Roots of the Big Drug Store Four

In the rampant development of the last several years, perhaps no arm of the mercantile sector (with the possible exception of Starbuck's) has expanded as much or as quickly as chain drug stores. Sure, we get a Target here, a bunch of Subways there. But our city is now polluted with innumerable Duane Reades, Rite Aids, CVSs and Eckerds. It's impossible to run the smallest errand without passing one of them. We see them every day, but do we know anything about these monster corporations?

I always find history comforting in a way, so I decided to look into the pasts of the drug store giants to see if I could find something that might ameliorate their looming awfulness. Here are a few thumbnail sketches.

DUANE READE: I've always felt the least malice toward Duane Reade, because at least it's a local chain. It was founded in 1960 and it actually owes its name to its first warehouse location: on Broadway between Duane and Reade streets. No, there was never a guy names Duane Reade. The founders were brothers Abraham, Eli, and Jack Cohen. And it was run by skads of Cohens until the early '90s. The rampant expansion didn't start until the late '90s, after it was sold to Bain Capital, Inc. Aside from having poor service, and bad labor relations, they're known for shoehorning their stores in anywhere, including an old movie theatre on the Upper East Side. Which is sort of charming. There are more than 230 locations, all in the New York area.

RITE AID: Duane Reade is puny next to Rite Aid: 5,000 stores in 31 states. The first one was started in 1962 by Alexander Grass in Scranton, Pennsylvania. It had the hokey name of Thrif D Discount Center. Rite Aid became the name in 1968. The company is headquartered in Camp Hill, a suburb of Harrisburg. It's sucked up a bunch of other chains along the way, including Read's of Baltimore, Perry Drugs of Michigan and the west coast's Thrify Payless. It "partnered" with General Nutrition Companies in 1999. The Grass clan wasn't such a loving family. Son Martin made himself CEO by pushing dear old dad out the door. Martin pleaded guilty to charges of fraud involving the restatement of $1.6 billion in earnings in 2003.

ECKERD: Eckerds are all around, but in a manner of thinking they don't exist anymore. Rite Aid bought Eckerds in 2006, and announced it would be retiring the old name. That name is the oldest in the drug store chain game: 109 years. Eckerd Pharmacy was founded in 1898 (McKinley was President) by young J. Milton Eckerd (seen above), in Erie, Pennsylvania. In 1912, Eckerd sold his original store to his sons and moved to Wilmington, Delaware, establishing a new store. It was from Delaware that the chain expanded to the the south. At its height, it had 2,800 stores in more than 20 states. Prior to the Rite Aid buyout, CVS had bought 1,000 Eckerd stores in 2004 and 2005. Perhaps not coincidentally, all these sellouts occurred after Jack Eckerd, son of J. Milton, and a man who kept running for Republican office (and losing), died in May 2004.

CVS: This is the big boy, the largest drug chain in the U.S. 6,200 stores. It's a slippery fish. It was founded in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1963, by Stanley and Sidney Goldstein and partner Ralph Hoagland, a Proctor and Gamble salesman; is incorporated in Delaware; and is based in (of all places) Woonsocket, Rhode Island (the Goldsteins hometown). The chain goes by an acronym for a good reason: it used to be called Consumer Value Stores, which makes it sound like a vaguely Communistic enterprise. CEO Tom Ryan now likes to pretend it stands for "Customers, Value, and Service." Sorry, Tom. No history rewrites. Here's a weird detail: many of the original stores did not include pharmacies. Throughout the years, it's gobbled up Mack Drug of New Jersey, the mid-Atlantic Peoples Drug chain (another Soviet-esque name), Revco and Arbor Drugs, as well as Albertsons, which include Osco Drugs and Sav-On Drugs. (My, drug store chains certainly have ugly names.) Stanley Goldstein was still with the company until only recently.

Things they all have in common: CEOs who get into hot water and have to resign; constant efforts to improve customer service, which stinks chain-wide; and lawsuits, lawsuits, lawsuits.

