Margaret Palca Now Bakes on Court Street

Margaret Palca Bakes isn't exactly a New York landmark yet, but it is sort of a Red Hook/Carroll Gardens West landmark, doing business in that nabe when back when nobody would.

It appears the outfit is branching out. I passed by a corner storefront on Court and Warren Streets with its windows papered with notices that Palca was now working out of the space. The corner used to house another bakery/deli/bagel place so anonymous and uninteresting that I don't even remember its name.

The company will still retain its store on Columbia Street, the clerk said. It will also apparently retain the same flat-footed service it offers at the old location. Palca makes good stuff, but it often takes an eon to get it. Get the lead out, guys! This is New York.

What the Buck?

Has anyone else noticed that the stretch of Columbia Street between Degraw and Hamilton is starting to resemble a barnyard? To wit: what's with all the loose chickens lately?

I passed by a local community garden yesterday and noticed a rust-feathered rooster clawing about the grounds. He seemed quite at home, not lost or panicked. I had never noticed him before, having passed by the garden myriad times.

I mentioned this to the Wife when I got home and she responded "Is it the same chicken that I saw in the Art Lot?" The Art Lot is a open-air, ad-hoc rotating art exhibition surrounded by chain-link fence, at the corner of Columbia and Sackett. "Someone there has been feeding them." I went to check out this claim and, sure enough, not one but two handsome, healthy, black-plumed chickens were strutting about, content as could be. The Wife thinks the hens might be the work of the artists, a sort of silent protest of the poultry slaughterhouse that lies just down the street from the lot. But the card describing the current show lists five artists, each responsible for a different part of the exhibition; there was no mention of chickens being part of the show.

She also suggested the cluckers were possibly escapees from the slaughterhouse. I doubt that. If they were, the owners of said abitoire would have run down the block and retrieved them long ago. Whatever their origins, someone wants them there: a dish of food and water has been laid out for them.

The garden rooster looks more the escapee part. He's in sad shape, having obviously been pecked at quite a bit.

I read some time back that certain Red Hookers had the odd habit of keeping hens as pets, which is quite legal from what I understand. (Roosters, on the other hand, are not lawful.) But these birds have no visible owners and are living quite public lives. What's going on?

Oh, for the record, I have no problem with the chicks. I like them. I raised Bantams as a boy. Won some ribbons for them, I did.

Brooke Astor Dies, Taking New York Society With Her

Brooke Astor has died. By the time this item is read (Tuesday morning), everyone will know that. She was a New Yorker through and through, but her death will be front page news in Wichita and Tallahassee. The name Brooke Astor was international shorthand for Old-style Rich Lady, the kind with good manners and jewels and fine hats, the kind who knew how to play the part.

Brooke Astor is one of those irreplaceable New Yorkers, like Bobby Short and Kitty Carlisle Hart. You won't find another like her, so don't bother to look. To my thinking, she was the last wealthy person in New York who understood the now-largely-forgotten ideal of Noblesse Oblige. She had money, and she knew that came with a catch. You had to try triply hard to justify your posh existence. And so she gave, and gave, and gave. She gave like a Carnegie, without Carnegie's motivation of having enormous sins against mankind to make up for.

With her passes the idea of New York high society—at least any version of it that still merits honor and respect from the man on the street. The folks who frequent the dinner parties along Park Avenue and the fancy benefits at the Met and Lincoln Center seem to me to be just well-fed, feckless moneymakers in garish dresses and badly fitted suits. They give money because they want their (usually ugly) name on some wall, or they want their friends to wonder at how grand and generous they are. They're place-holders, necessary plutocrats needed to keep the city's cultural infrastructure in place. Trouble is, no genuine article will be coming along to take their place. There's no Brooke Astor in New York anymore, and no one remotely like her.

Lost City: Wisconsin Edition: Primitive Living Still Possible

Journalists and sociologists like to go on about globalization and how the world is ever shrinking. It's all a bit exaggerated in my opinion. From my experience, it's still quite possible to cut yourself off from the modern world with very little effort.

Take my recent day trip to Washington Island, a Manhattan-sized isle in Lake Michigan, just off the tip of the Door County peninsula. The island has one grocery store, one school, one everything. Until recently, it's single gas station had no competition. And it only received its first ATM two years ago (and let me tell you, it's a primitive one, sounding a bit like an old fax machine as its churns into service). One of the few public phones listed on the map turned out to be touch-tone phone attached to an old GTE phone box, usable only if you had a credit card number to dial in.

Building costs are very high on the island, since all materials must be brought over from the mainland. Many buy prefab homes for this reason, but ferrying them over to the isle will run a cool $30,000 or so.

