The Lone Star Cafe

Construction of the new branch of Shrafft's began in 1936 after an old brownstone was demolished.

The Lone Star Cafe in 1978.

Another shot of the new building going up in place of the Lone Star.

The new high-rise going up in July 2011.

An interior shot of the new Shrafft's on at 61 5th Avenue, corner of East 13th Street, in 1938.

A shot of the front entrance in 1938.

The Korean Deli that was the building's last occupant in 2005.

The Lone Star Cafe in the '80s.

The 40-foot-long iguana keeping guard at the Lone Star about 1987.

I was walking around in Greenwich Village the other day and came across the new building going up in place of the former Korean deli on 5th Avenue and 13th Street. In 1936 a brownstone was demolished to make way for a new two-story Schrafft's, probably the most popular chain of diners in the city during the '30s, '40s and '50s. A number of photos from the Metropolitan College of New York show what a beautiful place it was when it was first built. A revolving door led to a cocktail bar to the right and a spiral staircase to the second floor on the left.

Critic Lewis Mumford didn't like the place, though. He hated its "screwy" curved front, calling it "the new cliche and it will soon belong in the done to death department." He went on to say that the building is "a pretty sorry mismatch" with "ill-assorted windows" and a "crazy little balcony".

These pictures were taken in 1938, when the place was still new and fashionable. By 1969, it had become the hang out of staff members from Women's Wear Daily, the New School, and loftmen from 14th Street. According to a 1969 New York Magazine article called "The Little Old Lady Restaurants", Schrafft's would fill up with L.O.L.s (which back then didn't mean "Laugh Out Loud"). In an effort to revamp their not-very-hip image, they hired Andy Warhol to do a commercial about the chain. But it was what it was, and ultimately closed a few years later.

In 1976, it became The Lone Star Cafe, the city's most popular country music concert venue. It hosted a number of musical acts, and particularly featured acts from Texas. Roy Orbison, Willie Nelson, Kinky Friedman and Billy Joe Shaver all did regular shows there. The Blues Brothers and James Brown also did shows there, with Brown recording a live album there in 1985. The place was also visited by Texas TV personalities such as Larry King, Dan Rather and Linda Ellerbee. My parents went to see rockabilly musician Robert Gordon there when they were dating.

Over the front entrance was draped the line "Too Much Ain't Enough" from Waylon Jennings' song "Old Five And Dimers Like Me", and the building was famous and infamous for the 40-foot long iguana sculpture on it's roof by Bob "Daddy-O" Wade. The place didn't really fit in with its upscale neighborhood, and local residents fought a hard battle get rid of the sculpture, considering it to be an eyesore. Detractors succeeded for a couple of years and it was removed, but in 1983 it was restored and unveiled in a ceremony presided over by Mayor Ed Koch and then-Texas Governor Mark White. My father said that he wanted to take it, but that it probably wouldn't fit in our apartment.

When the Lone Star closed in 1989, the iguana went into storage on the Hudson River docks across from North Moore Street, but ultimately "disappeared". I assume it was stolen. I don't know how they pulled that one off.

Serving as a gallery for street art for a number of years and then a deli, in 2009 it joined the ranks of historic buildings in the city that have been torn down to be replaced by expensive glass boxes. A ten-story luxury apartment building is currently being built in its place. I had been on that corner plenty of times when I worked near there and never even noticed that small building with a lot of history. I try to notice as much of them as I can these days, because they're disappearing one by one.

Securty Guard Jobs in the City

A security guard company on 42nd Street near 5th Avenue.

Don't waste your money at this place on 42nd and 5th.

For the past three years or so, I've been on the lookout for a new job, trying almost anything. Sending resumes and cover letters online, going to job fairs, calling people, calling my old job, all for naught. Usually, when I get an actual response, it turns out to not quite be a real job ... just a commissions thing, or some kind of pyramid scheme where I would never really make any money, and maybe I'm supposed to pay them about a hundred dollars for "training". Craigslist is full of these listings for security guard jobs -- "Jobs available!", "Hiring Immediately!", "No Experience Necessary!", "Will Train!"

