Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics)

by Joseph Mitchell

  When the Republicans began dancing in earnest, the activity in the kitchen slackened, and some of the waiters gathered around the slicing table and commenced eating. While they ate, they talked shop. ‘You know,’ said one, ‘a fat woman don’t eat so much. It’s those little skinny things; you wonder where they put it.’ Another said, ‘It’s the Cat’lics who can eat. I was to a beefsteak in Brooklyn last Thursday night. All good Cat’lics. So it got to be eleven-fifty, and they stopped the clock. Cat’lics can’t eat meat on Friday.’ The two weary chefs sat down together at the other side of the room from the waiters and had a breathing spell. They had not finished a glass of beer apiece, however, before a waiter hurried in and said, ‘My table wants some more steak,’ and the chefs had to get up and put their weight on their feet again. Just before I left, at midnight, I took a last look at the ballroom. The dance floor was packed and clouds of cigar smoke floated above the paper hats of the dancers, but at nine tables people were still stowing away meat and beer. On the stairs to the balcony, five men were harmonizing. Their faces were shiny with grease. One held a pitcher of beer in his hands and occasionally he would drink from it, spilling as much as he drank. The song was, of course, ‘Sweet Adeline.’

  The West Side school of beefsteak devotees frequents the Terminal Hotel, a for-gentlemen-only establishment at Eleventh Avenue and Twenty-third Street. Its chef is Bob Ellis, an aged, truculent Negro, whose opinion of all other beefsteak chefs is low. Of them he says, ‘What they call a beefsteak ain’t no beefsteak; it’s just a goddamn mess.’ Mr Ellis is also a talented clambake and green-turtle chef and used to make trips as far west as Chicago to supervise one meal. His most unusual accomplishment, however, is the ability to speak Japanese. He once worked on freighters that went to the Orient, and he sometimes reminds people who hang out around the belly-shaped Terminal bar that he has a wonderful command of the Japanese language. When someone is skeptical and says, ‘Well, let’s hear some,’ he always says haughtily, ‘What in hell would be the use of talking Jap to you? You wouldn’t comprehend a word I was saying.’

  Among the groups of rough-and-ready gourmands for whom Mr Ellis is official chef are the I.D.K. (‘I Don’t Know’) Bowling Club, a hoary outfit from Chelsea, and the Old Hoboken Turtle Club. This club was founded in 1796, and Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr were charter members; now it is an exclusive association of West Side and Jersey butchers, brewers, saloonkeepers, boss stevedores, and businessmen. Most of the members are elderly. Mr Ellis has cooked for them since 1879. In 1929 they gave him a badge with a green turtle and a diamond on it and made him a Brother Turtle. The Turtles and the I.D.K.’s and many similar West Side organizations always hold their beefsteaks in the Terminal cellar, which is called the Hollings Beefsteak Keller after John Hollings, a former owner of the hotel, who sold out in disgust and moved to Weehawken when prohibition was voted in. He used to store his coal in the cellar. Mr Ellis refuses to call it a Keller; he calls it ‘my dungeon.’

  ‘In the old days all steak cellars were called dungeons,’ he told me. ‘To me they’re still dungeons.’

  The dungeon has a steel door on which is printed the initials ‘O.I.C.U.R.M.T.’ That is a good sample of beefsteak humor. Also on the door is a sign: ‘WHEN YOU ENTER THIS KELLER YOU FIND A GOOD FELLER.’ The dungeon has a cement floor, over which sawdust has been scattered. The ceiling is low. On the trellised walls are yellowed beefsteak photographs ranging from an 1898 view of the M. E. Blankmeyer Clam Bake Club to a picture of a beefsteak thrown in 1932 by the New York Post Office Holy Name Society. Over the light switch is a warning: ‘HANDS OFF THE THIRD RAIL.’ In one corner is a piano and a platform for a German band. The dungeon will hold a hundred and twenty-five persons. ‘When a hundred and twenty-five big, heavy men get full of beer, it does seem a little crowded in here,’ Mr Ellis said. Beer crates and barrels were once used, but now people sit on slat-backed chairs and eat off small, individual tables. Down a subterranean hall from the dungeon is the ancient brick oven, over which Mr Ellis presides with great dignity.

