Your Guide to the Coolest Neighborhoods in North America, Page 2

  Chapter 2 - NEW YORK CITY:Van Damn-it

  Is It Too Good for You?

  Following two Czech tourists separated from their native-language bus tour of Manhattan, and on the trail of that urban artifact, the exclusive pop-up restaurant, I wandered into the lesser-known Manhattan neighborhood of Van Damn-it, determined to eat at the menu-less, heretofore nameless, restaurant, about which I had only heard rumors. Like a giant amuse-bouche stuffed with some organic hard-to-find cheese and perfumed with truck-exhaust and burnt pretzels, this exciting quarter offers the 19th century charm of brick facades, inside a 21st century city, begrimed by the dirt that comes from a million lives lived close together.

  Affectionately called “VaDa” by neologism-mad travel writers, “Throop” by realtors tired of befouling their sales with curse-words, “Fishhead” by history buffs, and “Schmutztown” by people confusing this neighborhood with a similar one in Philadelphia, Van Damn-it hides off to the very Far, Far West Side near other better-known, gentrified riverside collections of restored buildings.

  Here, you can get stuffed Lebanese-style mushrooms, shabu-shabu, greens a la Maroq and creative South American-inspired cocktails, which is surprising given that this was, up until 18 months ago, a mostly West Indian section of town.

  Warring gangs from the area often created havoc, so many stayed away. But people get hungry. For years, most Van Damn-it restaurants paid kick-backs to gangs. That ended in the 1980s when gang-members were jailed and the graft, instead, started flowing more efficaciously to City Hall. With crime lower, an incredibly diverse group of upper middle-class, mostly white, gay men, from the northeastern U.S. and western Europe, began restoring the buildings, using their innate, magical sense of centuries-old color schemes.

  Defrocked and ‘out’ priest Michael Intaglio, a homeowner and businessman here, said it best, when he told me, Van Damn-it, “is a place, where, with the right credit rating, income, financial advisor, schooling, connections, city licenses, cosmetic dentist, yoga teacher, sexual orientation, and social network, people can just be themselves.”

  Intaglio owns Hadrian Wallflowers & Hardware, (Little West 24th St. & 15th Ave.), a virtual Vatican for those needing hard-to-find handcuffs, leather cord, harnesses, chain-mail, and unusual geraniums. The store was supposed to be a bank, but the grand opening was improvidently scheduled for a day in the 1930s that would turn out to be a bank holiday, declared by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. It never opened. After that the building became a widely-respected opium den, patronized by many famous writers and musicians, where I’m told they inspired copy that gives the address if you, say, or play, the stories, or songs, backward.

  Definitely, grab some of Michael’s spider monkey-safe-coffee or some free-range Danish. The wheat for the pastries are grown willy-nilly on a hillside in the Catskills—seeds are scattered in a ceremony celebrating the randomness of the universe, courtesy of the Lacandon Hunter-Gatherer Collective, Kerfluffle, NY. Participation in the ceremony is available after each full-moon ; the Danish are $15 a piece, but worth every dollar ( two are for climate-change efforts).

  “Some customers tell me this is the best Danish they’ve ever had anywhere in New York; I tell them it better be for fifteen bucks a pop,” said Intaglio, who asserted that supporting free-range farming honored Van Damn-it’s agricultural heritage. “When you eat these naturally-sourced morsels, you’re reaching out to a distant New York of manure, well-water and lots of flies.”

  I spoke with Henderson Paisley, a television personality who lives here: “Within two or three blocks, you can get designer underwear, an Appletini and a 16th century Italian wall-sconce encrusted with bat-poop; there’s no reason to live anywhere else in New York.”

  (Spoiler Note: The New York Times-issued guidelines for covering historic New York neighborhoods recommend mentions of a buried creek, an unmarked colonial-era grave, a Roosevelt or two, a founding family's historic home, and all things Dutch. Mentions of the Doge’s Palace, in Venice, and a buried hatchet, are also encouraged.)

  Van Damn-it is on the site of the former Dutch village of Hoofd van Vissen—Fishhead, one of many hamlets peppering Manhattan Island in the decades before the American Revolution. It was so named for a popular fishhead stew made hereabouts.