Strange to think all these faceless corporations were founded by striving individuals. So that's the history. Do I find it comforting? A little. But not really. Except for Duane Reade being named after two downtown Manhattan streets. That's cool. James Duane, for whom the street was named, was an early mayor of New York. Joseph Reade was warden at Trinity Church.

The Un-New-Yorking of Duane Reade

Say what you will about the ubiquitous Duane Reade drug store chain. (And I've said plenty of the years, little of it complimentary.) It was New York's pharmacy chain—born here, grew here, dominated here. It was soulless, yes. The clerks were horrible. There were too many stores. They killed mom and pop pharmacies. But it had a more Gotham-y aura that Rite Aid or CVS. It was eccentric, taking up residence anywhere it could, in former movie theaters and ballrooms. It seemed scruffier and scrappier. And it was named for two Manhattan streets.

Now, Duane Reade won't belong to New York anymore. It's been sold to Walgreen's, which has over 7,000 stores (DR has 229) and was founded in Chicago and is based in Dearfield, Illinois. Price tag: $618 million. There, above, are the two suits who made the deal. One's the head of Duane Reade, the other of Walgreen's. Doesn't really matter which is which. Basically the same guy, right?

What will happen now? Will we really notice if Duane Reades become more Walgreen's-like? Probably not. We will notice, however, if Walgreen's chooses to retire the whole Duane Reade name, and close many of its branches, which they apparently intend to do. It's all about getting bigger, folks. Bigger and bigger until you can't get any bigger, and you inevitably get smaller, or go bankrupt, or get gobbled up by another fish determined to get bigger than you. Capitalism's like building castles in the sand. You can created a beautiful sand castle, one people love, one that wins contests, but there's always some bully waiting to kick it down, just because he can, and never imagining there's bigger bully somewhere who will kick down his castle.

Duane Reade Is the Subway Entrance King of the Drug Store Chains

A couple months ago I wrote about the novelty of a Duane Reade pharmacy in Times Square having it's own subway entrance—a luxury usually reserved for fancy hotels, office buildings and department stores.

I thought this was a kind of accident of architecture. But maybe Duane Reade knows exactly what its doing. Here's another branch at 60 Spring Street, and it has its own subway entrance! Granted, this is a different affair. The Times Square building is new. This is an old bank building that the DR chain took over. (We all know that the ever-invention Duane Reade will put a pharmacy in any existing structure, from a movie palace to a dog house.) So the bank had it's own subway entrance. But now Duane Reade does. Still, it lends a coolness to the damn drug store.

The bank, by the way, was the East River Savings Bank. It must have served the old Italian community in this area. One is used to see old lettering and inscriptions scraped of the sides of old stone banks. And you have that here too. But the words are in Italian. Cassette di Sicurezza means Safety Deposit Boxes.

Broadway Duane Reade Wants to Look Old, But Also Doesn't Really Care

There's a Duane Reade drug store on Broadway and 20th that's making a half-assed attempt at looking like part of Old New York.

Before you enter the store, you tread over some well worn tile (far below), a remnant of whatever store used to be at this address before Duane Reade took over. Inside, though, the tile theme continues, and a variety of newer colored tiles are arranged to clearly spell out the message "Welcome to Duane Reade."

Nice! Except that the current manager of the store obviously doesn't give a good God Damn about this charming bit of artistry. Half the letters are covered up by black floor mats and a large display unit holding bottled water. "Welc to Duane Ade."

Duane Reade Has Own Subway Entrance

By my measure, nothing about a Duane Reade should be cool. But, I'm sorry, this dedicated subway entrance on the lower level of the triple-decker Duane Reade at 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue is kinda neat.

I love exclusive subway entrances. They remind me a time when is was common for certain businesses, office buildings, restaurants and hotels that were near subway stops to enjoy the privilege of a special mass transit entry. There are a number of such portals still in use, including the one that connects Bloomingdale's to the Lexington Line. This Duane Reader passage, however, would seem to be a rare modern example.

The Walgreens Effect?