  ‘I’m not one of these hit-or-miss beefsteak chefs,’ he said. ‘I grill my steaks on hickory embers. The efflorescence of seasoned hardwood is in the steak when you eat it. My beefsteaks are genuine old-fashioned. I’ll give you the official lineup. First we lay out celery, radishes, olives, and scallions. Then we lay out crabmeat cocktails. Some people say that’s not old-fashioned. I’m getting close to ninety years old, and I ought to know what’s old-fashioned. Then we lay out some skewered kidney shells. Lamb or pig – what’s the difference?

  ‘Then comes the resistance – cuts of seasoned loin of beef on hot toast with butter gravy. Sure, I use toast. None of this day-old-bread stuff for me. I know what I’m doing. Then we lay out some baked Idahoes. I let them have paper forks for the crabmeat and the Idahoes; everything else should be attended to with fingers. A man who don’t like to eat with his fingers hasn’t got any business at a beefsteak. Then we lay out the broiled duplex lamb chops. All during the beefsteak we are laying out pitchers of refreshment. By that I mean beer.’

  Old Mr Ellis lives in the Bronx. He spends most of his time at home in a rocking chair with his shoes off, reading the Bible or a weekly trade paper called ‘The Butcher’s Advocate.’ Whenever Herman Von Twistern, the proprietor of the Terminal, books a beefsteak, he gets Mr Ellis on the telephone and gives him the date. Usually he also telephones Charles V. Havican, a portly ex-vaudeville actor, who calls himself ‘the Senator from Hoboken.’ He took the title during prohibition, when everything connected with Hoboken was considered funny. Mr Havican is a celebrated beefsteak entertainer. Most often he sits down with the guests and impersonates a windy, drunken senator. He also tells dialect stories and gives recitations. In his repertoire are ‘The Kid’s Last Fight,’ ‘Christmas Day in the Workhouse,’ ‘The Gambler’s Wife,’ and ‘Please Don’t Sell My Father Rum.’

  ‘If I am not previously known to people at a beefsteak, I sometimes impersonate a dumb waiter,’ Mr Havican told me, listing his accomplishments. ‘I spill beer on people, bump into them, step on their feet, and hit them in the face with my elbows. All the time I look dumb. It is a very funny act to people with a keen sense of humor. Of course, some people just don’t have a keen sense of humor.’

  ‘What do they think of your act?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, I tell you,’ said Mr Havican, ‘look at this scar on my forehead. And I guess you noticed that I walk with a limp.’

  (1939)

  A Mess of Clams

  PRACTICALLY ALL THE littleneck and cherrystone clams served on the half shell in New York restaurants come out of the black mud of the Long Island bays. They are the saltiest, cleanest, and biggest-bellied clams in the world. The most abundant beds are in Great South Bay and are owned by the towns of Islip and Babylon. Right after dawn every weekday about seventy licensed clammers from these towns go out on the Bay in a fleet of dilapidated sloops and catboats and spread out over the beds. They work over the sides of their anchored boats, using long-handled tongs and rakes; the clams are bedded in bottoms which lie under eight to ten feet of water. At noon the buy-boats of two clam-shipping firms – Still & Clock of Bay Shore, and G.Vander Borgh & Son of West Sayville – go out and anchor near the fleet, and from then until 4 P.M. the clammers bring their catches to the buy-boats in bushel bags and sell them over the rail for cash.

  One muggy June day I made a trip to the South Bay beds with Captain Archie M. Clock, who commands the Still & Clock buy-boat. This boat is the Jennie Tucker, a battered, stripped-down, 38-foot sloop powered with a motor the Captain took out of an old Chrysler. Captain Clock and his partner, Louis Still, are members of families which have fished, oyster-farmed, and clammed on the South Shore since the middle of the eighteenth century. I arrived at their weather-beaten clam shed on Homan Avenue Creek in Bay Shore at ten in the morning and found Captain Clock on the narrow wharf at the rear. He was sitting on an overturned clam bucket, smoking his pipe. A man I
know who runs a wholesale shellfish business in Fulton Fish Market had written me a note of introduction to the Captain, and I handed it to him. He read it, grunted, and said, ‘You picked a good day to see the beds. We’re going out a little early.’ He motioned toward a bucket with the stem of his pipe. ‘Have a seat and make yourself at home,’ he said. ‘Do you care much for clams?’

  I sat down on the bucket and told him that one Sunday afternoon in August, 1937, I placed third in a clam-eating tournament at a Block Island clambake, eating eighty-four cherries. I told him that I regard this as one of the few worth-while achievements of my life.

