamps, cherry-framed mirrors and mahogany tables stay on Fulton Street—they don't follow the name to whatever pile of bricks Chirico slaps the good names of Charles Gage and Eugene Tollner on. Jesus Christ. Does this need to be explained? The Four Seasons ain't the Four Seasons without Philip Johnson and the Seagram Building, and Gage & Tollner will never be Gage & Tollner anywhere but on Fulton in Downtown Brooklyn.

This bizarre idea of Chirico's, however, may explain why the Gage & Tollner signage has been removed from the brownstone. The etched letters in the window, gladly, can't be wiped away.

On the Death of Newspapers

Businesses and institutions are dying left and right these days, but, still, we New Yorkers naturally assume some familiar landmarks will stay with us no matter what. No one's going to tear down the Empire State Building. We're not going to give the Statue of Liberty back to the French. There will always be a Broadway, however diminished. And every morning will begin with the New York Times.

We may want to rethink that last one. As much as living in New York City without the New York Times (as we know it) is an unacceptable thought for me, I was forced to begin considering the idea after reading an unsettling piece in The Atlantic called End Times. You'll have to read the thing yourself to fully grasp how far up shit's creek is the hugely leveraged Grey Lady. (Moving to a expensive new building just before a huge recession, when you're already experiencing decreasing ad revenue and circulation is not a good idea. And doing business with unseemly Mexican billionaires is so un-Timeian.)

But it was this passage that really seized my heart, and not in a good way:

The collapse of daily print journalism will mean many things. For those of us old enough to still care about going out on a Sunday morning for our doorstop edition of The Times, it will mean the end of a certain kind of civilized ritual that has defined most of our adult lives. It will also mean the end of a certain kind of quasi-bohemian urban existence for the thousands of smart middle-class writers, journalists, and public intellectuals who have, until now, lived semi-charmed kinds of lives of the mind.

Hey. That's me.

If I had known that, as a free-lancer, I was living such a charmed, bohemian existence, I would have enjoyed it more.

Old Red Hook Storefront Having Weird New Life as Art Gallery

The open-air, no-charge, living museum that is the Red Hook storefront at 382 Van Brunt Street hasn't changed in forever (except at Christmas, when it is draped in boughs and wreaths). The windows have displayed the same aging array of dusty mercantile junk (an old GE neon sign, a sled, a suitcase, a fire hose, a bottle of bubbly) for years. But a recent viewing saw the store breathing a little contemporary air.

Displayed on either side of the weathered door are two small oil paintings depicting urban Brooklyn scenes. Are they for sale? Just for show? Did the building's owner paint them? Will there be other, different art exhibits in the future?

Frankly, I feel they spoil the former airless purity of the window display.

Polish Paris

Have I never posted about Greenpoint's Paris Shoe Store before? How could this be? I thought I had. Anyway, I freakin' love this little shop.

First of all, I love independent shoe stores period, mainly because, well, there aren't that many left, and, for some reason I can't explain, they all have a wistful, plaintive air about them. Nothing quite reeks of lo-fi, old-world values as a family-owned shoe store.

Furthermore, old shoe stores can almost always be counted on to feature a sort of storefront set-up I dearly adore. I wish I knew the architectural term for it, but it's that arrangement in which there are narrow, but roomy glass display cases on either side of a tiled walkway that leads up to the recessed front door. The blueprint kindly allows the shopper to browse the shop's entire stock without the pressure of actually entering the store. It also furnishes a little contextual variety to the street scene. The only other businesses I know that regularly featured this store design in the past were hat shops.

The shop's name is somewhat hilarious in its grand ambitions. What did or do the denizens of Greenpoint care about "Paris Style Shoes." Now, "Shoes for Kiddies," maybe. And certainly the big sale advertised on the left in English and on the right in Polish is of great interest.

I know nothing of the history of the shop, or even when it was founded. Just after World War II, I'd say. Anyone who knows more, please write in.

Sad News from the Eating Front

Eater reports two saddening developments. Rosario's, a standby of quick, fast, hot slices on the Lower East Side, has been shut down by the Department of Health. My guess is this stubborn holdout will bounce back soon.

Not so sure about La Goulue, the 37-year-old French restaurant on Madison Avenue that, I'm sure, has brought refined joy to legions of Ladies Who Lunch over the decades, and always makes me smile when I pass it by. (The prices usually prevent me from stopping.) You'd think this sort of place would be immune from the recession, and probably it was. The trouble here is the landlord would not renew the owners' lease.

The owners hope to move to another location.

St. Anthony of E. 28th Street

This old, five-story building on E. 28th Street seemed too grand and unusual not to have a story behind it. So I did a little detective work on the current home of Chef 28.

First of all, old it indeed is. It was built in 1879. And not by some hack either. The architect was Renwick, Aspinwall & Russell, as in James Renwick Jr., as in Grace Church and St. Patrick's Cathedral.

It's not so unusual that Renwick should design such a minor building, when you consider its occupants. This was the first fraternity house of St. Anthony Hall. Wha? Huh, you say? Read:

St. Anthony Hall, also known as Saint Anthony Hall and The Order of St. Anthony, is a national college literary society formerly known as the Fraternity of Delta Psi... The first, or "Alpha" Chapter was founded at Columbia University on January 17, 1847, which is the feast day of St. Anthony...In 1879, Baird's Manual characterized the organization as having "the reputation of being the most secret of all the college societies." References appear in several F. Scott Fitzgerald short stories, and the Order has a distinguished architectural inheritance.

Yeah, Fitzgerald would be obsessed with such a club as St. Anthony. Anyway, this chapter was connected to Columbia when the university was at 49th Street and Madison Avenue. When Columbia moved uptown in the late 1920's, the fraternity relocated but kept the building on 28th as a clubhouse for some years.

There is a small coat of arms, worn down by time, on the fourth floor.

The Brooklyn Automat As It Was

I wrote recently about an old Automat sign that lingers outside a downtown Brooklyn building, now a discount clothing outlet called ABC.

Just a couple days after posting that, a friend of mine showed me a picture book of hers that has side-by-side photos of Brooklyn scenes today and many decades ago. Including in the array was a Fulton Mall shot of the very Automat I had been chronicling. Looks like it was a big mother.

The photo also reveals that the Wendy's next door to ABC used to be a Bickford's, another chain of the Automat era. I just know that Bickford's sign is lurking right behind the Wendy's facade. All I have to do is wait patiently for the Wendy's to die and for a construction crew to peel that smiling, freckled-faced girl's mug off the front.

A Full Meal at Foltis-Fischer's

I never noticed this building on Park Avenue South near 28th Street before. Foltis-Fischer? Interesting name. What gives?

OK, this gives. Foltis-Fischer was the unlikely moniker of a restaurant chain. Sounds like a design house in the Garment District to me. It was owned by Constantine Foltis, a Russian immigrant who got his training at Childs. He bought out the Fischer chain of restaurants and attached his name (putting it first, of course). His ambition didn't take him far, however. The chain was out of business by the 1940s. The building on Park was built in 1930.

In Daniel Fuchs' novel "A Summer in Willaimsburg," a character named Tessie would rather have a "milkshake are Sherry's than a full meal at Foltis-Fischer's." I think I know what she means.

Tin Pan Alley Loses the Encumbrance

I don't now if it's a good sign or a bad sign, but the strip of old buildings on W. 28th Street known a century ago at Tin Pan Alley has lost the unsightly scaffolding that has defiled its appearance since last summer. More than that—and I can't be sure of this—it looks like the block of addresses had been tarted up a bit. It's still painted a rather sickly shade of pale green, but it looks like a smoother, fresher coat.