Landmarks Omission

The 21 Club closing upset my friend Shari, its former PR director. “It survived Prohibition and the Depression!” she wailed. “It was a quintessential NY place. Presidents ate there. So did families when their kids turned 21. Where do they go now?”  

The trouble with Landmarks 

NYC never really got landmarks. Paris has businesses in operation since before the Black Plague. London has plaques marking the birthplace of the scone…but NYC’s grittier history is tough to put on a plaque.  “Sid Vicious shot up here!” doesn’t have the same cachet. Only Jackie O. and NYC’s gentry could create a Landmarks Commission…and they forgot retail.  

So we lose those unofficial landmarks, the touchstones that make a neighborhood, that make NYC, that make… us. Places like….

Gem Spa

The Gem was the Vatican of Egg Creams and its last holdout (unless Rickey’s survives) but NYC once had hundreds of neighborhood luncheonettes – like Hy and Lil’s on E. 3^rd.   I’d drop my bookbag with a sigh, do some twirls on the red leatherette stool, and watch Hy make me an egg cream, extra sweet, at the shiny chrome fountain. Hy was a stocky older guy with an unlit DeNobli cigar and a soiled apron hiked up to his armpits –  but his eggs creams had an extra pump of U-bet.   He had thinning black hair, black eyeglasses, and an eagle eye for when I loitered too long by the comics. He always brought me out of my reveries with a verbal rap on the back of the head:  “Hey, kid, you buyin’ or what?” 

The Cupping Room

When West Broadway was a funky mix of retail and art, the Cupping Room was the local coffeehouse.  Tony, the mechanic from the garage across the street drank his coffee (regular, no sugar) next to  Klaus Nomi (cappuccino) wearing his full space alien kit, next to the mobster (espresso) who gestured with his unlit cigar and talked to himself. It was a great time to be young in an arty neighborhood. Rachel (orange juice, toasted bagel with a schmear), a zaftig redhead whose Willow House lingerie store was nearby, asked some of us gals to model at an open house one weekend.  We hung around the store in underwear – and stopped traffic. Literally. Including an ambulance.  

It was hard work, but fun.  I enjoyed my customers – like the guy (orange juice, espresso eggs) who had a migraine. “It’s terrible,” he moaned, “like a mental hernia.” I handed him an aspirin and told him he must have thought of something really heavy, and he tipped me a five.  The staff sang “I wanna be sedated” during clean-up. We knew when Barry’s wife was coked up because she went on cleaning binges with q-tips. (We comped her dealer as a thank you). I later learned I got canned because I had “too much personality.” That’s when I knew it was the beginning of the end for SoHo. 

Now what?

The closures now literally hit home because of such personal meanings: the store where you could inhale air that might have atoms exhaled from someone you loved; the Koreatown restaurant with the initials carved by the person you thought was the Love of Your Life.  The drugstore where you stopped for suntan lotion before going to the beach for the first time as a couple. Ordinary stops in ordinary places for ordinary events we all thought would just…keep going.

It’s like visiting your parents and seeing that they threw out everything in your room and just left it empty.

New York Natives learned to travel light because the city reinvents itself constantly.  First it was by urban decay (the Lowe’s Avenue B,), then by development fever (DiRobertis, where my grandfather held court). Covid-19 moved the cycle from decades to years to months to just weeks.  It took luncheonettes and hardware stores…and even institutions, like Lord and Taylor, the country’s oldest department store, founded in 1826. 

A parting shot

Despite its genteel air L&T was NY tough. It outlasted epidemics of cholera, typhoid, Spanish Flu, and smallpox, several depressions and two world wars – all while maintaining the city’s best handbag department.  In its “Everything must go!” stage I paid my respects with my friend Helen. While she was inspecting display cases and clothing racks hoping to snag some bargains, but I wandered around the picked over merchandise and the floors full of naked mannequins and got all philosophical and melancholy.

I got exactly what I deserved. Someone picked my pocket and stole my MetroCard.

It was the ghostly hand of Hy, giving me a virtual smack upside the head: “Hey, kid, you buyin’, or what?” – the unofficial motto of New York City, the city that still Never Sleeps and Never Stops, and just keeps going, no matter what.  

But don’t get me started about that.

Photo:  Beyond My Ken, CC By-SA40, via Wikimedia Commons