  ‘Well, you can eat yourself a bellyful today,’ he said. ‘I feel like having a few myself. They tell me brewers sometimes get so they hate beer, and sometimes I get so I can’t stand the sight of a clam, but I’m real hungry this morning.’

  The Jennie Tucker was lying alongside the wharf, and the mate, a muscular young man named Charlie Bollinger, was sloshing down her decks with buckets of water. ‘Give her plenty of water, Charlie,’ the Captain told him. He turned to me and said, ‘You have to be extra clean when you’re handling clams. Let a few dead clams lie around and you’ll breed up a smell that’ll make a strong man weak, a smell that’ll knock your hat off, unravel the knot in your necktie, and tear holes in your shirt.’ He stood up, yawned, spat, and went into a little office in the shed. When he returned he carried an armful of gear which included a lunch bucket, a tattered old ledger, and a green metal box. Later I learned that this box contained the cash with which he would buy the day’s load.

  ‘Everything O.K., Charlie?’ he asked.

  ‘She’s clean as a whistle, Archie,’ said the mate.

  ‘Let’s get going then,’ he said. We went aboard and the Captain stowed his gear in the sloop’s tiny cabin. The Captain was stocky, slow-moving, and sleepy-eyed. He was deeply tanned, but he had smeared some white salve on his nose and ears to guard against sunburn. He was roughly dressed; he wore patched pants, a blue work shirt, and a long-visored swordfisherman’s cap. He took the tiller, which he handled expertly, until we were well out in the Bay. Then he turned it over to Bollinger, got his ledger, and sat down beside me on the hatch. ‘The beds they’re clamming lie about four miles down the Bay,’ he said, motioning with his head in the direction of Babylon. He opened the ledger and got a new page ready, writing down the names of the clammers. The wind from the ocean ruffled the pages as he worked. Most of the names he wrote down were old Long Island ones like Doxsee, Ricketts, Baldwin, Crowell, and Tooker.

  ‘Most of the clammers come from families that have been around this bay so many generations they long since lost track,’ he said. ‘The bulk of them are of English descent or Holland Dutch, and there’s quite a few squareheads. They know the bottom of the Bay like they know their wife’s face. Clamming is back-breaking, but a man can get a living if his muscle holds out. I looked through this ledger last night and figured I paid one clammer eighty-some-odd dollars last week, but that’s unusual. Most of them average between five and ten bucks a day. It’s all according to how good a man can handle the tongs.’

  He laid his ledger on the hatch, stretched his arms, and yawned. The morning had been cloudy, but the sun came out soon after we left the wharf and now it was burning off the haze on the Bay. After it had been shining fifteen minutes, we could see the striped Fire Island lighthouse and the long, glistening dunes on Oak and Captree islands. I asked the Captain if any bayman can go out to the beds and clam.

  ‘He cannot,’ the Captain said. ‘He has to get a Conservation Department license that costs two and a half, and he has to be a resident of the town that owns the beds he works. A Babylon man can’t clam in Islip water, and vice versa. In fact, they’re always fussing among themselves about the division line. That’s a fuss that’ll go on as long as there’s a clam left in the mud.’

  ‘How much do you pay for a bushel?’ I asked.

  ‘The price is based on the size of the clam and the demand in Fulton Market,’ the Captain said. ‘Prices may fluctuate as much as a dollar in a single season, but right now I’m paying the boys two dollars a bushel for littlenecks and a dollar and a half for cherrystones. That’s for the half-shell trade. For the big ones – what we call chowders – I pay a dollar a bushel.

  ‘The bulk of the clams in South Bay are hard-shells – they’re called quahogs in New England. There’s a few soft-shells, or steamers, around the shores of the Bay, but we don’t bother with them. Most of the steam clams you see in the city come from New England. The hard-shell is the king of the clams. He can be baked, fried, steamed, put into chowder, or served on the half shell. I will say that the best chowder is made with a mixture of softs and hards. Out here we believe in Manhattan-style chowder, a couple of tomatoes to every quart of shucked clams. Our chowder clams are around four years old, a couple of years older than littlenecks. We truck our necks and cherries to dealers in Fulton Market and to restaurants in Manhattan and Brooklyn, and we truck the chowders to the Campbell’s soup factory in Camden, New Jersey. They take around fifteen hundred bushels of chowders off us every week.’ He turned to the mate. ‘I’ll take her now, Charlie,’ he said.