I unfortunately became a victim of this myself back in 2009. Desperate to find a job, I signed up for a three-day class at NYC Trailblazers out in Jamaica, Queens. Pay $320, take this class, and you'll be hired by Monday, they said. They were very accommodating to me, very willing to help me out and get me hired, which most of the time is a dead give-away that they're full of it. Any time a company wants to help somebody off the street because he seems like a good guy, that usually means somewhere along the way they're going to ask you for your money.

So, needless to say, I never got hired, and neither did any of the about thirty other people who signed up for that class. The class had all kinds, young and old, just looking for a decent job ... down on their luck. After I had taken these classes, the instructor proceeded to jerk me around for a while, sending me from one place to another, none of which had any jobs. Instead, I was sent from one agency to another, and each one had a deposit or two. Eighty dollars here, a hundred dollars there.

The last one I went to was on 42nd Street near 5th Avenue, right before Thanksgiving. After sitting there for about an hour, a big burly guy with a badge around his neck took me into his office and kept saying to me, "We're in the middle of a recession, I want to put you to work!" and "You seem like a good guy, I want to help you out! There's an ATM upstairs, go get me ninety dollars!" By the end of meeting, he wanted to take over a thousand bucks from me! Naturally, I didn't have that much money in the bank, or what would I even be doing there? He mentioned that I needed to take such classes as "Handcuffing", and "Homeland Security", and more nonsense like that I can't seem to remember.

These places prey on the poor and unemployed, claiming that the security industry is growing at about 500 percent a day or some absurd amount due to 9/11. This is what they do for a living ... take money from unemployed people? That's pretty low. During these tough economic times, a lot of us in the city are struggling to find work, so I just wanted to put the word out to not take these places seriously, and don't waste your money on them. They prey on the poor and unemployed, and exploit the memory of September 11th.

The St. Patrick's Day Parade

The FDNY pipe and drum band at the end of the parade.

Marching up 5th Avenue.

Another shot up 5th Avenue, follow the green line!

Myself with Division 1 of the AOH, holding the banner.

Myself with one of Division 1's VPs.

The banner, Thomas Rogers Memorial.

Another shot of the banner for the Ancient Order of Hibernians, Division 1.

This past Thursday, New York City held it's 250th annual St. Patrick's Day parade. It's one of the city's oldest traditions, dating back to 1762, when ex-patriot British soldiers from Ireland marched in formation up lower Broadway, playing traditional songs, wearing green and speaking Irish, which was all banned in their home country. After the Revolution, the parade transformed from being a military review of British soldiers to being a gathering of the many religious, cultural, and social organizations of the city's Irish. By the the time Old St. Patrick's Cathedral on Mott and Prince Streets was finished in 1815, these various groups would start from their church or headquarters, around such places as St. Peter's on Barclay and Vessey Streets, St. James' between the underpass of the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges, and St. Joseph's on West 8th Street and 6th Avenue, and all march toward the cathedral where they would be met by the Bishop of New York. A mass or prayer service would be held where the bishop and other dignitaries and politicians would speak, and then everyone would disperse to start celebrating.

As the heart of the city migrated further north, so did the Archdiocese with a new cathedral on 50th Street and 5th Avenue, and so did the parade. By 1851, the parade began to to unite under a single grand marshall and be led by the newly formed 69th Regiment of the Irish Brigade, which it still is to this day. Also, since 1851, the Ancient Order of Hibernians, who formed at St. James Church in 1836, have sponsored the parade. I started marching in 2007 after I had joined to AOH a almost a year earlier in April 2006. Originally founded to defend and protect Irish Catholics in America by guarding churches that would otherwise be vandalized and burnt to the ground, and standing up for the rights of neglected Irish workers, they seemed to have evolved into an organization of older guys who talk about organizing charity drives, cultural events, the Christmas party, and what time and where to meet for the parade on March 17th. All in all, pretty light stuff ... and, no, ILGO and all those gay people who are supposedly "banned" have never once been mentioned. But the parade, the largest in the world, upholds strict traditions by not having political activist groups, pro-Catholic or not, march, as well as remaining strictly a marchers' parade by not allowing floats or cars. As a member of Division 1, we meet where it all began, far downtown in Manhattan, at the Mercantile Grill on Pearl Street, not too far from Fraunces Tavern at the end of the block, where George Washington said farewell to his officers and went back home to Virginia at the end of the Revolution. However, being a Upper-East-Sider, this is my excuse for never making it to the meetings.

