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.

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.

—————————————————————

*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.

A Quick One at Billy La Hiff's Tavern

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:  Billy LaHiff’s Tavern

It was an occupational bar and neighborhood tavern, linking glitz and guts and newspaper ink.  They intersected in the neighborhood known as Times Square. 

From the day it opened in 1922, Billy La Hiff’s Tavern at 156-158 West 48th Street was a hit. It drew a Runyon-esque crowd; show girls and comedians, professional gamblers and gangsters, columnists of both the gossip and sports pages, ball players, turf accountants, prize fighters and their managers, all made the Tavern their home base. The roaring success owed much to the personality and reputation of host Billy La Hiff, and his expert staff led by the wise-cracking Jack Spooner, with Walter George Gates and Pat Geraty. This trio of star waiters had spent the ‘Teens honing their skills at Jack Dunston’s saloon (across from the famed Hippodrome) where they had a unique method of giving trouble drunks the bum’s rush. Adapted from the gridiron, they called it “the Flying Wedge,” and they would later employ it at La Hiff’s.

At age 16 Billy La Hiff left Providence, RI for New York City, landing a job in the wine cellar of the old Waldorf-Astoria under the tutelage of famous maître d’ Oscar Tschirky. Within two years he had advanced to wine steward, a high status job that acquainted him with all the top movers and shakers in café society: Diamond Jim Brady, Harry K. Thaw, gambler Dick Canfield, and Ward McAllister, the arbiter of New York’s fabled “Four Hundred.” His Waldorf connections would prove useful when in 1905 La Hiff struck off on his own, opening the Gayety Café at West 46th Street and Broadway, with partner Frank Gerety. The next venture, the Strand Café, was a solo effort located a block uptown on Broadway. He later moved off the thoroughfare to West 47th and rechristened his restaurant the Strand Chop House. In 1919 he sold the lease on this property at considerable profit, setting the stage for his most famous eatery.

Adjacent three story townhouses were acquired, numbers 156 and 158 on West 48th Street next door to the Vanderbilt Theatre.  A renovation joined the two structures, added a story, and opened in 1922 as La Hiff’s Tavern, with rental apartments above.

Those rentals would house a cast of Broadway characters over the years. The apartments took on the aspect of a bachelor pad for a time when Walter Winchell and Damon Runyon, both ducking the women in their lives, and cartoonist Bugs Baer lived upstairs from the Tavern. Other notable residents included a pre-Stork Club Sherman Billingsley, and Jack Dempsey. In 1930 newlyweds Ed and Sylvia Sullivan moved in.

Downstairs the Tavern was awash in celebrity. Every major Broadway star of the ‘Twenties made their way to La Hiff’s: Harry Richman, Paul Whiteman, Al Jolson, comics Bert Lahr and Bert Wheeler were regulars. Stardom became a family affair when one of the younger regulars, Billy’s niece Ann LaHiff, doing business under the stage name Nancy Carroll, found fame on Broadway before Hollywood stole her away. When Barbara Stanwyck was still Ruby Stevens, teenaged chorus girl fresh out of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, she and her roommates Mae Clarke and Walda Mansfield knew Billy was an easy touch for a roast beef dinner when money got tight. Presumably he saw the value of decorating his restaurant with vivacious chlorines, regardless of their ability to pay. The Tavern was in the English chop house style so popular at that time; the beef was very good, but it was the ale that columnist Westbrook Pelger remembered as about the best you could find during Prohibition. Speaking of the noble experiment, apparently it didn’t matter that Mayor Jimmie Walker was a regular, when the Feds wanted a raid they got it. On July 31, 1932 agents bought a glass of ale and promptly herded the waiters and cashier into patrol wagons.  On the street, a crowd of a thousand, both La Hiff’s diners and Broadway passersby, jeered the cops, according to the New York Sun. La Hiff’s Tavern was reopened for business within the hour.

With a new Madison Square Garden just a couple blocks over on Eighth Avenue and 49th Street, the Tavern drew the top talent in the pugilistic world. The joint got even more interesting. One evening, after Harry “The Pittsburg Windmill” Greb successfully defended his middleweight title against Mickey Walker, both fighters found themselves relaxing at the Tavern. Words were exchanged, and before long the two pugs decided it was best to take a walk outside and, to the delight of sports writers and fans at the bar,  start slugging each other, a bizarre encore to the fifteen grueling rounds they had just completed at the Garden. On another memorable night, Greb was spotted drinking at La Hiff’s before a big bout. The Tavern being filled with professional gamblers, as it always was, his drunken appearance lowered the betting odds in a considerable hurry. But the wily Greb had only been drinking ginger ale that evening and won the bout handily, thus enjoying a bonanza on wagers made much more profitable due to his subterfuge. La Hiff’s was so much a part of the prizefighting world that Jimmy Breslin, in his biography of Runyon, painted a picture of Primo Carnera training in the top floor loft.

