A Quick One, In Ragtime

The cemetery is a fine spot for the curious to wander, and you will often be rewarded with a genuine curiosity. Odds are you didn’t know that a superstar of the turn of the last century, the “King of Ragtime,” who made his name in St. Louis, wound up in an unmarked pauper’s grave in western Queens.

 

Beginning with the smash hit success of “Maple Leaf Rag,” in 1899, Scott Joplin went on to be a popular and prolific composer of ragtime, the syncopated synthesis of African American dance music and European classical and marches. His music was an important foundation for jazz, and by extension, every other pop form of the Twentieth century, but he’s mainly known nowadays due to a brief ragtime revival sparked by the movie soundtrack album for 1973’s The Sting, that featured several Joplin tunes (including “The Entertainer,” which peaked at number 3 in the Top 40 singles chart). His reign was short lived. The ragtime fad didn’t last long and Joplin’s fame wouldn’t either. Institutionalized for dementia caused by syphilis, he died in 1917 at the age of 49 in the Manhattan State Hospital on Ward’s Island and was buried anonymously in St. Michael’s Cemetery, East Elmhurst, Queens.

Each year St. Michael’s puts on a free concert to honor Joplin, and we have attended many times. The cemetery is a little tricky to get to on public transportation, so it is usually a small affair, a few dozen locals and fans, a band, free hamburgers and hot dogs. This year marks the centennial of Joplin’s death, and the turnout was much bigger than usual, probably because of better publicity. The Paragon Ragtime Orchestra was the perfect choice for this one hundredth anniversary of Joplin’s death. The Paragons were eleven pieces strong and the program was mostly Joplin rags with a few other timely selections to provide some context.







Joplin’s grave bore no marker until 1974 when ASCAP donated a simple bronze plaque. This year a memorial bench was dedicated as a somewhat grander tribute. Your Grade “A” Fanciers, of course, had other ideas about paying homage to the great musician. We were joined in a toast to Scott Joplin by our friends Gabrielle and Scott.

We devised an honorary drink for the occasion and named it The Maple Leaf Rag. Shooting for something that might have been downed at the turn of the century, this was composed with an Old Fashioned in mind, and it wasn’t too far a fetch that we'd add some maple syrup to salute Joplin’s first big hit. The Amaro Sfumato adds a little smoke for a barroom of the period, and a garnish of toasted walnut lends a trace of woodsy-ness and some tannins to counteract the sweet maple. Gab reminded us that walnut wood is used on pianos, which suited us swell.

The Maple Leaf Rag Cocktail

Advance prep:
• Toast as many walnut meats as drinks you will be serving
• Dissolve maple syrup 1:1 with hot water and let cool

Drink ingredients:
2 1/2 ounces rye, or a combination of Canadian whiskey and rye
1/4 ounce Amaro Sfumato Rabarbaro
2 teaspoons maple syrup dilution, or to taste
Dash Angostura Bitters
Dash Fee’s Old Fashion Aromatic Bitters

Shake lightly with ice and strain into a coupe glass. Garnish with a cocktail cherry and a toasted walnut. (Alternatively, this could be built as an Old Fashioned, in the namesake glass over ice.)

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After the concert we took a moment to visit another ought-to-be-famous resident of St. Michael’s. Just down the lane from Joplin is the modest grave of another African American legend, the man they called “the Black Edison,” Granville T. Woods.

Born a freeman in 1859 in Columbus, Ohio, Woods was an electrician and inventor with 60-odd patents to his name. One invention, a multiplex telegraph, spurred a lawsuit from Thomas Edison challenging its patent. When Edison lost he offered to make Woods his partner, but was turned down. His work was also crucial to the development of electric trolleys and third rail transit systems. His remarkable life is way too crammed with accomplishment to recount here. We should pause a moment to remember him and consider how paltry this simple marker is as a testament to his legacy.

The Borough of Showbiz

New York City is a boîte boneyard, a nite-spot necropolis, a potter’s field of cabarets, oyster palaces and hotel lounges.

