It was not the first time that an old-shoe neighborhood bar had had a modern tower built around it. Hurley’s, for example, has been contained within the Rockefeller Center complex, and just down the street on Third Avenue, Joe & Rose’s Restaurant is presently being encased in a huge new office building. But, because the architects at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill felt that Clarke’s was something of a special place, they designed a handsome courtyard around it, to set it off a bit, and then placed 919 Third Avenue several yards behind the regular building line to even further set it off. The Tishmans offered to lease part of this new plaza to Lavezzo for an outdoor café, but Lavezzo turned them down. The Tishmans are still somewhat disgruntled about that. After all, what realtor likes to see some of his property untenanted? But Dan Lavezzo thinks little of outdoor cafés in New York. “You get dust and soot in your potatoes,” he says, “and some bum can spit at you or try to panhandle you, or make a remark. Listen, if I was up on Fifth Avenue with a view of the Park, that would be something else. But I’m on Third with a view of the back door of the Post Office.” Michael’s Pub—in a new location in the Tishmans’ building—has set out umbrellas and tables and chairs in front of its share of the new plaza. Lavezzo doesn’t think they add much. “Clarke’s has always been an indoor sort of place,” he says. “People come here to get away from the streets and the traffic and the crummy people.” Lavezzo is prouder of the hospitable new bike rack that he has set up behind his saloon, and of the handsome new row of globe lights along his outside wall. The other night, while customers stood in line for tables at P.J.’s, Michael’s Pub next door was achingly empty, its bartender engrossed in the Racing Form.
In Paddy Clarke’s day, Irish bars like his along Third Avenue served free meals, usually a thick soup or a stew, with their drinks, but Dan Lavezzo brought in a simple but reasonably varied menu of dishes for which the best adjective would be honest. What was formerly the free lunch counter next to the bar is now set up to serve what Clarke’s regulars agree are some of the best hamburgers and chili in town, and the food in the dining room is—considering the tiny kitchen from which it emerges—very good indeed. Chalked on a blackboard, the bill of fare includes such items as steak Diane, meatballs with chili, and zucchini Benedict, which means with hollandaise sauce. Not long ago, Dan Lavezzo was tickled to receive, from a friend returning from France, a menu from a fashionable Paris restaurant which listed “spinach salad à la P. J. Clarke’s”—a salad of tossed spinach greens and fresh white mushrooms—and he is still proud of the fact that in 1966 Craig Claiborne of the New York Times gave his restaurant a rating of three stars. (“Not bad for a corner saloon,” he says.) There is also an extensive and reasonably priced wine list. Dinner for two, with drinks, can be had for under ten dollars.
There are other Lavezzo touches—such as the fact that virtually the only advertising he has ever done has been to print the name of the place on matchbooks and sugar cubes. (As a favor to his friend George Plimpton, Lavezzo runs an ad in the Paris Review consisting only of P.J.’s telephone number.) Also, his is one of the few remaining bars in New York that still serve real ice cubes in the drinks, and not the slivered machine-made wafers that have melted almost before the drink reaches the table. Then there are the huge, old-fashioned porcelain stanchions in what is the town’s most public men’s room—nicknamed “the Cathedral” because it is surmounted by a vaulted Tiffany glass ceiling—into each of which is placed, each evening, a block of icehouse ice. One customer, apparently unused to such amenities, emerged from the Cathedral not long ago carrying one of these blocks of ice and asked the bartender for “some Scotch for this rock.” Then there is Dan Lavezzo’s standard of service, which he likes to be prompt, polite, but informal and unfussy. To help achieve this he pays his waiters, who work in white shirtsleeves and aprons, on the scale of bartenders.
