The Bottom of the Harbor

by Joseph Mitchell

  Sloppy Louie’s is small and busy. It can seat eighty, and it crowds up and thins out six or seven times a day. It opens at five in the morning and closes at eight-thirty in the evening. It has a double door in front with a show window on each side. In one window are three sailing-ship models in whiskey bottles, a giant lobster claw with eyes and a mouth painted on it, a bulky oyster shell, and a small skull. Beside the shell is a card on which Louie has neatly written, “Shell of an Oyster dredged from the bottom of Great South Bay. Weighed two and a quarter pounds. Estimated to be fifteen years old. Said to be largest ever dredged in G.S.B.” Beside the skull is a similar card, which says, “This is the skull of a Porpoise taken by a dragger off Long Beach, Long Island.” In the other window is an old pie cupboard with glass sides. To the left, as you enter, is a combined cigar showcase and cashier’s desk, and an iron safe with a cash register on top of it. There are mirrors all around the walls. Four lamps and three electric fans with wooden blades that resemble propellers hang from the stamped-tin ceiling. The tables in Louie’s are communal, and there are exactly one dozen; six jut out from the wall on one side of the room and six jut out from the wall on the other side, and a broad aisle divides them. They are long tables, and solid and old and plain and built to last. They are made of black walnut; Louie once repaired a leg on one, and said it was like driving a nail in iron. Their tops have been seasoned by drippings and spillings from thousands upon thousands of platters of broiled fish, and their edges have been scratched and scarred by the hatchets and bale hooks that hang from frogs on fishmongers’ belts. They are identical in size; some seat six, and some have a chair on the aisle end and seat seven. At the back of the room, hiding the door to the kitchen, is a huge floor mirror on which, each morning, using a piece of moistened chalk, Louie writes the menu for the day. It is sometimes a lengthy menu. A good many dishes are served in Louie’s that are rarely served in other restaurants. One day, interspersed among the staple seafood-restaurant dishes, Louie listed cod cheeks, salmon cheeks, cod tongues, sturgeon liver, blue-shark steak, tuna steak, squid stew, and five kinds of roe—shad roe, cod roe, mackerel roe, herring roe, and yellow-pike roe. Cheeks are delectable morsels of flesh that are found in the heads of some species of fish, one on each side, inset in bone and cartilage. The men who dress fish in the fillet houses in the market cut out a few quarts of cheeks whenever they have the time to spare and sell them to Louie. Small shipments of them come down occasionally from the Boston Fish Pier, and the fishmongers, thinking of their own gullets, let Louie buy most of them. The fishmongers use Louie’s as a testing kitchen. When anything unusual is shipped to the market, it is taken to Louie’s and tried out. In the course of a year, Louie’s undoubtedly serves a wider variety of seafood than any other restaurant in the country.

  When I go to Sloppy Louie’s for breakfast, I always try to get a chair at one of the tables up front, and Louie generally comes out from behind the cash register and tells me what is best to order. Some mornings, if there is a lull in the breakfast rush, he draws himself a cup of coffee and sits down with me. One morning a while back, he sat down, and I asked him how things were going, and he said he couldn’t complain, he had about as much business as he could handle. “My breakfast trade still consists almost entirely of fishmongers and fish buyers,” he said, “but my lunch trade has undergone a change. The last few years, a good many people in the districts up above the market have taken to walking down here occasionally for lunch—people from the insurance district, the financial district, and the coffee-roasting district. Some days, from noon to three, they outnumber the fishmongers. I hadn’t realized myself how great a change had taken place until just the other day I happened to notice the mixed-up nature of a group of people sitting around one table. They were talking back and forth, the way people do in here that never even saw each other before, and passing the ketchup, and I’ll tell you who they were. Sitting on one side was an insurance broker from Maiden Lane, and next to him was a fishmonger named Mr. Frank Wilkisson who’s a member of a family that’s had a stand in the Old Market three generations, and next to him was a young Southerner that you’re doing good if you understand half what he says who drives one of those tremendous big refrigerator trucks that they call reefers and hits the market every four or five days with a load of shrimp from little shrimp ports in Florida and Georgia. Sitting on the other side was a lady who holds a responsible position in Continental Casualty up on William Street and comes in here for bouillabaisse, only we call it ciuppin di pesce and cook it the way it’s cooked fishing-family style back in Recco, and next to her was an old gentleman who works in J. P. Morgan & Company’s banking house and you’d think he’d order something expensive like pompano but he always orders cod cheeks and if we’re out of that he orders cod roe and if we’re out of that he orders broiled cod and God knows we’re never out of that, and next to him was one of the bosses in Mooney’s coffee-roasting plant at Fulton and Front. And sitting at the aisle end of the table was a man known all over as Cowhide Charlie who goes to slaughterhouses and buys green cowhides and sells them to fishing-boat captains to rig to the undersides of their drag nets to keep them from getting bottom-chafed and rock-cut and he’s always bragging that right this very minute his hides are rubbing the bottom of every fishing bank from Nantucket Shoals to the Virginia Capes.”