 Some names of past hotspots live on in popular lore — your Stork Club, your El Morocco. But there were so many others, maybe smaller in size and fame, that were at one time just as legendary with a certain clientele. Today they are nearly unknown. The heyday of these storied joints can never be recreated.  Well, if we can’t step inside, let’s loiter outside and toast, in salute to good times past. We may be a little late, but we have time for a quick one.

In this installment of a Quick One we go a-visiting with the inspiration for a popular cartoon personality and ponder the link between Broadway and Queens.

Queens has been called “the borough of jazz” for the many musicians who settled along the IRT Flushing line, now the No. 7, which provides a direct connection to Times Square and Broadway. It might be more accurate to say the borough of showbiz, because actors, musicians, and vaudevillians of all varieties, not just jazzbos, made that commute to their theater jobs. Beginning in the late ‘Twenties new neighborhoods sprang up in the “cornfields of Queens” thanks to the recent elevated line: Jackson Heights, Woodside, Corona all attracted their share of show folk who mixed in with other straighter refugees of the crowded clamor of Manhattan. It was a step up from the apartment hotels of the city.

One celestial couple of the Great White Way who made their home in Jackson Heights was hoofer Dan Healy and Helen Kane, the bubbly singer who was the model, both vocally and physically, for Betty Boop. We thought we’d like to lift a glass to them.

Helen (née Schroeder) came up in singing contests and chorus lines and went on to a full career as a Broadway star. Singing "That's My Weakness Now" in a show at the Paramount Theatre, the song's "boop-boop-a-doop" catchphrase quickly catapulted her to household name fame. She wasn’t the only one to interpolate baby talk in popular song, it was a gimmick many pop and blues singers used. An early example was in 1921's all-black Broadway smash Shuffle Along when Gertrude Saunders stopped that show cold with her number “Daddy Won’t You Please Come Home,” which ends with an entire scat chorus in baby talk. Helen wasn't the first, but she became one of the most successful, recording for Victor and headlining the Palace Theatre in 1928. Her fun-loving flapper persona became so popular that there were Helen Kane impersonation contests for aspiring Broadway babies looking to bust into show business. One winner of a contest held in Atlantic City was Mae Questel, soon to become the voice of Betty Boop.

Helen was a Bronx gal, fully evident in her movie roles like Pointed Heels (with William Powell and Fay Wray), Sweetie (with Nancy Carroll and Jack Oakie) and as the title character in Dangerous Nan McGrew. “Broadway’s Boy” Dan Healy was an established performer, showman and wheeler-dealer. You can see him in action as the oily Miller in the alternately fascinating and dull as a doorknob Glorifying the American Girl, (shot in Astoria, with heart-stopping location work at Grand Central Station and along 42nd Street). He was a master of ceremonies in night spots including the Cotton Club. Helen and Dan were portrayed in the 1950 movie Three Little Words. Debbie Reynolds played Helen, but it was Helen’s voice singing on the soundtrack.

Helen and Dan had skyscraper highs and serious lows; both finished their days together here at The Berkeley, a characteristically splendid Jackson Heights apartment building.

The Berkeley (fka Berkeley Hall), a neo-Georgian building with nine foot ceilings in its 84 units at 77-12 35th Avenue, was erected in 1937. It had a roof garden, children’s playground and gymnasium. It is now a co-op.

Our cocktail hour with Mr. and Mrs. Healy features the Charleston, from The Savoy Cocktail Book.  It’s an aromatic and potent sipper made with equal parts gin, maraschino, kirsch, Curaçao, Italian and French vermouths, and garnished with a lemon peel. A half ounce of each will build you a 3 ounce drink, and upon giving it serious thought, we have two suggestions: first, choose a bracing gin, and to top it all off, add a cocktail cherry after you’ve expressed your lemon peel.

To The Heights!

A Quick One On The Road

They called it the Spindle City, Cohoes, just north of Albany. In the 1830s textile mills sprouted up here at the confluence of the Mohawk and Hudson. By the middle of the century business was roaring; mills cranking out cottons, percales, wigans, jute, bags and yard goods by the ton. Like so much of upstate economy dependent on the Erie Canal, Cohoes’ industrial heyday is long gone. Now the old mills and worker tenements are apartments and condos. But what are your Grade “A” Fancy correspondents doing so far from our usual NYC beat? Here in sleepy olde time Cohoes there is an unexpected link to the big city, and you will be not at all surprised to learn it resides in a saloon.