In the winter, there is only one ferry a day to the island, with room for only 17 cars, two of which must be the grocery truck and the mail truck. You must make reservations in advance both from and back to the island and the trip, owning to ice, could take anywhere from 2 to 11 hours. (It usually takes a half hour.) Because of this, people board the ferry equipped with food, water, warm clothes and a good book.

Spend just a few hours on Washington Island, and it's easy to forget the rest of the teeming, striving planet.

Bootlegging Wars of Red Hook

Sometime back, I posted an item about an art exhibit at the open-air "Art Lot" on Columbia Street. It featured old newspaper clippings about the rough and tough goings-on in the Red Hook area during the first decades of the 20th century. Shootings, drunkedness, mobsters, death, etc. And there was one particularly juicy series of articles of a number of area deaths caused by a batch of bad bootleg liquor.

A reader, who chooses to be Anonymous, wrote Lost City recently with more info about Red Hook's violent past. I can't do any better than to quote him in full and let you sit back and enjoy the trip down Brooklyn's bloody memory lane:

There had been a bootlegging feud going on in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn in the early 1920's. On election night in 1922 there had been a pistol fight between Gregorio Lagana and Joseph Busardo at Tosca Gardens Cafe on Columbia Street. When police arrived they took Busardo who had been shot three times in the back to LI College Hospital as a prisoner. Lagana died. Busardo was later acquitted of the crime as there were no witnesses. On February 8, 1923 Jack Buccafusco and Charles Cucchairo had been visitng Vincent Busardo at his home on Homecrest Avenue. Two men in masks entered the home and killed Cucchairo. Police arrested Busardo & Buccafusco because they did not believe their story. They were released. On April 6, 1923 Vincent Busardo was shot in the back while walking on
DeGraw & Columbia streets. While half conscious on his hospital bed he identified Umberto Anastasio & Guiseppe Florino as his shooters when police brought them to his hospital room. Vincent Busardo died that evening. On April 29th 1923 two men were gunned down on Sackett Street. One man Biagi Giordano died and the other man UAnastasio was in critical condition. This shooting was said to be a vendetta for the killing of Busardo a few weeks earlier. Umberto who became Albert Anastasia and Joseph Florino were linked to many crimes including the disappearance of Pete Panta, a dock worker.

Lost City: Wisconsin Edition: A Good Sign: Florian II

Door County, Wisconsin, has no lack of great, antiquated signage. This piece of neon used by the Florian II Lakeshore Rib & Steakhouse (that is its full name) in Bailey's Harbor is particularly priceless. The business is family owned and has been there for 50 years. It's cheap breakfast buffet is apparently famous, though I've never met anybody who indulged in it.

What ever happened to Florian I, I don't know.

Kosher Bakery Solidarity on LES

A reader writes to tell Lost City that the late lamented Gertel's kosher bakery lives on on the Lower East Side.

Moishe's bakery on Grand Street, a surviving LES kosher bakery, has a sign in the window indicating it will carry Gertel's products in the future (Gertel's still does wholesale work out of Williamsburg). For this I say: Way to go, Moishe's. I would imagine that these two bakeries were competitors to the teeth in the past. It's nice of Moishe's to show support for its fallen comrade, and to give Lower East Siders an easy outlet for Gertel's goodies.

Lost City: Wisconsin Edition: Find a Fish and Fry It

Fish plays a big role in Wisconsin's culinary (if I may use that hoity-toity word) traditions. In Door County—the bucolic, touristy peninsula that juts into Lake Michigan, and ranks as a sort of Midwestern Cape Cod—the Fish Boil reigns supreme. A ritual since the 1940s, it involves a heap of fish, new potatoes and onions dumped into a cauldron of boiling water fueled by gasoline until the flames reach 30 feet in the air and the water rolls over the sides of the pot. It's then served on paper plates with coleslaw and a slice of cherry pie, and is quiet excellent. Also, very healthy—a rare thing in Wisconsin dining.

But the seafood tradition that blankets the state in general if the Fish Fry. Generally a Friday night tradition, you can find a good one in almost every small town in Wisconsin. A few pieces of lightly breaded, deep-fried lake fish (Perch is best), a side of fries, coleslaw, and you're there. For decades, the Fish Fry represented fine dining in Wisconsin. There was no need for anything fancier.

So, for a first timer, how do you know you're at a good Fish Fry place? Well, here are a few tips. If the restaurant looks too done out, too slick, you're in the wrong place. Fish Fry purveyors don't care about decor. Great places generally look like somebody's house. There's a sign outside, provided by a beer distributor, but little else. Inside, the seating should be functional. Square tables with plastic tablecloths, lackluster chairs. If there's anything on the walls, it's a few old photographs or mirrored beer signs or something having to do with the Green Bay Packers.

