The Great American Saloon Series/The Old Town Bar
Brookhiser, Richard
THE GREAT AMERICAN SALOON SERIES THE OLD TOWN BAR by Richard Brookhiser My neighborhood is changing. That is what New York magazine says, so it must be so. The agents of transformation there as...
...How can I possibly think that...
...But when all I want is a drink, and I'm paying with my own money, I step down the street...
...What surprises me more is that in the course of pointing out a simple error on my part, Jeffrey Hart imputes malice, questions my integrity, and takes a shot at my present employers...
...Tuesday's (formerly Scheffel Hall) at 17th Street and Third...
...When the sun sets and the gloom outside matches the gloom within, the place is lit by hanging lamps with frosted bulbs, and by the glow of the front signboard, a rusted metal sheet on which the name is pricked out in the most ancient neon...
...the ashtrays, giveaways from liquor companies...
...Marcia Spires New York, New York-Marcia Spires New York, New York...
...Anyone reading Edward N. Luttwak's works (including The Political Uses of Sea Power) will clearly see that Luttwak is a better writer and a better thinker than Lehman...
...Sorry 'bout that...
...In lightless caverns, fish bleach...
...The Old Town Bar occupies the ground floor of a lonely townhouse, a dwarfed relic hunkering between fin-de-secle office and factory buildings, relics now themselves...
...What distinguishes all this gay nineties retro from the competition is that none of it seems to have been restored, or refurbished, or even preserved, beyond day-to-day care and the force of inertia...
...Secretary of the Navy John F. Lehman ought to deep six the sour grapes (TAS, July 1985...
...Same issue, Benjamin J. Stein...
...Another instance: I don't really need a page of vapid reverie on what it is like to be young and in love in Washington...
...The statistics merely served as ancillary illustration of a point I wanted to make about how Dartmouth's sense of its own purpose was more social than academic and in turn how that fact undermines the case Poisoned Ivy struggles to make against affirmative action...
...For unselfconscious unfashionableness, you must go halfway down a still gray and un-upgraded block of 18th Street between Broadway and Park Avenue South, to the Old Town Bar...
...For if it won't be Coppola who breaks this oasis up, it will be something else...
...there is money to be made in my neighborhood, and glitter to be applied-so go, while they're still in the mint and the make-up case...
...For some reason, many of New York City's best-preserved nineteenth-century bars cluster within a mile of each other, between the Lower East Side and Midtown: McSorley's Old Ale House where, the masthead will tell you, this journal was founded, on 6th Street, between Second and Third Avenues...
...It wasn't at all what I was led to expect from the ad...
...Would he be so sanguine if, say, tomorrow, The Rockford Institute informed him that his services would no longer be needed and that his skills were technologically behind the times and that continuing his employment was economically infeasible...
...Carlson would be so glib if he were facing the same problems of unemployment and unemployability...
...The glass of the front windows, and of the cabinets behind the bar, is beveled in sunbursts-the only sun that penetrates this interior...
...It was a foolish mistake, and one for which, as Professor Hart helpfully points out, the editors of The American Spectator bear no responsibility...
...All owners are mortal...
...Harvey's Chelsea Restaurant, at 18th and Sixth...
...The agents of transformation there as in every neighborhood in and around Manhattan are yuppies...
...You must stop here on your way to America...
...When you do, you will see a hand-lettered sign in the window, a lone reference to current events...
...I am indebted to Jeffrey Hart for pointing out that my statistics regarding the academic qualifications of Dartmouth's class of '87 were in error...
...and since I too am of course a yuppie, I have no real reason to complain...
...Oh, come on, you say...
...Nothing in any of these places is the least bit new...
...He also told me that when The Cotton Club was being filmed, Francis Ford Coppola, on the lookout for echt backdrops, asked to use the Old Town Bar (and probably, being Coppola, offered to do a zillion dollar restoration in preparation for filming...
...CORRESPONDENCE (continued from page 7) be reading Plato, Aristotle, Dante, and Shakespeare...
...Yet for Hart to say that the "logic" of my review is based on these statistics is a bit curious...
...But nine decades of smallness and sleep and dinge, such as have accumulated in the Old Town Bar, suggest a true and deep understanding of the psyche...
...There are times when we only want to sit, in a place as satisfying as a mowed lawn, as easy as a hot bath, as snug as a shoe your wife has told you ten times needs fixing...
...Interesting patrons...
...Bernard Adelman Winthrop, Massachusetts Luttwak Ahoy...
...Here and there are new arrivals, as casual as the veterans: the indispensable color TV (even tarted-up bars must have one, though this one, to be sure, has seen better days...
...So would he please pick up and get another job somewhere else, and not make a fuss...