  And, that name stems from a tale of courtship gone awry, and of the inappropriate usage of farm implements: when McIver, a Scots rope-maker, paid court to tailor Cornelius van Draadmeester’s daughter without permission, the two agreed to duel—McIver with a lasso, and Draadmeester with a pitchfork. After separating by 100 paces, give or take 90, according to an old account, Draadmeester’s tool found its mark in McIver’s leg, at which he started to shout the tailor's name, but stopped to curse: “van…Damn-it all!” Luckily there was a cordswallow (a kind of barrel that appears in well-researched travel pieces like this one) of rum nearby, and McIver’s wounds and ego were patched up. Perhaps feeling sorry for him, the tailor allowed the rope-maker to marry his daughter, and the couple had four sons.

  Another utterly credible version of this story has four apples speared by the flying pitchfork, finding fertile earth, where they grew into diseased fruit trees in Throop Park that rained down wormy apples on park-goers.

  Regardless, this is re-enacted, as it must be, by the Empire State Sons of the Pitchfork, every year on Pitchfork Day, the Monday after Memorial Day. Local taverns serve fish-head stew, with New York’s mayor invited to sample some of each, and presented with a tiny replica pitchfork for the lapel. I recommend a peek at the boringly-worded plaque from the 1880s, at 14 Ave. Extended and Tiny West 26th St.: “Here is located the original site of Fishhead (now called Van Damn-it), the town and home of many people who settled this region. Nearby, fish were taken from the river, and their heads removed for a savory porridge.”

  After the Dutch left, things pretty much went downhill for a long time, and it got rougher and poorer after the Civil War, when many veterans returned to the city, and an influx of immigrants vastly over-taxed the neighborhood housing. Rent and life were cheap in Van Damn-it. Eventually, that famous police commissioner, Theodore Roosevelt, tried to clean up its tainted reaches, to no avail.

  A billiards club and bar, Va-Da-Ba-Da-Boom, (989 Compact West 17th St.), celebrates this edgy era in a former slaughterhouse, along with the adjoining Damnation Station coffee shop, where you can check your email and "pick people up" according to several young men I met, who were still in the early stages of fixing their personal telemetry on targets that would succumb to their Van Damn-it charms. I ate a crazy-expensive “artisanal” mini-Jamaican meat pie that was actually marked down from a day earlier, while talking to patrons. Heritage sodas, made from a type of sugar cane originally grown during the War of The Spanish Succession, are for sale at $7.95 a pop. Potato chips, sculpted by North Fork-of-Long Island food-art craft-persons, were eight bucks. I’d spent $25 on lunch, and was still hungry.

  One artist-type told me, “This is actually a cool place. I do something called low-brow art out of my studio. I’m working with found objects right now to re-create a pay telephone booth from the very early 1970s in a building with a lot of phone closets, and old phone wiring, on Punky West 20th St.”

  “Listen,” he leaned forward quietly,” when you’re done, could I have that crumpled napkin? Also the lemon from your ice tea, the meat-pie wrapper, and the juice can?” Whether hungry, or just scouting for art-materials, I never found out.

  Meanwhile, real estate agents gun for change, taking as their model the effort to turn Hell’s Kitchen into Clinton. The idea? Throop—namely, local greensward Gov. Enos T. Throop Park. Throop was a 19th century New York state lieutenant governor who, in later years was appointed by President Andrew Jackson as the Naval Officer for the Port of New York, and is said to have visited the area for a pint of ale on his way to a meeting at the customs house, from his home upstate.

  A poem said to be based on Throop’s comments to his tavern-mates, commemorates his V
an Damn-it sojourn. It’s on a park plaque, which is at 13 ½ Ave. and Dinky West 23 St.

  On Duty

  On duty, one can only say

  Excises must be paid today

  I come not to rearrange the tidy ledgers o’ yore domain

  But rather from the capitol

  Up Albany way’n

  I ride downstate to dictate

  That all goods, dry or wet, must be weighed-in

  And ult’mately you’ll see fed’ral tariff benefits be

  An out-go from your capital to ours

  Located southeast of Schenectady

  One can only ever say: duty is as it does

  Excises on wool (et al). Duties in full.

  Throop Park is also home to Old Scattershot, a dangerously out-of-kilter cannon that took off many appendages, and some heads, during Revolutionary War battles—graves are at the park's southeast corner. Its stern, dark presence at the park’s center reminds us of the place’s violent heritage, lest you think it was all butter-churning and games of horseshoes. And, it’s also home to the endangered Manhattoes Striped Squirrel. A Native American legend says that if the squirrels ever leave this quarter, the island would be swallowed up by surrounding waters. Seems prescient, and it makes sense when you think what a flood would do to buried acorns.