171 Remsen Street has been a tavern since the early years of the 20th century. The building dates from 1873 and according to town lore, early tenants included a “silent movie theatre” (more probably a nickelodeon) and a pool hall. In 1937 the tavern was bought by local political boss Michael T. (Big Mike) Smith. His new venture would become the unofficial headquarters for the Democratic Tammany machine in Cohoes, presided over by Big Mike from a corner booth in the front window.

Smith made improvements to the old tavern, including installing the impressive 50-foot-long bar he purchased from the O’Connors, who operated a speakeasy in Albany. The legend was that the O’Connors acquired the bar when the old Tammany Hall in Manhattan closed.

But which Tammany Hall? On 17th Street just off Union Square the last Tammany Hall still stands. You can read the inscription "The Society Of Tammany Or Columbian Order" above the door of what is now the Union Square Theatre. However, this was built in 1927, so too late to have housed the Cohoes bar. The first building to be called Tammany Hall was at Nassau and Frankfort, built in 1812 and used until 1867,  probably too early for our bar. In 1868 a grand new headquarters was built on 14th Street. The Hall’s political offices were restricted to a single room and the rest was given over to various showmen and entrepreneurs who jammed it full of cafés, oyster bars, minstrel shows, band concerts, opera companies and a bazaar. No doubt that a great bar could have come out of here.

Did the O’Connors of Albany salvage the long bar out of the 14th Street Hall when it closed in 1927, and later sell it to Big Mike of Cohoes? We have yet to find hard evidence, but that’s the story, and it’s a good one. The bar certainly is a splendid slab of mahogany, regardless of pedigree, and its vintage guarantees it has seen many wonders in its long life.

Smith’s today is a lovely tavern with tile floors, red Naugahyde brass-studded barstools, some outstanding circular wood booths, and that long beautiful bar. The backbar has cabinets ornamented with stained glass roses. The food is good, too. Although Big Mike exited for good in 1949, it’s said his joint on Remsen Street still looks pretty much the same. If you are on your way to the Adirondacks, or possibly the races at Saratoga, stop in at Smith's of Cohoes and raise a glass to a far-flung bit of New York City history.

 

 

Hold That Ghost

A quick one a little late at a midtown holdout that surprises.

You do run into old acquaintances in the strangest places.

There is a certain sainted saloon we’ve read about for years, a celebrated writers’ hangout of the last century, a place called Costello’s. Gone since 1992, so it was a shock to say the least when we encountered a bit of this storied joint’s remains in an aggressively average midtown sports bar.

But first, let’s raise a glass to holdouts, those little buildings that have resisted progress, and to their plucky owners who gave the middle finger to the fat cat high-rise developers. Such a painful amount of fine stock has disappeared from midtown, so we hold in esteem those tough nuts, the heroes who spare us from a homogenous glass and steel cityscape. There are a number of famous holdouts: there is Hurley’s bar*, the four story building on the corner of Sixth Avenue and 49th Street that refused to sell out to Rockefeller Center; there remains the weenie 19th century building at 34th and Broadway that Macy’s was forced to build around; the townhouse on 60th Street across from Le Veau d’Or, now dwarfed by skyscrapers; and of course P.J. Clarke’s saloon. None of these were architectural show-stoppers in their day, but today they shine as reminders of when cities were built at a more human scale.