Dan Lavezzo is distrustful of publicity, and such as P. J. Clarke’s has had has been self-generated, with no assistance from its proprietor. He reacted “with resignation” to the printed reports from the Knapp Commission hearing about Clarke’s being a police payoff station. “What the hell can you do?” he asks wearily. “Everything goes on at a bar.” And why, he wonders, did the D.A.’s office wait until the two men it wanted had wandered into P. J. Clarke’s for a drink before making their arrests? The officers, it turned out, had been following the pair for weeks. Was there a touch of press-agentry in the federal agents’ decision to make their big move in a famous and conspicuous place? And Lavezzo is cynical about the press itself. “If something bad happens here, the papers are always sure to spell your name right,” he says. But if the Daily News runs a picture of Ari and Jackie Onassis coming out of here, the caption will say they’re leaving ‘a Third Avenue saloon.’”
Too much publicity of any kind, Lavezzo feels, can be bad for a place like his, particularly in a city like New York where things go out of fashion almost before they’re in. “Look at the places that were big a few years back,” he says, “the places that were all over the papers like the Peppermint Lounge, Arthur, Le Club, Hippopotamus—they’re all dead or half dead now. Look at Elaine’s. Nobody gets more publicity than she does these days. She’s got friends feeding items about her into the columns every night. But the trouble is she’s attracting all the sorts of people she didn’t want to have. And I’ve heard reports of rude treatment and bad service. There used to be a place up the street called Stella’s. Stella’s was the in place for a while, and Stella used to insult the women and grope the men. She got away with it for a while because people thought it was cute. But she closed up and moved to Florida a long time ago. If I were Elaine, I’d be very careful.”
Getting and keeping the right kind of clientele is, one gathers, something like performing a tightrope act. “I don’t want this to become a singles joint, like Maxwell’s Plum or those places up on Second,” Lavezzo says. Single girls in New York have long been aware that P. J. Clarke’s is not a promising hunting ground for men. Two pretty young magazine editors who had stopped by Clarke’s for beers during the evening rush hour were told, somewhat abruptly, by the bartender, “Look, if you two girls just came in to get out of the rain, don’t take up room at the bar.” And when, several years ago, Clarke’s began to get a reputation as a rendezvous for the gay crowd, Dan Lavezzo put up a sign saying that men unescorted by ladies can only be served at the far end of the bar. This sign hangs face to the wall on most “normal” evenings, but can be flipped around so as to state its business should the occasion demand. Lavezzo says, “We don’t want people to have too good a time here. We don’t want people singing or banging on the table, or getting too noisy or getting into fights. I have my two bouncers, Eddie and Mark, to take care of that sort of thing. The trouble is, you can’t rough people up the way you used to—if you do, they’ll sue. What we want is to keep this a nice, friendly place where people can eat and drink in a relaxed, homey atmosphere.”
For the most part, Lavezzo gets his wish, though there are occasional bad moments. There is one man, the bane of Third Avenue saloonkeepers, who goes from bar to bar trying to engage the customers in arguments. He will argue, it seems, about almost anything. When he appears, and becomes too belligerent, he is gently but firmly ejected from Clarke’s. Also—and members of the Women’s Liberation Front should take note—Clarke’s bartenders insist that they have much more trouble with disorderly women than they do with men. “A drunk woman is impossible,” Lavezzo says, “and you really have to be careful throwing them out.” For some reason, there is a curious witching hour in bars like Clarke’s. It occurs around 10 P.M., and is the moment when trouble starts. No one knows quite why, but bartenders heave a sigh of relief when ten-thirty comes, knowing that if a saloon can make it peacefully through that moment it will probably make it through the night.
And Lavezzo must be doing something right, because Clarke’s is nearly always thronged with people from the time it opens at ten in the morning until three or four the n
ext, when it closes, seven days a week. If there are any complaints they are of crowds at the bar and long lines waiting for tables in the dining room. Business has never been better, and Dan Lavezzo admits, “Now that we’re stuck out here like a sore thumb, people notice us who never did before. It’s the best advertising we could have.” He has been gradually phasing out his upstairs antiques business, and would like to open another dining room on the second floor. The new dining room would be, according to Lavezzo, “a little more elegant, maybe, but still P. J. Clarke’s, still the nineteenth-century feeling. I’d have no trouble filling it.” His plan, however, has presently run afoul of his new landlords, the Tishmans. To accomplish it, Lavezzo feels that he would have to expand his kitchen facilities in the basement, including some space that belongs to the Tishman tower. Because of an existing contract with another restaurant owner in the building, the Tishmans say they cannot legally rent Lavezzo the space. At the moment, matters are at a standstill.