  Soon after Captain Clock took the tiller, we approached the fleet. The little boats were laying with the wind and the tide about two miles southeast of Babylon. Captain Clock said the majority of the boats were anchored near the imaginary line dividing the beds, and that some were hugging it. ‘Human nature,’ he said. ‘The boys from Islip just itch to work the Babylon water, and the Babylon boys think they could tong up twice as many if they could get over on the Islip territory.’ A few of the boats carried two clammers, one for each side, but one man to a boat seemed to be the rule. When we were about fifty yards from the nearest clammer, the Captain ducked into the cabin and cut off the motor. Bollinger hurried to the bow and threw out the anchor.

  ‘Now I’ll show you how to clam,’ said Captain Clock. ‘We’ll tong up a few pecks for us to eat.’

  He rolled up his shirtsleeves and picked up a pair of tongs, an implement with two sets of teeth fixed to the ends of two fourteen-foot handles. He lowered the tongs into the water, which was nine feet deep, and pushed the opened teeth into the mud; then he brought the handles together scissors-fashion, closing the teeth. Just before hauling the tongs over the rail, he doused the closed teeth in the water several times, washing out the mud. He opened the teeth on the deck and out dropped a dazed spider crab, two bunches of scarlet oyster sponge, a handful of empty shells, and twelve beautiful clams. The shells of the clams were steel blue, the color of the Bay water.

  ‘A good haul,’ he said. ‘I got four cherries, two necks, two chowders and four peanuts.’ He said that a state law forbids the sale of clams less than an inch thick and that such undersized clams are called peanuts. He tossed the peanuts and the crab back into the water. Then he put the tongs overboard again. He sent the teeth into the mud seven times and brought up forty-three clams. Then he laid aside the tongs and got two clam knives off a shelf in the cabin. He gave me one and we squatted on the deck and went to work opening the cherries. When the valves were pried apart, the rich clam liquor dribbled out. The flesh of the cherries was a delicate pink. On the cups of some of the shells were splotches of deep purple; Indians used to hack such splotches out of clamshells for wampum. Fresh from the coal black mud and uncontaminated by ketchup or sauce, they were the best clams I had ever eaten. The mate sat on the hatch and watched us.

  ‘Aren’t you going to have any?’ I asked.

  ‘I wouldn’t put one of them goddamn things in my mouth if I was perishing to death,’ he said. ‘I’m working on this buy-boat ten years and I’m yet to eat a clam.’

  He scornfully watched us eat for a few moments; then he went into the cabin and came out with a portable radio, which he placed on the cabin roof, and tuned in on a news broadcast. While the Captain and I opened and ate clams we looked out at the fleet and watched the clammers. The Captain said that a
clammer works both sides of his boat until the tongs start coming up empty; then he lets out slack in his anchor cable and drifts into unworked territory. ‘Most of them are patient,’ he said, ‘but some will be lifting and dropping their anchors all day long. When a man does that we say he’s got the runs.’ The fleet was made up largely of catboats stripped of their rigs and powered with old automobile motors. The majority of the men were tonging, but here and there a man worked with a rake. The Captain said that rakes are used only on stretches of soft bottom. ‘The handle of a rake is twenty-two feet long,’ he said, ‘and it takes a Joe Louis to pull it.’ Some of the clammers were stripped to their belts, but most of them worked in their undershirts. Occasionally a man would lay aside his tongs or rake and squat in the bottom of the boat and bag up his clams. Captain Clock said it is customary for the clammers to sell their catches in the early-afternoon hours, so the shippers will have time to cull and barrel the clams for trucking in the evening.

  The Captain and I were finishing the last of the forty-three clams when a whistle in Babylon blew for noon. ‘We better eat dinner, Archie,’ Bollinger said. ‘They’ll start bringing their loads over pretty soon now.’ Intent on his last clam, the Captain nodded. Bollinger brought out their lunch buckets and a thermos jug of iced tea. I had bought a couple of sandwiches in Bay Shore and I got them out of my raincoat. Bollinger tuned in on a program of waltzes broadcast from a Manhattan hotel. We sat on peck baskets in the hot sun and ate and listened to the waltzes. We were drinking tea out of tin cups when the first of the clammers came alongside. Bollinger jumped up, tossed the clammer a rope, and helped him make fast to the Jennie Tucker. The clammer was a small, spry old man in hip boots.