  I ran into the person most responsible for promoting that chestnut about the squirrels, formidable Harriet Shrillman, founder of the Friends of Lt. Gov. Enos T. Throop Park. Shrillman told me that in the early 1980s, the city tried to de-accession the park “to some filthy developer. “

  “This was a guy, Mark Luker was his name, who would build anything, anywhere, even in the dead of night! We stopped him cold. ” recalled Shrillman.

  Harriet, it turns out, was in the park to oversee a visit on a recently initiated study of the rodents by New York University Professor Carl Luciano-Schuyler; he holds the recently-endowed Mark W. and Helen T. Luker Chair in Rodent Sciences at New York University. We engaged him in a brief conversation that expertly weaved through the neighborhood’s history.

  “These rodents have been here since Alexander Hamilton’s day, at least until Aaron Burr shot him dead. And, then, you could say, they’ve been here since DeWitt Clinton’s day. Any way you look at, they’ve been here a long time. The question is why’d they move in? Rents? Drug traffic elsewhere? No. They’re squirrels, after all,” opined the professor. “There aren’t enough trees to sustain a population this size. Maybe an old grain-bin from a nearby, long-gone tavern? Mother McChesney's famous rum-whiskey-apple pie from a nearby tavern helped ease a lot of money out of Old New York pockets. Then, too, buried creeks may factor in."

  Those creeks would figure in, wouldn't they? I puzzled aloud over a rodent species affinity for human comfort food, but the professor interrupted, “Of course, another question is whether this sub-species wouldn’t be better protected in a kinder place, say, The Bronx Zoo.”

  Shrillman jumped in. “Say, where are you from anyway? I didn’t see a Columbia badge.” She fingered her umbrella, which began to take on the shape and menace of a shoulder-held rocket-launcher. The professor backed-up nervously. I made my excuses, and left.

  Furious texting and Internet searches still hadn’t yielded the location of the Van Damn-it pop-up eatery. So, I thought I’d kill some time trying to see the magnificent mansion of Verdure Entwhistle, a very distant relation to New York’s Famous “400,”—the list of elite society figures who reportedly could fit into Mrs. Astor’s late nineteenth century ballroom, minus their illegitimate offspring. It’s now a private museum, on Dwarfish West 22nd St. at Ave. of the Boroughs (13th Ave. South), called Bell’ston (Bellissimo Brownstone), and one of the finest examples of the Moravian Hruzny Style (‘Horrific Moravian’ or ‘Moravian Horrifische’ in bad tourist German, if you like). Some guidebooks call it a variant of Art Nouveau, while others are too disgusted to label it all. Inside, its curves and ornamental decoration, and allusions to clouds and twigs often invoke a warm, yet queasy, feeling, like taking old bowling shoes out of a box after many years.

  Entwhistle’s wealthy husband, the upstate talcum powder heir, Olcott Entwhistle, was killed in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, and a few years later Verdure built her mansion. She moved there in 1906, and then never left again, except, according to the web-site, for a 1949 Lord & Taylor glove sale.

  I stepped up to the famous corner manse, feeling lucky I’d been able to schedule a tour: a foundation now runs the house. “Bell’ston” is open to the public on the third Tuesday of alternate months of alternate years of alternate decades, counting from June 30, 1898. Basically, it’s been open to the public three times since its 1970 debut as an attraction. Happily, an opening coincided with my final day here. This sort of thing happens a lot when you’re a travel writer with a book contract. My advice for civilians? Email the foundation repeatedly.

  The front door’s double-knocker is a separate piece of art with its own alarm system. Called Zeus Stealing Proserpina to the Underworld, it’s reputedly the biggest set of knockers in New York. A few heavy thunderbolts from it, and keeper of the Entwhistle flame, Sharon Putsch, opened the door. “Welcome! Welcome to this special place, this special part of New York history,” she bubbled, as she re-did some buttons on her blouse, and sent a man standing next to her packing, with a slap on his rear.

  “He’s a contractor,” Putsch, explained. “They’re doing work downstairs on the boiler.”

  Putsch brought me into the two-story foyer, and turned around, apologizing for the run in her stocking. While she fiddled with that, I looked up at the soaring walls, the soaring skylight four floors up and the soaring tapestries that soared up for many feet. A soaring art nouveau vase decorated a carved wooden side-table with a green marble top, which was heavy and stolid and did not soar.