I have to say, I find it very strange and utterly perverse to get press releases sent to me from Duane Reade. I mean, don't they read the blog and all the bad things I've said about them in the past? Or are they reaching out because of all the bad things I've said? Or, is this part of a new marketing image activated since the drug store chain was taken over by Walgreens?

Anyway, this is what DR headquarters wanted me to know: "Attached you will find a release about Duane Reade’s newest store in Chelsea that may leave shoppers wondering if they’ve walked into their neighborhood drug store or a specialty foods shop. This new 24-hour Duane Reade is unlike any other in the chain as it features a greater emphasis on fresh foods, locally-sourced grocery items and on-the-go coffees and meals designed to appeal to the young and active habitué of the neighborhood."

Hey, as a young and active habitué myself, there's nothing I love more than on-the-go coffee. But the above picture reminds me of suburbia, not New York speciality food shops.

Not What You Usually See

This blog usually thinks of Duane Reade as one of 21st-century New York's Visigoths, trampling history underfoot as the company erects more and more megastores. But this old remnant of a sign, near Chambers Street downtown, reminds us that even today's chains can go the way of the dinosaur. Also, that Duane Reade has been around since 1960. Hm. I feel so much more warmly toward a dead Duane Reade than I do a live one.

Lost City's Guide to Tribeca

The recent news about the coming possible loss of Bazzini's nuts and dry foods store on Greenwich Street got me to thinking that it was time to take a tally of what history is left in Tribeca that lives and breathes and isn't just a handsome stone shell housing ritzy condominiums. Well, there isn't much. A lot of beautiful architecture. But few slivers of functioning history. So many of Tribeca's living landmarks, including El Teddy's and Montrachet, have died in recent years (and even they weren't of such phenomenal importance). And the nabe's days as an industrial and warehousing center, where New York went to get much of its foodstuffs, are well in the distant past. In other words, if you're looking for Old Tribeca, go to Hunts Point. For what's left, look here.



THE NEW YORK SUN BUILDING: We'll start on Broadway and Chambers Street. The old headquarters of the New York Sun (the first one), which ceased publication in 1950, wouldn't be worth a mention if it weren't for those wonderful clocks latched to the north and south corners of the structure. Each bears the paper's name and its motto "The Sun Shines for All." The southern ornament is a four-sided clock; the northern one tells the temperature. Both were broken for many years, but recently have been in good working order much of the time. I hope they're never taken down.

DUANE READE: Walk to the block of Broadway between Duane and Reade Streets. Here stood the future pharmacy giant's first warehouse. That's right: it got its name from a couple of random streets. (A block north and it would have been called Thomas Duane, which still sounds like someone's real name.) Nearly 50 years after its founding, it's still got a stranglehold on the city.

ODEON: Walk north to Thomas Street and turn left to West Broadway. In Tribeca, 30 years is an eon for a restaurant. Odeon was the "21" Club of the 1980s, the joint where all the hip, hot, young writers hung out. You may not have thought much of McInerney, Ellis, Janowitz and the like, but theirs was a literary scene like we haven't seen since and probably won't see again. They were the Last of the Fitzgeralds. (Bookwriters don't generate social scenes anymore.) Logic would dictate that Odeon should have faded with the careers of its habitues. But somehow it's survived and thrived. Before Odeon came along, this was the old Tower Cafeteria.


COSMOPOLITAN HOTEL: Walk south to Chambers Street. Here is the boxy, spartan Cosmopolitan Hotel, favorite of young, visiting European tourists. It was once the Hotel Bond. According to some sources, this is the oldest, ongoing, extant hotel building in the city. The address has been used for that function since 1861, when the Civil War began.

BAZZINI: Go west on Chambers to Greenwich Street and travel three blocks north to Jay Street. Want to know what Tribeca was like a century ago? Imagine a hundred stores like Bazzini, warehouses selling of nuts, fruit, eggs, cheese and whatever along every street. None of them looked as nice and slick as this 120-year-old company; Bazzini stayed in business by converting its factory into a gourmet store. Recent reports are that current owner Rocco D'Amato wants to get out and call it quits.