On the table will be a plastic basket filled with nothing-special dinner rolls and a smaller dish of squares of individually wrapped butter. You see, it's the Fry that matters. That's why people come. They know it's special. To do anything to point out that it's special would just be too embarrassing for modest Wisconsinites.



A legendary Door County Fish Fry that meets all of the above standards in the Sister Bay Bowl, in Sister Bay, Wisconsin. As the name indicates, the place does not even advertise itself as a restaurant—a classic sign that you're in a good place. Anyone who drove by the place, which sit on top of a hill overlooking Sister Bay, would think it a bowling alley. And it is that, as well as a bar. The dining hall (and it is just that, a spare, ugly dining hall, like you might find at a Lion's Club) is through a door at the left as you enter. Though large, it is regularly packed.

On Tuesdays and Fridays, the Fish Fry is offered. There is a version with Walleye and Shrimp, but as the waitress told me, "It's the perch you want." The perch I got and the perch I ate, moist yet firm and absolutely perfect. Hokey crinkle-cut fries on the side; only in Wisconsin are crinkle-cut fries still popular and "fun."


I talked briefly with the daughter of the Bowl's founder. She said, when dad bought the place in 1950, there was no restaurant, just the bar and a very popular dance hall in the back. Hotel rooms were available on the second floor. In 1958, he tore down the dance hall and built a six-lane bowling alley, which is still there. Six years later, the restaurant opened in a space that used to be where the Willems family lived. The 1964 menu featured roughly five dinner choices, including prime rib. So the set-up has remained ever since.

City Continues Evil Persecution of Red Hook Vendors

What the hell is wrong with City Hall? Does it hate good food, intrinsic culture and The American Dream?

Are they now doubly pissed at the poor, hard-working, great-cooking Red Hook Ballfield food vendors, because the Parks Commissioner's plan to unleash the field's concessions gig to open bidding was met with wide public opposition and gave the City a big bad-press black eye? (The people assert their will? How dare they?)

According the Porkchop Express, the City has now sicked a new agency on the vendors, in the form of a sudden inspection by the Department of Health. "Hey, if we can't shut them down one way, we'll try another!" Well, the raid didn't work, at least for now:

Councilwoman Sara Gonzalez was alerted. She immediately called the Mayor's office, and arrived to monitor the inspection in-person. In so doing, she defused a potentially big bomb. Rather than threatening closure, the DOH simply offered a list of "suggestions."

Foremost amongst these: no running water at the fields. So today (Tuesday) at 5:15 pm, Cesar was contacted about a "big" meeting Wednesday with the Deputy Commissioner of Health. Pressure has intensified, City Officials are again flexing muscle, and the implied bottom-line is rough. Worst-case scenario, the Vendors will have to shut down operations stat to comply with DOH mandates. But we wont know anything until tomorrow afternoon.

Next up: a surprise visit from the Fire Department to check for fire hazards ("Hey, they're using fire to cook the food!"), and the Police sweep the area looking for any illegal immigrants ("Those vendors look like they were born in another country!"). A goverment of petty putzes.

UPDATE (Aug. 9, 10 AM): According to reports this morning, re Eater and Porkchop Express, by Sunday August 19th the vendors must:

· store more ice in coolers
· acquire portable hand washers/sanitation units
· wear sterile gloves and change said gloves regularly
· have a source of running water to wash hands, tacos, etc.
· rent commercial grade kitchens to prep food, or prepare everything on-site

And, "Most significantly, The Powers That Be want everyone who works at a stand to be licensed. Anyone associated with a tent – from corn shuckers to pupusa stuffers – must undergo a training session to obtain a mobile food vending license. At present, only 12 tent operators are licensed; this number will (must) more than quadruple."

Sigh.

NYC Building Dept. Not Just Bad, But Also Anti-Good

The NYC Department of Building, not content with green-lighting scads of ugly super-developments and looking the other way while developers skirt zoning laws and knock down a landmark structure here and there, have started filled out their schedule throwing roadblocks in the way of people who independently try to preserve New York architectural culture.

The Daily News reports that the City bureaucracy has put the brakes of the plans of that nice Wyoming man who wants to cart the Moondance Diner off to the Equality State. Vincert Pierce bought the eatery, one of NYC's last free-standing diners, with the idea of bringing the thing to the small town of LaBarge, which badly needs an address at which to chow down on burgers and such.

The move has been put off for at least 24 hours, because, said a city Buildings Department spokesman, the dept. needs a "clarification" from the new owner "explaining how he plans to move the diner and demolish the foundation." (Definition: The rich guy who wants to develop the property called the City and asked them to put the squeeze on Mr. Wyoming, because he doesn't want to get stuck paying for the destruction of the foundation.)

"Disappointed - I don't know. It's frustrating," said Pierce. We know how you feel, Vince.