At the moment, cranes are everywhere you turn. The current monsoon of money (which somehow avoids our grasp) fuels rampant construction which means a heaping helping of rabid destruction of New York City. The blocks of 43rd and 44th Streets between Second and Third Avenues are, as we speak, being ripped apart by a full block-through pull down, and old office buildings, printing plants and garages are pfft. While the neighborhood suffers the unendurable noise and unimaginable loss of business, a wee 1926 townhouse at 225 East 44th Street stands up defiantly to the scaffolding and open pits that soon will sprout even more soulless towers. This holdout is the now aptly named Overlook bar. It is the kind of place we would have passed without a glance just a few years ago: the ubiquitous sports-woo! atmosphere, the corporate post-collegiate clientele, it’s an utterly bland and uninviting run-down joint illuminated by a couple dozen TVs. It has the look of a rock club in the daylight: no character to speak of, not even the gloss of one of those cookie cutter prefab Irish bars. But if there’s one thing we know about New York City, it’s that there is always something you never saw before. And indeed the Overlook has a startling and unique bonus. Venture past the branded beer sign décor and hypnotic sports screens to the back room and you’ll find the walls are covered with cartoons – so many familiar faces, and some obscure characters nearly lost to time. They commemorate not only the work of dozens of comic artists, but also the last remnant of Costello’s, the famed newspapermen’s saloon. This was the last outpost of the bar, established as a speakeasy, surviving into the 1990s, and immortalized by Tim and Joe Costello’s regular customers, many of whom were top-drawer writers.


Costello’s was a favorite stop for a hard-drinking literary set which included Ernest Hemingway, John O’Hara and the New Yorker bunch. Its earliest edition was upstairs at the corner of Lexington Avenue and 44th Street, but its most celebrated locations were at the corner, and near corner, of Third Avenue and 44th from the ’30s-‘70s, where it became known as a shining example of an old-fashioned Irish bar of the under-the-Third Avenue Elevated variety. John McNulty set countless Talk of the Town pieces there, and made the recurring character of Tim Costello famous in its pages. Another star at the magazine, James Thurber, made his mark on Costello’s in a different way. In 1934 he covered a wall with his cartoons to settle his bar bill. When in 1973 the building was to be razed, the bar moved again and landed finally at 225 East 44th. Thurber’s art survived the journey but was sometime thereafter “lost.”

By this time the crowd at Costello’s included newspapermen from the Daily News, nearby wire services, and artists from the big cartoon syndicates. The walls seemed a little bare, and one May afternoon in 1976, after some nudging by Tim Costello, Jr., Daily News cartoonist Bill Gallo organized a party of fellow National Society of Cartoonists members to decorate the place.

Costello’s passed into saloon history for good in 1992.

225 East 44th served the thirsty as the Turtle Bay Café through the early 2000s when it lost its lease and there was talk – crazy talk that is – of gutting the premises, but that is when the Overlook stepped in.

And today – in the same year that The Palm cruelly whitewashed comic art history – almost miraculously, the murals remain. They may be a little beat up, but the cream of cartoonery is there, dominated by Stan Lee’s Spiderman and Milton Canniff’s Steve Canyon, alongside Bullwinkle the Moose, courtesy Al Kilgore: Mad Magazine is represented by a gang of Sergio Aragones’ Mexican revolutionaries and a self-portrait by the great Al Jaffee; there is a fabulous array of funny pages superstars from the 1970s: Hagar the Horrible (Dik Browne), the Lockhornes (Bill Hoest), Boner’s Ark and Beetle Bailey (two smash hits from Mort Walker); for fans of the obscure, McGown Miller gives us a classic gag from his King Features one-panel character Noah Numskull and Bill Yates offers up professor Phumble; sharp-eyed New Yorker fans may spy a disgruntled dog from the pen of Charles Barsotti; the op-ed crew is here too, with Dick Hodgins giving us a pan-handling Mayor Abe Beame, and all this is just for starters. Appropriately for the time and place, there is a booze-happy theme to many of the yuks.

But wait, there’s more. In 2005 the owners of the Overlook took a stab at honoring their historical windfall by inviting Bill Gallo back to decorate the opposite walls. The new gang of cartoonists reprised several characters from the old mural, including Beetle Bailey, Dondi, and the Lockhornes. A highlight of the new wall is an Alfred E. Neuman by Mad art director Sam Viviano.