STAPLES STREET: Walk a half block east along Jay to Staples Street. This narrow passageway runs two blocks from Duane and Harrison. (Duane Harrison!—another good name for a drug store!) Once, here is where you went to get eggs, cheese, milk—staples, in other words.

HARRISON STREET HOUSES: Walk north on Staples, turn left on Harrison and cross Greenwich. Here are a lovely set of beautifully preserve Federal house, dating from the early 1800s. Wouldn't you like to live in one of them?

TRIBECA GRILL'S BAR: Walk one more block north to the corner of Greenwich and Franklin. Robert DeNiro's vanity restaurant doesn't interest me, though the food's OK. What's interesting here is the bar, which used to belong to a better and far more famous restaurant: the one and only Maxwell's Plum.

WALKER'S: Walk to North Moore and turn right two blocks until you hit the corner of Varick. I've always had a bit of a problem with Walker's claim that it's one of the oldest bars in the city. What it is is an old building that's often been used as a bar since the 1890s. But not the same bar. And sometimes not even a bar: it was an Irish restaurant in the '40s, then a Spanish eatery in the '50s. Jerry Walker, who also owns the Ear Inn, brought the place bar to its original purpose in 1987. Oh well. In Tribeca, you'll take historical patina where you can't get actual history.


FOURTH PRECINCT, NYPD: Head up one block north to the corner of Varick and Ericsson Place. This Renaissance Revival building is the 4th Precinct of the NYPD. Used to be the 1st precinct. The facade says both 4th and 1st.

ST. JOHN'S LANE: Look across from the precinct house, to the block bounded by Hudson, Varick, and Laight Streets and Ericsson Place, and heave a sigh. This was once St. John's Park, a private park as elegant as Gramercy Park, surrounded by red brick Federal row houses and anchored by St. John's Chapel. It died in 1866 when Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt bought the park and constructed a freight warehouse for the Hudson River Railroad. The Holland Tunnel was then built in 1927. A little further east is a small alley called St. John's Lane—all that's left to remember the area's bucolic past.

AT&T HEADQUARTERS: Take Ericsson east to Sixth Avenue between Walker and Lispenard. An immense Art Deco gem, completed in 1932, with a fantastic lobby, if you can find a way to see it. The guards aren't that friendly. AT&T is long gone.

CAPSOUTO FRERES: Walk back to Greenwich, go five blocks north (right) to Watts and turn left one block. Nice restaurant. Been around about 30 years. But it's in this survey for two reasons. One, it's housed in one of the most beautiful buildings in Tribeca, a neo-Flemish beauty done up in hues of orange and gold, built back in 1892 when someone apparently thought that this grimy neighborhood of warehouses deserved a lovely building. Two, there's an old wooden phone booth in the basement, near the bathrooms.

More Exclusive Subway Exits

A week or so ago, I posted about a Duane Reade in Times Square that had its own subway entrance on its lower level. People proved to be very interested in this topic and some asked me to compile a larger list of New York businesses that enjoy exclusive access to the underground. I haven't found time to put together such a list. But someone at this blog has, so I'm just going to commandeer their information wholesale. (Thanks, guys!) Here's what they came up with (to which I've added a couple of my own):

• Canal St A/C/E has an exit into the AT&T building
• Jay St-Metrotech A/C/F/R has an exit into 370 Jay, which used to be an MTA building but is currently abandoned
• 34th St N/Q/R/B/D/F/V exits into Manhattan Mall (there is a closed passageway underground, owned by the mall, that once connected to Penn Station)
• South Ferry 1/Whitehall R exits into the Staten Island Ferry terminal
• 28th St 6 exits into the New York Life building
• Penn Station & Grand Central subways have numerous connecting exits
• Wall St 4/5 exits into a couple buildings
• There's an exit into a Duane Reade at 42nd and 8th (A/C/E, PABT)
• Astor Place (6) exits to Kmart
• Clark St 2/3 - the elevators exit into a strip mall in the ground floor of the Hotel St. George. 
• Several of the buildings that make up Rockefeller Center have their own subway entrance.
• 42nd Street 4/5/6 exits into the Chrysler Building.
• 59th Street 4/5/6 exits directly into Bloomingdale's.
• Wall Street 2/3 exits into One Chase Manhattan Plaza.
• Fulton Street 2/3 exits into 110 William Street.
• Park Place 2/3 exits into the Woolworth Building
• 42nd Street 1/2/3/N/R/W/7 etc. exits into Reuters building.
• 66th Street 6 train exits into Lincoln Center complex.
• 23rd Street 6 train exits into 1 Madison Street.
• Grand Central 4/5/6 exits into Lincoln Building