The parade is always backed up, and we stood on 46th Street and Vanderbilt Avenue for about two hours, and then finally was the long haul up to 79th Street. Unfortunately, the parade, and all parades in the city, were cut short by Bloomberg starting in April of last year to supposedly cut costs on sanitation. Last year's St. Patrick's Day parade was the last to march up to 86th Street and past the Irish Historical Society on 83rd Street, as the new rule went into effect on April 1st of last year. That's Bloomberg for you: if he decides he wants to do something, he just goes right ahead and does it, often despite what most New Yorkers want. It's a hefty walk just the same, though, and as it nears the end you seem to get a less formal crowd of little kids holding out their hands to slap five and older "big kids" drunkenly yelling things. All in all, there's a lot of history and tradition to all of this, and I'm happy to be able to take part in the largest parade in the world. Celebrating afterward is always good, too.

Lord and Taylor

Lord and Taylor's 3rd building, from 1872-1914, on 20th and Broadway.

Lord and Taylor's 4th and current building on 5th Avenue and 39th Street.

This past week I started working at Lord and Taylor ... they need holiday-season sales associates and I, for a change of pace, was hired on the spot. I guess to say that they "need" people is an understatement. I actually got training these past couple of days from a very outgoing sales manager, obviously the kind of personality-type the folks at Lord and Taylor are looking for ... they certainly emphasized that enough, and I hope I'm up to snuff. The key, I think, is to just come across as knowledgeable and approachable. Lord and Taylor has a long history, though, that they seem to be very proud of ... which is a stark contrast from most businesses that only want to concentrate on what's hip and contemporary.

Lord and Taylor was the first department store in the United States, founded in 1826 on Catherine Street and Broadway, and then moving to Grand Street in Broadway by 1861. In 1863, the sales associates were actually given guns to protect themselves and the store during the draft riots -- kind of different from today's standards.

In 1872, the store moved for a third time to a beautiful, Gothic-style, haunted-house-looking building on the corner of Broadway and 20th Street. Broadway in the 1890s was said to have a "champagne sparkle", and was the center of high-society shopping and nightlife. I've walked past this building so many times when I used to work down here. I always knew the Chelsea area maintained a lot of its old buildings, much more so than uptown, but unfortunately it wasn't until after I got laid-off that I knew the back stories to pretty much any of them.

Lord and Taylor, being on Broadway between Union and Madison Squares, was obviously a store for the rich, the "carriage trade", who didn't want to associate with the working class who rode the elevated train along Sixth Avenue and shopped at such bargain stores as Siegal-Cooper and the Hugh O'Neill building. This store on Broadway was state-of-the-art, as ten thousand people visited simply to ride the brand new elevator over the the first three days of business.

However, the city's center continued to migrate uptown, and Fifth Avenue gradually became what it now has been for decades, one of the world's best known shopping districts. In 1914, Lord and Taylor's fourth and current 11 -story flagship store opened up on the corner of 5th Avenue and 39th Street. And each morning, the sales associates gather on the second floor, play the national anthem (a tradition that started in the '70s in solidarity for the hostages in Iran) and have the rally, committing to sell, sell, sell!

As the store sets up its famous Holiday window displays, and people from all around the world come to shop with us, I plan to get in the spirit as best I can so I can make at least a little money this Christmas, and maybe they'll even keep me on. In the mean time, I'll try to wow 'em with my vast knowledge of the rich history of this store.