This is no shrine or museum. There is no velvet rope or protective Plexiglas bolted to the wall. In the freewheeling spirit of Costello’s the art is presented in the raw, subject to the wear and tear of seepage and careless patrons. Visit on a weekend afternoon when it is quieter and you can commune with the cartoons without bugging anybody. Settle in with a beer or a Bloody Mary, and a copy of McNulty’s “This Place on Third Avenue,” and tune out the comical present.

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*Hurley's saloon is no more; the building was ultimately sold and today houses a branch of a particularly loathsome cupcake chain.

A Quick One With Texas Guinan

New York City is a boîte boneyard, a nite-spot necropolis, a potter’s field of cabarets, oyster palaces and hotel lounges.

 Some names of past hotspots live on in popular lore — your Stork Club, your El Morocco. But there were so many others, maybe smaller in size and fame, that were at one time just as legendary with a certain clientele. Today they are nearly unknown. The heyday of these storied joints can never be recreated.  Well, if we can’t step inside, let’s loiter outside and toast, in salute to good times past. We may be a little late, but we have time for a quick one.

In today’s installment of A Quick One, A Little Late, we call on Texas Guinan on the anniversary of her death, 82 years ago today. Guinan was one of the most famous and colorful characters of the Prohibition years. That’s really saying something given that the era of the Noble Experiment boasted a splendid trove of interesting characters:  cynical newspapermen, flamboyant gangsters, inventive saloonkeepers, daredevil rumrunners, hot-cha songwriters and tin pan alley tune pluggers, hep musicians, imaginative undercover Feds, exceptional bohemians, and underage chorus girls.

Some of those chorines like Ruby Stevens (Barbara Stanwyck) and Ruby Keeler worked for the most notorious niteclub hostess, Texas Guinan. While the Twenties were roaring, Guinan was always news; reports on her doings -- clubs opening, clubs padlocked, and court and jail appearances were constant fodder for the press. Her greeting of “Hello, Suckers!” shouted at her guests was as ubiquitously popular as Little Orphan Annie.

She hosted clubs through the era, usually partnered with legitimate businessman Larry Fay. Some of her joints: the El Fay, the 300 Club, the Century Club, the Texas Guinan Forty-Eighth Street Club, Salon Royale, Club Argonaut, Club Intime and a roadhouse called Texas Guinan’s Show Palace (later La Casa Guinan), on Merrick Road in Valley Stream.

*      *      *

Mary Lousie Cecilia Guinan grew up in Waco, Texas. She had a career in vaudeville as a showgirl and songster. Beginning in 1917 she featured in silent pictures, cowgirls a specialty, and continued right through to talkies. In 1933, when she appeared in her last movie, she pretty much played herself. All tolled, she had 51 credits to her name. In 1945 Paramount released a posthumous Hollywoodized biopic called “Incendiary Blonde,” starring Betty Hutton.

 We came a-calling on a warm, sunny Halloween afternoon.  Miss Guinan’s final resting spot in Long Island City's Old Calvary Cemetery is literally monumental, but it betrays none of the bawdy hell-raising glamour of the notorious Queen of the Nightclubs.  It’s an elegant crypt, only steps from the noble limestone beehive chapel, a mini Sacré-Coeur built in 1895.

 
We brought along a flask of Corpse Revivers, because, you never can tell.  But did you know? A corpse reviver isn’t a recipe, it’s a category. It is the morning pick-me-up, alternatively known as an eye opener. That’s why you’ll see entirely dissimilar cocktails named Corpse Reviver in your how-to manuals.  We concocted a thermos-full of our favorite formula, a healthful revitalizer known as Corpse Reviver #2.  It’s a shaken gem of gin, Cointreau, lemon juice, Cocchi Americano (stepping in for the extinct Kina Lillet) and absinthe. Our guests for this semi-spooky jaunt were pals Scott and Gabrielle, who thoughtfully supplied a tin of All Soul’s Day cookies, which were the perfect nosh for our spirit-raising mission.

A toast to Texas Guinan,

“Give the little lady great big drink!”

A Quick One At The Krazy Kat Klub

New York City is a boîte boneyard, a nite-spot necropolis, a potter’s field of cabarets, oyster palaces and hotel lounges.