The Inexplicably Sophisticated Duane Reade in Soho

No Duane Reade has any right to look as dignified as this Soho branch does.

I understand that local landmark district strictures probably kept the drug store chain's signage discreet and understated, and that the nature of the cast-iron architecture itself lends a certain gravitas to the business.

But whose idea was it to emblazon an entire wall with an Anthony Trollope quote? And the snappy white font against the bare-brick wall is unbearably smart. Does this branch has a super-urbane manager or something?

The Two Suns of Chambers Street

The New York Sun newspaper (the first one) stopped publication in 1950, when it merged with the World-Telegram. But the building it occupied still sits on lower Broadway at Chambers Street and, more than most buildings, it carries heavy reminders of its former tenant. The side of the structure boasts the words The New York Sun in etched stone. And on the southwest and northwest corners of the building hang metal boxes, now green with age, which bear the paper's name and its motto "The Sun Shines for All" (surely one of the best newspaper slogans ever). The southern ornament (above) is a four-sided clock; the northern one tells the temperature. Both were broken for many years, but recently have been in fine working order.

I'm not sure why this is, but I think it has something to do with the new New York Sun newspaper, which was founded in 2003 and probably doesn't want to be associated with a busted clock or inaccurate weather readings. The new Sun is actually two blocks to the west on Chambers Street, in the cast-iron Cary Building (below), which was built just a decade later than the 1846 Sun building.

The old Sun is best remembered today for publishing the famous 1897 "Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus" editorial, which is either one of the most heart-warming pieces of journalism of all time, or one of the most mealy-mouthed, depending on your viewpoint; and for columnist Don Marquis, who invented the cockroach Archy and cat Mehitabel, who, he purported, snuck into the building at night and wrote some of his columns. The paper also employed John B. Bogart, a city editor between 1873 and 1890, who uttered the unforgettable maxim: "When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news."

The new Sun is primarily known for its arch-conservative views and for standing in as one of the scenes in "The Devil Wear Prada." Movie critics carped that newspaper offices no longer looked like the one in the movie, with its high ceilings, low-hanging lights, high windows and papers stacked everywhere. But, it turned out, the Sun does actually look like that.



One final note about this general area: there is a Duane Reade drugstore on Broadway and Duane Street, just one block from Reade Street. That's got to be about as charming as that chain gets.

Holy Suffering Crap! The Brooklyn Inn to Close?

How did I miss the posts on this? The great old Brooklyn Inn, which have been on the corner of Hoyt and Bergen in Brooklyn since dinosaurs roamed the borough, is to close??!!!

It's news like this that makes me fearful that anything could happen in horrid li'l olde New York in today's real estate market under the reign of Mayor "What-Me-Worry-About-The-City's-Cultural-Legacy" Bloomberg. (Big pictures he's great at; small ones, he sucks.) The Old Town Bar to become a Duane Reade. Rao's to convert into a Dunkin' Donuts outlet. The Fraunces Tavern to be ripped down to make way for condos. It could all happen tomorrow, folks! Where developers have a will, they'll find a slimy, loophole-ridden way.

The Brooklyn Inn has been on that corner for a century or more. My 90-year-old landlord told me how he used to drink there. It's famous for having no signage to speak of, a la Chumley's, and for its high tin ceiling and massive wooden bar. It's has literary status, too: Jonathan Lehman made it one of the settings in "Motherless Brooklyn." I can't bear to think it's on the way out. I ask you people: What the fuck is wrong with this city?

