Greenwich Village Part 13

Martin remembers "Bob" Chambers, and some young newspaper men from the _World_--G.o.ddard, Manson and others. From uptown the great foreigners came down--some of them stayed there, indeed. In 1889, approximately, it started its biggest boom, and it went on steadily. Ask either Mr.

Martin or its present proprietor, Mr. Raymond Orteig, and he will tell you, and truthfully, that it has never flagged, that "boom." The place is as popular as ever, because, in a changing world, a changing era and a signally changing town, it--does not change.

It was to the Hotel Martin that the famous singers came--Jean and Edouard de Reszke and Pol Plancon and Melba; the French statesman, Jules Cambon, used to come, and Maurice Grau--then the manager of the Metropolitan--and Chartran, the celebrated painter, and the great Ysaye and Bartholdi. And Paulus--Koster and Bial's first French importation--to say nothing of Anna Held and Sandow!

A motley company enough, to be sure, and certainly one worthy to form the nucleus of New York's Bohemia.

Says Mr. Martin: "The most interesting thing that ever happened in the 'Old Martin'? I can tell you that quite easily. It was the blizzard of 1888, when we were snowed in. The horse cars ran on University Place then, the line terminating at Barclay Street. I have a picture of one car almost snowed under, for the snow was fully six feet deep. It was a Sat.u.r.day night and very crowded. When it became time for the people to go home they could not go. So they had to stay, and they stayed three days. They slept on billiard tables, on the floor or where they could. We did our best, but it was a big crowd. Interesting? It was most interesting indeed to me, for I could get no milk. I could supply them with all the wine they wanted, but no milk! And they demanded milk for their coffee. Oh, that blizzard!"

Mr. Martin, in remembering interesting episodes, forgot that trifling incident--the Spanish-American War, in 1898. Whether because of his early connections with Panama (there were countless Spaniards and Mexicans who patronised the hotel at that time) or whether because of a national and political misunderstanding, he was justifiably and seriously concerned as to the feeling of New York for the Hotel Martin. Many good and wise persons expected France to side with Spain, and many others watched curiously to see what Frenchmen in New York would do.

Mr. Martin left them but a short time for speculation. Today, with our streets aflutter with Allied colours, perhaps we fail to appreciate an individual demonstration such as this--but at that time there were few banners flying, and Mr. Martin led the patriotic movement with an American flag in every one of the fifty windows of the Hotel Martin and a French flag to top off the whole display! Perhaps it was the first suggestion, in street decoration, of what has recently proved to be so strong a bond between this nation and France.

If any of you who read have even begun to peer into Bohemian New York you have undoubtedly visited the Lafayette as it is today. And, if you have, you have undoubtedly seen or perhaps even played the "Lafayette Game." It is a weird little game that is played for drinks, and requires quite a bit of skill. It is well known to all frequenters; the only odd thing is that it is not better known.

"Americans are funny!" laughs Raymond Orteig. "When I go abroad and see something which is new and different from what has been before, my instinct is to get hold of it and bring it back. If I can I bring it back in actual bulk; if I were a writer I would bring it back in another way. But through these years, while everyone has played our absurd little game, no one has ever suggested writing about it--until tonight!"

Its name? It is _Culbuto_. That is French,--practically applied,--for failure! It is, you see, an effort to keep the little b.a.l.l.s from falling into the wrong holes. As it so often results in failure _Culbuto_ is an ideal game to play for drinks! Someone has to pay all the time! It is an unequal contest between the individual and the law of gravity!

But we must not linger too long at the Lafayette, alluring though it may be. All Greenwich is beckoning to us, a few blocks away. We have a new world to explore--the world below Fourteenth Street.

Fourteenth Street is the boundary line which marks the Greenwich Village's utmost city limits, as it marked those of our great-grandfathers. Like a wall it stands across the town separating the new from the old uncompromisingly. Miss Euphemia Olcott, who has been quoted here before, describes the evolution of Fourteenth Street in the following interesting way:

"Fourteenth Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues I have seen with three sets of buildings--first shanties near Sixth Avenue from the rear of which it was rumoured a bogy would be likely to pursue and kidnap us.... These shanties were followed by fine, brownstone residences.... Some of these, however, I think came when there had ceased to be a _village_. Later on came business into Fourteenth Street...."

And today those never-to-be-sufficiently-pitied folk who live in the Fifties and Sixties and Seventies think of Fourteenth Street as downtown!

CHAPTER VII

_Restaurants, and the Magic Door_

I

What scenes in fiction cling more persistently in the memory than those that deal with the satisfying of man's appet.i.te?

Who ever heard of a dyspeptic hero? Are not your favourites beyond the Magic Door all good trenchermen?

--ARTHUR BARTLETT MAURICE.