Some names of past hotspots live on in popular lore — your Stork Club, your El Morocco. But there were so many others, maybe smaller in size and fame, that were at one time just as legendary with a certain clientele. Today they are nearly unknown. The heyday of these storied joints can never be recreated. Well, if we can’t step inside, let’s loiter outside and toast, in salute to good times past. We may be a little late, but we have time for a quick one.

Today's Stop: Ye Syne of Ye Krazy Kat

For years Volare has been among our favorite Village restaurants. Food and service are top notch, and the building, at 147 West 4th Street, is overflowing with history. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney began her Studio Club, which would eventually evolve into the Whitney Museum of American Art, in the main and lower floors, John Reed worked on Ten Days That Shook the World here and Edward Hopper had his first solo exhibition at the Club. It housed a later version of the Bohemian hangout Polly Holliday’s restaurant until sometime in the early 1930s when the space became Mother Bertolotti’s.

As enjoyable as the osso bucco and the vitello tonnato, as impeccable as the waiters’ jackets, as lovable as the archetypal Greenwich Village Italian restaurant interior, the incomparable thing about Volare is the art on the walls. Above the booths hang large charcoal and crayon drawings of scantily clad showgirls cavorting with elegantly attired sports. We asked our host about them and he said they were created by a successful Broadway set designer called Cleon Throckmorton.  That’s a name that’s hard to forget. Installed during the Bertolotti era (some are dated 1933), they remained with the restaurant when it became Volare in 1984.

 

In 1924, fresh out of college in Washington, DC, Throckmorton went to work designing sets for the Provincetown Players, starting with Eugene O’Neill’s Emperor Jones, and dressed many of their productions for several years. Moving to Greenwich Village after that first season was the natural next step. An early commission was his design for the interior of the Cherry Lane Theatre, also in 1924. He soon went on to conquer Broadway.

From the moment he hit the Great White Way, he was apparently kept hopping. His October 25,1965 obituary in the New York Times tells us, “In the nineteen-twenties Mr. Throckmorton became so busy and so prominent that his name, it was said, appeared on Broadway playbills with a frequency exceeded chiefly by the fire commissioner.”

 A fascinating side project and grand amusement was launched in 1928, when he and his buddy, writer Christopher Morley, began staging a series of old-time nineteenth century melodramas, played for satirical laughs, in a dilapidated theater in Hoboken. From the Gay Nineties look of the stage-door Johnnies and chorus girls in his Volare drawings, Throck thoroughly enjoyed the campy charm of Old Broadway. It’s clear these characters knew how to have a ball. Enjoying the wilds of the “last seacoast of Bohemia” meant art projects galore, not only sets and posters but the creation of their own Hoboken Free State with related gewgaws including a flag, city map, and elaborate passports issued to friends and acquaintances. (Fans of Yo La Tengo and other 1980s Hoboken scenesters will relate to these ancient artists on the other side of the Hudson.) There’s a great book about these fun-filled days called Born in a Beer Garden; Or, She Troupes to Conquer: Sundry Ejaculations by Christopher Morley, Cleon Throckmorton and Ogden Nash; And Certain of the Hoboken Ads with a Commentary on Them by Earnest Elmo Caulkins; Embellishments by Edward A. Wilson, George Illian, Cleon Throckmorton, August William Hutaf and Jay.

All Soap Abandon, Ye Who Enter Here.

Cleon Throckmorton, at right, with pals in front of the Krazy Kat Klub. Courtesy Shorpy.com

That’s a little about Mr. Throckmorton. Unsurprisingly, we became fans the moment we clapped eyes on those walls at Volare. From that day we were on the lookout for Throckabilia, so you can imagine our eyes were like saucers when our daily dose of the Shorpy photo blog began to deliver posts featuring the man himself! These photographs date to 1921, Throckmorton’s college days in DC, and show Cleon and friends, decked in Bohemian splendor, at play in and around a speakeasy/nightclub of their own creation called the Krazy Kat Klub (or sometimes Klubb.) Descriptions of the interior mention a riot of gaudy Impressionist and Futurist pictures on the walls, and a clientele of students, artists and atheists. It was one of the very few speakeasies we’ve ever heard of to boast a treehouse out back.


