The Great American Saloon Series / Closing Time
Brookhiser, Richard
appealofCommunism? I doubt it. The same motives that led certain people to look to Communism to improve the situation of the masses in the Soviet Union and China still generate support for...
...goose, served in chunks that seemed all bone, but what w a s n ' t was worth the work...
...Perhaps they will install video games (PAC.MAN would be appropriate...
...9 . + a sense of history between the World Wars {Chambers wrote years later] . . . . the soldiered platform at Duren, the train running for miles with the smiling Senegalese holding their machine guns on it from the overheads, Nazis, Communists, the fail of nations, a wedge of wall standing above what had been St...
...Meanwhile, the Landmarks Commission is making a move to preserve the Liichow's interior...
...The people continue ro suffer as much as, or often more than,, in the past...
...The regimes of Salazar, Franco, and the Greek colonels could give way to democratic ones because they were r e a c t i o n a r y and self: interested rather than revolutionary...
...Mencken, another patron, remembered a meal with the music critic James Huneker: We sat down to luncheon at one o'clock...
...as he left, he would weigh himself to make sure he had not exceeded 350 pounds...
...But Liichow's made me think of it...
...1 didn't start out to.write this...
...A typical Brady repast is said to have consisted of several dozen oysters, halfa dozen broiled crabs, double turtle soup, six or seven lobsters, two orders of terrapin, two ducks, steak, v e g e t a b l e s , p a s t r i e s , a two-pound box of candy, and a gallon of orange juice...
...Every weekend young voids with dayglo hair and leather wardrobes flock to the Palladium to have their eardrums punctured...
...and live music, a battle of the bands, no less, a string trio in white tie switching off with an oompah band in Alpine caps and Lederhosen, stumping from table to table and blaring brassily...
...Those who seek Utopias are the true villains, and this is as true for leftists as it is for rightists_9 The bad can be made much worse...
...The ideal is the enemyof thegood...
...mirrored walls and dark wood paneling...
...New Yorkers put up with a lot of heterogeneity in pursuit of what they want...
...It sounds like toothpaste and Seven Up, looked n a u s e a t i n g , and t a s t e d wonderful...
...Slowly but surely the loftbuying middle class is creeping down Park Avenue South, and every Saturday during the warm months, the...
...but if he had attacked the twenty-Seide/lunch, who would have said him nay...
...Four blocks north, Pete's Tavern, which O. Henry patronized--the booth where he wrote "The Gift of the Magi" being carefully marked--has made the transition from a workingman's watering hole to a resort of the chi-chi...
...We no longer lunch from one to six, or start meals with twenty-four oysters and end them with a gallon of orange juice...
...but I will have Berlinerweisser, perhaps three, in honor of the former President...
...Every night, alcoholics without the excuse of youth stumble in and out of Giancy's bar...
...No, the real reason for Liichow's demise (and to leave its old premises was to seal its demise, whatever uptown reincarnation it seeks) was that New Yorker's had ceased to want it...
...Like all but the worst spots in Manhattan, Lfichow's beleaguered home was only a few streets away from wholesomeness, even elegance...
...Nor was he unique: August Liichow, the founder, required four waiters to hoist him upstairs to his room by meal's end...
...On the way out, if no one's looking, I'll weigh myself...
...Whittaker Chambers went there as Richard Brookbtser is editor at National Review and wezgbs 175 pounds...
...a thirty-foot ceiling and skylight...
...One door further down, you can dine at Burger King--or could, till it closed (the currend franchise-lessor is Arby's...
...For even in its nonagenarian deCadence,~it offered a handful of splendid dishes, unobtainable elsewhere--saddle of venison, _which melted in the mouth from the consistency of filet mignon to the consistency of zabaglione, with lingonberries, sour cream, and chestD nut puree on the side...
...I think it must have been at Liichow's, his favorite refuge and rostrum to the end...
...a teenager, taken by an older woman, a neighbor and mentor, "from [whom] 1got my German, in fact, all my languages, my Europe, and much else...
...Their rulers, who p u r p o r t to believe they are serving the people's interests, are more inclined to use terror to foster t h e s e i n t e r e s t s than are those who are only concerned with maintaining power...
...Who else could possibly make use of it, I cannot imagine...
...One door down, you can have your palm read...
...pushers cede the northern fringe of Union Square to a farmer's market...
...and o f . c o u r s e b e e r - - c h i e f l y draft b e e r , in liter Seidels, though my favorite was Berhnerweisser, a kind of beer cocktail which started with a puddle of r a s p b e r r y syrup in a fat, round g l a s s , to which was added a bottle of pale, almost tasteless ale...
...Unfortunately, the venison will not be in season...
...Yet ultimately the demographic explanation does not satisfy...
...Beyond this urban oasis, life stirs...
...And yet finally you didn't go to eat...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1982 5...