It was O. Henry, I believe, who spoke of restaurants as "literary landmarks." They are really much more than that--they are signposts, psychical rather than physical, which show the trend of the times--or of the neighbourhood. I suppose nothing in Greenwich Village could be more significantly illuminating than its eating places. There are, of course, many sorts. The Village is neither so unique nor so uniform as to have only one sort of popular board. But in all the typical Greenwich restaurants you will find the same elusive something, the spirit of the picturesque, the untrammelled, the quaint and charming--in short, the _different_!

The Village is not only a locality, you understand, it is a point of view. It reaches out imperiously and fastens on what it will. The Brevoort bas.e.m.e.nt--after ten o'clock at night--is the Village. So is the Lafayette on occasion. During the day they are delightful French hostelries catering to all the world who like heavenly things to eat and the right atmosphere in which to eat them. But as the magic hour strikes, presto!--they suffer a sea change and become the quintessence of the Spirit of the Village!

It is 10.20 P.M. at the Brevoort in the restaurant upstairs.

All the world and his wife--or his sweetheart--are fully represented.

Most of the uptowners--the regulation clientele--are going away, having finished gorging themselves on delectable things; some few of them are lingering, lazily curious; a certain small number are still coming in, moved by that restless Manhattanic spirit that hates to go home in the dark.

Among these is a discontented, well-dressed couple, seen half an hour before completing their dinner a block away at the Lafayette. The head waiter at that restaurant explained them nonchalantly, not to say casually:

"It is the gentleman who married his manicurist. Regard, then--one perceives they are not happy--eh? It is understood that she beats him."

Yonder is a moving-picture star, quite alone, eating a great deal, and looking blissfully content. There is a man who has won a fortune in war-brides--the one at the next table did it with carpets. There is a great lady--a very great lady indeed--who, at this season, _should_ be out of town.

Swiftly moving, deft-handed waiters, the faint perfume of delicate food, the sparkle of light upon rare wine, the complex murmur of a well-filled dining-room. It is so far not strikingly different, in the impression it gives, from uptown restaurants.

But the hands of the clock are pointing to the half-hour after ten.

Hasten, then, to the downstairs cafe,--the two rooms, sunk below the level of Fifth Avenue, yet cool and airy. If you hurry you will be just in time to see the Village come in. For this is their really favourite haunt--their Mecca when their pockets will stand it--the Village Restaurant de Luxe!

Upstairs are exquisite frocks and impeccable evening clothes; good jewels and, incidentally, a good many tired faces--from uptown. Down here it is different. The crowd is younger, poorer, more strikingly bizarre--immeasurably more interesting. Everyone here does something, or thinks he does--which is just as good;--or pretends to--which is next best. There is a startling number of girls. Girls in smocks of "artistic" shades--bilious yellow-green, or magenta-tending violet; girls with hair that, red, black or blonde, is usually either arranged in a wildly natural bird's-nest ma.s.s, or boldly clubbed after the fashion of Joan of Arc and Mrs. Vernon Castle; girls with tense little faces, slender arms and an astonishing capacity as to cigarettes. And men who, for the most part, are too busy with their ideals to cut their hair; men whose collars may be low and rolling, or high and bound with black silk stocks after the style of another day; men who are, variously, affectedly natural or naturally affected, but who are nearly all of them picturesque, and, in spite of their poses, quite in earnest, after their queer fashion. They are all prophets and seers down here; they wear their bizarre hair-cuts and unusual clothes with a certain innocently flaunting air which rather disarms you. Their poses are not merely poses; they are their almost childlike way of showing the prosaic outer world how different they are!

Here they all flock--whenever they have the price. That may be a bit beyond them sometimes, but usually there is someone in the crowd who is "flush," and that means who will pay. For the Villagers are not parsimonious; they stand in no danger of ever making themselves rich and thus acquiring place in the accursed cla.s.s called the Philistines!

It is beyond question that the French have a genius for hospitality.

It must be rooted in their beautiful, national tact, that gracious impulse combining chivalry to women, friendliness to men and courtesy to all which is so characteristic of "the world's sweetheart" France.

I have never seen a French restaurant where the most casual visitor was not made personally and charmingly welcome, and I have never seen such typically French restaurants as the Lafayette and the Brevoort.

And the Villagers feel it too. From the shabbiest socialist to the most flagrantly painted little artist's model, they drift in thankfully to that atmosphere of gaiety and sympathy and thoughtful kindliness which is, after all, just--the air of France.

Next let us take a restaurant of quite another type, not far from the Brevoort--all the Village eating places are close together--walk across the square, a block further, and you are there.

It is not many years since Bohemia ate chiefly in the side streets, at restaurants such as Enrico's, Baroni's--there are a dozen such places. They still exist, but the Village is dropping away from them.

