Postcard Thursday: Pushcarts

This postcard of Mulberry Street ca. 1900 has become one of the most enduring images of Little Italy. (In fact, it was in the running to be the cover image of Footprints in New York but too many other people had already used it.)

Lining the center of the photo are pushcarts where food vendors could sell their wares without the overhead of a traditional storefront. (Compare this to our earlier postcard of cheese vendors, who sold from baskets.) As you might imagine, there were often turf wars between the brick-and-mortar stores and pushcart vendors, who were seen by some shop owners as bad for business. Under pressure, the city enacted a law that said that pushcart vendors could not sell from the same spot for more than 30 minutes at a time, though this proved hard to enforce.

During the Depression, Mayor La Guardia attempted to ban street vending altogether, claiming it was a safety hazard to have the streets clogged with carts. To accommodate the displaced vendors, the city constructed indoor markets, like the Essex Street Market on the Lower East Side and the Arthur Avenue Retail Market in the Bronx, and while these both still exist, they were never popular with the pushcart sellers.

This is just one topic we'll be covering on our Sunday tour of Italian New York City. Read all about it at http://blog.insidetheapple.net/2015/10/reminder-italian-nyc-walking-tour.html and sign up!

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Footprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers

Available from your favorite online retailers (Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc.) or from independent bookstores across the country. 

What's a Gustavademecum?

As we enter the week in which Americans spend more on food than any other (including $875,840,000 on turkey alone), our thoughts turn naturally to dining. We were combing through the Inside the Apple archives the other day, when we came upon this charming little booklet from 1940: the "Gustavademecum for the Island of Manhattan," a sort of scientifically-minded forerunner to Zagat. As the cover notes, the booklet was "prepared for the convenience of mathematicians, physicists, engineers, and explorers," and it's a small wonder.

For those whose Latin is a little rusty, "Gustare" is to taste and "vade mecum" literally means "to go with me" but colloquially refers to a handbook. Thus, a Gustavademecum is a tasting handbook.

On the inside front cover, the guide has a key to its descriptions and symbols. Some are straightforward, such as C for Cafe and R for restaurant. Then comes "DATA, verifiable," including:

L=general illumination, measured in lumens per square foot or foot-candles. When L=0.1, menu is just legible. L=1, one wax candle one foot distant. L=200, north window at noon, January 1.

and

N=noise level, measured in decibels. N=20, country house, no children. N=50, conversation intelligible at 3 feet. N=70, shouting level.

For most entries in the book, all that is provided is the address, type of cuisine, and price of the least expensive meal. All the other data was to be filled in by the user. One of the most complete entries is the Greenwich Village Casino which has D50EO7x2 -- that means it had a 50-square-foot dance floor, entertainment, and two, seven-piece orchestras.

The least expensive restaurant in the guide is the Actor's Kitchen at 229 West 48th, where dinner was just 35 cents. (As the name suggests, the Actor's Kitchen existed to provide cheap meals to working actors.) The priciest entry is The Colony at 667 Madison, where the least expensive meal was a three-course dinner for $4.00. The Colony--which first became known as a gambling den--will be the subject of a future blog post.

Perusing the list of eateries, most are now gone. Some old favorites are listed such as the "21" Club, Fraunces Tavern, and Tavern on the Green, but most of these restaurants are now just a dim memory. On the page excerpted above, the only place we recognize that's still going is Marie's Crisis, the venerable West Village piano bar. However, the ghost of Moneta's at 32 Mulberry Street is still hanging around. If you go to this block of Mulberry (just north of Mosco Street, opposite Columbus Park), you can see the faint trace of Moneta's sign on the facade of 32 Mulberry, revealed when the bar Yello went out of business and its awning was removed.

In the coming weeks, we'll research some of the old restaurants in the Gustavademecum and post our findings. Is there any old New York eatery you wish you knew more about? Let us know.

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Read more about New York in the 1940s in

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City

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Crazy Joe Gallo

Born in Red Hook, Brooklyn

In the year of who knows when.

Opened up his eyes

To the sound of an accordion.

--Bob Dylan and Jacques Levy, Joey

 

Today marks both the birth and the death of one of New York’s most famous gangsters, “Crazy” Joe Gallo.

Though Bob Dylan claimed he’d been born “in the year of who knows when,” Gallo was actually born April 7, 1929, in Red Hook. His life of crime began when he and his brothers became enforcers for the Profaci family in the 1950s. After successfully carrying out the murder of Albert Anastasia at the Park Sheraton Hotel, Crazy Joe asked Joseph Profaci for a bigger cut of the action. When Profaci refused, a turf war broke out between the Gallo brothers and the Profacis—a bloody fight that continued well into the 1960s even after Gallo was sent to prison for ten years for extortion and Joseph Profaci died of cancer, handing the reins of the family to Joseph Colombo.

Crazy Joe was released from prison in 1971 into a whirl of publicity. Jimmy Breslin’s book The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight—a humorous take on the Gallo/Profaci war—had been released in 1969 and filmed in 1971. In the film, Jerry Orbach—later of Law and Order fame—played “Kid Sally,” the character based on Gallo. Crazy Joe wasn’t thrilled with the performance, so invited Orbach and his wife over to dinner to set them straight. They were amazed at his knowledge of art and literature—as Marta Curro Orbach later said, “When he asked me whether I preferred Camus or Sartre, I almost fell into a plate of spaghetti.” The Orbachs quickly became some of Gallo’s closest friends, introducing him, in turn, to their friends in the world of theater and publishing.

However, the friendship was not to last. On April 7, 1972, Gallo celebrated his birthday with the Orbachs and other friends at the Copacabana. After the party broke up, Gallo, his wife, and his body guard, Pete “the Greek” Diapoulas decided to head to Little Italy for a quick bite at Umberto’s Clam House. Uncharacteristically seated with his back to the door, Gallo didn’t notice a gunman enter the restaurant until it was too late. He leapt up and ran toward the hail of bullets—probably to draw fire away from his wife—and staggered out on to Mulberry Street, where he died.

While Umberto’s still exists in Little Italy, it is no longer in its original location. The spot where Gallo was killed, at the corner of Hester and Mulberry, is now Da Gennaro. Umberto’s moved to Broome Street a few years after the murder.

Gallo’s life is not only recounted in The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight and Bob Dylan’s Joey (from the album Desire), it was also made into a film called Crazy Joe in 1974 starring Everybody Loves Raymond’s Peter Boyle.

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More about Little Italy -- including a walking tour of famous and not-so-famous sites -- can be found in our book Inside the Apple, which is now available. For more information about the book and our upcoming talks and walking tours in New York, visit http://www.insidetheapple.net.

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