Progress Doesn't Want Me to Do My Job

As I say in my blog "profile," I make a living as a writer. A goodly part of that living is in the field of journalism. And a good deal of that is feature articles. Which means interviews. Phone interviews. In-person interviews. But interviews. And I don't know any reporter that takes shorthand anymore, or remembers quotes from memory, so interviews mean a tape recorder.

Progress does not appear to favor my line of work—and I'm not talking about the long, slow death of print news—though that is a worrisome fact of my life. I mean the disappearance of the apparatus that allows me to do my job. A year of so again, my old Sony cassette recorder which I use on interviews finally gave out. I had had it for 15 years. Nice piece of machinery. I went to a Best Buy to purchase another. After questioning a few clerks as to where I might find tape recorders (and who all thought I was talking about video recorders), a wiser worker led me to an obscure corner of the basement level where a couple cassette recorders, encased in plastic, hung on a wall. They could have been phonograph needles, so remote was their location, so un-sought-after were they.

Lately, meanwhile, I have had some trouble finding cassette tapes to put in that tape recorder. Some locations of the big chains, like Duane Reade and Rite Aid, don't carry them (thought Staples dependably stocks them). In the past, such tapes could always be found in the school/office supplies section. Often then were displayed in the racks by the cash register. Moreover, many corner bodegas could be counted on to have one or two on the shelf. No more. People don't make tapes anymore—voice, music or otherwise. And again, people think I'm asking for video cassette tapes when I ask for audio tapes. Everyone, it seems, owns a video recorder. Nobody owns an audio recorder.

And it gets more difficult. For phone interviews, one needs a small, rubber suction-cup device. The cup is applied to the phone receiver and the attached cord is plugged into a specific hole in the tape recorder. By this method, an interview is recorded for later transcribing. Used to be, Radio Shack always had these in stock. Last week, however, I went in search of one (they cost about $4) and went away empty-handed from three Radio Shack outlets. Each of the stores' clerks spoke doubtfully about whether the gizmos would ever be stocked again.

Next I'll be told that pencils and notepads are being phased out. What is going on? Is the paraphernalia of journalism doomed to go the way of the tools of bookbinding and blacksmithing? Is this a vast plot by conservative corporations to defang the Fourth Estate by depriving them of basic equipment? Anybody know where rubber suction cup thingies can be found out there? I think I better take a case.

Fairway's Sad Cafe

Time for a nice, cleansing rant. And what more deserving subject than the cafe at the Red Hook Fairway supermarket?

Is there a more colossal, abysmal failure in all the New York food service industry than this lackluster, indifferent, actively frustrating cafe? The fare on offer is unappealing and unappetizing, and the help so disinterested and inefficient, one suspects it is run by a city agency, like the MTA or the DMV. How could it be possible that a corporation as successful, and as talented at image-crafting, as Fairway could allow the cafe inside its showcase Brooklyn outlet come off like a concession at one of the mangier terminals in LaGuardia?

The menu is a predictable array of sandwiches, pizza and the ubiquitous panini—all unexciting in their choice of ingredients. The items are allow to sit around on display and get stale, until someone actually orders food and the crew is given the opportunity to overcook it.

But worse than the cardboard food—much worse, INFINITELY worse, worse than Duane Reade cashiers—are the people who man this cafe. Sullen, unsmiling, slow, unresponsive, incompetent, uncommitted clockwatchers all. They do not know the food that they are serving, and they do not know how to prepare it in a way that would make it edible. They lack basic communication skills and any comprehension of the concept of customer service. For instance, a person standing at the counter eyeing the food with a look of ready anticipation on their face is not, to the Fairway Cafe worker's mind, a potential customer with an order to place. That person is perhaps a loiterer, or someone who is lost.