  Putsch followed my gaze. “Verdure loved green and she ordered this top to be hand-made by Julian Alps pygmy craftsmen, kind of like ‘Upper Balkan Oompa-Loompa’s,’ if you will, in a cave somewhere; the marble comes from a nearby mine once owned by the Doges of Venice,” commented Putsch, smoothing down her outfit.

  “Well, let’s talk about this creation of a wonderful New York matron,” began Ms. Putsch. “As you already know, Olcott Entwhistle was one of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, but Olcott never made up to the top of San Juan Hill. Instead, tragically, he fell into a vat of molasses on the sugar plantation near their encampment and drowned, the day before the battle.

  Mrs. Putsch paused, and seemed ready to faint. I asked if I could help, and she shook her head, turning around to pull on a huge rope that rang a bell. She then yelled, “Florid, I need my special coffee,” and explained to me that Florid was Bell’ston’s intern from Vassar.

  Within a minute, a young woman appeared, brought coffee, which was redolent of liquor. I remarked on this to Putsch, but she brushed it aside, swallowing much of the coffee in one large gulp, then wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, breathing a deep sigh and placing her cup and saucer on a tray next to the telephone stand.

  “Oh my dear,” she declaimed, while steadying herself on a railing, “you can’t imagine what was here before the foundation rescued Bell'ston; Verdure left no heirs and the house had been chopped up into apartments. I’m afraid you are smelling the alcohol of those years, soaked into its very bones, when this precious place was a nothing but a crash pad.”

  We reached the top of the staircase, and entered the master bedroom.

  “Verdure spent much of her time composing romance short-stories. She also commissioned a number of inventions for her home, including a mechanical tissue-dispenser—she cried a lot as she wrote, remembering her husband no doubt."

  Then all was quiet. “Breathe in the air that sustained Verdure for more than 50 years!” said Putsch to no one in particular. I took a deep breath, but smelled nothing but dust.

  One well-publicized treasure is the portrait of Entwhistle by the famous society painter John Singer
Sargent. We entered the library and Putsch closed the door behind me, walked to the oil painting, nearly eight feet in height and paused to gaze up at it for a long moment. She then turned around and gave me a very strained look, with a faint, pained smile growing slowly across her face. Florid entered the room with another cup of coffee, but Mrs. Putsch motioned for her to stop. I leaned in to read the title-plate, “Verdure, wife of the late Olcott Entwhistle, 1909.”

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it? It is—was, I should say—considered to be one of most stupendous evocations of a society lady committed to canvas. The brush-strokes, the tinge of color in her cheeks, the attention to the details of her gown. Sensual and passionate and lovely, without debauching the subject a whit. Any number of people have remarked on it,” said Putsch. “But,” and here her voice dropped a little, and there was another sigh, along with a gesture motioning Florid to approach with the sacred coffee cup, "this is not a Sargent. At least we don’t think so. We think possibly it was painted by a friend of Sargent’s, someone who may have stopped here, for a party or called on Verdure. We just don’t know. There are no records to support the Sargent provenance,” she said, voice cracking as she gave ‘provenance’ full Gallic articulation.

  “The first clue we had was when we saw a small chip of paint had fallen away—underneath was what looked like a commercial poster for milk or something.”

  “We only found this out after the piece had been loaned to the Met for a Sargent exhibition; one of the curators called us with the bad news.”

  Putsch let out a small sound that sounded like a croak, then a moan. Then it became a small sob, and then a larger one. Her coffee cup fell out of her hand and she turned to the painting, sobbing quietly but deeply.

  “Who painted you. Who painted you!! I don’t understand it. I don’t, I don’t.” Putsch wailed, muttering, “bastard” under her breath.

  Florid stepped over to pick up the coffee cup, then got up and put her arm around Putsch, murmuring gently “why don’t we go downstairs and find you some food, hmmm?”

  The intern then gave me a piteous look, smiled and led Putsch to the servant’s stairs. That seemed to signal the tour’s end, so I exited the house, and stepped outside.

  It was mid-afternoon, but as in Chitty-Chitty Bang Bang’s Vulgaria, children are rarely seen in Van Damn-it, though not outright prohibited. One couple told me they were moving to a more artsy, industrial neighborhood on the Brooklyn-Queens border, where many families who want to stay in the city have settled among its row-houses and smaller apartment blocks.