The club was of course named in honor of George Herriman’s masterpiece, the comic strip Krazy Kat. Although the strip lasted from 1913 to 1944, the twenties would have been the height of its popularity, and it is impossible to overstate the impact of Herriman’s creation at that time with highbrow types. Not many daily comics inspired essays from art critics, and even a ballet (1922). The innovative art and surreal story lines had to have had an irresistible appeal for the youthful Throck and his arty pals.

All this vicarious hotcha was well and good, but the spirit of Grade “A” Fancy demanded that one day we would have to track down what remained of this den of frivolity. Recently, finding we had business in the District, we did just that.

The Krazy Kat Klub was housed in a stable down an alley called Green Court, off Thomas Circle. The building is long gone, probably Charleston’d to flinders. The blue building, now a gym, is where it once stood.

But you can get an idea of what it may have looked like from the converted stables across the alley, which currently hosts a gay bar of long standing.

On our return home there was no question but to visit Volare to raise a glass to Cleon Throckmorton, surrounded by his fabulous drawings.

A toast! To Throck and his showgirls, to George Herriman and Krazy Kat, and to all the iconoclasts and flappers, the members of the Klub.

The Tempo King, The Marine Room and Chicken Tetrazzini in the Subway

Research is a shaggy dog. And more often than not that dog will disappear down a rabbit hole. When casting about for tasty bits of New York City barroom history for A Quick One, A Little Late, the winding path taken can be as fascinating as the ending. Take this example wherein a little sleuthing into the origins of a stride piano record leads to an opera megastar, a little bit of radio broadcasting history, and finally deposits us in a downtown subway station, loitering in front of some nautical froufrou that once adorned a spectacularly whimsical grotto in Herald Square.

The other day, a song came on the radio, a novelty number from 1936 with a stride piano strongly reminiscent of Fats Waller. The vocal was clearly not Fats, but it was pleasantly laid back and the trumpet break interesting. We looked it up and learned that the band was called Tempo King and his Kings of Tempo. Catchy!  Some snooping on the Google machine yielded more than four dozen sides cut under the Tempo name with this line-up: the Marsala brothers, Joe on clarinet and Marty trumpet; the great Eddie Condon, guitar; Queenie Ada Rubin on piano; Mort Stuhlmaker playing bass; ace drummer Stan King; and the vocal by Tempo King. Some of these names were familiar enough to surmise that this was a white group trying to cash in as a Fats Waller sound-alike act, but who, we wondered, were the two halves of this fake Fats: the piano of Queenie Ada Rubin and the voice of “Tempo King?”

Nobody seemed to be sure, although conspiracy theories were, unsurprisingly, easy to find. A fanciful moniker like Queenie Ada Rubin doesn’t immediately come across as real, and speaking of aliases, clearly nobody was born Tempo King, so he’s got to be a fake too, right? Some people suggested that Fats Waller cut these tunes himself; it was the golden age of musicians recording under a pseudonym to dodge exclusive contracts, and everyone did it. Probably just a series of record dates Waller’s good friend Condon put together to earn him a payday without The Victor Talking Machine Co. getting wise. But a little searching in newspaper archives laid that theory to rest. Radio listings from 1935 tell us that Tempo King and his Kings of Tempo played Saturday nights on WMCA, and the Times notes that Tempo King opened a trio engagement at the Town Casino Club in July 1936, so the act was more than a studio concoction. Plus Ada Rubin would have been an old hand at radio dates by this time since we found regular solo appearances listed for her from the 1920s. And how’s this for sewing things up: in a biography of music publisher Joe Davis, author Bruce Bastin reveals that Rubin worked as Davis’ secretary at about the same time he was publishing Waller’s tunes and she was playing with the Kings of Tempo. She continued to perform on 52nd Street long after the band was kaput, according to Linda Dahl's Stormy Weather, a guide to women in jazz. So while there is little chance that Queenie Ada Rubin was a figment of anyone’s imagination, we haven’t discovered the true identity of Tempo King. Some of the mysteries may remain unsolved, but the fact that the group played regularly on WMCA is a concrete connection to a spot of New York history.