I have been to this cafe about a dozen or so times. (Why I return, I do not know. Probably because the view of New York harbor from the dining patio is so breathtaking.) I have never once been greeted with a "May I help you?" or any sort of entreaty. I have always had to get someone's attention, and that with difficulty. On average, I have waited 10 to 15 minutes for simple orders like pizza or a hot dog. At least three times a worker has completely forgotten my order and I've had to place it again. (No apology has ever been tendered when this has happened.) I have watched workers take my order of a hot dog and wait a full five minutes before placing a frankfurter on the grill—all the time in between doing nothing in particular.

I have never met a Fairway patron who has a good opinion of this cafe. I'm sure the market is far from realizing the traffic it could on the restaurant due to the cafe's mismanagement. Why does the market allow it to continue in such a fashion? Hard to know. Maybe they don't care. Maybe the cafe is a loss leader, there to draw customers to the cash cow that is the market itself. But do people really come to Fairway to go to the cafe and then think, "Hey, maybe I'll do some shopping while I'm here"?

Renaissance Court

Renaissance Pharmacy, perhaps the last independent pharmacy on Court Street in Brooklyn, has closed. As the above picture shows, the space is for rent and the sign has been removed, leaving only the outline of the cursive wording.

This is no surprise, given that there is an Eckerd two blocks away, a Rite Aid four blocks away, another Rite Aid further up Court and another Eckerd at Court and Atlantic. All of these big boxy boys opened in the last five years. The neighborhood only lacks a Duane Reade. Carroll Gardens pharmacy, near Carroll Park, closed last year and was supplanted by a Chase branch. Another small Court Street pharmacy, supposedly a hunded years old, closed a few years back. It was replaced, appropriately enough, by a real estate broker.

I liked Renaissance best. It was quaint, made up of two small aisles and a raised pharmacy counter in back. There was a seat when elderly people could rest their bones while waiting for a perscription. And the young female pharmacist was kind and cute and looked a bit like Lili Taylor. A loss for the community, without question.

Wooden Phone Booth Sighting: Farrell's

It's been a while since I've done one of these. But wooden phone booths aren't found in every Duane Reade.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

This one's in Farrell's, the wonderful old bar in Windsor Terrace, favorite of Pete Hamill's pop and various hard-drinking blue-collar Brooklynites. It's in the back room, in working order. Folding door, ceiling fan, whole nine yards. If it's my old lady, I'm not here.



Wooden Phone Booth Sighting: Capri Social Club

What? No Dunkin' Donuts?

The chains creep in, year by year, and one day you're strolling down a street you thought you knew and suddenly realize its entire length has been ripped out body and soul and replaces by some strip from deepest suburbia.

The stretch of Broadway between Lincoln Center and 72nd Street never had much personality, but now it bears no resemblance whatsoever to, well, you know, Broadway. I once knew it well; I worked in Lincoln Center for a time. It was an unpretty and low-slung thoroughfare. But it had pizzerias, cute restaurants, a five and dime store of sorts, a florist or two and a scruffy post office.

Now it begins with a Barnes and Noble and ends with a McDonald's. In between are a Victoria's Secret, Pottery Barn, Duane Reade, Chase Bank (among several other banks), Banana Republic, and any other ubiquitous corporate entity you care to mention. I don't think there are more than three or four independently run businesses along the span, and those are affairs so tiny you wouldn't even notice them.

It's a crushing walk. Do yourself a favor. Get on the 1 train at 66th Street and take it one stop to 72nd. Spare your eyes.

Lost City Asks "Who Goes to Fortune House?"

Dining at Fortune House in Brooklyn Heights, for my latest Eater "Who Goes There?" column, reminded me of the long gone Jade Mountain in the East Village. How I miss that place.

Who Goes There? Fortune House

Chinese restaurants that hold their ground while garnering little notice outside the immediate area are hardly unusual. You'll find plenty in Chinatown, and every neighborhood has its stubbornly tenacious take-out joint. What makes Fortune House a noteworthy case is, while is does a steady take-away business, it also fills a great many of its tables every night. Plus, for 26 years it has held on to a prime piece of Henry Street real estate in Brooklyn Heights that assumedly should have been converted into a Duane Reade or Starbucks long ago. What can it be about the pink tablecloths, green walls and Cantonese-American-style duck-sauce-to-pineapple-and-fortune-cookie cooking that keeps them coming back?