Paddy Clarke was a great lover of animals, and in his day, there was always a dog, or sometimes two, around P. J. Clarke’s. (Even today, dogs have a better chance of getting into Clarke’s than ocelots.) One of Paddy’s dogs was a habitual wanderer, and became well known around the East Side—so well known that cab drivers, spotting him on his rounds, would pick him up and drive him home to Clarke’s, always certain that they would be paid their fare. Another dog, patently female, was named Bobo Rockefeller, after a favorite Clarke’s customer. All these dogs were known and loved by Clarke’s regulars, but the old-timers agree that there was never a dog quite like the one Paddy Clarke named Jessie. Jessie, according to Paddy, was a “Mexican fox terrier,” but whatever she was she was an extraordinary person. If you gave Jessie a nickel she would trot across the street to Bernard’s drugstore and buy a chocolate bar. She would return to Clarke’s with the chocolate bar and nudge you to unwrap it for her. If you gave her a quarter, she would go in the other direction to a meat market, and there she would purchase a bag of dog scraps. Paddy Clarke used to insist that at the end of the day she collected his bar receipts and helped him check them against the chits. She was the official screener of Clarke’s customers. If Jessie growled when you came through the door, you could not be served.
When Jessie died, Paddy Clarke had Jessie stuffed and placed in a position of honor, on a shelf just above the entrance to the ladies’ room. Only slightly the worse for time and dust and smoke and a few moths, she is still there, as immortal as Clarke’s itself, a mascot and a symbol. She still wears a savvy expression, keeping a beady eye on things. Isn’t it pleasant to think, in this age of instant self-destruct mechanisms, that thanks to Danny Lavezzo’s ninety-nine-year lease, Jessie will still be there in the year 2066, by which time there will surely be saloons on the moon. So will P. J. Clarke’s still be there, indestructibly dowdy, triumphantly tacky. If Patrick Joseph Clarke had made a will, the way everybody had wanted him to, who knows what might have happened to his bar and grill? As it is, it would seem that only an act of God could remove P. J. Clarke’s from the corner of Fifty-fifth and Third. And God, in most cases, was on Paddy Clarke’s side.
Photo by Erich Hartmann, Magnum
Andrew Goodman inspects a model at Bergdorf’s
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New York, N. Y. 10019: What Are They Doing to Bergdorf Goodman?
Are there no more absolute strongholds of the super-rich? Well, there are places that have tried to be. But they too are changing fast, and turning into something else.
At Bergdorf Goodman, for example, it used to be that nothing was done that was not done with elegant flourishes. When Andrew Goodman, the president and owner of the store that confers New York’s most prestigious fashion label, once brought in a urine sample to be sent over to his doctor, his secretary in the Christmas confusion had it gift-wrapped and sent to the doctor’s house. It was under the tree on Christmas morning. And they tell the tale of how once in the Bridal Salon the bride-to-be was hesitant about buying a white wedding gown because, as she put it, she was still in mourning for her first husband. A hasty conference was called among Bergdorf’s brass, and the bride wore gray. At the same time, during the recent craze for women wearing cartridge belts slung around their hips, Bergdorf’s would not stock the belts because Andrew Goodman found the fashion personally distasteful.
It was, therefore, something of a shock to the business, social, and shopping communities of New York when Andrew Goodman announced in 1971 that one of the last family-run stores in America would pass out of his family and, pending FTC approval, become a part of the Broadway-Hale department store chain—the conglomerate that also recently gobbled up another of the last family-run stores in America, Neiman-Marcus. What will become of the Bergdorf touch?
