Saturday, November 12, 2011

The Former Maxwell's Plum

The newly opened Falk Surgical Supplies.
Falk Surgical on 64th and 1st.
The flamboyant interior of Maxwell's Plum in its heyday.
TGI Friday's circa 1970.
Baker Street today.
A close-up of the new sign.
Recently a store called Falk Surgical Supplies opened up on the southwest corner of 64th and 1st in a building that was sitting empty for what seemed like a couple of years.  From 1966-88, that building was Maxwell's Plum, a flashily decorated bar and restaurant which followed T.G.I. Friday's one block south, opened the previous year, as the first-ever singles bars, where young, single twenty-somethings can meet and mingle.  Before these places opened up, bars were strickly old-man hangouts.  Places like P.J. Clarke's and McSorley's were not for schmoozing.  Opening up a place for young people to socialize was a new concept in the '60s, which is hard to believe because now there's a singles bar on practically every block in the city.

Mervin LeRoy, the owner of Maxwell's, also opened up the world-famous Tavern on the Green in Central Park, which closed just recently, and TGI Friday's founder Alan Stillman later opened Smith & Wolenski's Steakhouse on 49th and 3rd.  Stillman didn't know anyone named Smith or Wolenski, instead he got the names out of a phonebook.  LeRoy faired well in the city for decades, boasting such regulars as Cary Grant, Barbara Streisand and Warren Beatty, but didn't have much luck in other cities.  A second Maxwell's Plum opened in San Francisco in 1981 at a cost of $7 million but soon closed.  His Potomac Restaurant in Washington, DC, the largest in the city's history, opened at a cost of $9 million but closed shortly thereafter.  As much as LeRoy tried, he was never able to duplicate the popularity and glamour that his bar/restaurant on 64th and 1st enjoyed throughout the '60s and '70s.  The restaurant's ultimate demise came in the '80s, when its food-to-value ratio deteriorated.  An average dinner, once around $10 had shot up to around $40-$50.  As newer fashionable singles' spots were shooting up all over the city, snatching up many of LeRoy's customers, the restaurant struggled to regain its food image.  In the process the menu veered all over, from continental, French, Californian, and American, to a confusing blend of all of these.   The iconic bar/restaurant, once a niche in and of itself, was long past its prime in July 1988 and abruptly closed.

TGI Friday's, on the other hand, moved out to bigger, better quarters in 1989, and now has locations all over the world (although it is known as a family-themed restaurant now rather than a singles bar).  The original Friday's on the corner of 63rd and 1st is now another pub/restaurant called Baker Street, which still boasts itself as the place where Tom Cruise trained to become a bartender in the 1988 movie Cocktail.  Baker Street has maintained much of the basic layout of the original Friday's and some of the Tiffany windows are still on display.  The Maxwell's Plum building, however, is now completely unrecognizable as Falk Surgical Supplies.  Left behind are the ghosts of a block on the Upper East Side that introduced the singles' scene to New York City.  Since the days of 63rd to 64th Streets on 1st Avenue in the 1960s, the entire city has taken a novel idea and run with it.

9 comments:

  1. This is wrong. Mp was on the northwest corner, not the southwest. The old building was torn down.

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  2. U r correct!!!!!wrong corner.....

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  3. It's so weird when we try remembering spots that get torn down & architecturally completely redesigned. The WAS a restaurant that inhabited the Falk Surgical corner but the Duane Reade inhabits the old Maxwell Plumb corner. The Ricky's next door had been a little disco for a long while but had originally been the movie theater that Mr. Leroy first ran before the idea of the restaurant came.

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  4. There's a major error here. "Mervin" Leroy didn't open Maxwell's Plum. Mervyn Leroy was the producer of the Wizard of Oz movie. His son, Warner Leroy owned Maxwell's Plum and Tavern on the Green.

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  5. Spot on. My father did all the mirror work at Plum and Tavern (SF also). It was fun and cost was never a consideration, only quality. I even saved a few spare pieces. I Schwartz Glass and Mirror, 412-16 East 59th Street.

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  6. I remember Maxwell Plums with the Tiffany lamps, the Mad Hatter, Bogie's with the saw dust on the floor, Harlows, Mike Malkins, TGI Fridays, Barney Google's on East 86th St in it's hey day! Lived on E. 91rst Street in an old brownstone rent controlled, 90 dollars a month..today that same apt goes for $2500..what a difference! The ever changing scene in NYC! City has grown in leaps and bounds! Bryant Park is gorgeous now and reminds me of parks in Paris! Central Park gorgeous as ever! Miss NYC but also miss those great night spots as well! Thanks for sharing! New York NY it's a hell of a town, the Bronx is up, the Battery's down! "My kind of town"!

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  7. I would like to thank you for the efforts you have made in writing this article. I am hoping the same best work from you in the future as well..
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  8. I fondly remember Maxwell's Plum which was a few (ok maybe 4 blocks away). My favorite was the warm spinach and bacon salad. Just loved the ocelots and other exotic jungle animals hanging over head.

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  9. 1970s NY was the best, and everything that got "cleaned up" is what made it the best. Always an edge to it, a sense of danger on the streets and sex in the back rooms, anything could happen and did, you could meet anybody and you did. You could go anywhere in torn jeans and a leather jacket. There was the lowest sleeze to high art. CBGBs to Studio 54 and everything in between. Liza Minelli and Andy Warhol. Now it's like a giant shopping center, BORING. Not worth visiting. Other great cities of the world sre far more interesting.

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