  Louie said that some days, particularly Fridays, the place is jammed around one o’clock and latecomers crowd together just inside the door and stand and wait and stare, and he said that this gets on his nerves. He said he had come to the conclusion that he would have to go ahead and put in some tables on the second floor.

  “I would’ve done it long ago,” he said, “except I need the second floor for other things. This building doesn’t have a cellar. South Street is old filled-in river swamp, and the cellars along here, what few there are, the East River leaks into them every high tide. The second floor is my cellar. I store supplies up there, and I keep my Deepfreeze up there, and the waiters change their clothes up there. I don’t know what I’ll do without it, only I got to make room someway.”

  “That ought to be easy,” I said. “You’ve got four empty floors up above.”

  “You mean those boarded-up floors,” Louie said. He hesitated a moment. “Didn’t I ever tell you about the upstairs in here?” he asked. “Didn’t I ever tell you about those boarded-up floors?”

  “No,” I said.

  “They aren’t empty,” he said

  “What’s in them?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve heard this and I’ve heard that, but I don’t know. I wish to God I did know. I’ve wondered about it enough. I’ve rented this building twenty-two years, and I’ve never been above the second floor. The reason being, that’s as far as the stairs go. After that, you have to get in a queer old elevator and pull yourself up. It’s an old-fashioned hand-power elevator, what they used to call a rope-pull. I wouldn’t be surprised it’s the last of its kind in the city. I don’t understand the machinery of it, the balancing weights and the cables and all that, but the way it’s operated, there’s a big iron wheel at the top of the shaft and the wheel’s got a groove in it, and there’s a rope that hangs down one side of the cage to go up, and you pull on the part that hangs down the other side to go down. Like a dumbwaiter. It used to run from the ground floor to the top, but a long time ago some tenant must’ve decided he didn’t have any further use for it and wanted it out of the way, so he had the shaft removed from the ground floor and the second floor. He had it cut off at the second-floor ceiling. In other words, the way it is now, the bottom of the shaft is level with the second-floor ceiling—the floor of the elevator cage acts as part of the ceiling. To get in the elevator, you have to climb a ladder that leads to a trap door that’s cut in the floor of the cage. It’s a big, roomy cage, bigger than the ones nowadays, but it doesn’t have a roof on it—just this wooden floor and some iron-framework sides. I go up the ladder sometimes and push u
p the trap door and put my head and shoulders inside the cage and shine a flashlight up the shaft, but that’s as far as I go. Oh, Jesus, it’s dark and dusty in there. The cage is all furry with dust and there’s mold and mildew on the walls of the shaft and the air is dead.