They are very good and very cheap, and the tourist--that is, the uptowner--thinks he is seeing Bohemia when he eats in them, but not many of them remain at all characteristic. Bertolotti's is something of an exception. It is a restaurant of the old style, a survival of the days when all Bohemian restaurants were Italian. La Signora says they have been there, just there on Third Street, for twenty years. If you are a newcomer you will probably eat in the upstairs room, in cool and rather remote grandeur, and the pretty daughter with the wondrous black eyes will serve you the more elaborate of the most extraordinarily named dishes on the menu. But if, by long experience, you know what is pleasant and comfortable you will take a place in the bas.e.m.e.nt cafe. At the clean, bare table, in the shadow of the big, bright, many-bottled bar, you will eat your _Risotta alla Milanese_, your _coteletti di Vitelle_, your _asparagi_--it's probably the only place in the city where they serve asparagus with grated cheese--finally your _zambaione_,--a heavenly sort of hot "flip," very foamy and seductive and strongly flavoured with Marsarla wine.

If you stand well with the house you may have the honour to be escorted by the Signora herself--handsome, dignified, genial, with a veritable coronal of splendid grey hair--to watch the eternal bowling in the alley back of the restaurant. I have watched them fascinated for long periods and I have never learned what it is they are trying to do with those big "bowling b.a.l.l.s." They have no ninepins, so they are not trying to make a ten-strike. Apparently, it is a game however, for now and then a shout of triumph proclaims that someone has won. He orders the drinks and they go at it again.

"But, what _is_ it?" I asked the Signora.

"Eh--oh--just a _Giocho di Bocca_," she returned vaguely, "a game of bowls--how should I know?"

Beyond the bowling alley is a long, narrow yard with bushes. It would make quite a charming summer garden with little tables for after-dinner coffee. But the Signora says that the _Chiesa_, there at the back of it, objects. The _Chiesa_, I think, is the Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square. Just why they don't want the Signora to have tables in her own back yard is not clear. She, being a Latin, shrugs her shoulders and makes no comment. Standing in the darkness, there is a real freshness in the air; there is also a delicious, gurgling sound, the music of summer streams.

"How lovely!" you whisper. "What a delightful, rippling sound."

"Yet, it is the ice plant of the big hotel," says La Signora sweetly.

There is, at Bertolotti's one of the queerest little old figures in all that part of the world, the bent and aged Italian known universally as _Castagna_ (Chestnuts), because of the interminable anecdotes he tells over and over again. No one knows his real name, not even the Signor or the Signora. Yet he has worked for them for years. He wants no wages--only a living and a home. In the aforementioned back yard he has built himself a little house about the size of a dog kennel. It is a real house, and like nothing so much as the historic residence of the Three Bears. It has a window, eaves, weather-strips and a clothesline, for he does his own washing. He trots off there very happily when his light work is done, and, when his door is closed, opens it for no one. That sc.r.a.p of a building is _Castagna's_ castle. One evening I went to call on him, but he had put out his light. In the gleam that came from the bowling alley behind me, something showed softly red and green and white against the wooden door. I put out my hand and touched that world-famous cross. It was about six inches long, and only of paper, but it was the flag of Italy, and it kept watch outside the _Casa Castagna_. I am certain that he would not sleep well without it.

Probably the most famous Bohemian restaurant in the quarter is the Black Cat. It is not really more typical than the others,--indeed it is rather less so,--but it is extremely striking, and most conspicuous. There is, in the minds of the hypercritical, the sneaking suspicion that the Black Cat is almost too good to be true; it is too obviously and theatrically lurid with the glow of Montmartre; it is Bohemianism just a shade too much conventionalised. Just the same, it is fascinating. From the moment you pa.s.s the outer, polite portals and intermediate anterooms and enter the big, smoke-filled, deafening room at the back, you are enormously interested, excellently entertained.

The noise is the thing that impresses you first. In most Village resorts you find quiet the order of the day--or rather night. Even "Polly's," crowded as it is, is not noisy. In the Brevoort there is a steady, low rumble of talk, but not actual noise. At the Black Cat it is one continual and all-pervading roar--a joyous roar, too; these people are having a simply gorgeous time and don't care who knows it.

It is a wonder that the high-set rafters do not fall--that the lofty, whitewashed walls of brick do not tremble, and that the little black cats set in a rigid conventional design around the whole room do not come to life in horror, and fly spitting up the short stairway and out of the door!

When you go to the Black Cat you would better check what prejudices you have as to what is formal and fitting, and leave them with your coat at the entrance. Not that it is disreputable--Luigi would pale with the shock of such a thought! It is just--Bohemian! Everyone does exactly what he wishes to do. Sometimes, one person's wishes conflict with someone else's, and then there is a fight, and the police are called, and the rest of the patrons have a beautiful time watching a perfectly good and unexpected free show! As a rule, however, this determination on the part of each one to do what he wants to has no violent results. An incident will show something of the entire liberty allowed in the Black Cat. A man came in with two girls, and, seeing a jolly stag party at another table, decided to join them. He promptly did so, with, as far as could be seen, no word of excuse to his feminine companions. In a moment two young men strolled up to their table and sat down.

"Your friend asked us to come over here and take his place,"

explained one nonchalantly. "You don't object, ladies?"