...9 Setdel of Pilsner, and he was bringing to a close prestissimo the most amazing _9 monologue . . . . Berlioz and the question of the clang tint of the viola . . . why Nietzsche had to leave Sils Maria between days in 1887 . . . the precise topography of the warts of Liszt . . . what to drink when playing C h o p i n . . . whether a girl educated at Vassar could ever really learn to love . . . what George Moore said about German bathrooms . . . the genuine last words of Walt Whitman . . . L i i c h o w ' s stood at the intersection of 14th Street and Irving Place, in a pair of red brick townhouses, with balconied windows and trim--scallops and other doodads--painted to look gilded...
...it will never be perfect...
...nooks and cul-de-sacs scattered here and there...
...The immediate neighborhood slowly became nondescript, 32 THt- AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1982 seedy...
...but capitalism is ingenious, and I shall hope...
...worse, so did the theaters...
...But once in power, the utopians, as Marx anticipated, turn into oppressive authoritarian rulers of impoverished societies...
...But Chambers's associations were idiosyncratic...
...Perhaps new owners will hang ferns and serve quiche...
...Brady, a r o b b e r baron and philant h r o p i s t (he endowed the James Buchanan Brady Urological Institute at Johns Hopkins) would be considered bulimic by today's standards, but in fact he followed a regimen, which the s c a l e s . h e l p e d enforce...
...Before that happens, I want to go one last time--indeed, this eulogy has been nothing but an elaborate pretext...
...The owners have said they will take Diamond Jim Brady's scales uptown with them...
...When it was founded, the east side of 14th Street was the double heart of the theater district, and the German community...
...For the decades which gave Lfichow's the ambiance it so jealously p r e s e r v e d were not the tumultuous twenties and thirties, but the spaciousfin-de-si~cle...
...Seating himself to a Liichow's dinner, he would position his stomach four inches from the table top, and stop when they touched...
...So, even at the end, it was possible to go to LLichow's without f e e l i n g swindled ol: sickened...
...and we have lost interest in even such ghosts of old habits as Lfichow's offered...
...A night at Liichow's was like dining in a time capsule--the nineteenth century in the overripe, overstuffed, underexercised flesh...
...For Liichow's--founded in 1882, and moving uptown to new quarters this y e a r - - h a d become, in its old age, something perilously close to a tourist trap: one of those New York restaurants like Mama Leone's, or J o e ' s Pier 52, which specialize in high p r i c e s , indifferent food, and hectic s e r v i c e , and which manage year a f t e r year to pay the r e n t because of their famous names and the unwariness of visiting bumpkins...
...and if an expense account meal ticket in the Big Apple comes our way, we load up on Bloody Marys and head for protonouvelle cuisine at the Four Seasons...
...Union Square, where the nearest subways debark, teems with entrepreneurs in controlled substances...
...in the West...
...The same motives that led certain people to look to Communism to improve the situation of the masses in the Soviet Union and China still generate support for Communist-led movements in various less-developed countries+ Utopian socialism remains a live force in the Third World, if not...
...Demographics is supposed to haye done Liichow's in...
...J u s t inside the door, a thoug.htful management placed a warning to the f a i n t h e a r t e d in the form of Diamond Jim Brady's scales...
...in Christmas season, the l a r g e s t indoor tree you'd ever seen, artificial (which was a minus), but made in Oberammergau (which made it plus again...
...Next came an anteroom, a living room, really, having no discernible purpose except the display of painti n g s - a l l in ornate frames, and all in execrable taste, though that, and the profusion in which they were hung, was t h e i r charm_9 Last, the main dining room, with room for five hundred ff there was room for one...
...CLOSING TIME by Richard Brookhiser I f you have never lived in New York, only visited it, there is still a good Chance you ate at Liichow's, and a good chance you didn't much like i t , at least as f a r as food is concerned...
...Mihiel...
...Even 14th Street at its worst is only unsightly, not seriously unsafe...
...To that state had Liichow's almost come--almost, not quite...
...The best we can do is to try to make society better...
...we pamper our bodies with exercise...
...They might as well donate them to the Museum of Natural History...
...Climmy Carter, it is true, inveighed against the three-martini lunch, and the electorate repudiated him...
...We are still gluttons, but our arteries have replaced our gullets as objects of concern...
...Con Edison's headquarters, kitty corner from the lonely restaurant, gives the block stability, but no life past five o'clock, and what life there is is mostly low...
...you went to go...
...When we eat out (and that means you, hypocrite lecteur), we go Chinese, or Indian, or something equally refined and parsimonious...
...It succumbed to the inexorable grinding of fashion...
...Two blocks north of that lies Gramercy Park, fenced, private, as sleek as Union Square is grim (one of the surrounding townhouses is reportedly being offered for a cool $2 million...
...At six, when I had to go, the waiter was hauling in his tenth (or was it twentieth...
...Afterwards, we jog...
...The Germans left decades ago, without a trace...
...Communists may not yield power, because they believe they represent historic truth and virtue, much like the Nazis...
Vol. 15 • June 1982 • No. 6