Big league baseball players favored the Tavern as well. The last game of the 1926 World Series begat another legend connected with La Hiff’s. Pitching ace Grover Cleveland Alexander had already won two games for the Cardinals. After his victory in game six, and assuming the team wouldn’t need him again, he celebrated so vigorously at La Hiff’s that the morning of the seventh game found him back at the Tavern trying to shake off a monumental hangover. Manager Rogers Hornsby, fearing he might need Alexander, sent a taxi to collect him from the Tavern and deliver him to Yankee Stadium. By the seventh inning the starting pitcher had developed a blister. After scant warmup, Alexander came in with the bases loaded and the dangerous Tony “Poosh ‘Em Up” Lazzeri at the plate. He struck him out, closed out the remaining innings with no damage from the Bombers, and St. Louis won the Championship.

It’s no wonder columnists were drawn to the Tavern as the hub of the Times Square scene. Newspapermen found the goings-on irresistible. Besides Sullivan, Winchell and Runyon, the usual crowd would include Grantland Rice, Gene Fowler, Westbrook Pelger, Mark Hellinger Leonard Lyon, Ring Lardner and Brooklyn Eagle gossip Rian James, who lost badly at checkers to Billy La Hiff but always came back for more.

After La Hiff died in 1934, his son, Billy Jr., hired Toots Shor as manager. Toots had made a reputation as a trusted bouncer and glad-handing doorman in a series of top speakeasies, Owney Madden’s the Five O’Clock Club being the first. In 1936 the younger La Hiff sold out to Shor and a partner, Philadelphia real estate developer Paul F. Herron. Shor and his wife moved into the apartments above the Tavern and enjoyed the established La Hiff Tavern scene, mixing with the sporting and entertainment worlds. This idyll lasted until the end of 1938 when Toots’ gambling losses pushed him out of the job. But the atmosphere at the Tavern suited Shor’s personality so perfectly that when he opened his own joint in 1940 it was to follow the same lively pattern.

Jack Spooner went on to maître d’ the Cub Room at Sherman Billingsley’s Stork Club. Walter George Gates kept on at the Tavern, logging something near six decades as a waiter. La Hiff’s Tavern closed in 1942.

The empty space was filled by another established restaurant, Zucca’s, relocated from 118 West 49th, its home since 1919. In 1965, Rockefeller Center bought the building for Manny’s Music whose original location would be razed to make room for new office towers as the complex expanded across Sixth Avenue. Manny’s reopened in 1969, sold out to Sam Ash music in 2009, and the store at 156-158 West 48th finally closed in 2012.

There’s nothing left of the glory of Billy La Hiff’s Tavern.

And Manny’s is just a name inlaid into the tile in front of a locked roll down gate.

But here on the sidewalk we raised a glass of ale to Billy La Hiff and the memory of one of the brightest spots on the Great White Way.

Next time we have a Quick One, A Little Late we will be taking a peek at another long gone hot spot, one that kept our Bohemian ancestors well lubricated.

A Quick One at Bleeck's

New York City is a jumble of eras. As another glass tower rises, our 1882-vintage underground steam system pokes its head up to laugh. A building comes down and a ghost sign touting hair tonic or whalebone corsets is exposed on the adjoining bricks. At a brand new cocktail lounge we might admire a tile floor dating from three shops ago, or wonder about the path the backbar has taken over the course of a century to arrive here, though it is frustratingly mute to our attempts at an interview. The restaurant we ate at last night could very well be eulogized in Jeremiah’s column this afternoon. Today’s newspaper is already old by the time it hits the newsstand.

When we’re reading —even if it’s fiction— and a notable address is mentioned, we can’t help running down the street to see what’s there now. It’s exciting when some scrap from the past remains, but fat chance these days; odds are everything’s long gone. Sometimes not even street numbers persist if a block has been busted up by an office tower, often sporting a showy new realtor-minted address. In a recent binge-read we gobbled up Jack Finney’s time travel fantasy novels, “Time and Again” and “The Woodrow Wilson Dime.” Even if you never daydream that, by some clever mind game or simply squinting real hard, you could maybe (maybe, maybe) trick a parallel world into view, Finney style, the many strata of city history are there in plain sight, waiting for you. Our 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 still live on in popular lore — your Stork Club, your El Morocco. But there were 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, long departed, can never be recreated. But 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.

Our first stop, Bleeck’s.

 

 

Interior décor at Bleeck’s featured a full suit of armor swiped from the prop department of the old Metropolitan Opera, and a marlin said to have been caught by J.P. Morgan.