Well, maybe it's the $4.25 tiki drinks! Fortune House serves Mai Tais, Zombies and Navy Grogs. These aren't retro Polynesian cocktails. Fortune House knows not irony. They're the genuine, time-warp items, the drinks your Mom and Dad used to throw back, complete with tiny umbrella and little plastic sword skewering a cherry and orange slice. "The cocktails are great," encouraged a regular. "And they're so cheap!" I didn't need much pushing. Worrying about being passed some rotgut, I watched the "bartender" (really, a young Asian women of about 17) make my Mai Tai. I saw five ingredients go in, two of which were rum, one recognizable as Myers. I started to feel pretty good about my drink. The girl then mixed the concoction with a shake that wouldn't wake a baby. The result wasn't good, and it wasn't bad. It was $4.25. And totally worth it.

The ever-whirling help must have read some of the reviews on the Internet that characterize the service at Fortune House as "indifferent." Though distracted by sheer business, the waitresses rarely left a table unattended and even occasionally smiled. Overseeing all was a fierce female manager in glasses and black pant suit. She was always dropping off some dish or picking up a check, cleaning, clearing, inquiring and sometimes chatting with the more regular of the regulars.

Though all the patrons seem to be from the extreme immediate area, there are two customer worlds at Fortune House. The old people tend to take a table. Elderly couples who linger over a glass of red wine at the end of their meal like they're at Le Bernardin. Mothers being taken out to dinner by their middle-aged sons and daughters. Old friends hashing over their ailments. Solitary, white-haired gentlemen who nurse multiple Martinis. Meanwhile, the young worker bees—running-panted, ear-budded, iPhoned—come in for take-out, waiting for their order on the long cushioned bench by the cloudy fish tank. An exception to this rule was a single hipster couple—thin, bearded, confidently cool guy, and his less certain girlfriend, in black bangs, babydoll dress and many bracelets—who dined in. They alone weren't having dinner in a Chinese restaurant. They were "having dinner in a Chinese restaurant."

But everyone—old sitters and young takers—seemed weirdly serene. That is perhaps the main attraction of a place like Fortune House, aside from the very cheap prices. It's comforting, never unsettling. The menu-decor-fish tank today will be the menu-decor-fish tank of tomorrow. Imagining the weary, perhaps mildly depressed, 20-something New Yorkers taking their hot cartons home to eat while watching their favorite program on a cold, November night, I felt comforted for them.

Or maybe that was the Zombie.
— Brooks of Sheffield

East Village, Southbound Lights

Despite the encroaching Citywide gentrification and homogenization, New York neighborhoods still have their differences, even when it comes the Christmas decorations.

In Dyker Heights, if you'd struck by the holiday mood, you blow $10,000 and erect a giant electric snowman on your yard. In Brooklyn Heights, you adorn your door with a wreath and some classy, traditional evergreen boughs, and make sure your stately tree is visible from the street. In the East Village, meanwhile, you buy a few strings of lights at the local Duane Reade, plug them in the outlet nearest the street and fling them out the window. Job done!

I first noticed this particularly lazy, but charmingly raffish way of decorating back in the late '80s and early '90s, when I lived in the East Village. There would be no elaborate looping or draping of lights. The strings would simply dangle out the window, reaching down two or three stories. When there were several such strings on one block, the effect would be strangely magical, as if a row of buildings was being pelted with neon rain.

I reasoned that this was the work of East Village hipsters, who felt a slight urge to get into the holiday groove, but didn't want to exert themselves too much, as that would be highly uncool.

Last night, I was happy to see that this peculiar tradition had persisted. I spotted several tenements so adorned. The strings pictured here were on E. 3rd and E. 4th Streets.

A Good Sign: Jam's Stationery

In Greenpoint. Don't know anything about it. But, in these days of Staple's and Duane Reade, I like an variety goods store. "Paperbacks." That's what I used to go to my local variety store to buy when I was a kid.