  “Sure the schools are the same, but craft brew just doesn’t taste good outside The City, you know?”

  If you’re tired out from the Bell’ston tour, or mis-timed your arrival and so won’t be able to see it until 2071, try this quick historical hit: Nos. 890-891 Throop Place (at Smallish West 17th St.) are fine examples of the Triumphal Elegante style of architecture--occasionally called Early Third Republic style, or just Early Third if you’re in design circles and want to seem knowledgeable. Jackson Claypit built these homes during a modest upturn, between the Panic of 1884 and the Frenzy of 1885. These two row houses are private, and not open for tours, I learned. The owners are exceedingly mean-spirited people who will call the police on you, if you so much as brush your slip-on weekend walker toe against their aged Vermont granite steps. Triumphal Elegante prefigures the popularization of things French, after they gifted the Statue of Liberty to the U.S.; its hallmark is a vertiginous presentment of swoops and swirls—all easily broken off, hence its disuse in construction after this epoch.

  I say: Go ahead! Speedily snap a pic with your phone, posing against the banisters, then run away, quick-smart. What can they really do?

  Thinking hard about my Bell’ston tour, I wandered without any sense of direction for a few minutes, turned a corner, and there it was: the pop-up restaurant, as described online.

  It’s called contrarybitch (666 13th Ave. South) and when I got there, I was at first disappointed, as I later realized I should be. It’s in a closed laundromat. But there is a small nicely-shellacked bench outside with a skull-and-crossbones flag flying over the door. Inside is a thrift-store mish-mash of ancient office furniture, old hotel and country-club fittings, and what looked like my Aunt Ida’s china service from 1951. There’s an aggressive use of tightly-fitted brocaded chairs, lacking arms, which either slip out from under you, on the heavily-finished wood floors, or can’t be moved from their settings in deep-pile shag. The tables are too close, and the seats too low. The chef, Connie Plunkett, thinks that’s perfect.

  “You know how hard it is to find a maker of real annoying shag carpeting now? I had to buy seconds from Bulgaria,” she told me, after seating me early (“I’m bumping some folks who need to understand how we do things here”).

  Indeed, Plunkett cooks and serves delicious pan-European cuisine with gastronomic value, and a flair for emotional cruelty, which she says harks back to a saucier, tougher time in the city's past.

  One side of the restaurant is incredibly well-lit by arc lamps formerly used to operate a lathe; the rest of the restaurant is almost pitch black. You can grasp one of the centerpiece tea-candles to read the menu, but they are hard to hold and liable to drip wax on your fingers or wrist. Connie changes the cuisine each week – this quarter it’s Cambodian, last quarter it was Brazilian – without notice, with devotees of the previous week inevitably showing up, being seated and then facing something they hadn’t counted on eating. “I call it ‘the surprise announcement.’ These Wall St. types, they’re used to it; it taps into their fear of losing everything that comes with all that money.”

  Connie came over during the extra-long wait for the food and explained her philosophy. “New York used to be fun. You not only had to sing for your supper, you had to punch someone in the teeth. My father could fight with a retail clerk over a free pack of matches; my mother thought everyone was ‘fresh,’ ” said Connie. “Those were the days,” she added, wistfully.

  "Now there’s all this ‘namaste’ crap and ‘no worries’ garbage. Who needs it? We try to get past that here. We cook good food, and treat you like you should be grateful. This is how New York used to be, and that’s why Van Damn-it is the right location—we don’t want the typical schlubs that dine out to come here,” adding, ”we had a lot more fun before, seating non-smokers next to smokers, but those days are over.”

  My food finally came to the table, and it was quite average. Connie popped over. “Sometimes we go the other way—you know, really incredible food, but we make you eat fast to turn the table over. This time, the food’s so-so, but you can stay as long as you want. By the way, we’ve run out of all the stuff you like,” said Connie, adding that she intended to shut-down her pop-up without warning, hopefully leaving many reservation-holders in the lurch.

  After a tense dinner in which I struggled to get my wine and water glasses filled, I left and sat down outside on the bench to reflect on my edgy repast. It was only seconds before I realized Connie had also watered the bench along with the adjacent potted plants. My bottom was now soaked. I got up, but Connie poked her head out of the restaurant; she was smiling and clearly understood what happened.

  “Aw,” she cooed, grinning and looking up at her restaurant sign. “Karma is…well…you know.”

  Van Damn-it all!

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