The Collyer Brothers

The entrance.

Collyer Brothers Park on 128th Street and 5th Avenue.

A footpath inside the park.

Inside the park, looking east.

Inside the park, looking west.

Another shot, looking west.

The park sign with city park rules and regulations.

The park, on the site of the Collyer Brothers' mansion on the northwest corner of 128th and 5th.

Homer and Langley Collyer were very odd brothers. Their eccentricities, such as compulsive hoarding, anti-social behavior and their filthy lifestyle in the expensive mansion they inherited after their parents sudden departure, have a special place in off-beat New York City history to this day. Many New Yorkers don't agree that they deserve to have a city park named after them just because it used to be the location of the house where they hoarded junk and garbage and eventually accidentally killed themselves in. After all, they were only a nuisance to the community, and the feeling was mutual.

Their father was a bit strange himself. A doctor at Bellevue, he would take a personal row boat out on the East River when called to work at the hospitals on Blackwell Island (now Roosevelt Island), and could be seen carrying it home after he returned to Manhattan. When he abruptly abandoned them and moved to West 77th Street (maybe with their mother, but it is not clear), the life-long bachelor brothers, who had degrees in engineering and law from Columbia University, began a decades-long commitment to reclusiveness that involved collecting piles of garbage and junk that they found interesting and wanted to tinker with, and walking around the city for miles at night looking for food in garbage cans and leftovers that butcher shops and groceries were going to throw out. Langley reportedly walked as far as Williamsburg, Brooklyn, for a loaf of bread.

Despite living like they were poor, when cops kicked down their door for neglecting to pay the mortgage on the house, Langley handed over a check for $6,500 (equivalent to about $88,000 today), and paid the mortgage in full, proving that they actually did have a pile of money. From then on, they asked to be completely left alone, other than to occasionally complain to police about burglars or disruptive kids.

By spring of 1947, neighbors started complaining about the stench coming from the house, and a police crackdown found the older brother, Homer, who had long been blind and paralyzed, dead and hunched over in a chair he'd probably been sitting in for years, his head touching his knees. Langley, the younger brother, it seemed, had disappeared. First a misleading call that someone spotted him on a bus to Atlantic City, and then leads that took the police to nine different states turned up nothing, until a sanitation worker found him a few days later buried in old newspapers and a booby-trap he had concocted, only a few feet from his brother. His body had been decomposing and was being eaten by rats, and the stench that neighbors complained about clearly came from him. He had been crushed by piles of junk and newspapers while trying to bring his brother food. His helpless brother starved to death a few days later. The piles of newspapers, stacked to the ceiling in every room, made it almost impossible for police to get inside. Langley, who fancied himself an amateur inventor and scientist, had been working on a concoction that would, he claimed, one day restore his brother's eyesight, and he was saving all those old papers so that, when that day came, his brother could catch up on the news.

Anyway, it's a pretty weird story. It kind of sounds like something out of an Alfred Hitchcock movie, but it really did happen on the northwest corner of 128th Street and 5th Avenue, and I decide I ought to go take a few pics of the little resting area that sits there now in their honor. I've got to admit, Collyer Brothers Park is actually very nice, and if I didn't live so far away, I could see myself spending a lot of time there. A few benches are set up with a couple of small gardens, and a stone walkway. On this warm end-of-summer day, the flowers, grass and trees were lush and in full bloom, and it was a very nice contrast from the harsh concrete Harlem streets surrounding it. On the fence by the entrance was a community bulletin board, with info posted on when and where the next Harlem Community Board meeting was and other neighborhood events. It seems to me that these brothers didn't have to do much to have a very peaceful and important park named after them.

There were a couple of other pics I wanted to get for the Facebook page while I was this far uptown before the sun went down (the Tomb of the Amiable Child, the Seinfeld diner), so I kept on walking and left the very relaxing and refreshing Collyer Brothers Park for another day.