Bergdorf’s has also always been a store that is nothing if not cozy. It has been, as they say in the motel business, a “Ma and Pa operation,” and quite literally Andrew Goodman’s father, Edwin Goodman, who founded the store (with a Herman Bergdorf who long ago departed) and his wife were known by all the store’s employees as “Dad” and “Mom.” There are still old-time Bergdorf’s people who refer to the present president as “young Andrew,” and to his son, who is thirty-one, as “little Eddie.” The Goodman fiefdom on Fifth Avenue has been run with such an air of benevolent paternalism that not only the staff but many of the longtime customers treat the place as they would a second home. After all, what other New York specialty store has on its top floor a vast apartment for the Goodman family where, when the lights go out, the storekeeper can sleep right on top of his merchandise. The third elevator in the main bank serves the apartment (which also has its own entrance on Fifty-eighth Street), and through the years customers and salespeople have grown used to the Goodmans, and their children and grandchildren with their nurses, going up and down that elevator. The rule—up until the time the elevators finally went automatic—was that if any member of the Goodman family got into the car, he or she was taken to his chosen floor, reversing directions if need be, regardless of where the other passengers were headed, and the passengers were expected to be understanding. Most were, but one woman wrote crossly, “Why don’t you Goodmans wait until 5:30 when the store is closed—then you can ride up and down that elevator all night as far as I’m concerned!”
“The Apartment,” indeed, has over the years developed its own mystique. It has become a sort of sacred place, since only a few of the elect have been invited into it. To be asked to the Apartment has awesome significance, though whether for good or evil one never knows until one gets there. It is as though, from the Apartment, a Big Brother of Bergdorf’s watches over all. And perhaps he does. In the dining room of the Apartment hangs a portrait of the founder, Edwin the Elder, and not long ago Andrew Goodman, gulping down his breakfast coffee and realizing that he was going to be late for his office on the floor below, looked nervously up at the portrait and said, “Don’t worry, Papa, I’ll stay an extra fifteen minutes tonight.”
The Goodman family has always indulged itself at Bergdorf’s. Several years ago, for reasons which to the outside world seemed odd and whimsical, an antiques department was opened on the third floor where ten-thousand-dollar French clocks were sold hard by ten-thousand-dollar Russian sables. It was because Andrew Goodman’s sister, Ann Goodman Farber, was married to a man who liked fine old furniture. Nena Goodman, Andrew’s wife, collects paintings and is herself a painter of some talent, and so she has been given her own art gallery in the store—a boutique called Nena’s Choice. One of their daughters, Minky (her name is Mary Ann but she had a governess who used to call her “a little minx”) makes pottery, and it has occurred to her to ask for a corner of the store. But Bergdorf Goodman has also been indulgent to its staff, particularly those who have long demonstrated their loyalty to the Goodmans, and the store has many pensioners as well as people who have been kept on the payroll long after their usefulness has ended. Andrew Goodman takes pride in the fact that with a thousand-odd employees he knows ne
arly every one by name, and in most cases knows their children’s names and ages, and their sizes. The faithful are granted special privileges. Mrs. William Fine, wife of the president of Bonwit Teller but who, as Susan Payson, used to work for Bergdorf’s, once got a last-minute invitation to a formal party. First she murmured that she had nothing to wear, but then added that she thought she could work it out. She “borrowed” an eighteen-hundred-dollar designer dress from her stock, went to the party, and the first person she encountered there was Andrew Goodman. He merely winked, said he admired her taste in dresses, and all was forgiven. When Liberty Bandine, now the store’s personnel director, first went to work for Bergdorf’s she earned seventy-five dollars a week, and her boss became curious about the decidedly expensive way she dressed. Miss Bandine coolly explained that she earned a comfortable second income by playing the horses, and that she had a bookie named Whitey who drove a Bond Bread truck. Thereafter Whitey was permitted to park his truck at the store’s Fifth Avenue entrance while Miss Bandine placed her bets.
The Right Places Page 17