  “The first day I came here, I wanted to get right in the elevator and go up to the upper floors and rummage around up there, see what I could see, but the man who rented the building ahead of me was with me, showing me over the place, and he warned me not to. He didn’t trust the elevator. He said you couldn’t pay him to get in it. ‘Don’t meddle with that thing,’ he said. ‘It’s a rattlesnake. The rope might break, or that big iron wheel up at the top of the shaft that’s eaten up with rust and hasn’t been oiled for a generation might work loose and drop on your head.’ Consequently, I’ve never even given the rope a pull. To pull the rope, you got to get inside the cage and stand up. You can’t reach it otherwise. I’ve been tempted to many a time. It’s a thick hemp rope. It’s as thick as a hawser. It might be rotten, but it certainly looks strong. The way the cage is sitting now, I figure it’d only take a couple of pulls, a couple of turns of the wheel, and you’d be far enough up to where you could swing the cage door open and step out on the third floor. You can’t open the cage door now; you got to draw the cage up just a little. A matter of inches. I reached into the cage once and tried to poke the door open with a boat hook I borrowed off one of the fishing boats, but it wouldn’t budge. It’s a highly irritating situation to me. I’d just like to know for certain what’s up there. A year goes by sometimes and I hardly think about it, and then I get to wondering, and it has a tendency to prey on my mind. An old-timer in the market once told me that many years ago a fishmonger down here got a bug in his head and invented a patented returnable zinclined fish box for shipping fish on ice and had hundreds of them built, sunk everything he had in them, and they didn’t catch on, and finally he got permission to store them up on the third and fourth floors of this building until he could come to some conclusion what to do with them. This was back before they tinkered with the elevator. Only he never came to any conclusion, and by and by he died. The old-timer said it was his belief the fish boxes are still up there. The man who rented the building ahead of me, he had a different story. He was never above the second floor either, but he told me that one of the men who rented it ahead of him told him it was his understanding there was a lot of miscellaneous old hotel junk stored up there—beds and bureaus, pitchers and bowls, chamber pots, mirrors, brass spittoons, odds and ends, old hotel registers that the rats chew on to get paper to line their nests with, God knows what all. That’s what he said. I don’t know. I’ve made quite a study of this building for one reason and another, and I’ve took all kinds of pains tracking things down, but there’s a lot about it I still don’t know. I do know there was a hotel in here years back. I know that beyond all doubt. It was one of those old steamship hotels that used to face the docks all along South Street.”

  “Why don’t you get a mechanic to inspect the elevator?” I asked. “It might be perfectly safe.”

  “That would cost money,” Louie said. “I’m curious, but I’m not that curious. To tell you the truth, I just don’t want to get in that cage by myself. I got a feeling about it, and that’s the fact of the matter. It makes me uneasy—all closed in, and all that furry dust. It makes me think of a coffin, the inside of a coffin. Either that or a cave, the mouth of a cave. If I could get somebody to go along with me, somebody to talk to, just so I wouldn’t be all alone in there, I’d go; I’d crawl right in. A couple of times, it almost happened I did. The first time was back in 1938. The hurricane we had that fall damaged the roofs on a good many of the old South Street buildings, and the real-estate management company I rented this building from sent a man down here to see if my roof was all right. I asked the man why didn’t he take the elevator up to the attic floor, there might be a door leading out on the roof. I told him I’d go along. He took one look inside the cage and said it would be more trouble than it was worth. What he did, he went up on the roof of the building next door and crossed over. Didn’t find anything wrong. Six or seven months ago, I had another disappointment. I was talking with a customer of mine eats a fish lunch in here Fridays who’s a contractor, and it happened I got on the subject of the upper floors, and he remarked he understood how I felt, my curiosity. He said he seldom passes an old boarded-up building without he wonders about it, wonders what it’s like in there—all empty and hollow and dark and still, not a sound, only some rats maybe, racing around in the dark, or maybe some English sparrows flying around in there in the empty rooms that always get in if there’s a crack in one of the boards over a broken windowpane, a crack or a knothole, and sometimes they can’t find their way out and they keep on hopping and flying and hopping and flying until they starve to death. He said he had been in many such buildings in the course of his work, and had seen some peculiar things. The next time he came in for lunch, he brought along a couple of those helmets that they wear around construction work, those orange-colored helmets, and he said to me, ‘Come on, Louie. Put on one of these, and let’s go up and try out that elevator. If the rope breaks, which I don’t think it will—what the hell, a little shaking up is good for the liver. If the wheel drops, maybe these helmets will save us.’ But he’s a big heavy man, and he’s not as active as he used to be. He went up the ladder first, and when he got to the top he backed right down. He put it on the basis he had a business appointment that afternoon and didn’t want to get all dusty and dirty. I kept the helmets. He wanted them back, but I held on to them. I don’t intend to let that elevator stand in my way much longer. One of these days, I’m going to sit down awhile with a bottle of Strega, and then I’m going to stick one of those helmets on my head and climb in that cage and put that damned elevator back in commission. The very least, I’ll pull the rope and see what happens. I do wish I could find somebody had enough curiosity to go along with me. I’ve asked my waiters, and I’ve tried to interest some of the people in the market, but they all had the same answer. ‘Hell, no,’ they said.”

  Louie suddenly leaned forward. “What about you?” he asked. “Maybe I could persuade you.”