“I’m going downstairs.”

In the offices of the New York Herald Tribune these words always signified a field trip to Bleeck’s, the bar at 213 West 40th Street, just “a stein’s throw” away from the newspaper’s back door. The Herald Tribune was at 230 West 41st Street from 1924-66, but the employees’ entrance was one block south at 219-220 West 40th; today, fittingly, this is the entrance to the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. Bleeck’s was destroyed by fire in 1981 and 213 is now a link in the Hale & Hearty Soup chain.

In 1925 Jack Bleeck (pronounced ‘blake’ in the Dutch manner) finagled a charter for a social club he named The Artist & Writers Club. No one was ever quite sure the reason for that singular artist. The private club angle was a dodge to skirt Prohibition. Soon there were 6,000 members on the rolls, a sizable proportion of these were ink-stained wretches from the Trib. At this point everyone just called it Bleeck’s. Ace Broadway press agent and Bleeck’s regular Richard Maney told Life Magazine readers in 1945,

Even those skilled in distinguishing shadings in the spectrum find it difficult to determine where the Herald Tribune leaves off and Bleeck’s starts in, and vice versa.

It is said that when the walls of the saloon would begin to shake as the presses upstairs started their run, the bar would clear out as newsmen ran to check their copy. The New Yorker offices were also nearby, and soon Joe Mitchell and A.J. Leibling were leading James Thurber and their co-workers along a well beaten path to Bleeck’s door. Eventually reporters, columnists, writers and press agents from all over town made the bar a favorite literary hangout. Dick Schapp interviewed Norman Mailer there to coincide with the publication of “An American Dream.” The Newspaper Guild union was practically formed there in 1933 when Heywood Broun encouraged Bleeck’s habitués to join.

Bleeck’s was a busy joint. In the early days it attracted opera singers from the old Met, just a block away, and sundry thespians and stagehands from the National Theatre (later the Billy Rose, now the Nederlander) at 208 West 41st Street. Tallulah Bankhead is remembered wearing mink with slacks while she shot dice with French sailors during her 1939 run at the National in Lillian Hellman’s “Little Foxes.” Bogart brought Bacall to learn the famous “match game.”

As described in Life, the match game was born in Bleeck’s and the fierce competition became the stuff of legend. A game for any number of players, each hides in his fist from zero to three matches. Contestants guess the total number of matches held, and a correct guess means you are eliminated. This continues until there are two players left. From this point, the best two out of three rounds wins, and the loser pays out a predetermined stake to each of the winners.

The local color at Bleeck’s was not restricted to its famous patrons. The staff had its characters, too, according to Lucius Beebe, in “Snoot If You Must,”

It was at Bleeck’s that Harry McCormack, the demented barkeep, imagined he maintained a complete poultry farm and apiary behind the bar. The premises, in his fancy, were filled with white leghorns and bees in clover, and he was forever scattering imaginary cracked corn to his flock among the duckboards back of the ice bins. He was an excellent barkeep.

Some Regulars: Herbert Asbury, Lucius Beebe, Heywood Broun, Jimmy Breslin, Walt Kelly, John Lardner, A.J. Liebling, Arthur Miller, Joe Mitchell, John O’Hara, James Thurber, and Herald Tribune owner Jock Whitney.


Shall we have a look at the place today?

The Artist [sic] and Writers Club (later Restaurant), or more familiarly, Bleeck’s. Today you can get turkey gumbo to go instead of knockwurst, beer and camaraderie.

Two doors west, once the backside of the New York Herald Tribune and currently the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.

Cocktails on West 40th Street with the ghosts of Bleeck’s, while commuting hordes advance towards Port Authority and Times Square. Bleeck’s Martinis were preconcocted at 5-to-1 and kept on ice behind the bar, chilled and ready to be served undiluted. Ours are similarly readymade and thermos-cooled for sidewalk quaffability.

The match game begins. We keep an eye out for John Law as dollar bets are placed.

While talking occupational bars, guest illicit imbiber Paul Lukas reminds us of his piece in Beer Frame mentioning a past New York Times local, Gough’s Chop House, 212 West 43rd Street (1947-1993, R.I.P.) Surreptitious sipper Heather McCabe also relays memories of another dearly departed saloon, a home-away-from-home once favored by the staff of Sports Illustrated.


“Wanamaker Pfeufferneuse Knickerbocker Benchley!” (Our own Grade “A” Fancy version of “Down the hatch!”) And a toast to the memory of Jack Bleeck, and to the grand tradition of New York City trade bars.

In the next installment of A Quick One, A Little Late, we’ll drop by a chophouse that was a second home to all the Broadway Babies in the Roaring Twenties.