In the earliest days of radio it was common for stations to be owned by a city’s tallest hotels because they were awfully convenient places to stick a broadcast tower. The first broadcast from a New York hotel was hosted in 1920 by the McAlpin on Broadway and West 34th Streets. Opera superstar Luisa Tetrazzini (yes, her legacy includes the namesake chicken dish) took to the nascent airwaves with a recital beamed from her apartment at the hotel. The show was arranged by the Army Signal Corps and its success convinced the McAlpin’s management to dive into the radio game in a big way. In 1925, WMCA (McA — get it?) began a regular schedule of broadcasting from its glass-enclosed circular studios, fashionably Art Deco stylish and technically cutting edge, newly built on the 24th floor. The hotel soon sold the station to Broadway playbill publisher Donald Flamm, and by the end of 1928 the studios moved into the Hammerstein Theatre building on 53rd Street where in 1935 Tempo King would make those Saturday broadcasts.

The McAlpin was also home to an eye-popping example of turn of the century glamour more apropos to the proceedings on these pages, the glorious Marine Grill. Dating from 1913, a year after the opening of the palatial McAlpin, this restaurant in the hotel’s basement was an immense maritime fantasy seating 250 diners. Polychrome terra-cotta covered every inch of the stocky piers and vaults, framing 24 lunette-shaped murals of New York’s seafaring past designed by Fred Dana Marsh. In 1957, the room became The Gate of Cleve, a hoked-up burlesque of a grand old restaurant in Amsterdam. By that time the writing was on the tiles. Over the years, as the McAlpin’s fortunes slid, the space accommodated a string of mediocre hash houses — one German, another Indian, a Japanese — and miraculously the interior largely survived these humiliations. But in 1976 the hotel was converted to rental apartments and by the Eighties the management ran out of takers to lease the restaurant. Plumbing repairs necessitated the destruction of its ceiling in 1989, and the following spring the space was stripped. Ground floor retailer The Gap began using it for a storage room. The majority of the interior went into the trash (a preservationists’ horrifying nightmare) but a salvage company retained sixteen of the terra-cotta murals, offering them for sale.

That would be too sad an ending, and you know we always like to see the glass half full of gin, so fear not, there is a happyish finale. Six of those murals, rescued by the NYC Landmarks and Preservation Commission, can be seen today by anyone with the price of a subway fare. The MTA, through its Arts for Transit program, installed these six lunettes and the restaurant’s iron grillwork gate in the William Street entrance of the Fulton Street 2-3-A-C subway station.

The mural at the top of the stairs honors Robert Fulton’s Clermont, the first commercially successful steamboat, which plied a passenger service between New York and Albany beginning in 1807.

Downstairs, facing the token booth, is the cast iron gate that once decorated the entrance to the Marine Room.


Through the turnstile and to the left are the remaining five murals. The original native New Yorkers, the Lenape, canoeing out to greet the arrival of Henry Hudson’s Half Moon is the scene in the center. Flanking Hudson to the left is the Commonwealth, the last and the largest of the Fall River Line steamers, and a British warship in New York Harbor during the Revolution, possibly on a foray up the Hudson River in July 1776. On the right, we find a tug guiding the luxury liner RMS Mauretania, and a depiction of settlers entering the harbor of New Amsterdam during Dutch colonial times.

After seeing everything was shipshape with the survivors, we buzzed up to Herald Square for a look at the carcass of the McAlpin, and of course, a Quick One.

For a toast to maritime history, the Grade “A” Fancy cocktail department prescribed a rum and lime drink.  Here at a cocktail table in the ass-park on Broadway, we knock back what we’ll call a McAlpin Daiquiri:  Muddle two pitted cherries (fresh or from your grocer's freezer, thawed) in a glass with a flat bottom that will permit muddling.  Shake two ounces rum (El Dorado 8 Demerara Guyana on this occasion), the juice of ½ a lime, and a teaspoon superfine sugar with ice until you’re tired.  Strain the liquid over the cherries and that’s it.

 Yo ho ho!