  I thought it over a few moments, and was about to suggest that we go upstairs at any rate and climb in the cage and look at the elevator, but just then a fishmonger who had finished his breakfast and wanted to pay his check rapped a dictatorial rat-a-tat on the glass top of the cigar showcase with a coin. Louie frowned and clenched his teeth. “I wish they wouldn’t do that,” he said, getting up. “It goes right through me.”

  Louie went over and took the man’s money and gave him his change. Two waiters were standing at a service table in the rear, filling salt shakers, and Louie gestured to one of them to come up front and take charge of the cash register. Then he got himself another cup of coffee and sat back down and started talking again. “When I bought this restaurant,” he said, “I wasn’t too enthusiastic about the building. I had it in mind to build up the restaurant and find a location somewhere else in the market and move, the trade would follow. Instead of which, after a while I got very closely attached to the building. Why I did is one of those matters, it really doesn’t make much sense. It’s all mixed up with the name of a street in Brooklyn, and it goes back to the last place I worked in before I came here. That was Joe’s in Brooklyn, the old Nevins Street Joe’s, Nevins just off Flatbush Avenue Extension. I was a waiter there seven years, and it was the best place I ever worked in. Joe’s is part of a chain now, the Brass Rail chain. In my time, it was run by a very high-type Italian restaurant man named Joe Sartori, and it was the biggest chophouse in Brooklyn—fifty waiters, a main floor, a balcony; a ladies’ dining room, and a Roman Garden. Joe’s was a hangout for Brooklyn political bosses and officeholders, and it got a class of trade we called the old Brooklyn family trade, the rich old intermarried families that made their money out of Brooklyn real estate and Brooklyn docks and Brooklyn str
eetcar lines and Brooklyn gasworks. They had their money sunk way down deep in Brooklyn. I don’t know how it is now, they’ve probably all moved into apartment houses, but in those days a good many of them lived in steep-stoop, stain-glass mansions sitting up as solid as banks on Brooklyn Heights and Park Slope and over around Fort Greene Park. They were a big-eating class of people, and they believed in patronizing the good old Brooklyn restaurants. You’d see them in Joe’s, and you’d seen them in Gage & Tollner’s and Lundy’s and Tappen’s and Villepigue’s. There was a high percentage of rich old independent women among them, widows and divorced ladies and maiden ladies. They were a class within a class. They wore clothes that hadn’t been the style for years, and they wore the biggest hats I ever saw, and the ugliest. They all seemed to know each other since their childhood days, and they all had some peculiarity, and they all had one foot in the grave, and they all had big appetites. They had traveled widely, and they were good judges of food, and they knew how to order a meal. Some were poison, to say the least, and some were just as nice as they could be. On the whole, I liked them; they broke the monotony. Some always came to my station; if my tables were full, they’d sit in some leather chairs Mr. Sartori had up front and wait. One was a widow named Mrs. Frelinghuysen. She was very old and tiny and delicate, and she ate like a horse. She ate like she thought any meal might be her last meal. She was a little lame from rheumatism, and she used a walking stick that had a snake’s head for a knob, a snake’s head carved out of ivory. She had a pleasant voice, a beautiful voice, and she made the most surprising funny remarks. They were coarse remarks, the humor in them. She made some remarks on occasion that had me wondering did I hear right. Everybody liked her, the way she hung on to life; and everybody tried to do things for her. I remember Mr. Sartori one night went out in the rain and got her a cab. ‘She’s such a thin little thing,’ he said when he came back in. ‘There’s nothing to her,’ he said, ‘but six bones and one gut and a set of teeth and a big hat with a bird on it.’ Her peculiarity was she always brought her own silver. It was old family silver. She’d have it wrapped up in a linen napkin in her handbag, and she’d get it out and set her own place. After she finished eating, I’d take it to the kitchen and wash it, and she’d stuff it back in her handbag. She’d always start off with one dozen oysters in winter or one dozen clams in summer, and she’d gobble them down and go on from there. She could get more out of a lobster than anybody I ever saw. You’d think she’d got everything she possibly could, and then she’d pull the little legs off that most people don’t even bother with, and suck the juice out of them. Sometimes, if it was a slow night and I was just standing around, she’d call me over and talk to me while she ate. She’d talk about people and past times, and she knew a lot; she had kept her eyes open while she was going through life.