...McSorley's and Pete's were the hang-outs of Tammany pols...
...Atmospherically, they are the opposites of America...
...A large selection of brews...
...The hot brand in town for a year now (continued on page 49) SALOON (continued from page 47) has been a new beer, called New Amsterdam...
...He strives for a "useful objectivity" while Secretary Lehman makes cracks about "armchair theory," "amateur Bismarcks," and "undemocratic desires...
...John F. Williams III Portland, Oregon The New Smugness I am a recent subscriber...
...in the Old Town Bar, all hues deepen: the floor, paved with hexagonal tiles, once white, now gray...
...Well, take, for instance, the article titled "Pennsylvania Prophets" in the July issue...
...Any place small and sleepy and slightly dingy can provide these gratifications...
...The conservatives are in danger of becoming as self-absorbed as the Liberals...
...Good food...
...Mencken described him-"it was too white, or it curled the wrong way, or a feather peeped from the band-and a hint of antinomianism in his cravat...
...The most delicate decorations hide on the swing doors of the stalls in the men's room (where there may also once have been a period chain on the water closet, though to work it now you must tug a straightened-out coat-hanger...
...A regular told me to avoid the menu...
...The yuppie flag was most recently raised at a state-of-the-art restaurant called America, on 18th Street, between Broadway and Fifth Avenue...
...But in their determination to be so, they in fact resemble it...
...The bar top has the fleshy feel of wood that has been soaked and cleaned and soaked again, for years and years (93 of them, according to the bartender...
...Poisoned Ivy had led me to believe that querulous reaction and criticism was the exclusive preserve of liberal professors at Dartmouth College...
...Many of these establishments have political or literary associations...
...I'm afraid the quote highlighted on page 33 is all too true, if this magazine is any indication...
...It is not deliberately retro at all...
...Pete's proudly displays the booth where O. Henry once sat, fashioning O. Henry endings...
...In case you are curious, I'm disappointed mainly because the overall tone reeks of smugness...
...Please cancel my subscription...
...The story depressed me...
...Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review...
...The owner said, thanks, he liked things just fine the way they were...
...A Small Gem Yale and Rita Kramer's "The Shrinking of America" (TAS, June 1985) is to me a small gem: beautifully written, realistic and wise, amusing (even belly-laugh hilarious in spots, such as the report on Robert Jay Lifton's quick getaway after his "I'll be around, boys and girls" windup), and really informative to a "layman" such as myself, whose knowledge of psychoanalysis ranges from superficial to zilch...
...The "logic" of my review was based on Poisoned Ivy's inadequacies, an issue of only tangential connection to the quality of students at Dartmouth College...
...I second Forbes magazine's recommendation that Luttwak become our next Secretary of Defense, and Mr...
...I haven't had the heart to check it out...
...This," it declares, "is Ellis Island...
...they don't have it...
...stick to Budweiser...
...Lehman's boss...
...Pete's, at 18th and Irving Place...
...I wonder if Mr...
...My, my...
...yuppies are everywhere...
...There is something restful in this haphazard-ness, and soothing to the soul...
...It's as big as an airline hangar and about as noisy, and it has stylish wall murals through which (of course) the pipes have been allowed to show, and if you don't have a reservation you'll wait an hour and a half to be seated, and the menu in addition to some very good dishes has cute items like s'mores and fluff-r-nutters and tunafish sandwiches (it's American cuisine, you see, though at five bucks for s'mores, American Express cuisine is more like it), and all the waitresses wear miniskirts and black jewelry, and you can't toss a brick without killing someone who voted for Gary Hart...
...That is America the restaurant, and it may be America the country...
...New York never lies...
...Down a ways is a lampshade brandnamed by a whiskey company, stuck atop an oversized crock in the shape of a bottle- just the sort of knick-knack that filled suburban "dens" when the yuppie generation was being born...
...Scheffel Hall was a hang-out of James Huneker, music critic and bon vivant ("there was always something rakish and defiant about his hat," H.L...
...There were efforts, back in 1892, to make the place comfortable-a row of booths, equipped with coat hooks and bronze-colored lamps-but few to make it beautiful or whimsical...
...I stand by this larger point, and am somewhat surprised that Jeffrey Hart would question it since he is on intimate terms with at least one of the last decade's two towering monuments to a sans souci Dartmouth College: National Lampoon's Animal House and Ben Hart's Poisoned Ivy...
...Over the bar is a pendulum clock, but when the pendulum fell still, they put an electric in the case (forty years ago, by the look of it...
...the ceiling, surfaced in pressed tin, once dark, now darker...
...Their owners are also stylists, every bit as much as the punk maitresses d' and the earringed busboys...
Vol. 18 • September 1985 • No. 9
